THE GRUNTS
scribed sleeping pills and twice
slept through morning formation,
getting slapped with two unauthorized absences. All this added
up to what the Marine Corps considers a “pattern of misconduct.”
At war, he’d been exposed to
IED blasts six times and shot once,
while he was manning a machine
gun in a firefight. He’d risked his
life, led men he loved in combat
and seen some of them die. And
now that he’d come home sick at
heart, the Marine Corps, which he
also loved, meant to kick him out.
Let’s pick him up now, a year
or so later, in Philadelphia. Despite his earlier trouble, he’s
been honorably discharged from
the Marine Corps and is rooming
with Paul Rivera, a Marine buddy
from Afghanistan. Nick is working as a bodyguard for a security
firm. His physical wounds have
healed. Physically he is here. But
the sounds and sensations and
urgency of battle keep puncturing
the peaceful civilian reality he’s
trying to occupy.
“Coming back, I didn’t know
what could help, like ... how do
I get those feelings to stop?”
Nick said. He can be out in public and then comes something
like a panic attack: He feels the
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adrenaline rush of combat, the
crazy excitement, the hyperalertness ... and watches again as
the boy comes around the wall.
“The feeling hits you and like ... I
don’t want to be like that.
“I just want to be normal.”
‘YOUR TRUST HAS BEEN
RUINED AND BROKEN’
At the U.S. Naval Medical Center
in San Diego, close by the sprawling Marine base at Camp Pendleton, staff psychologist Amy Amidon sees a stream of Marines like
Nick Rudolph struggling with their
combat experiences. “They have
seen the darkness within them and
within the world, and it weighs
heavily upon them,” she said.
Morally devastating experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan
have been common. A study conducted early in the Iraq war, for
instance, found that two-thirds
of deployed Marines had killed an
enemy combatant, more than half
had handled human remains, and
28 percent felt responsible for the
death of an Iraqi civilian.
If the resulting moral injury
is largely invisible to outsiders,
its effects are more apparent. “I
would bet anything,” said Nash,
the retired Navy psychiatrist,
“that if we had the wherewithal
to do this kind of research we’d
find that moral injury underlies