THE GRUNTS
we got close to, and to have that
same kid turn around and blow
you up, it shatters your reality of
what’s OK and what’s not OK. Your
trust has been ruined and broken.
The only ones you trust are the
guys you went with.”
The evidence suggests that such
invisible wounds are widespread.
A study by the Armed Forces
Health Surveillance Center found
that for all the military personnel medically evacuated from
Afghanistan between 2001 and
2012, the most frequent diagnosis
was not physical battle wounds
but “adjustment reaction.” This
category includes grief, anxiety,
depression, post-traumatic stress
and other forms of moral injury
and mental disorders caused or
inflamed by war. Between the
start of the Afghan war in October
2001 and June 2012, the demand
for military mental health services
skyrocketed, according to Pentagon data. So did substance abuse
within the ranks.
The statistics suggest a massive
and widespread wartime trauma
whose scope and depth we are only
now beginning to grasp. And it
worries people like Marsha Four,
who was a combat nurse in Vietnam and knows war trauma inti-
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mately. She eventually found purpose and solace running a veterans
center in Philadelphia, before she
retired last year to work with the
Vietnam Veterans of America.
Vietn am veterans like Four have
their own struggles. But most of
them served only one tour. The
new veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, she believes, are especially
wounded, because they serve multiple combat tours. “What have
we done to this generation?” she
wonders. Moral injury, acknowledgement and forgiveness aren’t
so easy. “But we gotta give it a
shot. Otherwise, we are going to
pay the price for what we have
done to them.”
“Civilians are lucky that we
still have a sense of naiveté about
what the world is like,” said Amy
Amidon, the Navy psychologist.
“The average American means
well, but what they need to know
is that these [military] men and
women are seeing incredible
evil, and coming home with that
weighing on them and not knowing how to fit back into society.”
I asked Maj. Gen. Jones, who
is deeply concerned about moral
injury and its effect on combat
Marines, whether he thought war
itself is immoral, whether moral
injury is unavoidable in war. I
wanted to know what he’d meant
when he said actions that involve