THE GRUNTS
his long hair out of his eyes. “One
of the bullets bounced off his spinal cord and came out his eyeball,
and he’s laying there in a wheelbarrow clinging to the last seconds
of his life, and he’s looking up at
me with one of his eyes and just
pulp in the other. And I was like 20
years old at the time. I just stared
down at him ... and walked away.
And I will ... never feel anything
about that. I literally just don’t
care whatsoever.”
But Canty wondered what kind
of person didn’t have qualms
about killing. “Are you some kind
of sociopath that you can just
look at a dude you shot three or
four times and just kind of walk
away? I think I even smiled, not
in an evil way but just like, what
a fucked-up world we live in —
you’re a 40-year-old dude and
you probably got kids at home and
stuff, and you just got smoked by
some dumb 20-year-old.
“You learn to kill, and you kill
people, and it’s like, I don’t care.
I’ve seen people get shot, I’ve seen
little kids get shot. You see a kid
and his father sitting together and
he gets shot and I give a zero fuck.
“And once you’re able to do that,
what is morally right anymore?
How good is your value system if
HUFFINGTON
03.16-23.14
you train people to kill another
human being, the one thing we are
taught not to do? When you create
an organization based around the
one taboo that all societies have?”
Canty is bright and articulate.
For a guy who never feels anything about killing, he constantly
monitors and analyzes his feelings
about war, rubbing together his
thoughts about duty and morality
like worry beads, until they’re raw.
“My thought was, you did what
you had to. But did I really? I saw
him running and I lit him up. It’s
the right thing to do in war, but in
every other circumstance it’s the
most wrong thing you could do,”
he said. Faced with those kinds of
moral challenges, “your values do
change real quickly. It becomes a
war of moral injury.”
Canty’s moral injury is his own
struggle. But his intimate, dark
knowledge of war is also a gift —
of insight, which he badly wants
others to share.
“We keep going regardless of
knowing the cost, regardless of
knowing what it’s gonna do,” he
said. “The question we have to
ask the civilian population is, is
it worth it, knowing these mental issues we come home with?
Is it worth it?”
MORA L IN J URY >> PART I I