THE RECRUITS
ways place the mission first.”
The entire military is “a moral
construct,” said retired VA psychiatrist and author Jonathan
Shay. In his ground-breaking
1994 study of combat trauma
among Vietnam veterans, Achilles in Vietnam, he writes: “The
moral power of an army is so
great that it can motivate men to
get up out of a trench and step
into enemy machine-gun fire.”
The military’s moral structure
is intended to help guide troops
through “morally ambiguous situations,” said Marine Col. Daniel J.
Haas, who commands the recruit
training regiment at Parris Island.
“We think about this all the
time,” he said. In morally tricky
situations where you have to
make a split-second decision,
“ultimately, the answer you
come up with is the one you will
have to live with. You’ll be more
likely to live with your decision
if you make it a considered, values-based decision.”
But in war, asking troops to
meet the ideals and values they
carry into battle — always be honorable, always be courageous, always treat civilians with respect,
never harm a non-combatant —
may itself cause moral injury when
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these ideals collide with the reality
of combat. Accomplishing the mission may mean placing innocent
civilians at risk. Duty, honor and
discipline may mean obeying an
order you know to be misguided —
and later cause a feeling of having
been betrayed by your leader.
The great moral power of an
army, as Shay puts it, makes its
participants more vulnerable to
violation, and to a sense of guilt
“We spent two deployments where
you couldn’t trust a single person
except the guys next to you.
We have trouble trusting people.”
or betrayal when things go wrong.
It was Shay’s work with Vietnam
combat vets, in fact, that led him to
recognize that their trauma often
came from a deep sense of betrayal.
He recognized that the official definition of PTSD failed to describe
their mental anguish, leading him
to coin the term “moral injury.”
The ideals taught at Parris Island “are the best of what human
beings can do,” said William P.
Nash, a retired Navy psychiatrist
who deployed with Marines to Iraq
as a combat therapist. “It’s these
values that give you some chance