THE RECRUITS
stan found that two-thirds knew
someone seriously injured or killed.
Fifty-six percent had a member of
their unit wounded or killed.
‘THE RIGHT THING TO DO
COULD GET YOU KILLED’
In retrospect, signs of the resulting moral confusion are difficult
to miss. The rate at which troops
were hospitalized for mental illnesses has risen 87 percent since
2000, according to a July 2013
study by the Armed Forces Health
Surveillance Center. The center
also reported in June of last year
that mental complaints, not physical injury, were the leading cause
of medical evacuations from the
battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2012.
Michael Castellana, a psychotherapist at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, sees the
damage among dozens of his Marine patients: an erosion of moral
certainty, or the confidence in
their sense of right and wrong.
“We are beginning,” he told me,
“to venture into what I think is
the kernel of combat trauma: the
transformative capacity of what
happens when we send our children into a war zone and say,
‘Kill like a champion.’”
HUFFINGTON
03.16-23.14
Nash, the retired Navy psychiatrist, said veterans looking back
on their time in Iraq or Afghanistan are prone to wonder, “In my
little sphere of influence, how well
did I or didn’t I live up to the ideals?” Often, he said, the answer
“is what kills them.”
The inability to consistently
achieve the highest levels of moral behavior in the shambles and
“The problem we’re trying to
understand is, can we detect people
who may have more difficulties with
moral and ethical quandaries that
happen every day in combat.”
chaos of war can produce varying
degrees of “shame and guilt and
anger — the primary emotional
consequences of this moral injury,” Castellana said. “And if you
read the suicide notes, the poems
and writings of servicemembers
and veterans, it’s the killing; it’s
failing to protect those we’re supposed to protect, whether that’s
peers or innocent civilians; it’s
sending people to their death if
you’re a leader; failing to save the
lives of those injured if you’re a
medical professional. ... Noth-