THE RECRUITS
ers, officers and noncommissioned officers alike, were trained
to recognize Marines under severe stress, to calm them down
and arrange peer support so they
wouldn’t isolate themselves, and
to get higher-level help if needed.
“This is relevant to moral injury big-time,” said Nash. It’s onthe-spot help from compassionate
and wise mentors, the people who
know Marines the best. A good
platoon sergeant or squad leader
is “better than I ever could be, listening to a Marine’s story, saying,
‘I’ve been there and done that and
I made sense of it by saying this
part was my responsibility but all
that other stuff I couldn’t help.’”
The best military leaders do
this instinctively. In Iraq, Nash
once watched a battalion commander lean over a wounded Marine being carried off on a gurney;
like most of the wounded, he was
not only in extreme pain and fear,
but tormented with shame for
having been wounded, and guilt at
having to leave his buddies. “You
did your job,” the commander
said, “and I am proud of you.”
The military’s efforts to build
“resiliency” in its troops has
drawn criticism from the Institute
of Medicine, the independent,
HUFFINGTON
03.16-23.14
nongovernmental health arm of
the National Academies. In a new
report published in February,
the IOM said there is an “urgent
need” to prevent psychological
health problems in the military,
but that the Pentagon’s prevention programs are “not consistently based on evidence” and
there is “no systematic use of national performance standards” to
assess their effectiveness.
A more focused effort to help
troops think through ethical and
“None of us really knows what
it’s like until we go over there, and
we go two, three, four, five times
before we ever pause to think
about what we’re doing.”
moral problems is a virtual reality (VR) prototype designed by
Albert “Skip” Rizzo, a University
of Southern California psychologist and specialist in virtual reality at the school’s Institute for
Creative Technologies.
In one VR scenario, troops on
a routine patrol halt their convoy,
confronting a man drawn up in a
fetal position on the road. As they
watch, he moves slightly — he’s
alive. Young soldiers are saying,