THE RECRUITS
troops and veterans with physical
and mental health issues.
Rizzo and his team are using
the virtual reality scenarios
to study soldiers’ reactions to
moral challenges, monitoring
each participant’s heart rate,
respiration and skin conductivity, and drawing blood to check
for stress biomarkers.
“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,” Rizzo said. “And whether exposure to these scenarios
has an impact” on how soldiers
absorb combat trauma.
Such work may begin to provide
critical insights into the nature of
moral injury and help identify individuals who are more vulnerable
to it. But for now, young troops
will go to war not fully prepared
for what they’ll find.
“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,”
said Stephen Canty, a thoughtful
24-year-old who is now out of
the Marine Corps.
“There’s always going to be
HUFFINGTON
03.16-23.14
people like me who are smiling
the first time they get on the bus
[to boot camp] — they don’t want
to miss the war,” he said. “There
will always be kids willing to
fight, and they’re always going to
pay this price, and there are always going to be guys like me who
are saying, ‘Hey man, you don’t
wanna do it, no, no, no, you don’t
want to. It seems like fun, and
I can’t tell you not to do it.’ But
there’s no talking a kid out of it.”
Only after troops get back, he
said, “do we start to look at the
mental effects of killing other human beings.”
Canty’s little brother, Joe, joined
the Marines in 2010 and recently
deployed to Afghanistan. “I know
what he’s getting into; he’s going back to Helmand Province less
than 20 miles from where I was,
and he’s got a grin ear to ear,” Stephen said. “And there’s nothing I
can do to wipe that grin off his face
because, that was me, you know?
Three years earlier. Nobody could
have told me.”
Stephen’s grandfather tried.
He’d been a Marine in the Pacific
in World War II. “Don’t do it,”
he told Stephen before he enlisted at 17. “You’re too goddamn
smart, boy.”
MOR AL IN J URY >> PART I I I