JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
HEALING
caused by blows to their moral
foundation, damaging their sense
of right and wrong and often leaving them with traumatic grief.
Moral injuries aren’t always
evident. But they can be painful
and enduring.
“Everybody has demons, but
there are some wild kind of demons when you come back from
combat,” said a Navy corpsman
(the Navy’s name for its medics)
who served a tour each in Iraq and
Afghanistan and asked not to be
identified by name. He was once
unable to save a Marine with terrible head wound, and afterwards
felt other Marines blamed him.
“You come home and ask yourself,
HUFFINGTON
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what the hell did I do all that for?
You gotta live with that shit and
there’s no program that the military can send you to or any class
that’s really gonna help.”
“Guilt is the root of it,” he said.
“Asking yourself, why are you such
a bad person?” He wasn’t that way
before his military service. “I have
a hard time dealing with the fact
that I’m not me anymore.”
Marine Staff Sgt. Felipe Tremillo also is struggling with guilt.
Two years after he came home
from his second combat tour,
in Afghanistan, Tremillo still is
haunted by images of the women
and children he saw suffer from
the violence and destruction of
war. “Terrible things happened to
the people we are supposed to be
helping,” he said. “We’d do raids,
A 10-year
old wounded
Afghan girl
is carried by
a U.S. army
medic to
a medical
evacuation
helicopter to
be airlifted
to Kandahar
hospital on
Aug. 21, 2011. ((0