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Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Tending to Veterans’ Afflictions of the Soul


By Samuel J. Freedman
The New York Times
Originally published January 13, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

Moral injury might best be defined as an affliction of the soul, as distinct from a specific mental health condition like post-traumatic stress disorder. It arises, to speak in a very broad way, from the way a combatant’s actions in war seem to violate and thus undermine the most deeply held moral beliefs.

Ms. Brock did not formulate the concept of moral injury, which is attributed to the clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay. In books like “Achilles in Vietnam,” Dr. Shay has traced moral injury back as far as the Trojan War. But for Ms. Brock and her colleagues, the kind of counterinsurgency wars America has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan has left soldiers uniquely vulnerable to moral injury.

“There’s no good choice,” she said. “If you’re looking at a kid on the side of the road with something in his hand, if it’s a grenade and he throws it and kills someone in your unit, you’ve failed your comrade. But if it’s a rock, you’ve just shot a kid with a rock.
“If you’re praying that your company gets out or that your best friend isn’t shot, and it doesn’t turn out that way, it can collapse your whole moral system. It feels like God abandoned you.”

Her description closely matched that of Michael Yandell, 28, a student at the Brite seminary who worked on a bomb disposal team during the Iraq war. “Most deeply, it’s a loss of confidence in one’s own ability to make a moral judgment with any certainty,” he said. “It’s not that you lose your ability to tell right from wrong, but things don’t seem so clear any more. For me, it’s whether or not what I did, did any good.”

Ms. Brock’s affinity for veterans, and her knowledge of their suffering, has long, deep roots. Her father, Roy Brock, was taken prisoner during World War II and underwent electroshock treatments after liberation for his psychological distress. He later served two tours in Vietnam as a medic, enduring the deaths not only of countless soldiers but the local translator he had befriended.

The entire story is here.