Guest Lecture
The Deepest War Wound

Most undergrads at Moravian University were not yet born on 9/11/2001; they have lived with the United States at war their entire lives. But the suffering of war is emotionally distant for them and most US citizens because so few of us (less than 1 percent) have carried the burden of enacting US wars. Yet the destructiveness of the longest wars in US history profoundly impacts not only war’s targets, victims, refugees, and nonhuman life across the world. War also changes and existentially damages the lives of too many US military active duty and veterans, and their families, friends, and communities.

What is “moral injury”?

In 2009, the Veterans Affairs (VA) psychologist Jonathan Shay coined the phrase moral injury to define a war wound that is not well understood. Working with Vietnam vets, Shay needed language to articulate the deep moral pain of shame, guilt, and resentment that disabled too many returning service members. Moral injury is not a psychological pathology. It is the destruction of a person’s moral center within the context of war. The dominant feature of moral injury is the sense of having betrayed one’s own deepest moral values or having those moral values betrayed or transgressed by others. For too many, the evisceration of their moral core can lead to a host of disabling consequences, including suicide. One especially troubling recent study by Thomas Howard “Ben” Suitt III, a recent graduate of Boston University’s graduate program in religion, determined that suicides of veterans aged 18 to 34 have increased by 76 percent since 2005.

VA chaplain Chris Antal describes moral injury as the struggle and pain of a reflective conscience thrust into the harsh realities of war and killing. In the book Moral Injury, edited by Brad E. Kelle, Iraq War veteran and theologian Michael Yandell describes it as “despair of the world, and of myself.” I further build on these important definitions: Moral injury is the inevitable consequence of participation in the moral distortion of the world that is created by militarism, militarization, and war.

Moral injury is “like acid seeping down into your soul; and then your soul is gone.”
—Kevin Powers

Connecting Moral Injury to US War-Culture

In 2020, the United States spent more on its systems of war than the next 11 highest spenders in the world combined, according to the National Priorities Project, which has estimated that the US has spent $21 trillion in the wars of the past 20 years. In addition to this structural violence, cultural worldviews pre-reflectively acculturate people to accept war as the best and only option for addressing conflict and providing security. In the past 20 years, national and religious leaders have often described war as “a necessary sacrifice,” but this meme too needs our analysis and critical questioning.

The end of American military involvement in Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of 9/11 offer opportunity for national self-examination about US ways of war. As one moral-injury scholar puts it, “War is our national posture, and we are more or less comfortable with it.” Nevertheless, listening to the voices of morally injured military service members and veterans may have the power to slice through emotional distance and acceptance of the horrors of war. For moral injury is a terrible and terrifying consequence for individuals, and it is also rooted in a much wider and deeper landscape. As Iraq veteran and writer Kevin Powers describes, moral injury is “like acid seeping down into your soul; and then your soul is gone.”