Teaching Moral Injury
- By Zach Savich
This fall’s college freshmen were seven years old when the US invaded Afghanistan. Most don’t remember the protests in the days before the invasion, which, as a college freshman in September 2001, I attended in Seattle. They don’t remember the predictions one heard at those marches—that the Bush administration would soon engineer another war, that both wars would be costly and unwieldy, devastating for Afghanistan and Iraq while distracting from environmental and other concerns in the US. They don’t remember that you could be called anti-American for suggesting that Iraq’s arsenal was a false pretense, or that an indefinite war on terror made as much sense as a war on infinity.
Most of the students in my "Introduction to Culturally Diverse Literature" course this fall, in which we are studying literature of our recent wars, didn’t begin the term knowing how many civilians have died in Iraq (hundreds of thousands) or the unconscionable number of active duty and veteran suicides in recent years. From 2004 to 2009, the suicide rate across active forces doubled; 6,500 veterans take their lives each year, 1 every 80 minutes.
They didn’t know these details, but, on the other hand, this ignorance could also count as knowledge of our age: they’ve come to maturity in a time of continuous war, in which, depending on where you live and where you get your news, you can go weeks without hearing about it. The consequential war literature of our era, which engages the psychic effects of warfare in the beginning of this century, might not be of firefights, valor, or even of veterans returning home, but of the dissociation of our populace, the ways in which a decade of constant battle can become muted. These wars have become weather we live with, so we can pretend the feelings they give us are the effects of any old rain.
For my students, this dissociation, this foregone forgetting, seemed productively troubled by both the shock of war’s facts and, especially for those without family in the military, that shock’s distance from daily life—and from the recent election. In recent war literature, one sees a similar dissociation in the depiction of home searches, IED sweeps, and the purgatorial tedium of war. Of course, there are similar frontline effects in many eras’ accounts, but when the war is an occupation, the frontline is everywhere; isolated experiences of uncertainty underscore the persistent ambiguities of an occupation.
If the frontline is everywhere, then it’s also with us, at home. As my wife, Hilary Plum, has speculated, the Occupy Movement’s employment of “occupation,” and that term’s quick absorption into a cultural meme (Occupy Sesame Street, Occupy Sandy), may suggest the lingual manifestation of a state we’ve felt weighing on us for some time. Her forthcoming novel, They Dragged Them Through the Streets, shows some of the effects of that weight, and will be excerpted in MR next spring.
In “The Morally Injured,” his essay from the recent Casualty issue of The Massachusetts Review, Tyler Boudreau notes the difficulty of comprehending wars that don’t resemble “the famous battles of the past in the trenches, and the beaches, and the mountains, and the jungles” familiar from “every mode of popular culture,” new wars in which “the amount of violence witnessed by the average soldier…is quite low.” Boudreau, who served as a Marine Corps infantry captain in Iraq, proposes that such occupations are particularly effective at causing “moral injury,” which the VA defines as involving “an act of transgression that creates dissonance and conflict because it violates assumptions and beliefs about right and wrong and personal goodness.” Walt Whitman called a “good heart” a “radical possession”; simply accepting that moral experience is relevant for soldiers is similarly radical, particularly if you’ve read anything about the approaches the VA too often takes to trauma and psychological distress.
For Boudreau, applying this term avoids the medicalizing catch-all of PTSD. It also connects soldiers intimately with others. By admitting that a soldier can be impacted by the moral imposition he has placed, or seen placed, on a foreign civilian or combatant, moral injury requires “acknowledging the humanity of Iraqis” and others. It also displaces guilt’s burden from individual soldiers. If a soldier who witnesses or orders another soldier’s transgression is morally injured, then the country that witnesses its soldiers’ transgressions is morally injured, and the country that cannot speak of its soldiers’ experiences is morally injured as well. Boudreau asserts that if we hope for something like healing, if healing can be a goal that surpasses victory, we should take war’s moral consequences “out of the mental health profession, and into the living room,” to make the “notorious ‘invisible wounds’ all of our problems, not just the problems of the VA.”
The trauma of war is diffuse and collective, this suggests, a communal moral concussion we shouldn’t go to sleep with. For my students, whom I sometimes worry have been educated into a time of trauma—the traumas of the economy, of high stakes standardized testing, of rising tuition and declining regard for education except education that is narrowly vocational, narrowly relevant to a world that is already changing—Boudreau’s essay helped us discuss the connections between a country and the distinct experiences within it, but without judging, without taking a position outside of empathy, without empathy requiring the elimination of difficulty.
In 2001, when I was a freshman, you had to choose: were you for the war or against it? That question, and the debates my friends and I had, now feel quaint. We didn’t know what either position meant. We didn’t know that in eleven years each view would lead to a similar sorrow and that we’d be inside of it together.
Zach Savich is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Firestorm, and a book of prose, Events Film Cannot Withstand. He teaches at Shippensburg University.
