Greenbelt: Modes of Moral Health

Presentation given at the Greenbelt festival in Cheltenham, UK, on August 25, 2013.

Very recently, a number of VA clinicians in the United States conducted a study and coined the term moral injury. Several years before that, back in the seventies, the term moral pain was coined, though it wasn't used widely. Moral injury, as I'll get into in a bit more depth, is defined as witnessing or perpetrating acts that violate one's religious training and/or beliefs.

So in a nutshell: I am trained by my religious community, or my national community, to believe certain things are right and good and just. Then I either witness those beliefs violated, or I perpetrate the violation myself, or I fail to prevent it. My mom always told me two wrongs don't make a right. On September 11th, the US was attacked, so we went and invaded not only Afghanistan but Iraq — which violates something I'd been taught to believe. That's one example of how moral injury can form, in a more abstract sense.

Here's a more immediate example — and, unfortunately, this isn't a PG-13 talk, it's probably going to be R-rated. Young men and women go into war. I was a convoy driver a lot; my unit was a quick reaction force. I'm told that children and women are noncombatants. I'm also told, as a convoy driver, that you never stop — you do not slow down, you do not stop. If you're in a convoy and you slow down, you become a target, and you can endanger everybody in your vehicle. So if there are children playing in a village I'm passing through at fifty miles an hour and they run in front of my vehicle, I cannot stop. I've been told they're noncombatants, and that I'm supposed to protect them if we subscribe to just war theory. But given the situation, and given my training, if a child steps in front of my vehicle, I have to keep moving — and that's the kind of thing that causes moral injury.

Moral injury is distinct from post-traumatic stress disorder, the more familiar diagnosis in the DSM-IV. (Is anyone here a psychiatrist or psychologist, familiar with the DSM?) PTSD took a lot of effort and energy to get recognized in that manual, and moral injury looks like it's taking a similar path. It's distinct from PTSD because PTSD is a response to a traumatic event — a normal human reaction to an abnormal, inhumane experience: rape, war, violence. The normal reaction is to grieve, to feel some kind of moral pain associated with the experience.

I think, particularly in America, we have these pre-set ways of thinking, acting, and speaking about this. I spoke a little about it yesterday at my book talk. In the States, you're either a hero — because the United States is "the last, best, greatest hope for mankind," as Obama said on Letterman four years ago — or, in the absence of anyone saying anything, veterans are more or less equated with something worse. I was in the West Bank in 2006, shortly after my discharge from the US Army, as a Christian pacifist, and I heard protesters in Bil'in — the group I was with — chanting "baby killers" at the IDF. But in the IDF there's a draft; conscripts don't get to choose. A number of sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-olds — almost children — are going to jail in Israel for refusing to serve. There's a lot of ground in the middle that we simply aren't having a conversation around.

In the US we have a twenty-billion-dollar recruitment budget. The church doesn't have that kind of money. So the military is getting some of our youngest, best, and brightest, in the hope of going on to college. I signed up for college money — my parents, who were public school teachers, went bankrupt sending me to private schools. There's a kind of economic draft in place that creates a coercive effect on young men and women who want to move up the social ladder, and that includes college. At twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year, that's not something most families can afford easily. The military provides free education — I completed an entire year of my undergraduate degree while on active duty. When I got out, I had two and a half years left; I finished my undergraduate degree, and now I'm working on a Master's in Theological Studies at Duke Divinity School. And I'm getting that for free. So I can't stand in front of a young man or woman in an economic situation they want to escape and simply say, "don't join the military."

Part of my perspective is standing between these two binary ways of understanding the world. To some pacifists I sound very patriotic, very nationalistic. To some conservatives I sound un-American and unpatriotic. That's okay — I think we need more bridges in the world. The problem is, you get stepped on a lot.

I'm going to move quickly through the bibliography, and then we'll talk about the three modes — I know I said "models" earlier; I've since adjusted the language. Moral health is the model I'm trying to propose, and there are three modes within it. Prior to war, I call that moral formation: what do we do to create people who are moral agents, whom we then send off to conduct violence in our name? The second mode is conscience in war, or moral fragmentation: what happens in war that doesn't square with the formation we've given people beforehand? Most of this is coming from an American perspective; some of it may hold true for a British audience, some may not — I'll leave you to judge, and I'd invite your commentary in the Q&A, which I'll leave as much time for as possible. Finally, when soldiers come home: conscience after war, or moral reintegration. What needs to happen to bring military members and veterans back into our communities and churches more fully and more healthfully? And how do we recognize their experience as valuable, and evoke it in a way that doesn't compromise their moral health?

When I started at Duke Divinity School, it was very difficult. On the first day of student orientation, a psychiatrist was telling us about doctor-patient confidentiality — that you can say almost anything in a psychiatric office. He said, "You can tell us you kick your dog, you're cheating on a test, you're cheating on your spouse," and on and on, and he finally ended with, "you can even tell us you've killed someone." The entire entering class of 175 students — my cohort — burst out laughing. I had spent fourteen months in Iraq in 2004 with an infantry unit, and that's exactly what I was going to see them about. I knew immediately not only that the psychiatrist giving that presentation didn't understand the moral pain I carried, but that I wouldn't be able to share it with my classmates without significant emotional turmoil. I finished that first year, then took a year off to complete my book. Now I'm getting ready to go back for my second year, and I've already had two phone calls from the admissions staff saying, "We have veterans who are having difficulty integrating — can you help them?"

A lot of what I'm sharing today has been cultivated through Centurion's Guild and another student group at Duke Divinity called Milites Christi — Latin for "soldiers of Christ." Does anyone know the Iona Community? I read about them — apparently their founder was a World War I veteran who became a pacifist, and I believe members of the community are sometimes called Milites Christi as well. If nobody can correct me, I'll assume I'm more or less right. Iona also has the oldest St. Martin's Cross — one of a number of Celtic crosses there. I'd love to go, but I don't have time; I have to be on a train at 7:30 Monday morning.

But Milites Christi — this is where the bibliography starts. Veterans Day in the US is November 11th, which also happens to be Armistice Day globally. In 1954, the United States renamed it Veterans Day and began celebrating veterans broadly; before that it was Armistice Day, marking the day we signed the end of World War I — which was supposed to be "the war to end all wars." Once we couldn't keep that promise and had another world war, we stopped calling it that and changed the holiday's name. Before that, the church celebrated the feast day of Martin of Tours. You can read a little about him in a nutshell: he was the first soldier-saint who wasn't a martyr. Not long after Constantine, when the church was no longer persecuted, he told the emperor, "I am a soldier of Christ; it is not permissible for me to fight." He wasn't killed for it — he was jailed for cowardice, then discharged, and became Bishop of Tours in France. Milites Christi has Martin as our patron.

Last year, on November 11th, we held — you can find this online under "After the Yellow Ribbon" — a small day-and-a-half conference. We had pacifists, just-war advocates, and military ethicists as speakers. Stanley Hauerwas, who teaches at Duke, wasn't able to attend in person, but we did get him and five other faculty members to sit for interviews, including Sam Wells and Jo Bailey Wells, who are now at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London — they both spoke about moral injury and how the church can reintegrate service members. Jeremy Begbie, who teaches jointly at Cambridge and Duke, also gave an interview; he's the one who introduced me to Wilfred Owen. I included Owen's poem "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" in one section of my book — about the binding of Isaac as a parallel to sending young men off to war. If you want to check any of that out, it's at sites.duke.edu, under "After the Yellow Ribbon," then media — or if you'd rather not take the handout, I have the details there too.

We've talked a bit about Centurion's Guild — you can find more about us there, and on Twitter and Facebook; we're also developing a website, hopefully up within the month. We have e-mail updates too — the address is on the card. Jesus, Bombs, and Ice Cream is another good resource. Just before November 11th this year, Shane Claiborne spoke at Greenbelt — he wrote the foreword to my book, and we've been collaborating for a while. We put together a kind of testimony evening: we had a juggler, an "Oreo demonstration" from Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's — I think they're making a study guide out of it now, if you look at thesimpleway.org. Shane invited me to give a short testimony about my time in the military, and I reflected briefly on what it means to go to war and come home. A 9/11 family member also spoke that night.

Finally, on the publications: the Truth Commission on Conscience in War was conducted in 2010 by Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini, who have a book coming out — I believe November 16th, 2012. The Truth Commission became the fertile soil for what they're now calling the Soul Repair Center, which will draw together what we learned in the Truth Commission, Centurion's Guild, and various other books into one physical location at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. If you want to check that out, it's britesoulrepair.org.

I'd also recommend William Mahedy's book, Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets. It was, frankly, a horribly edited book, but he was a Catholic priest in Vietnam who later became Episcopalian and worked with the VA to help create Vet Centers — places to talk and decompress away from the VA itself, which has a horrible reputation in the States that I won't disagree with. On the handout, some bullet points are arrows and some are plain bullets — the arrows mark specifically Christian resources, the bullets mark more general ones.

Last thing on the bibliography — films. I'm very critical of them. I went to a screening last night and heard someone talking about how movies don't dwell well in the middle, and that makes me nervous, because in the US we have individual service members who are very well regarded by the public in ways that ignore a lot of the real details.

Has anyone heard of Audie Murphy? He was the most decorated American soldier of World War II. He came home and wrote an autobiography called To Hell and Back, in which he described his service as a kind of brand. He recalled going through a village searching for snipers, coming into a room, seeing a dark shadowed figure in the corner, and immediately raising his weapon and firing — only to find it was a mirror. The symbolism of that haunted him the rest of his life. He struggled significantly with what we'd now call PTSD, was accused of and later acquitted of murder, and by some accounts became something of a vigilante — yet the United States only really knows him as a war hero and a movie star; he went on to star as himself in the film based on his autobiography.

Alvin York, by contrast, was a World War I veteran who did something similar in the public eye. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor, came home, and became an advocate for educational reform. Warner Brothers approached him about a film on his life, which was eventually released in 1941 and effectively became a piece of World War II propaganda.

All that said, there are a few films I do think are worth watching, if you're more drawn to Hollywood than independent film. I'd recommend In the Valley of Elah, with Tommy Lee Jones — I've never seen a film take the subject matter of war so seriously. I won't say more, but it's one of the few that passes my own sniff test.

Let me talk briefly, just a point or two each, through the three modes — I'm sorry to move quickly, but I want to leave real time for Q&A.

Conscience before war: moral formation. In a nutshell, I think American society used to be much more generationally rooted — we'd share stories around the hearth, read the Bible together as a family, in the nineteenth-century sense. With the advent of mass media, movies and video games have largely taken that place. I know men and women who can quote movie lines fluently but struggle to recite the Apostles' Creed every week. I recited the oath of enlistment exactly once and I can still remember it; I still struggle with the Creed.

Part of the difficulty is that war is, in a real sense, a social construct. If you're familiar with gender studies, you'll know the argument that gender or sexuality is socially constructed — meaning we define it, and the definition is flexible, not absolute. We often think of war as this fixed, absolute thing, but communities across time and geography have defined just war very differently. In the US alone there are some three hundred-odd denominations, each with a different understanding of what constitutes a just war, and each telling their young men and women something different about it, based on their own traditions and readings of scripture. So I think war has become — if it hasn't always been — a social construct, and our training for it takes place entirely within the context of community.

In the US military, before you join, you take an oath of enlistment: to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and to obey the orders of the president and the officers appointed over me. Something happens on a deeper level than the words themselves when collective violence like this is undertaken — a kind of social contract. I know I'm doing this for you, the people, in a representative democracy; I know my acts aren't merely my own, and I carry the moral weight of them more heavily because of that. Abraham Joshua Heschel said that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible. These vows and oaths take on real significance that will come back later in the talk — if I don't mention it again, ask me.

In the Bible, vows work similarly, and Old Testament vows and oaths were very intricate, and very bloody. When Abraham makes his covenant with God, he splits animals in half and walks between the pieces. Our God is covenantal — always making and renewing promises with us, and those promises carry real moral substance. If we replicate that on a human scale — marriage is another kind of covenant, another kind of oath — we're promising something, and we do our best to fulfill it, and it acts on our conscience accordingly. That becomes especially fraught when one covenant partner doesn't uphold their end of the bargain. In the US, that might look like deciding we'll only go to war out of necessity — and then invading Iraq anyway, even though it had no missiles that could reach us — "shut up and deploy." A lot of soldiers knew Iraq wasn't legitimate. Some believed Afghanistan was justified, based on their own convictions, and went and did it. Ten years later, we're asking the same questions about Afghanistan that we were asking about Iraq not long ago. When vows aren't upheld by either party, they lose their substance — and the soldiers doing the violence, who are preparing themselves not only to risk death but to render it to others under that contract, absorb an added weight from that breach. I'll come back to why I think that is when we get to conscience after war.

Conscience in war: moral fragmentation. I'll leave a lot of this to the Q&A. One question I always warn people in the US against asking a loved one who's served in combat is whether they've ever killed someone — and for some reason, it always seems to be the first question people want to ask. There's something about the act of killing another human being that we probably all recognize as significant, morally, personally, emotionally, spiritually. Psychiatrists and even moral theologians are now recognizing — I'm not sure they always did — that what's most morally significant in war isn't that a soldier might suffer death. Soldiers know going in, as part of the social contract, that they might lose a limb, might die, might suffer irreparable harm. Traumatic brain injury is one of the signature wounds of these wars — there's often no outward sign of it, but people lose the ability to concentrate, to self-regulate emotionally. We know all of that going in. But the most morally significant act in war is being expected to kill another human being.

Until fairly recently, almost nobody had reflected on this in any serious way — until Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, a US Army Ranger and psychological operations officer, wrote a book called On Killing. His point, roughly: we have entire libraries on sex, marriage, and relationships — similarly intimate acts — but almost nothing on killing, so he set out to write that book. He writes at length about what has to be in place for someone to kill — legitimate authority, mechanical distance, emotional distance, and so on. It's a good book, written from within the military establishment's own framework. He openly admits that getting someone to kill another human being takes real psychological effort — operant or classical conditioning. You want it to happen, but naturally human beings are not inclined toward violence; we're one of the few species not especially prone to intraspecies violence. It's simply a fact. But in war, we need people able to do it.

In World War II, the US Army's official historian, S. L. A. Marshall, wrote a book called Men Against Fire, in which he claimed — his research methods have since come into serious question — that fewer than 25% of frontline riflemen actually fired to kill. One in four. Everyone else fired over the enemy's heads, or faked a jam. Regardless of the soundness of his methods, the Army took this as gospel and decided the firing rate needed to go up. Nobody stopped to ask why — a 25% firing rate had, after all, won the war. But the Army adjusted its training accordingly. Where soldiers used to fire at concentric circles — simple marksmanship, whether you can hit the broad side of a barn — they began firing at human-shaped silhouettes, aiming for "center mass": the heart, the largest target, rather than the head, which requires an expert marksman. My dad probably fired at flat cardboard silhouettes shaped like a head and shoulders with a circle in the middle; the closer to center, the better marksman you were rated. By the time I went through basic training in 2000, I was firing at molded plastic silhouettes with a pink face, a green helmet, and a green uniform. Almost humanoid shapes on the range. It was no longer really about marksmanship — it was about repetition, classical conditioning: they want you to fire the instant you see an "enemy." The targets pop up on spring-loaded tracks, and the instant one appears, you fire, and it drops. You just engage. You do it over and over until it becomes instinctive — this is what's called reflexive fire.

Without thinking, you become a product of habit. When something registers as an enemy, you put two rounds into it. The justification: they could have done the same to me, I felt threatened. That's the standard in combat — if you feel threatened, you're free to use lethal force, and all you have to say is that you felt threatened. Now, basic training units are actually using video games for this — something Grossman would have real problems with. You can have a group of four or five recruits in a large virtual-reality simulator with plastic M4 rifles fitted with a laser that vibrates when fired, so you know you've "engaged." The Army even made a video game, America's Army, used both to train recruits and to bring around in big branded vans to high schools — thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds, sometimes older. Twenty billion dollars gets you a lot of shiny vans, reaching the minds and hearts of young people who are not remotely morally prepared for what we're eventually going to ask of them.

Side note: Alvin York, the most decorated soldier of World War I, was 29 when he enlisted. The average age of an American service member in Vietnam was 22 or 23; in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's 18 and 19. We're recruiting younger and younger, and doing a worse and worse job of forming people in a way that would prepare them to legitimately take a human life and then decompress from it afterward.

One more point on moral fragmentation — I don't know if this is true in Britain, and you can tell me if it isn't — but in America we have a real allergy to calling war evil. We talk about "the good war." That doesn't work in Christian terms. War is, at best, a necessary evil — it is not a good, and we repent of it even when we're forced into it to protect justice and restore peace. But we never want to say the word "evil" about it. We have a narrative structure in the US that assumes soldiers are heroes defending the country against threats it can't otherwise resist — even though the majority of the 9/11 hijackers weren't Afghan. Some leadership was based in Afghanistan, sure, but we didn't invade Saudi Arabia, where eleven of the nineteen hijackers were actually from. Soldiers start to notice that disconnect once they're in combat. There's a scene in Jarhead — one guy in the unit says, "this is crazy, it's all about oil" — and people do start to realize that. But in the meantime you've got seven or eight more months on your deployment, and the only way you're going to see your wife and kids, or your favorite video game, or get back to the surf, is to get through it alive, by whatever means necessary. So the language — "I felt threatened," "him or me," "I'm fighting for the people next to me" — takes on enormous power in your life. But we do need to call war evil, particularly as Christians. I'm happy to get into the theology of that if anyone wants, but practically speaking, at the After the Yellow Ribbon program we had people who are very good at debating this from different sides, and we all came together on what actually mattered: the lives of the young men and women we're sending to do this violence in our name.

Conscience after war: moral reintegration. In the United States, even though we call our soldiers heroes, they are committing suicide at a higher rate than at any point in our history. Veterans — people like me, discharged from active duty, the reserves, or the National Guard — are taking their own lives at a rate that CBS News, in a 2007 investigative report using vital-statistics data from 45 states, put at 6,256 deaths in 2005 alone — roughly 17 a day, one every 80 minutes. That number hasn't come down; if anything, those figures were undercounted, and the rate hasn't decreased once in the years since. Active-duty and reserve/Guard suicides, more recently, have reportedly reached about one a day — Time magazine ran a cover story on it, and July of this year was reportedly the worst month on record. These are supposed to be our heroes. Something isn't adding up. If they're heroes, why don't they believe it themselves? Why would heroes take their own lives at such an alarming rate? Something is being missed.

Here's an illustration. I landed at Dallas–Fort Worth airport in February 2005, on my way home. The airport was covered in banners reading "Thank You," American flags everywhere, everything red, white, and blue. On my connecting flight home to California I was bumped up to first class, and people applauded as I walked up the aisle — because I hadn't had a chance to change out of uniform, so everyone knew I was military. Strangers came up and hugged me; I'm an introvert, I don't love that. But more importantly: forty-eight hours earlier, I'd been in an intense firefight in Mosul, after an insurgent had lobbed a grenade off a rooftop toward our convoy. Nobody was hurt, thankfully. So — what exactly was I being thanked for? In my mind, that firefight was the most immediate, most powerful memory I had. Gratitude assigns a positive moral value to something — thank you for your service, thank you for dinner, thank you for the ride to the airport, something good has happened. But what I'd done wasn't good. It was, at best, a necessary evil. Somebody attacked my unit, and I responded. That's necessary, but it isn't good. In American media, everything is framed as: our soldiers are heroes, what we're doing is good. That framework builds a kind of collective wish that war is good. But that's a lie — war is a necessary evil, at best.

So something isn't going well; we are not reintegrating people. A psychiatrist at a major research institution never stopped to consider that an entire generation would be coming home needing to talk about having killed someone. Duke gives out five scholarships a year to veterans, filled every cohort — that's fifteen veterans at the Divinity School at any given time — against a national backdrop where less than 1% of Americans serve in the armed forces. So when "Occupy" was going on, occupying DC, Wall Street, Los Angeles, and everyone was talking about "the 1%" — I'd already had that phrase in my head meaning something else. It doesn't quite map onto the language being used, and there's a strange irony there, since we're now at a point where even people on the political right are openly calling it an occupation. That's a small aside about how language and cultural markers evolve and get repurposed.

As I said at the start, moral injury and moral pain are communal afflictions. One thing I find ironic: this "us versus them" framing is, at best, all of us versus all of us. It's not me versus Iraqis, or me versus Afghans, the Taliban, or al-Qaeda — it's all of us, together, and if that's true, we all bear some responsibility. As Heschel said, in a representative democracy — which both the US and Britain are — some are more guilty than others, and it's usually not the ones actually carrying the guns; it's the ones who issued the orders that sent them. But we're all responsible for recognizing that right beside us in the grocery line, behind us in a lecture hall, in front of us at a podium, there may be people carrying this particular kind of moral pain. It isn't the only kind, but we need to do a much better job — particularly in the church, where reconciliation, absolution, and forgiveness are our prerogative. This is our job. The state doesn't do that. The state doesn't forgive, the state doesn't love — the state adjudicates. The church loves. The church reconciles. The church forgives.

When we started Centurion's Guild in 2008, I assumed, like most people, that the folks who'd eventually reach out to us would be upset with their military chain of command. My own commander accused me of aiding and abetting the enemies of America, of not deserving the rank I wore, because I asked to redeploy to Iraq without carrying a weapon — I told him I was happy to deploy again, but as a Christian, I would not carry a weapon. It's a stance a number of soldier-saints held, people the church beatified precisely because they refused to do violence, or refused to worship Caesar. For that, my commander accused me of aiding America's enemies. My pastor at the time accused me of abandoning the women and children I'd sworn to protect to militant extremists. A spiritual father of mine, who had taught me that the gospel was about love, somehow concluded that the US military is God's hand of judgment in the Middle East. The church is losing its mind on this.

I don't want to belabor that too much, though I think it's warranted. I do want to offer a couple of biblical models. The Book of Job — this is where we're at now — is, in effect, a post-trauma spiritual quest. For those who don't know it: Job has a lot of money, a big family, a lot of livestock, and God allows Satan to test him — being tested at all implies you're worthy of it, and God clearly has a lot of faith in Job, which is interesting, since we're the ones usually called to have faith in God. God allows his livestock and family to be destroyed, through nothing Job did to deserve it. His friends' theology is: you must have sinned, or God wouldn't do this — God blesses the prosperous, you can measure God's love by what you own. Job knew better. His friends, initially, did the right thing — they sat with him, sat shiva for seven days. The person grieving doesn't do anything; they don't shower, don't cook. Their friends do that for them. Nothing is said. You just sit with your grief, and with God. It's when Job's friends open their mouths that they go wrong — "surely you did something to deserve this." The important thing is that they were trying to overwrite Job's own experience. Job knew his relationship with God better than they did, but they insisted they knew better.

We do something similar in the US, at least with veterans — we say, no, you must be a hero, you're a veteran, you're a soldier, you must be a hero. And something inside says, no — the things I witnessed aren't things a hero does. The alternative, when society says anything at all, tends to be worse: we've been "war-weary" for over a decade, so we're tired of talking about it. And when people do say something, sometimes it's: you signed the contract, what did you expect? I've heard this from pacifists too — how dare you think you'll feel better after war, you should feel bad. Nobody says that outright, but it's the assumption underneath. So if I know I'm not a hero, but I also know some of what I witnessed — and did — was monstrous, I'll believe the "monster" part. Seventeen a day. That's not nothing.

There are, broadly, two ways a service member or veteran responds to that. I spoke about this last night — does anyone recognize the name Timothy McVeigh? He wrote home saying he no longer felt human, that he was becoming a monster; Shane found some of those letters while writing the foreword to my book. He bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City to bring home, to American eyes, what he'd helped bring to Kuwaiti and Iraqi families during the Gulf War. At his trial, he asked for the death penalty. You either explode — and a number of veterans have gone on rampages, barricaded themselves and their families in their homes, committed murder-suicide — or you implode. Another example: Jeffrey Lucey. He too told his family, "don't you see, I'm a monster" — in letters, in person. He came home and tried to get help from the VA, spent seven hours there one day, and his family knew he wasn't okay. Not long after, he went down to his parents' basement and wrapped a garden hose twice around his neck, to make sure this world wouldn't be bothered by him anymore.

There needs to be another way to respond to this kind of moral pain. The church has resources the state doesn't. At best, the state gives me disability compensation — I get about a thousand dollars a month, rated 60% disabled for PTSD and joint and back problems. They can give me money; they can give me something you could generously call healthcare — the VA is borderline healthcare, at best. What they can't do is point me toward absolution. They can't point me to God. They can't point me to reconciliation, or even to resolution. The best they can offer is "thank you for your service." I don't want gratitude.

One thing I tell people: the last thing you should say to someone coming home is "thank you." Say "welcome home" instead. I think the most powerful four-letter word in the world is love — and in our society, at least in the US, I think we have a very superficial notion of it. We treat love as passion, as infatuation, something that fades. That's part of why I think our divorce rate is so high — we expect it to keep burning the way it did at the start. But real love perseveres. Love waits. Love is patient, love is kind, love is gentle, love doesn't accuse — you don't really know if you'll be accused until you've been together a couple of years. So the best thing you can tell people — not just with your words, but with your lives, your bodies, how you conduct yourselves as Christians and as human beings — is that service members are loved. I've heard directly from soldiers who feel they cannot be loved for what they've done. That is fundamentally untrue, in Christian terms. Nothing can separate anyone from the love of God, expressed through other human beings.

That's moral reintegration. Before we get to Q&A, I do have the Prayer of St. Martin, which might make more sense in this light — let's just take a breath, and then we'll open it up.

Q&A

I hope you'll forgive me — we only have about eight minutes for questions, though I'll stay longer if people want. I'll definitely be around at 12:30 at the book signing, and you can find me there too. For the next half hour, I'll stick around — I'll be in the hallway somewhere, so don't feel like I'm running off.

Q (on Breaking the Silence and the IDF): You mentioned Israel and IDF soldiers — how do you feel, in the US, about the organization Breaking the Silence, and how it's treated, both as an organization and personally?

A: Breaking the Silence is based in Israel — IDF veterans and, I believe, some Palestinians as well, coming together around the idea that violence isn't the answer, but that silence is a betrayal too. If you check out the After the Yellow Ribbon site (sites.duke.edu), a number of the faculty reflect on silence specifically — Stanley Hauerwas kept returning to it. We were only able to air five or six minutes of each interview, but there's much more footage. Stanley's point was, roughly: the act of taking another human life creates this awkward silence — the church doesn't know what to do with the individual, or with the act. But God speaks a word; the creative force behind everything we stand on, and the people we embrace, was a word — and in parallel, Jesus Christ was the Word. I get less upset at conservatives hawking the "hero" narrative, or progressives hawking the "monster" narrative, than I do at people who should be saying something and aren't — because that silence forces the entire burden of interpreting the experience back onto the individual, and that isn't fair.

I actually think it's a real evil that the American church has, more or less, gone silent on this — though that's changing. I'll try to end on something more hopeful. I'm dating myself here, but thirty years ago the UK fought a war I opposed — over a group of islands in the South Atlantic, which I insist on calling the Malvinas; most people here call them by another name, which I understand, but they were taken from Argentina in what amounted to an act of ethnic cleansing in the early nineteenth century, something very few people in this country know much about. Successful governments tend to be very good at burying that kind of thing. I've been told since then that I ought to be ashamed of myself for "betraying my country." To that I'd say: should Dietrich Bonhoeffer have been ashamed of himself? Germany was at war, and Bonhoeffer was part of a plot to kill their own Führer — a far bigger betrayal than mine. Pope Benedict XVI, as a boy, was conscripted into the Hitler Youth. I hold to the principle that "my country, right or wrong" is something no Christian can adhere to. If your country is in the right, there might be some justification for fighting for it; when your country is wrong, it's your duty to oppose it — even if that means being accused of betraying it.

Q (on patriotism vs. nationalism): I'd just push a little further on that point —

A: Agreed. Pope John Paul II drew a distinction between patriotism and nationalism: patriotism is love for one's own country, land, and people that still extends that same love and room to other countries; nationalism defines itself by excluding them. People accuse me of being unpatriotic, but in America our own founders said things like "give me liberty or give me death" — I don't see nationalism in that. It's a little funny, reflecting on it here in England. I actually think patriotism, like love, has become very superficial — mostly a rhetorical device people wield against each other, and I wouldn't even call most of those exchanges debates, just petty arguments. Argentine friends of mine have told me I'm a patriot precisely for defending the honor of England, as opposed to its narrow interests. I wouldn't disagree — and Bonhoeffer is a great example of that same distinction.

Q (from an audience member, referencing St. Martin and military chaplaincy, and speaking as a Mennonite about a Military Counseling Network in Germany): I wanted to thank you for your work, and comment that referencing St. Martin is interesting, because his story highlights the battle over the narrative itself — do you know where the word "chaplain" comes from? [Logan: I do, yes.] It comes from Martin, from his cape, his chappelle — not just "chaplain" but "chapel" too, yet the military chaplain today is often institutionally supportive of the military structure rather than critical of it. I think the church needs to engage much more directly in that battle over the narrative, because we're being used by state and economic interests, often without realizing it. Separately — as a Mennonite, I think I understand what you said about pacifists shaming soldiers, and how unconstructive that is. In my congregation in Germany, during the second Gulf War, we actually started something called the Military Counseling Network, counseling soldiers who wanted to talk to someone outside the military, including giving legal advice on how to get out of the military. I think churches that oppose war — whether on principle or with respect to specific wars — need to think not just about whether we oppose it, but about how we help soldiers get out of that structure.

A: Yes — the equivalent group in the US is called the GI Rights Hotline. And I think if we really want to work for peace, it matters that soldiers are told, on the surface, that what they're doing advances peace — that violence is a means to a greater justice. But when we ostracize them instead, we give them a blank slate: when they have to do the thing that can't be undone, it just becomes "well, it had to be done, war is chaos." I don't think war is chaos — I think, at best, it's a limited use of violence in service of a greater good, and it's fundamentally about restraint. If we can agree with the military on that point at least, I think we have a real conversation partner.

Q (on drone/remote warfare): I was wondering how you feel about the development of remote and remote-controlled warfare, and what implications that has for everything you've been talking about.

A: Drone warfare in the US is largely run out of Las Vegas. I read somewhere — I can't remember where, so take this as anecdotal — that for a while, the highest suicide rate within the military itself belonged to recruiters. This connects to the earlier point about giving soldiers the benefit of the doubt: recruiters are under real pressure to meet quotas, and they're often sent back to their own hometowns, recruiting their friends' children — and their communities know they're the ones who helped get those kids in. The next-highest rate, from what I recall, belongs to drone pilots. You're surveilling a target — a human being — for weeks at a time, learning their habits, when they eat dinner, when they wake up. When the order comes, hopefully the target isn't with family, but sometimes they are. You engage the target, you kill that person to protect the national interest, then you leave your office, drive down the Strip, and go home to have dinner with your own family. On the policy side: no classical just war theorist, in the entire tradition, has ever said secrecy is legitimate. The whole point of just war doctrine is that there are reasons you can give publicly for a war being just — legitimate authority, proportionality, and so on. Secrecy has never been condoned. In the US we have "executive privilege," which isn't something Christians can simply sign off on — there's no legitimate category of secrets between a sovereign and the people, and in the US, the people are the sovereign, which makes it even more confused.

Q (on psychological training/preparation, comparing to medical training): As a practical matter — is there any armed force anywhere that actually builds in real psychological preparation and emotional resilience training, so people are equipped to deal with what they'll face, both during and after? Training a medic or doctor takes years, partly so they can manage their own responses to holding people's lives in their hands. I wonder whether there's room to make military training longer, so recruits aren't seventeen and being trained on what's essentially a video game.

A: I can only answer that as something of a devil's advocate, since I'm not sure I believe it's possible to train people for this in a formula, the way a clinic or medical training does. That's a personal, subjective view. I think part of what's needed is training in ethics specifically — because what the military does, structurally, is repetition and conditioning; that's just not how morals work. Compare that to law-enforcement training in the US — there, a target pops up: an angry man holding a baby, and you have to decide whether to shoot, or a woman with her hands up. There are video games built around exactly that. At least that's training toward a moment of decision, which doesn't currently exist in infantry training — there, it's "hit as many targets as possible, get your marksmanship badge, get promoted." The careerism around that developed more after World War II and Vietnam — that's its own rabbit hole.

There's a good documentary by a Notre Dame professor, a Frenchman — I believe his name is Olivier — called On the Bridge, interviewing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. One is a doctor who reflects, with real moral pain, on how clinically people are treated in the field — someone is still breathing and communicating, but you know you don't have the resources or time to help them, so you move on to people you can return to the fight — which is, on paper, part of the chaplain's job too, spiritually preparing people to return to combat. From a Christian perspective, that's not what you're there for. You're there for the spiritual and medical wellbeing of the individual human being, and their dignity — in Catholic social teaching, which I'm more familiar with, the mission is never a thing unto itself. Legally, too, laws aren't ends in themselves; they exist to protect something else we've identified as good, as tied to human dignity.

I actually have some real discomfort with the language of "moral injury" itself. It's useful, and it starts us down a path we need to go down — but calling it an "injury" implies there's a treatment, a formula, a clinical answer, and I just don't think that's true. The clinical model starts with a generic patient and works to find what makes them different. I think we need to start from the assumption of uniqueness — you tell me what's going on. That's normal parish ministry: at Duke we train ministers never to assume Johnny is the same as Jane before we've even established they're different people. Everyone will have different theological doubts, different questions to work through. That's not the clinical starting point, at least in the US — we tend to assume everyone starts the same and chip away toward the differences. Especially with moral pain and moral guilt, I don't think that works. Even "moral injury," even "Soul Repair" — sorry, Rita, if you ever hear I said this — it isn't that easy. It isn't mechanical. I'd like to see a much more holistic approach, and I think that's the direction it's actually moving — I know it is, because they've put me on the advisory board.

This is a years-long process. Reintegrating service members, veterans, or anyone carrying this kind of moral pain or trauma isn't a one-off. There's no pill for this — I'm sorry, this isn't The Matrix. One thing I tell pastors: we have this habit in the US of asking, "if you've served in the military, please stand up." Don't do that. Here's how that lands, to use a comparable example: it's like asking, "if you've ever been raped, please stand up, because I need to know how to help you." It doesn't work that way — it carries real moral weight, real pain, real nuance. So I tell pastors: don't ask people to stand up. Do the hard, slow, unglamorous work of finding those people yourself. Have dinner with them, and I'd bet money it comes up — "Dad never talks about Vietnam, but I hear him crying at night," or "I can't stop thinking about something that happened over there." Wait for it to be said. Don't ask if they've killed someone; don't ask how Iraq or Afghanistan was. Your job as a Christian — and especially as a minister, though not only as a minister — is to create a space where those experiences can surface without compromising the person's wellbeing. We already have some practice with this kind of slow work: how do we become a gender-inclusive church, an economically inclusive church, a church where rich and poor genuinely welcome each other? That's lengthy work too. We have to step back from our own urge to fix things immediately, in order to actually see what individual people need — the church isn't one monolithic thing, and it shouldn't act like it is.

Q (from a pastor with the Catholic Worker movement, who served a year in prison over an anti-war action, now working with Veterans for Peace, on the disconnect between public opposition to war and public unwillingness to look at it): During the Vietnam War, the draft pulled young men in directly. Now, all society seems to require of us for these ongoing wars is that we look away. I think that's part of why people are so offended by things like WikiLeaks — it forces attention back onto something we'd rather avert our eyes from. There doesn't seem to be popular support for these wars, but there's also very little visible opposition. What's your reflection on that disconnect, between the larger society and the people actually fighting and dying?

A: That's a good note to end on. Some context: my undergraduate capstone thesis was on Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and the Catholic Worker movement — we were actually in Honolulu when we started what I believe was the first Catholic Worker community there. So I'm very sympathetic to where you're coming from; I'm not disagreeing, more identifying with it. What I'm about to say tends to put people on the defensive, though. I'm actually in favor of a draft in the United States — at minimum because it would force people to articulate a reason for not contributing to the common good. Right now, there are people — I grew up in Orange County, California, think The Real Housewives or The Hills — who go their entire lives without once contributing meaningfully to the common good. I used to say "national service," and I don't anymore, but there's a common good the country genuinely has some claim on. Baptists, who are often my sharpest critics but also my most valued conversation partners, remind me that we're not ultimately called to be citizens of any nation-state — which is true, but in the meantime we can't simply shed our national identity; it forms us. You can tell I have an accent; I'd say the same of all of you. I have friends who travel to the Middle East wanting to believe they can simply stop being American there. We can't do that. The best we can do is live in a way that witnesses to a citizenship that doesn't grant the nation ultimate sovereignty, but still recognizes whatever good the nation genuinely contributes. There are things America does relatively well — but we don't actually love a country, any more than we love a person, if all we ever see are its strengths. I always challenge conservative Americans: name something America's done wrong. It's remarkably hard to get an answer.

That connects to my earlier point about silence — all you have to do to avoid thinking about the war is change the channel. And then it forces its way back into attention, not just through something like WikiLeaks, but through veterans — there have been three or four incidents just this past summer, including the Milwaukee shooting; I don't know if that shooter saw combat, but he did have military training. I don't want to go too far down that road, because it makes me genuinely angry — but at minimum, a draft would force people to articulate some overt reason for not serving. I'm not saying the wealthy or privileged wouldn't still find ways around it — but right now there's no reason required at all. Right now the operative question in America is: why would I join the military, or the Peace Corps, or the National Park Service, or contribute to any version of the common good the country claims to stand for, when I could just go work on Wall Street instead?

I should say — and we haven't really gotten into this, it's genuinely complicated — that any draft would need to include selective conscientious objection. Currently, to register as a CO in the US you have to be an absolute pacifist, objecting to war in any form, which I personally do. But the church broadly holds to just war doctrine, which requires selective objection — the position that we won't fight every war, because not every war is just, even if some are; if only some, then not all. My rough model would be to build up the institutions that already serve the common good — Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, the National Park Service, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and others — maybe with some process where an organization makes its case for the common good it serves, and you do two years there. If you haven't done some form of service by, say, twenty-five, then you're drafted, but at least you've done something of tangible good along the way. We have over 300 million people in America; roughly 1% serve in the military, and I'd guess less than 4 or 5% ever do the Peace Corps or comparable national service. The largest group, by far, does no form of national service that contributes to the common good at all — and I think that's a problem. We all draw on the common good; far fewer of us actually pay into it.

I think that's all the time we have. I've got books in the back for eight pounds, icons for a pound or whatever you'd like to give, and please take the newsletters — I don't want to carry them home. I don't usually push this hard, but they're heavy and my joints aren't what they used to be. Thank you all for coming — don't feel obliged to clap. I'll be around, and I'll be at the book signing at 12:30. Thanks again for coming.