> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Wild Goose Festival 2: Moral Fragmentation - URL: https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/wild-goose-fragmentation/ - Published: 2012-06-23T19:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-29T00:51:27.000Z - Author: Logan Martin Isaac - Tags: Public Speaking, audio, Wild Goose Festival, Moral Health, Reborn4thJuly *A talk given at the Wild Goose Festival, June 23, 2012 — the second of three sessions on moral health:* [*formation*](https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/wild-goose-formation/)*, fragmentation, and* [*reintegration*](https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/wild-goose-reintegration/)*. Lightly edited from the original recording.* I'm a combat veteran, so I'm heavily invested in figuring this stuff out. Yesterday we talked about conscience before war and moral formation. Today, conscience in war. Tomorrow, conscience after war — how communities might welcome veterans home well, and some of the obstacles standing in the way of doing that. ## The Mark of Cain Edward Tick writes, on page 285 of *War and the Soul*, that war leaves a permanent imprint on the people who go through it — not everyone comes home with moral injuries or PTSD, but a soul that has been to war is never quite the soul that left. Something happens in war that changes people, and we don't always know what to call it. I want to be careful, when we talk about PTSD, not to talk about it to the exclusion of other kinds of trauma — sexual trauma, the trauma of a car accident. PTSD as a diagnosis applies to all of them. But something specific happens in war, and I keep coming back to what biblical models might help religious communities make sense of it. I've found a peculiar way into Genesis 4 — Cain and Abel. Cain murders his brother; he's the first person to commit homicide. I don't bring him up as an indictment of soldiers — it's too easy to make soldiers either wholly evil or wholly good, and I want to sit in the middle ground instead. What struck me about Cain is the mark he's given. Jewish tradition, in the Midrash, often reads it as horns — some visible sign that he's done something. But reading Genesis 4 more carefully, the actual curse on Cain is wandering. After he kills his brother, God condemns him to wander the earth, and Cain immediately says the burden is too great to bear — even though he's the one who did the killing. God's response is to give him a mark — not a mark of condemnation, not a way of identifying the wrongdoer for everyone else to see, but a mark of protection, so that no one could kill Cain. Including, I'd argue, himself. That mark is worth sitting with a little longer. It isn't condemnation. It isn't the community's signal that someone has done wrong. It's protection. And the curse of wandering lasts exactly three verses — Cain is cursed in verse 12, and by verse 14 he's already settled in the land of Nod. God's justice in cursing him is overtaken almost immediately by God's mercy. The curse is temporary. The mark is permanent, and it's for protection. There's something in the deeper background here too — the knowledge of good and evil, the first sin. Conscience, linguistically, means "with knowledge" — the same root as *omniscience*, all-knowing. *Con* is "with." Once you've acquired a certain knowledge, you can't easily set it back down, if you can set it down at all. Veteran authors write again and again about not being able to get away from their own experience. In war, you come face to face with the extent of human evil — including in yourself — and you spend the rest of your life wondering whether you can ever fully leave that behind. I don't think you can. Tick, and Bernard Verkamp, are both sharply critical of therapeutic approaches that try to separate a person from their experience, or from their moral being. But veterans, in their own writing, largely reject that separation: *I cannot pull the moral content of what I did apart from the whole of who I am. I can't be a former veteran.* Maybe I want to be. It may not be something that's actually possible. In that sense, combat heightens the knowledge of good and evil exponentially — it's something like eating the forbidden fruit all over again. ## Calling War What It Is Something has troubled me since 2001, and it may be just as relevant going back to World War II: when we call a war good — full stop, without qualification — we assign it a positive moral value it probably hasn't earned. I came home from a firefight in Mosul, and 48 hours later I was standing in the Dallas airport under a banner that said "thank you." I didn't know how to reconcile that. On one level, that reflexive gratitude gets in the way of a very human need to mourn what's actually tragic. On a more basic level: if we're unwilling to call war evil, we take away veterans' ability to distinguish between the good they did in war and the bad they did in war. I got into this with my thesis advisor once — whether to call war evil, or sin. His distinction: evil is a failure to act in a positively good way, and people can commit evil without necessarily sinning; sin is an active violation of God's law. I'm not sure I land exactly where he does, but the distinction is worth naming. Just war tradition works from something like this logic too — it says we're suspending peace to pursue a more lasting justice. We can't say we're going to war *for* peace; that doesn't hold together any better than saying we're having sex for the sake of chastity. War has to be nameable as bad on some level — something we're accepting the suspension of justice and peace to achieve, that has limits, that will end, that carries restraint and conditions for its own cessation. When we call an entire war generically good, we get uncomfortably close to calling it a crusade. War is a moral minefield; it can't carry a single, simple moral label. A lot of Vietnam veterans I've been reading return to one question that I don't hear as often from Iraq or Afghanistan veterans: *where was God in Vietnam?* Free-fire zones, civilian casualties, napalm, Agent Orange — where's God in that? The story our culture tends to tell is that God is on our side, which raises an uncomfortable question: is God there pulling the trigger with us? And how do we square that with the Gospels' call to peace, or with the relative restraint the Old Testament shows around war? Jericho and the more genocidal episodes are a different category — I'm not calling that war, exactly. But where the Old Testament does depict violence, there's a pattern of restraint built in. Deuteronomy 20 is the clearest example: anyone who's built a new house, married recently, or is simply afraid, is released from the front line — no shame attached, just go home. Whoever can and will fight, does, and by and large the number of people fighting on God's side is deliberately reduced against an overwhelming opposing force, so that the outcome can't be credited to human strength alone. That logic doesn't map cleanly onto a modern American military that is, by a wide margin, the most capable fighting force in the world — there's no room left to say God did it, because our tanks and our rifles are clearly doing quite a lot on their own. So where is God in Iraq, in Afghanistan? Is God AWOL? Is Christ derelict? Our theology says no — God is present even in the midst of evil, not absent from it. But to say that honestly, we have to first be willing to say that a war isn't going to be simply, generically good. We can call specific actions good — someone giving their life for a friend, even inside a war, is good — without extending that label to the whole conflict. There's a risk on the other side of this too, one I haven't fully worked out. If we polarize our thinking about war — us doing good over here, them doing whatever they're doing over there — we drain any moral content out of the other side's actions, and then when we insist the military is a force for justice, that claim stops making sense on its own terms, because we've already stripped away the possibility that restraint and justice apply to what soldiers actually do. I wonder, without being certain, whether something like this happened in Vietnam — as though we built a shoe labeled "monster" and some veterans, told often enough that the shoe was theirs, tried to grow into it. If the standards of justice and restraint are never actually leveraged against a soldier as something that applies to *them*, they may take that as license. I don't think that reasoning holds up in the end, but coloring war as either totally good or totally evil seems to erode the claim that justice and restraint have any purchase on it at all — and I think we need to find where God is present *despite* injustice in war, whether that's in the camaraderie, or in the intent to protect the innocent that brings a lot of people into service in the first place. Someone's intent and someone's actions in a given war can be judged separately. ## The Soldier Is Not the War There's a line from Michael Walzer's *Just and Unjust Wars* (page 195) that I keep coming back to: a soldier doesn't direct the war, and the war shouldn't come to define the soldier — responsibility belongs to the finger on the trigger, not to the trigger itself, which is simply part of the larger machine. In pacifist circles especially, I hear the argument that because there's no draft, enlistment is a fully free choice, and so culpability for the war falls on the individual soldier who chose to join. I understand the appeal of that logic, but given what the economy actually looks like for a lot of enlisted recruits, I don't think "choice" carries the weight that argument wants it to carry. I can't speak as well to what draws people toward becoming officers — most of the officers I know either gave up their commission before finishing their degree or left the service shortly after. Just war thinking distinguishes *jus ad bellum* — the justice of entering a war — from *jus in bello* — justice in how a war is conducted, which falls more directly on individual soldiers: protecting noncombatants, proportionality, and so on. There isn't full consensus on which criteria belong to which category, which keeps it a genuinely gray area — exciting, in its way, if also confusing. What I take from Mahedy's writing on this is that a *jus in bello* framework gives a soldier's personal war story a shared backdrop, so their experience isn't left as a purely private, isolated narrative — it becomes part of a collective conscience they can understand themselves inside of, rather than a narcissistic retreat into feelings that belong to no one else. One of the better-documented failures of Vietnam is how individually soldiers were rotated in and out. In World War II, you entered for the duration and came home with your unit, often after weeks together on a ship — time to decompress, to talk, and then a homecoming where the community could visibly affirm what you'd done. I was home from Mosul within 48 hours. Vietnam veterans were often home within 72\. That compression pushed the weight of the war onto individual conscience in a much heavier way than what we're doing now, where entire units deploy and redeploy together — something I actually think is an improvement, even though I was personally stop-lossed and didn't love that. I can't imagine what it would have been like to fly to Iraq alone, join a unit I'd never trained with, and come home from that same disconnected position on a two-hour flight. I'm critical of just war tradition in a lot of ways, but there are real, constructive things in it worth drawing on, for soldiers and for the society that sends them. ## Dehumanization and Ritual Karl Marlantes' *Matterhorn*, and his shorter book *What It's Like to Go to War*, describe his time as an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam. He isn't writing from a Christian frame — he's drawing more on Greek and Roman myth, particularly Mars, who in Rome was god of war *and* god of justice; the hill named for him, Mars Hill, was where Rome's equivalent of a supreme court sat. It's a useful reminder that "all's fair in love and war" isn't actually how the tradition understood it — justice was supposed to be constrained within war, symbolically housed on the same hill as the god of war himself. Marlantes argues that one of the things that damages people in war is the process of dehumanizing the enemy — what he calls pseudo-speciation, treating the other side as something less than human, less than animal, a category outside the animal kingdom altogether. That dehumanization wasn't nearly as pronounced in wars between culturally similar European powers. Marlantes tells a story from North Africa: a German unit and a British unit exchanging condolences by letter over lost men, and a German pilot making a low pass over an English tank to warn the crew to evacuate before he destroyed their communications equipment on a second pass. Vietnam didn't have much of that — whether because of race, or because of training methods aimed at raising the "firing rate" that S.L.A. Marshall wrote about (a claim I should say up front has been seriously disputed by later historians), I don't know. But Marlantes' broader point stands regardless of Marshall's numbers: something in how we prepared soldiers stripped out that older recognition of a shared humanity across the battle line. He suggests there might be room, even inside combat, for ritual — a ceremony soon after a firefight, led by some kind of moral or religious figure, where both sides' dead are buried and honored together, recognizing a kind of equality between combatants and allowing a formal goodbye on both sides. That process, as he describes it, undoes some of the dehumanization and returns a measure of respect in both directions — because dehumanizing another person, I'd add, does something to the person doing it. You don't get away from it cleanly. Something in the act of dehumanizing someone else asks you to dehumanize part of yourself along with them, whether or not you notice it happening. --- ## Discussion *The conversation that followed touched on several threads, condensed here.* **On returning to the place of war.** Some Vietnam veterans have gone back to Vietnam, some even during the war itself, and by most accounts it's been genuinely therapeutic. Edward Tick leads trips like this, along with sessions in the U.S. for veterans and non-veterans together — some non-veterans carry their own quieter grief about not having gone, a sense that they let someone else carry the weight, and Tick makes room for that too. **On who war happens to.** One audience member pushed back on the framing that people "go to" war — for a lot of people, she said, war comes to them, leaving marks that aren't only psychological but physical, and that pass down through generations. She raised birth-defect and cancer rates in Fallujah in the years after 2004 as an example. *\[That specific claim is worth verifying before republishing — elevated rates in Fallujah post-2004 have been documented in some public health literature, but the figure as stated in the room is a striking one I haven't independently confirmed, and I'd check it before it goes out under your name.\]* She also raised restorative justice — the idea that healing, for veterans and for the wider society, requires actively acknowledging and repairing harm done, not just individual gestures but something closer to a collective effort, which she felt hadn't really happened after either Vietnam or Iraq. My response, in part: calling a war something that needs to be grieved cuts against a lot of assumptions on both sides of the debate — even in a war most people would call just, there are things combatants need to mourn, and we haven't done the work of separating the lived experience of war from the abstraction of it. Veterans of nearly every war in living memory have written about this directly, and that testimony tends to get talked past. It's easy to accept that war produces victims. It's harder to sit with the fact that people who fought are, in a strange and uncomfortable way, sometimes both — I don't think of myself as a victim of the war, but I've also been tested for depleted uranium exposure and told my levels aren't a concern, at a VA that took over a decade to formally recognize PTSD as a diagnosis at all. Victims and veterans share more in common than either side of that conversation usually wants to admit. **On naming war evil without excusing it.** Someone asked me to restate what I meant by trying to hold both — that war can be entered into for justified reasons and still be evil, rather than treating those as opposites. I used an example, lightly sketched here to protect the people in it: a father intervenes violently to stop an assault on his daughter, calls emergency services immediately afterward, and still feels genuine remorse, even though most people would call his response justified. That combination — justified, and still something to grieve — is the position I think we're avoiding. Pacifists get asked constantly what they'd do in a hypothetical worst case, and my answer has always been some version of: I was trained as a marksman, so I'd disable rather than kill if I could. But even then, I wouldn't call what I'd done *good*. I'd call it possibly necessary, and I'd still be the first person to call for help afterward, because I'd know what it had cost. I think the harder, more distinctly Christian question isn't who the enemy is in a moment like that — it's the ways we try to make ourselves feel untroubled by things that are always going to trouble us. If you can put a first and last name to your enemy, I'd be suspicious you've found the real one. Pete Kilner, an ethicist who taught at West Point and spoke at a veterans' event I helped organize at Duke, argues from inside the just-war tradition that the Pentagon should be training soldiers to make moral judgments in the moment rather than to fire reflexively — precisely because reflexive training is what produces so much of the later PTSD and moral injury. He's said the Pentagon has quietly resisted that argument, worried that soldiers who pause to think critically under fire will hesitate at the cost of their own lives or someone else's. My thesis advisor, Stanley Hauerwas, described a related debate he encountered visiting the Air Force Academy — pilots arguing over whether it was honorable to drop bombs from 10,000 or 15,000 feet, whether an honor code like the one that shaped World War I aerial combat could still mean anything at that altitude. I think that's the right kind of question to be asking. I'd call war evil, and still insist there are more and less justifiable ways of conducting it — those aren't in tension. **On religion and the enemy.** Someone asked whether it mattered that in World War I, opposing sides largely shared the same religion, in a way that wasn't true in Vietnam or Iraq. I think it mattered a great deal — it's much harder to dehumanize an enemy through religious language when you know they claim the same faith you do. Chaplain Francis Sampson's story is worth looking up: a real World War II chaplain, part of the history behind *Saving Private Ryan*, who lost two of his own brothers, was later captured along with wounded men the Germans intended to execute, and was spared — along with the men in his care — when a German non-commissioned officer recognized the cross on his lapel as a fellow Catholic. Stories like that rarely make it into how the war gets retold on screen. Propaganda came up too — not only in obvious forms, but in stories that reshape memory after the fact. Sergeant Alvin York, the most decorated American veteran of World War I, applied for conscientious objector status three times before the war and was denied each time; decades later, when Hollywood wanted to turn his story into a film, internal studio memos (visible now in the DVD's special features) show the project was consciously framed to help build support for entering World War II — a good cause, but pursued knowingly through a story reshaped for the purpose. I have real reservations about that, even when the underlying cause is sound, the same way I have reservations about the confidence political leaders projected about weapons of mass destruction ahead of the Iraq war, independent of whether the underlying facts held up. **On silence.** At a separate session that weekend, I asked why religious leaders gathered at the festival — a week before Veterans Day — hadn't named soldier suicide as a fundamental issue of social justice. The response I got moved quickly to how difficult it would be to end a given war. That wasn't the question I was asking. I wasn't especially interested, in that moment, in the debate over whether to end a war — that's a real debate, and I enjoy having it, but it's not where I think the more urgent problem sits. The urgent problem is a public, and a set of religious leaders, that hasn't built the habit of talking about what war actually does to the people it touches — a habit that silence keeps from ever forming. Agreeing that we should support the people we send to fight, and that they are, in fact, suffering, isn't actually the hard part. It's a starting point we already have available to us, if we're willing to use it.