> ## 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 3: Moral Reintegration - URL: https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/wild-goose-reintegration/ - Published: 2012-06-23T22:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-29T01:36:02.000Z - Author: Logan Martin Isaac - Tags: Public Speaking, audio, Moral Health, Wild Goose Festival, Reborn4thJuly *A talk given at the Wild Goose Festival, 2012 — the third of three sessions on moral health:* [*formation*](https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/wild-goose-formation/)*,* [*fragmentation*](https://www.loganmartinisaac.com/wild-goose-fragmentation/)*, and reintegration.* Some of what follows grew out of a community I helped found in January 2008 called Centurions Guild — current and former service members trying to hold honest, compassionate, deliberate conversation about military service and Christian faith. A lot of what I've come to over the last several years took shape inside that conversation, not on my own. ## Where We've Been In the first session, we talked about how moral character forms within community — we know who we are through the people around us, and moral injury and moral pain are communal afflictions, not merely individual ones. In the second, I tried to hammer home that some may be guilty in war, but all are responsible, especially in a democracy like ours — which doesn't absolve anyone, including governments, and including churches that have stayed silent on war and peace when they didn't have to. I was frustrated, and said so, about religious leaders present at the festival that year who'd chosen that silence. I don't think that's a neutral choice. I think it's a betrayal, and if we're all responsible in some way, that responsibility calls us to act. We also talked about how a just war framework — for all its limits — at least gives a service member a shared story to locate their own experience inside of, rather than leaving them to process what they did entirely alone. One thing I want the church to hear clearly: welcoming soldiers home matters, and their pain should be pain we all carry. If the pain we inflict is pain inflicted on Christ, then the pain we feel and express in response is also felt by Christ. Even where we disagree with what a service member did, their pain is real, and the church should feel it too. Part of what needs to happen is moving the moral weight from *me*, the individual veteran, to *us* — not an us-versus-them dynamic, and not a me-versus-them one either, but all of us participating in this together, in some form. ## Neither Venerated Nor Villainized When veterans come home, we tend to do one of two things badly: venerate them or villainize them. Vietnam leaned toward villainizing — veterans became a social scapegoat once the war itself couldn't be called a victory, as though the loss had to be someone's fault, and it landed on the people who'd fought it. I think we've overcorrected from that. When I came home, I was told "thank you" over and over, and that repetition disabled whatever grief or remorse I might otherwise have expressed, or at least worked through. A better alternative, I think, is simply affirming the experience without assigning it a fixed moral value on someone else's behalf: *I had this experience, and I accept that I had it — good, bad, or indifferent.* Communities need to acknowledge some level of their own complicity too, without either taking all of it on or waving it away entirely. Moral isolation is the real enemy here — it strips the war experience of any constructive meaning, or turns meaning itself into something violated. I draw on Mahedy, Tick, and Marlantes throughout this, and won't dwell on any one of them for long. But a theme comes up again and again: the sense that everything has been rendered meaningless. I felt something like that myself, coming home. Guilt isn't the problem — guilt can move a person toward action, toward penance. The real enemy is nihilism: the conviction that nothing matters, including your own life, which leaves you with no reason to keep living. That's close to the phrase that recurs from Vietnam — *it don't mean nothin'.* Bill Mahedy, toward the end of *Out of the Night*, does something remarkable with that phrase: he takes it into the register of liturgy, where in the presence of God, nothing else carries ultimate weight — not because the war experience is trivial, but because God means everything. It's a genuinely striking move, and I'd encourage anyone who can find the book to read it. Mahedy is himself a Vietnam veteran and was a chaplain during the war; he helped lead the effort that became today's Vet Centers. One more thing on this point: I'm not convinced social media is much help here. Posting something doesn't guarantee anyone actually hears it. Confession, as a practice, requires a response — in the Roman Catholic tradition, there's a priest physically present, someone carrying a distinct kind of moral authority who can speak into your life from outside your own brokenness. I think conversation among veterans — rap groups, vet centers — is genuinely valuable, but I'm not convinced it can do that particular work on its own. There's something almost incestuous, sacramentally speaking, about expecting a group that shares your exact wound to also be the place that heals it. That's a personal instinct more than an argument; I've never been to AA and don't know enough about how that model works in practice. But confession requires being heard, and it requires some expectation of response — not necessarily an answer, but an active, present kind of listening. ## Calling War a Moral Act We talked in the second session about war as a moral act, and the need for veterans to be able to separate the good they did from the evil they took part in. Reflexive gratitude gets in the way of this — if I'm told something was good, that tells me, implicitly, that I'm not supposed to feel remorse about it, and that produces a lot of internal moral confusion. War will affect a person negatively, and if naming that honestly means calling parts of it evil, or calling it something that inflicted pain, I think we need to be willing to do that. Healing, in a Christian context, has to include an acknowledgment of sin. The idea of "the good war" leaves no room for mourning or penance, which doesn't match the actual experience many veterans carry — most of the veterans I know, and I should say plainly that most of the people I spend time with are anti-war, find the whole "thank you" ritual genuinely disorienting; they don't know what to do with it. And returning to a question from yesterday: where was God in Vietnam? If we raise young people believing God is on our side, and then we're in combat, does that mean God is there pulling the trigger with us? That doesn't sit easily against our own scriptural tradition. We have to be able to mourn our resort to the necessary evil of war, and let veterans mourn it too. But if God isn't there at the moment of greatest moral weight — the moment of taking a life — where is God? It's worth remembering that God didn't abandon Christ on the cross, even though God didn't answer him. Christ's last words include "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — and there was no reply. He went all the way to death without knowing whether he'd been abandoned. A lot of veterans carry something like that same unanswered question, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the church needs an answer better than silence. God has not abandoned them any more than God abandoned Christ. ## Three Books, Three Responses Bill Mahedy's *Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets* is one anchor here. Edward Tick's *War and the Soul* is another — Tick is especially interested in myth and ritual, and argues that modern Western culture has lost much of its own mythology, so that war and basic training function as a rite of passage without the second half of that rite ever completing. We don't know how to receive veterans back, or affirm whatever new identity combat has given them — Tick calls it something like a miscarriage of passage. He proposes purification and cleansing, storytelling, restitution to family, and formal initiation as a warrior as the missing pieces. Karl Marlantes, in *Matterhorn* and in *What It's Like to Go to War*, writes about something similar — what he calls "the club," a kind of fraternal order among veterans that doesn't yet have a clear shape. Marlantes also argues that discharge deserves its own ritual, the same weight we give enlistment — we have the oath, the parades, the ceremony of entry, and then someone leaves the military and is left to find their own way, with no comparable ceremony marking the return. I don't agree with everything either of them proposes, but I think there's something real in trying to cultivate ways for veterans to give voice to what they carry — and in the church, I think that has to connect to confession, though not confession confined to a private exchange between one priest and one penitent. Veterans' stories carry real value if we can find ways to receive them that don't ask a person to compromise their own stability in the telling. I don't know the formula for that. I was fortunate in where I landed after coming home — The Simple Way, Centurions Guild, Duke Divinity School among them — but I can't reduce that to something transferable. Maybe every community has to find its own way into this, shaped by the particular veterans who are actually part of it. ## Job, and Not Overwriting the Question Job is one of the two biblical models I want to close with — a post-trauma spiritual quest carried out inside community. Mahedy discusses this around page 165 of his book. My thesis advisor made a point I've held onto: Job insists he's done nothing wrong, and his friends, to their credit, sit with him in silence for a week before anyone speaks — that part they get right. Their mistake comes after, when they try to overwrite Job's own interpretation of what's happening to him, insisting there must be some hidden wrongdoing, some theological frame that makes sense of his suffering. Job refuses that frame entirely. And when God finally answers, near the end, it isn't with explanations — it's with more questions. As I remember Mahedy's reading of it, the hardest part of that ending is that Job never gets the answer he was owed. He gets *I am God, and you are not.* The lesson I take from my advisor is: don't try to overwrite a veteran's experience — especially their cynicism. In my own circles, which lean anti-war, cynicism is common, and the question of where God was in a given combat experience is a real, unresolved question for a lot of people. When they can't find a satisfying answer, some stop believing, if they ever fully did — and I don't think that's automatically a bad outcome. Doubt can be a genuinely healthy response to trauma. I watched an American soldier die in an accident that had nothing noble in it — exhaustion, a vehicle rollover — and I didn't want to believe God was somehow present in that death for some purpose. Sometimes the only honest answer we're going to find is that God is God, and we are not. ## Jubilee In the first session we talked about vows — the oath of enlistment, church creeds, statements of faith — and how they bind an individual to a community, while binding that community back to the individual in return. I want to offer Jubilee, from Leviticus 25, as a framework for release from those vows. The Hebrew *deror* and the Greek *aphesis* both carry the sense of freedom or release, and both get translated, in different contexts, as something close to salvation. If we can help veterans move through a release of their vows and their experiences — not to forget them, not to leave them behind, but to let them go, to watch them take on their own life apart from a white-knuckle grip on the identity the military gave them — I think that matters enormously. I still see men at the VA in their fatigues, Marine caps on, twenty years out from service, because that identity was so solidly formed, and held so much meaning, that letting go of any part of it feels like losing the ground under them. I sit on something closer to the other end of that spectrum — I worry I'll always be seen as *Logan the veteran* rather than Logan. If any of this is a vocation, I can't fully set it down, but it has to be given its own life apart from consuming the rest of mine. What I think we're being called toward is seeing veterans, and letting veterans be seen, as full human beings first — not erasing what they carry, but not letting it become the whole of who they are either. The three functions of Jubilee were release from debt, the freeing of those enslaved, and a return home — which speaks directly to what veterans need: release from vows made, freedom from a kind of servitude to national and military identity, and an actual homecoming. This year's theme at the festival is exile and return, and it circles back to Cain, who I talked about in the first session — our fratricidal forebear, exiled in Genesis 4:12, but only for two verses before he settles in the land of Nod. Cain's mark wasn't condemnation; it was protection, so that no one — including Cain himself — could harm him. If we can help veterans return all the way home, and reintegrate the whole of who they are rather than only the part the military formed, I think that does something real. --- ## Discussion *The conversation that followed was long and wide-ranging. Condensed here.* **On whether Old Testament war maps onto modern war.** Someone asked how texts like Jericho and Deuteronomy 20 relate to war as we understand it today. My short answer: not directly. Ancient warfare in a text like the Canaanite campaigns doesn't resemble the political self-interest that drives modern state conflict — nobody's circling Fallujah with a trumpet section. Interpretation isn't only linguistic; it requires cultural translation too. What I do find genuinely useful in Deuteronomy 20 is the pattern of deliberately thinning the ranks before a fight — sending home anyone newly married, newly landed, or simply afraid, no shame attached — so that when Israel wins against a larger force, the outcome can't be credited to human strength. That logic doesn't transfer cleanly onto a modern American military that's overwhelmingly the strongest force on the field; there's no room left in that story for the same kind of humility. **On parades and public acknowledgment.** Someone raised the desire many veterans and families have for genuine public recognition. The last time that really happened at scale was World War II — a war with far less moral ambiguity attached, where the country broadly agreed Hitler had to be stopped, and where soldiers were given actual time to process what they'd done before coming home. We couldn't have held the same ticker-tape parade for Vietnam, because claiming victory there wasn't honest, and nobody did the harder work of designing a public ceremony that could acknowledge an ambiguous or unfinished outcome. In that vacuum, silence just fell on the people who'd fought. Marlantes writes about the value of ritual solemnity in a homecoming — something like pointing rifles downward as a symbolic close to hostilities. Tick points to the same idea in some Native traditions, where war functioned as a rite of passage with a clear ending built in. What troubles me about the current wars is the absence of any such ending — if the Global War on Terror runs as long as the war on drugs has, it never resolves, and that's fundamentally incompatible with any coherent ethical framework for war, which generally requires conditions under which you know the fighting has stopped. **On profit, secrecy, and honesty about what we're calling war.** War used to be commercially costly in a way it largely isn't anymore — once conflict became profitable rather than costly, the human toll became secondary to the balance sheet, and that's a fairly recent shift. Secrecy has never been a criterion any just war tradition accepts — a just war is public and accountable by definition, which is part of why I think a drone war doesn't clear that bar and shouldn't be called one. Stanley Hauerwas has posed the sharper version of this question: if a war fails the tests for a just war, is it still war, or is it something closer to murder? I don't have a clean answer, but I think that's the level of honesty we need to be reaching for, rather than defaulting to language that makes an ambiguous conflict sound settled. **On what communities can actually do.** Someone asked how a smaller community, rather than the broader public, might actually offer a returning veteran a real welcome. Wendell Berry's distinction between a public and a community is useful here — a public is open-access and anonymous; a community is mediated, particular, shaped by whoever's actually in it. I don't think there's a universal formula, because a Catholic parish's liturgical resources look nothing like a non-creedal Baptist congregation's. What I can offer isn't a script so much as a few instincts: don't ask whether someone has killed anyone. Don't lead with "thank you for your service" — try "welcome home" instead. And say, plainly, "I love you," along with some version of *you may have done things I'll never fully understand, and there's nothing that changes that.* Jeffrey Lucey — a young Marine whose story became public after his death, and whose family didn't know how to respond when he told them he felt like a monster — is the kind of situation this is meant for: not correcting the feeling, just refusing to let it become the last word. **An extended exchange with a Catholic Worker in the audience** touched on how thoroughly the calendar itself is organized around war — Flag Day, Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day, and now September 11 — and how even ostensibly solemn days like Memorial Day slide easily into celebration. He raised Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist whose son died in Iraq, as someone who tried to warn other parents away from the same loss, and noted that many grieving families instead resolve their grief into affirmations that the loss was noble. My response, in short: veneration and villainization are two sides of the same coin, and I want to set both down. A lot of energy in anti-war spaces still runs on that same sacrificial logic in reverse — treating a veteran's story as useful primarily insofar as it argues against the war, rather than sitting with it on its own terms. I said I never felt fully at home in some antiwar veterans' organizing for something like that reason — I think the church's response has to be preceded by lament rather than anger, and anger, however righteous, isn't a reliable theological lens on its own. What I keep coming back to, imperfectly, is something closer to Dorothy Day's model — sitting with someone, feeding them, listening without an agenda, letting them set the terms of their own return, rather than organizing a strategy around them. He pushed back that this reads as more available to people with the leisure to sit and reflect than to, say, an eighteen-year-old weighing enlistment, and I think that's a fair challenge I don't have a full answer to — I don't know exactly what I'd tell a kid in that position beyond trying to live in a way that makes the whole apparatus look as unnecessary as it actually is, which takes more than words or slogans. The same exchange turned briefly to his own history in the Plowshares movement — disarming a missile launcher at a defense plant and serving time for it — and a story he told about a fellow member of his community, an elderly religious sister in poor health, testifying at her own trial about tapping a missile casing with a small hammer until she left a dent, then setting the hammer down. It's a vivid illustration of largely symbolic direct action, and worth keeping in mind that this was his account of another person's testimony, not something I can independently verify in these exact words. **On alternatives to enlistment**, someone asked what resources exist for young people who feel drawn to service but are only ever shown one path into it. The American Friends Service Committee publishes a booklet — I believe titled *It's My Life* — laying out alternative paths (agriculture, education, construction trades) alongside the ways to fund them. The deeper problem isn't the absence of alternatives; it's that the military's recruiting budget vastly outspends anything else competing for a young person's attention, and that imbalance shapes what feels like the obvious choice long before anyone weighs it seriously. **On spiritual direction versus chaplaincy**, a spiritual director in the audience, prompted by my earlier comment that military chaplaincy exists primarily to support the mission, asked whether spiritual direction might offer a different kind of space — one where a veteran can simply be heard rather than managed. I didn't have much to offer beyond agreeing that the two aren't the same thing, and that a space built around listening without an agenda, letting someone set the terms of their own process, sounded like exactly the kind of thing this conversation has been circling.