*Content Warning: Discussions of violence, combat, warfare, PTSD, and moral injury*

“Our veterans’ terror is real. They come home stumbling out of hell. But we don’t see them as they have become. Instead, we offer them beer and turkey dinners, debriefing and an occasional parade, and a return to routine jobs and weekends in the shopping malls. Because we as a nation are trapped in a consciousness that cannot acknowledge abject suffering, especially if we have caused or contributed to it, we do not see the reality of war. Meanwhile, survivors feel trapped in that apocalyptic reality and rarely try to explain it to people who will not understand.”

—War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, by Edward Tick

Things are getting fairly exciting in the development of this research project. For the past six weeks, I have been reading articles, journals, magazines, and books, as well as listening to podcasts and watching documentaries and videos pertaining to the subject of moral injury (and moral injury within the realm of PTSD) and how it affects our nation’s returning veterans. This has been a very rewarding exposure in that I had little idea before the start of this project the importance of talking about moral injury, what causes it, and how to help those it affects heal. I also had little idea of my own personal responsibility to returning service members in doing my best to better understand what they go through once they return from service.

I am excited at the prospect of beginning to write the paper on this research. Alongside writing this paper, I soon hope to have some really wonderful and engaging experiences: Brite Divinity School has a Soul Repair Center, “dedicated to research and public education about recovery from moral injury,” that I hope to be able to visit and take a tour of this summer; I also have the honor and privilege of being able to speak with some great leaders of support programs for veterans in the Monterey County community. This project has really been meaningful so far and I can only wait for it to become more so.

What continues to surprise me is the genuine interest many people have in the topic I am exploring. I haven’t yet come upon a person who has not seemed fully engaged in discussing moral injury with me; many times, people are interested in really learning more about something they didn’t know was such a serious issue. I sense that many people do honestly care for our veterans and want to help share in the pain that many of them carry. This gives me hope that our nation’s consciousness around the experiences of returning service members will one day expand enough to hold all of the anguish, grief, and sorrow so many of our soldiers internally struggle with. It gives me hope that we can one day honor the full person, all of who they are, through civilians sharing in this broadened understanding of the true costs of war on a veteran’s moral conscience.

As a person who finds war at odds with a lot of what I believe in and value, I cannot deny my own personal responsibility to our returning veterans and service members who have fought on my behalf (perhaps even for a conflict I might not have chosen to support). I have a personal responsibility to these individuals to try my best in understanding and unpacking with them their pain. It is our moral responsibility as citizens to not leave this undertaking up to the individual veteran alone to suffer through and figure out; we, too, should better acknowledge the horrifying realities of war that we expect our returning soldiers to deal with.

As a Unitarian Universalist, the first principle I witness to is “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” It breaks my heart that some people might return from war feeling that they have lost their personal worth and dignity for what they have witnessed or done. It pains me more to know that many carry this pain alone, for they fear other Americans cannot and do not understand their experiences, or may judge them for what they have done or failed to do. I have a personal obligation to validate their inherent worth and dignity as people, even when they cannot validate it themselves. They should not have to hide who they are and what they have gone through from the public’s eye, for fear that they have lost their humanness.

I hope to keep being humbled by reading about these morally injurious experiences and the lives that have been so deeply afflicted by them. I ask myself to hold this information close to heart so that it may transform how I understand the complete calculated costs of waging war.

A question for you: do you agree or disagree that civilians have a moral obligation and responsibility to returning veterans in sharing in their pain and anguish? Why or why not?

More updates will follow as my project continues to develop and take shape. Be well and thank you for reading.