A few months into recovery, I was invited to attend a day-retreat organized by a local veterans’ moral leadership group. Those vets live with what’s known as military moral injury (in some cases going back decades). For years now, I’ve been researching and writing about the devastating consequences of the militarization of this country and the armed violence we loosed on the world in the 21st century. I’ve been listening carefully and trying to more deeply understand the stories of veterans from America’s disastrous wars in my own lifetime.
Now, given my own condition, a new window has opened for me. I can’t help but see more clearly the visceral experience of recovery, including moral recovery. So, I found myself sitting in that circle of a dozen vets, the only woman among them. And I soon had to catch my breath, because, as I briefly described what I was experiencing, they responded in a way I hadn’t expected, expressing their own profound vulnerability, understanding of, and empathy for my plight. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at how they “got it” in a way that even my loved ones struggled to grasp when it came to my own journey through the challenging nature of recovery.
Intolerable Suffering
Most civilians know little or nothing about the experiences of vets who live with what’s become known as “military moral injury.” It’s been described as “intolerable suffering” that arises from a deep assault on one’s moral core. Think about facing horrific suffering caused by violence you not only had to witness, but could do nothing to stop. You probably were even trained and mandated to perpetrate it. Sooner or later, such a dystopian world invariably slices through whatever bedrock values you’ve been taught and begins dissolving your sense of self. That’s military moral injury, and it’s been linked to the epidemic of self-harm and suicide among former members of the US military that continues to this day.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand that military moral injury is rooted in being exposed to unsparing violence. It erupts as a consequence of witnessing violence, perpetrating it, or being on the receiving end of its death-dealing forms of betrayal. Moral injury bursts forth as people find themselves powerless to stop the suffering violence begets. War is a deep assault on life itself (both figuratively and literally), and violence isn’t a tool that a person picks up or sets down without consequences.
Admittedly, in this century, we in this country became woefully adept at denying the impact of our own violence on ourselves and the rest of the world. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called that phenomenon “psychic numbing.” We tend to minimize the violence we’ve committed globally and avoid facing what it’s done to our own soldiers, burying any awareness of it deep in our subconscious minds. It’s too painful, too scary, too horrible to live with (if you don’t have to) and, when we’ve been so deeply mixed up in it, too shameful to stay with for any length of time.
Military moral injury is like the Guinea worm that festers in a person’s body until it begins to burst out, painfully and devastatingly.
Nonetheless, the penetrating cultural and systematic violence of American militarism and militarization globally has shaped all our lives, even if it’s only the 1% of us who have actually done the dirty work and suffer the most. My own work has helped me see how the militarized violence of the post-9/11 period, orchestrated by my own country, is now being turned inward with increasingly violent military incursions into our nation’s cities.
In my research, I’ve investigated the obscene level of material resources this country has dedicated to militarization in this century, our unparalleled “empire” of military bases (domestically and internationally), and the ways that the violence of militarism has dripped into our own lives, culturally and institutionally. And make no mistake, subterranean forms of violence regularly burst into direct armed violence. We tell ourselves that violence is like a coat that you can put on and take off when you choose, but that’s a tragically mistaken way of thinking. Violence works its way into your body, even into your soul. Then it festers there, eating away at your capacity for being human—your longing for loving, honest relationships; your care for yourself and others; and your deep connection to other living beings. Even worse, in a culture that glorifies violence and has made it into something sacred, such dynamics are excruciatingly hard for us to see clearly.
Nevertheless, the veterans I sat with that day were in recovery from just such an exposure to violence and they understood me. They recognized what was happening to me because of their own struggles to grasp and admit their injuries, especially their moral injuries, and get themselves on the highway of healing and repair.
Moral Injury and the Guinea Worm
These last years, I’ve been trying to find words that truly describe the experience of military moral injury. In that context, let me share a story with you. Some weeks ago, I was driving and listening to NPR on the radio when I heard a reporter launch into a story about the near-eradication of a terrible plague, Guinea worm disease, or GWD. At one point, that parasitic malady had debilitated an estimated 3.5 million people living in 20 different African and Asian nations.
A “searingly painful” disease, Guinea worm infects people who drink water tainted with its larvae. Those eggs then grow into worms that can be up to 3 feet long inside the human body (including children’s bodies). Think of them as long thin ropes. Eventually, the worms break through the skin in burning blisters, bursting out of the body. One sufferer said that it was “more painful than childbirth,” and the process of extraction can take weeks as the worm spools out like something from a horror film.
The pain is so awful that some people in natural settings will seek out water in streams or ponds for relief from the burning sensation. But as they plunge their limbs in, they release thousands more Guinea worm larvae, contaminating the water. Then, the cycle repeats itself as others drink that same water.
As I listened to the story that day, I could feel my face twisting into a grimace. What a horrific and frightening affliction, I thought.
The Dream That Visited Me
Reaching home, I continued with my day’s work—a new book focused on a set of in-depth interviews with military veterans living with moral injury. I hope to shine a stronger light on their voices, while tracing their journeys of reparation, recovery, and the renewal of hope. But that night, a dream about the Guinea worm awakened me.
It was as if my subconscious had made a connection too awful for me to make consciously. In the dark of night, I realized that violence is like the Guinea worm. In the United States, people thoughtlessly—even in a celebratory fashion—drink it in, absorbing it into their bodies and generally thinking little of being exposed to it.
One common theme from the interviews I’m conducting with veterans is how many of their fathers and mothers encouraged them to enlist in the military when they were teenagers, some just 17 years old. Their parents obviously didn’t wish them to be hurt. They just believed that such service and the discipline that went with it would “make a man out of you,” while giving them a useful trade in life or earning them money to go to college or buy a home. They generally weren’t prepared to consider how encouraging their children to enlist might lead to exposure to relentless violence in their lives (if, that is, their children even lived through it). It really was akin to taking their child to a stream to drink water infected with the Guinea worm.
Many in the moral engagement group have taken up the work of healing, reparation, and community building, even while they still struggle with the consequences of their own violence and that of others in their lives.
The violence their children, now the veterans I was dealing with, would witness, or even mete out and absorb, had melted their humanity. As one veteran put it, “I became cold, unfeeling.” It wasn’t until decades later, when his daughter accompanied him to a therapy appointment and, weeping, told him about the impact his iciness had on her, that he began to grasp the cost of war not only to his own life, but to hers as well.
When I asked another veteran, “What exactly was injured in you?” he responded, “I became cruel, unnecessarily.” He had been acclimated into a military culture where soldiers in training were “disciplined” by those of slightly higher rank through regular physical assaults, being slapped, hit in the head or groin, having things thrown at them. He became very good at such behavior himself, even reveling in it, until, many years later, his life fell apart, and he saw what he had both done and lost.
Another veteran described to me the results of the violence in his life this way: “My heart was broken, and it was as though poison was injected into me.” That veteran had enlisted at the age of 17 in the military’s “delayed entry program” and endured three deployments to war-torn Iraq. When he enlisted, he hoped to use his military benefits to become a pediatrician later in life. But after his service, being in the presence of children shamed and devastated him. And there was no one he knew who understood what he was experiencing.
Military moral injury is like the Guinea worm that festers in a person’s body until it begins to burst out, painfully and devastatingly. And we’re now in a culture and society in which all too many of those we claim to esteem, our service members and veterans, are living with just such pain. They say it’s like “losing your soul.” Interviewing them, I now understand that perhaps the worst part of that pain is the isolation they experience. Their fellow citizens simply don’t understand what they’re going through and, in fact, regularly avoid dealing with it.
Eradicating the Violence That Worms Its Way into Our Souls
A new documentary tells the story of how Guinea worm disease, “born out of poverty and perpetuating poverty,” has been nearly eradicated. Even more surprising, the overcoming of that devastating parasite did not happen through the development of fancy medicines or vaccines, but by distinctly “low-tech” means. Activists on the ground tirelessly used the power of education and discussion, so that those potentially most affected could learn how to both filter the water they used and avoid spreading the larvae through water. Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center devoted funding to and publicized support for the campaign to bring the disease under control, and that cause remained front and center for Carter until his death.
One such activist is Garang Buk Buk Piol, a former child soldier in Sudan. “Carrying an AK-47 when he was 12 years old, he learned how to slay another human being.” But according to the documentary’s director, “That child turned into a Guinea worm warrior, a philanthropist, and an activist amongst his people.” He has spent his life as a teacher in South Sudan’s schools, building programs to fight Guinea worm disease, “waging peace and building hope.”
In a country that engaged in so many disastrous wars in this century (with another one in Venezuela possibly looming on the horizon), the veterans I’ve been interviewing were left in the unavoidable position of having to “swallow” violence alone, intimately, and on a profound scale. Today, like Buk Buk, many in the moral engagement group have taken up the work of healing, reparation, and community building, even while they still struggle with the consequences of their own violence and that of others in their lives.
And what about the rest of us? I experienced the violence of a serious car crash, and my life won’t ever be the same as before. But the crushing collision with violence that too many of our veterans are still dealing with is so much more horrible than anything I (or most of the rest of us) could possibly imagine. Meanwhile, the growing violence of my country (and these days, in my country) since 9/11, continues to—yes!—worm its way into our bodies and souls, even if so many of us aren’t really aware of it.
We’ve become accustomed to believing that there is no other way except through violence. But that is patently false. This Veterans Day, I’ll be thinking about the sort of acts I can muster to respond to the latest assaults of violence that are penetrating our lives, city streets, workplaces, courts, universities, federal institutions, access to healthcare, food security, and all too much else. Instead of responding with fear, collusion, or apathy, I’m making plans to resist violence with others through acts of healing, humor, love of neighbor, and building hope. I hope you are, too.
(AI image: Rep. Ted Lieu/X)
(AI image: Rep. Jason Crow/X)
(AI image: House Ways and Means Committee Democrats/X)
