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‘For the Ashes of his Fathers, And the Temples of his Gods’. Or is it something else that makes a soldier fight? – Part II

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By Sonia Bhatia and Kamaldeep Singh Sandhu

The ritual of training and leadership works best for a military group (Credit Image: CC0 Creative Commons)

 

Introduction

Part I of this article had argued that shared political views and motivations do not shape soldiers’ actions in battlefield. Instead, their actions are defined by more immediate things such as the group survival, deprivation, fatigue and fear for life and limb. In addition, it argued that the combat effectiveness of a squad, section, platoon or a company is derived from its cohesiveness and training, which does not depend upon any cultural or linguistic basis. Part II of the article will highlight that groups are formed through rituals, and that the ritual of training and leadership works best for a military group.

 

Group formation through Rituals

Ardant du Picq, a nineteenth century French army officer wrote that

‘From living together, and obeying the same chiefs, from commanding the same men, from sharing fatigue and rest, from cooperation among men who quickly understand each other in the execution of warlike movements, may be bred brotherhood, professional knowledge, sentiment and above all unity’.[1]

One of the most effective ways to form cohesive groups is through ‘Rituals’. Tarak Barkawi rightly states that living and acting like a group, in daily and periodic rituals, creates group feeling. Groups do not require an outside social basis or an essentialised identity like nation, religion or caste to account for their solidarity or common behaviour. Rituals exercise their power when a group simply participates in them. Tarak also mentions the Australian concept of Mana – a ‘vague power’ or ‘force’ that seems to flow through and among participants in ritual, conjoining group members, their totems and their god, and inspiring sentiments of unity, cooperation and sacrifice. Fed by daily and periodic ritual activities performed under common symbols and identities, formal and informal, mana is what military professionals call esprit de corps. Thus, rituals are a ‘strategic form of socialisation’. In military terms it boils down to nothing else but ‘effective training’.

Training, which occupies a great deal of time in military calendars, achieves a dual purpose of both ritualised solidarity-building as well as disciplinary instruction in taking the correct actions in combat.[2] Training may be more technically grounded, focusing on the geography and climate of the area of operation. Training can also be superimposed with the principles and ideals, such as ‘fighting for the common good of the population’ and ‘the victory of good over evil’ and are common to everyone irrespective of their religion or social background. Soldiers easily identify with these principles and ideals as they were a part of their upbringing and may have been a reason why they chose to join the army.

 

Leadership

Besides training, another crucial factor that kneads any military sub-unit together, irrespective of its social composition is effective leadership. Officers, and in particular, commanders, play a crucial role as personified symbols of collective groups. Commanders, such as Field Marshal Sir William Slim, Napoleon Bonaparte, Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw and many others, can also symbolise the identity and spirit of military formations.[3] War time historiography is full of military leaders who, through trust, character, courage and competence, have brought out the highest virtues of all who followed them. Since early years of warfare, irrespective of the nature of armaments in use, tactics and strategy, organisational structure, training and discipline, the political construction of states and the social makeup of the armies, the characteristics of leadership have not changed. Group solidarity rituals are just as important as creating strong leaders whom soldiers can follow.

 

Conclusion: War and Political Rationality

The primary group theory (as explained in Part I of this  article) and the national narratives of sacrifice, the two sources of fighting spirit of a soldier, are often connected through a historical framework. The martial antagonism towards an adversary is invoked through the way national histories of war and armies are written. Unfortunately, the inquiry, whether the adversary is real or perceived, is left to current political narratives, also often used to justify the rationality of the government’s actions. This is where the magical language of national sacrifice becomes necessary and the belief in such narratives important, simply because the population finds it appealing. Whether this is correct approach or not, remains debatable and varies from one region to another and from one society to another.

Nevertheless, it is always better to generate battlefield effectiveness from strong primary groups created from rituals of training and leadership rather than from any other source. Once trained, a soldier is motivated enough to do his job as long his/her primary group is strong and intact and there is a strong leader to follow. The battlefield generated sources are good enough to shape a soldier’s combat behaviour. A soldier’s personal idea of nationalism and politics alone may not work, as each man all by himself may just contribute as much as a cog in the wheel. It is however, the coordinated action of each cog that makes the wheel turn. Same is true for any formation. This coordination is only possible with an institutionalised training program. An effective training program focusses on tactics and operations rather than on ideologies or political narratives. Tarak Barkawi sums it up appropriately by saying that

To represent soldiers and their actions in the service of one or another nationalist cause is to reduce war to a political rationality. The problem is that war, and the fate of people caught up in it, exceeds politics.[4]

 

Raised in an army household, Sonia Bhatia is a Post Graduate Diploma holder in Public Relations and Human Resource Management from the University of Madras. She graduated in BA, Health and Nutrition from Delhi University. She has been brought up in a traditional Army family which has seen generations of men and women serving in the Army and the Air Force. Her experiences and interests have been close to the social structure of the Army Regimental life. She also has five years of work experience in Human Resource Management in the corporate sector, which enriched her with the contrast of the social structure that exists outside the army.

Kamaldeep Singh Sandhu is a doctoral student at the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. He is currently researching on India’s defence diplomacy in the 21st century. His other research interests include South Asian security and military culture. Kamaldeep is an alumni of National Defence Academy, Pune as well as Army War College, Mhow. He has served as an officer with the Indian army’s Parachute Regiment for ten years. Thereafter he graduated in MA, ‘War in the Modern World’ from the department of War Studies at King’s College London in 2014. You can find him on Twitter @kamal_sandhu78

 

Notes

[1] Barkawi, Tarak, ‘Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II’, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017, p.166 and (Du Picq, Battle Studies, p. 96)

[2] (Barkawi, 2017), p.179

[3] (Barkawi, 2017), p.181

[4] (Barkawi, 2017), p. 119

 

Image Source: 

https://pixabay.com/en/military-paratroopers-airborne-582356/

 

‘For the Ashes of his Fathers, And the Temples of his Gods’. Or is it something else that makes a soldier fight? – Part I

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By Sonia Bhatia and Kamaldeep Singh Sandhu

‘Horatius Cocles defending the Bridge’ by Charles Le Brun (1619 – 1690) – Google Art Project (Credit Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Introduction

In the 6th century BC, during a battle between the armies of Rome and Clusium, a Roman officer Publius Horatius took a suicidal stand defending a bridge on river Tibre. His actions injured him permanently but saved the day for the city, as the delay he caused was enough for the bridge for to be damaged by the Romans, thus preventing the enemy from crossing the swollen river Tiber.

Later in the 19th century, Thomas Babington Macaulay, inspired by this Roman tale of bravery, wrote a poem ‘Horatius’ in his dedication, narrating the often-quoted lines, ‘… For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods…’ These lines have influenced plethora of narratives inspiring generations of young men and women to fight for their motherlands both in and out of armed forces.

One can argue that these narratives do ignite passion and romanticism to serve and to protect the society from which one emanates. However, when it comes to the actual battlefield, when bullets are flying overhead and buddies are getting killed or injured, what is the motivation that drives a soldier to kill and to die? Thomas Macaulay’s Horatius suggests a viewpoint that a soldier is motivated by the desire to protect his family, friends and society in general and thus performs such extreme acts of violence. In the contemporary era, the language used in the recruitment drives, news reporting, obituaries, commentaries on military ceremonies, etc also advocates this viewpoint. It forces us to think that the spirit needed for deliverance or sacrifice during wartime is usually derived from ideology, political ideals and, above all, nationalism.

From a soldier’s point of view things are very different. At an individual level, soldiers, like any other human being, seek meaning to their job and do so by more visible and immediate things such as by ‘pursuing relations of estrangement and identification with others’,[1]  especially with whom they live and work on daily basis. For a soldier, what matters is his squad, company, battalion or at most his regiment. Based on Tarak Barkawi’s latest book, ‘Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in the World War II’, this two part article aims to carry this debate further.

 

Primary Group Theory

Shils and Janowitz in their seminal essay published in 1948, based on the study of captured prisoners of war of Wehrmacht, argued that it is a soldier’s relationship with his primary group, that is his section, platoon and company, which goes far to explain why he responds to one appeal and not to another.[2]

‘He [a soldier] was likely to go on fighting, provided he had the necessary weapons, as long as the group possessed leadership, with which he could identify himself, and as long as he gave affection to and received affection from the other members of his squad and platoon. In other words, as long as he felt himself to be a member of his primary group and therefore bound by the expectations and demands of its other members, his soldierly achievement was likely to be good’.[3]

The average age of a soldier, when he joins his battalion for the very first time is about twenty years. This is also the age at which he starts carving out his own identity for the very first time. While he may identify with the customs and ideals of his family, his identity is still very malleable. As he leaves home to serve his country, his background and upbringing continue to have an impact on his speech, accent, food preference etc. These traits however are dwarfed in front of the adaptations he makes willingly with a susceptible young mind ready to be impressed upon by his peers and environment. It creates a distinct identity for him as he serves alongside other men of various backgrounds and beliefs.

For soldiers, the idea of fighting, living and dying for the motherland/fatherland or for the cultural possessions of the fatherland, is a relatively distant thought. In Indian Army, for example, officers and soldiers are groomed under strong regimental ethos to serve for ‘Naam, Namak aur Nishaan’ (reputation, loyalty and standard/identity) of their battalions and regiments. While ideas such as nationalism, patriotism, country, nation, ideology and politics are commonly used to articulate the required social and political narratives; when in actual operations, these ideas are overshadowed by soldiers’ relationships with each other, their will to survive and succeed. Tarak Barkawi has argued that during the Second World War, the shared political beliefs did not shape soldiers’ discipline and cohesion. Their actions were shaped by what was more immediate – deprivation, fatigue, fear for limb, for oneself and others near him.[4] This issue, therefore, inherently becomes one of the critical considerations for battle effectiveness.

 

Battle effectiveness

But how does it matter? As long as soldiers have the required motivation to do their job, why is this distinction necessary and this debate critical? In the fast changing socio-economic context it is pertinent to be aware of the dynamic motivations of a soldier, especially for the military leaders. The Indian Army Infantry Regiments are a case study in hand. Since independence in 1947, the Indian Army has won many conventional battles. Besides good strategy, tactics, training and logistics, one of the most important battle-winning factor has been the cultural and linguistic cohesion at the unit and sub-unit level. Hence, until recent years, the recruitment for the infantry regiments was carried out from specific social groups and regions. The military elites had resisted the political pressure to recruit from all communities, under one pretext or another, in order to maintain the class composition of its infantry battalions. The army’s leadership was determined to preserve these compositions, because it saw them as crucial to its effectiveness and cohesion based on ‘intimate sense of kinsman-ship and traditions’.[5] However during the last few years, the army has started recruiting from all communities for its infantry regiments.  So, what will be the binding factor for the units, which were so used to bonding based on kinship and common language dialect, when troops from different regions and languages start joining?

Fortunately, the universal fact is that the cultural identities of soldiers in a group are malleable. The Second World War proved that when the army was disrupted, disordered and re-ordered due to the heavy losses suffered initially, the British realised that their worries about the martial races and mixing classes were ill-founded. [6] Soldiers become attached to their unit identities through serving in those units.[7] For instance, in 2/13th Frontier Force Rifles, Jats were incorporated into its Sikh company due to wartime recruitment shortages .The Jats ‘fitted well with the Sikhs’. When the time came to revert to an all Sikh company toward the end of the war, the Jats asked if they could convert to Sikhism in order to remain with the battalion.[8]

 

Conclusion

Nationalism and fighting for the flag may seem as the ultimate motivation for a soldier. It is, however, the operating environment generated factors – which include a vivid account of passion for survival that they share with their comrades, about conviction of the cause, their dependability on each other, clarity of each other’s perspectives, strengths and weaknesses, and more importantly, the faith that they stand by each other – that truly act as a driving force. The military effectiveness will always remain dependent upon effective group formation at the lowest levels of squad, section, platoon and company. The empirical evidence suggests that as long as a military sub-unit has good training and strong leadership, it will be ‘fit for battle’ irrespective of its cultural, demographic or linguistic composition.

 

(…To be continued in Part II)

Raised in an army household, Sonia Bhatia is a Post Graduate Diploma holder in Public Relations and Human Resource Management from the University of Madras. She graduated in BA, Health and Nutrition from Delhi University. She has been brought up in a traditional Army family which has seen generations of men and women serving in the Army and the Air Force. Her experiences and interests have been close to the social structure of the Army Regimental life. She also has five years of work experience in Human Resource Management in the corporate sector, which enriched her with the contrast of the social structure that exists outside the army. She is married to an Army officer and continues to uphold the values she has learnt, while imbibing the same in her two children.

Kamaldeep Singh Sandhu is a doctoral student at the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. He is currently researching on India’s defence diplomacy in the 21st century. His other research interests include South Asian security and military culture. Kamaldeep is an alumni of National Defence Academy, Pune as well as Army War College, Mhow. He has served as an officer with the Indian army’s Parachute Regiment for ten years. Thereafter he graduated in MA, ‘War in the Modern World’ from the department of War Studies at King’s College London in 2014. You can find him on Twitter @kamal_sandhu78

Notes: 

1 Barkawi, Tarak, ‘Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II’, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017, p.159

2 (Shils and Janowitz 1948), p.380

3 (Shils and Janowitz 1948), p.284

4 (Barkawi 2017), p.82-83

5 Wilkinson, Steven I., ‘Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence’, Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2015), p.115

6 (Barkawi 2017), p.80

7 (Barkawi 2017), p. 271

8 (Barkawi 2017), p.56

Image Source

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22151760

 

The unforgiven: How do soldiers live with their guilt?

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By Kevin Sites:

When soldiers kill in war, the secret shame and guilt they bring back home can destroy them

November 2004, against a shattered wall in south Fallujah in Iraq, with video rolling, I conduct a battlefield interview with US Marine Corporal William Wold. He has just shot six men dead inside a room adjoining a mosque and is juiced with a mix of adrenaline and relief.

He describes the 30-second sequence with a profane candor I have never seen matched in my decade of reporting on war around the world. ‘It was a fucking small room, dude. It was fucking small!’ He shakes his head. ‘Thirty-five fucking rounds. I was fucking scared dude. I fucking grabbed my nuts.’ Then, with one hand, he does so again, and lets out a big ‘Ohhh!

‘I was told to go the room,’ he says, ‘and my first Marine went in… he saw a guy with an AK, I told him to shoot the guy, then I shot the six guys on the left… and my other Marine shot two other guys.’

Wold grew up near Vancouver in Washington State. A high-school linebacker, he had a college football scholarship waiting for him, but gave it up to join the Marines. His first assignment out of boot camp was with a small unit assigned to protect President George W Bush.

Sites-1
Photo by Alex Pena of Stars and Stripes

Now, here in Fallujah, the site of what will become the most famous battle of the US war in Iraq, the 21-year-old is covered in sweat, dirt and grime, which does nothing to diminish his charisma and good looks. We talk through the sound of machine-gun fire, tanks and even an air strike, the explosions providing unnecessary emphasis to his remarks.

‘My fiancée’s worried that I’m not going to come back the same. I’ll never tell her what things I did here. I’ll never tell anybody. ’Cause I’m not proud of killing people. I’m just proud to serve my country. I hate being here but I love it at the same time.’

Wold’s fiancée was right. He wouldn’t come back the same. He thought his war was over, but a few months later, back in the safety of his childhood home surrounded by his adoring family, the dark secrets and all the guilt emerged from his mind – like the Greeks from their hollow wooden horse, unrelenting in their destruction of ancient Troy.

The story of the Trojan horse, delivered as a gift but transporting lethal agents instead, has long served as an allegory for the destructive power of secrets – like the unaddressed guilt hidden in the minds of soldiers, repeated with every homecoming for thousands of years. War’s simple premise, killing, is like that Trojan horse, devastating those sent to do it and, ultimately, the society they return to when the war is done. The insidious damage is only made worse because wartime killing, a philosophically problematic act, has been left out of the global dialogue. After all, how can humanity’s greatest civil crime, killing, become heroic in the context of war? There are practical considerations as well: will too much discussion of killing make soldiers hesitate or even rebel against protecting us from threats?

I recognized the dissonance after completing a project for Yahoo News in 2006 called In the Hot Zone, in which I covered every major war in the world in one year. In 368 consecutive days of travel, 71 airplanes, 30 countries and 21 wars, the indisputable truth I found was this: combat is almost always the shortest and smallest part of any conflict, while collateral damage or civil destruction is war’s most enduring legacy. But even more surprising to me was that former combatants often become casualties themselves. War veterans I met across the globe, from Somalia to Sri Lanka, feel that they killed a part of their own humanity every time they pulled the trigger, becoming collateral damage as well.

Karl Marlantes, a former US Marine lieutenant in Vietnam in the late 1960s, says he and his fellow soldiers lacked context for the killing they would have to do. ‘When I did eventually face death – the death of those I killed and those killed around me,’ he wrote in his book What It Is Like to Go to War (2011), ‘I had no framework or guidance to help me put combat’s terror, exhilaration, horror, guilt and pain into some larger framework that would’ve have helped me find meaning in them later.’

What we’re beginning to learn now is that, of all those things Marlantes mentioned, unaddressed guilt might be the most dangerous for returning veterans. A recent study by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) shows that nearly two-dozen veterans are killing themselves every day, nearly one an hour. This attrition, connected at least in part to combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other war-related psychological injuries, is an enormous price to pay for avoiding the subject. So great, in fact, that the total number of US active duty suicides in 2012 (349) was higher than the number of combat-related deaths (295).

 If soldiers felt nothing about taking the life of another human being, that would be indicative of sociopathy

 VA researchers recognised the epidemic, and over the past five years conducted a series of studies trying to drill down. Overwhelmingly, the work showed that veterans who killed others in war were at greater risk of psychiatric problems and psychic break. In a 2010 paper in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, VA researchers studied 2,797 US soldiers returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some 40 per cent of them reported killing or being responsible for killing during their deployment. Even after controlling for combat exposure, killing was a significant predictor of PTSD, alcohol abuse, anger, relationship problems – and suicide risk.

Armed with these results, VA clinicians developed a disruptive new theory they’ve termed ‘moral injury’ – the notion that it’s not simply witnessing trauma that undoes combat veterans, but guilt; and in particular, guilt over two things: killing and not being killed. The implication is that we humans are fairly resilient in our ability to see horrible things and somehow continue functioning, but we’re not so good at living with what we consider our more shameful deeds. Even if killing seems justified by the demands and duties of war, it sends our moral compasses spinning.

According to the VA psychologists Shira Maguen of San Francisco and Brett Litz of Boston, both experts on military trauma, the key precondition for moral injury, our so-called Achilles’ heel, is a sense of ‘transgression’, a betrayal of what’s right. ‘In the context of war,’ they write, ‘moral injuries may stem from direct participation in acts of combat, such as killing or harming others, or indirect acts, such as witnessing death or dying, failing to prevent immoral acts of others, or giving or receiving orders that are perceived as gross moral violations. The act may have been carried out by an individual or a group, through a decision made individually or as a response to orders given by leaders.’ Indeed, commanders are not just responsible for the physical wellbeing of their soldiers, but through the moral consequences of their orders, their future mental health.

Some military leaders are disturbed by the findings, and say the term moral injury impugns the character of their soldiers. But researchers argue it’s quite the opposite: if soldiers felt nothing about taking the life of another human being, that would be indicative of sociopathy. Disturbance caused by killing indicates the presence of morality, not its lack.

Indeed, Maguen and Litz report, the combatant might see himself as ‘an evil, terrible person’ and ‘unforgivable’ because of acts done in war. Veterans might feel betrayed by the society that sent them to war or the superior officers who placed them in a situation where accidental killing of their own men or innocent civilians occurred.

Sites-2
Photo by Alex Pena of Stars and Stripes.

‘When a leader destroys the legitimacy of the army’s moral order by betraying “what’s right”,’ writes the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, an expert in combat trauma, in his book Achilles in Vietnam (1994), ‘he inflicts manifold injuries on his men.’ Returning vets who have killed are far more likely to report a sense of alienation and purposelessness caused by a breakdown in standards and values. They withdraw from or sabotage relationships.  The sense of self-condemnation, those feelings of guilt, betrayal and shame, might remain hidden inside the warrior’s head until he returns home, and once the Trojan horse is safely inside the gates of Troy, the agents of destruction are unleashed.

This could be what happened to Corporal William Wold, who, not unlike Homer’s Achilles in the Iliad, was a brave and accomplished warrior made vulnerable by a fatal flaw. Wold’s mother Sandi said he was fine for a while when he first got home, but after a few months the darkness seeped out. He couldn’t eat and he never slept.

The transgression that bothered him most wasn’t the carnage in the mosque, but another, even more disturbing incident, an accidental killing at a vehicle checkpoint in Iraq. The vague description Sandi gave to a local television reporter is horrifying: ‘A vehicle came through that hadn’t been cleared,’ she said. ‘The lieutenant says: “Take them out.” He took them out. They went to the van – it was a bunch of little kids. And he had to take their bodies back to the family.’

 It was in the calm of these ‘safe’ surroundings that his guilt and shame overwhelmed him

 Instead of killing an armed enemy, Wold had, through the orders of an officer, killed several children. Accidental killing of civilians in the Iraq War, as in all wars, are much more common than you can imagine. Numbers are so high it wouldn’t benefit the military to keep accurate tabs; rigorous documentation would just fan the public relations nightmare and boost the propaganda value of the deaths for the other side.

Wold, like many combatants, was able to contain his guilt while still in Iraq. But when he returned home, he brought the Trojan horse with him. It was there, in the calm of these ‘safe’ surroundings, that his guilt and shame overwhelmed him. He became addicted to the pain medication prescribed for an injury he had suffered in a roadside bomb attack and augmented that with methadone that he scored on the street.

It was clear to his family that Wold was deeply troubled. They took him to psychiatrists, psychologists, tried everything, but nothing seemed to help, and he was unable to find any peace in civilian life. Though his mother begged him not to, Wold ultimately rejoined the Marines. ‘My brothers will take care of me,’ he said.

But when the Marines discovered his drug problem, they sent him to a treatment programme. When he failed to complete the programme, he was sent to a naval hospital near San Diego, to await his discharge.

One night a couple of friends came to visit Wold there. They went out together to see a movie and get tattoos. When they returned to his room, Wold couldn’t remember if he had taken his medication or not – so he took it again, in front of his friends. They watched TV for a while. The friends left when Wold fell asleep, but had plans to return in the morning to take him on a camping trip.

The next morning, the friends found Wold in bed, in the same position he had been when they had left him the night before. Only now he wasn’t breathing. They began CPR and called the medical staff to try and revive him.

He was pronounced dead at 9:35am. The date was 10 November 2006, just two years to the day I had talked with him against that shattered wall in Fallujah – and also, the date on which the US Marine Corps annually celebrates its founding in 1775.

The medical examiner’s autopsy stated that the cause of death was drug toxicity likely caused by the methadone Wold had added to his mix of prescription drugs; the brew probably led to respiratory failure, and death.

Sandi felt the Marines had failed her son. But she knew he had loved the camaraderie of the corps and had him buried in his dress blues. She also knew that the uniform was just the surface of a much more complex story, a story of belief, duty and honor yes, but also about how guilt over killing in the pursuit of those ideals could lead to ruin.

Both parts of the story were imprinted on Wold’s skin. On the inside of his right forearm was the tattoo that he had gotten the night before he died, an exuberant design of a woman and an eagle wrapped in a flowing American flag with a banner that read: ‘All American Bad Ass’. But a second tattoo, this one on the right side of his chest, had a more sombre message, an image of a pair of praying hands with the words, ‘Only God Can Judge’.

It is that sense of violating one’s own basic moral values, of transgressing against what is right, that separates moral injury from garden-variety PTSD. Today’s standard treatment for veterans suffering from combat-related PTSD involves prolonged cognitive and psychodynamic therapies where subjects either tell or write their stories over and over in an effort to bring context and reason to their experiences. This is done in a clinical setting, but it is also a nod to the value of the age-old practice of storytelling, especially within warrior societies, as a method for sharing both the burdens and the glories of war – like the Greeks with their epic poems, or Native American tribes of the plains speaking around their campfires, or Maori warriors tattooing their battle exploits on their bodies. Litz calls these evidence-based treatment therapies ‘so extraordinarily effective that it should be considered malpractice not to use them’.

But to treat moral injury, which can and often does co-exist with PTSD, the VA is testing a different approach: a six-session pilot treatment programme, currently run by Maguen, called Impact of Killing in War, or in the military world of forced acronyms – IOK. Silly acronym or not, the programme represents a seismic shift in the treatment of war trauma, embracing for the first time the concept that real healing might need to include moral and spiritual notions such as forgiveness and giving back.

The first step in IOK involves education; veterans literally learn about the complex psychology of killing in war and the inner conflict it provokes. Then, looking inward, they are trained to identify those feelings in themselves. The third step involves the practice of self-forgiveness. Finally, the veterans are asked to make amends through individual acts of contrition or giving back.

Keith Meador, a psychiatrist with a pastoral religious background, has been breaking down the barrier between mental health and spiritual care to help the veterans heal. His programme at the Durham VA Medical Center in North Carolina is tagged with yet another acronym –Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Centers, or MIRECC.  ‘The piece that is particularly relevant,’ Meador told me, ‘is that patients don’t present to us saying this is my mental health need or this is my spiritual need. They come to us saying, “I’m suffering”.’

 In the truest warrior tradition, he shared his story as an act of faith and an act of healing

 A few small studies and reports suggest that the new therapy helps. Indeed, if Corporal Wold is our allegorical Achilles, felled by an untreated moral injury, then Lance Corporal James Sperry is our Odysseus, who, after struggling for years, finally makes it home.

I met Sperry, like Wold, during the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq in 2004. I videotaped him after he had been wounded during the first day of fighting. Like Wold, Sperry came home with a head battered from war and filled with guilt. But Sperry’s guilt wasn’t over killing; it was over not being killed, survivor’s guilt. His unit suffered some of the highest casualty rates of the war.

He sent me an email six years after Fallujah, thanking me for helping carry his stretcher that day and asking if I had any photos of his comrades killed in action. ‘I was the Marine that you helped carry to safety after I was shot by a sniper,’ he wrote. ‘I was wondering if you had taken any photos of me during that time of injury and any of my fallen friends. I have lost 20 friends in this war and would like to get as many pictures as I can.’

That note came during a dark period of Sperry’s life when he was struggling with cognitive impairment and debilitating migraines from his physical injuries and a host of psychological issues consistent with moral injury. He met nearly all of its criteria, including purposelessness, alienation, drug and alcohol use, and even a near-suicide attempt (he went as far as to sling a rope over the rafters of his garage).

His recovery, which took years, was not the result of a single act, but encouragement from family and friends, ongoing determination and a groundbreaking programme from the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, which specialises in helping those with brain and spinal cord injuries. That rehab blended the best traditions of Eastern and Western medicine, using yoga, acupuncture, hypnosis, psychotherapy and exercise. Once the myriad of prescribed medications he’d been taking had been dialled back, the fog that had enshrouded him for so many years began to lift.

Sperry did one more thing. He broke the silence. He shared his story with me for my book The Things They Cannot Say, with all of its setbacks, dark moments and eventual successes. In perhaps the oldest and truest warrior tradition, he shared his story as an act of faith and an act of healing, to help him and others, both soldiers and society, better understand what comes home inside a warrior’s mind after war. His story caught the attention of President Barack Obama and the First Lady, and he’s been invited to the White House twice.

But that wasn’t enough. In the style of veterans undergoing IOK therapy, his struggles inspired a new sense of purpose, leading him to found The Fight Continues, an organisation dedicated to helping veterans make the transition home. It does this in part, by tapping into the idea of service. Sperry and other members were in Moore, Oklahoma assisting victims of the devastating tornado there last May.

Corporal Wold and Lance Corporal Sperry are just two of millions. According to US Department of Defense data, since 2001 about 2.5 million Americans went to war in Afghanistan and in Iraq, with more than 800,000 deploying more than once. Nearly 700,000 of those veterans have already been awarded disability status, with another 100,000 pending, according to the VA.

They all need support. As Jonathan Shay wrote in Achilles in Vietnam: ‘When you put a gun in some kid’s hands and send him off to war, you incur an infinite debt to him for what he has done to his soul.’

We might do that best by anticipating what is coming home with them. If we can become more thoughtful about the consequences of conflict, the agents of destruction might someday be crowded out by the agents of hope inside the hollow horses pulled through our gates.

 

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Backpack journalist and author Kevin Sites traded a career as a network news producer and correspondent (ABC, NBC, CNN) to become the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. In his groundbreaking Hot Zone project, he covered nearly every war in the world in one year earning the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism and in 2010 was chosen as a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University.  

He is the author of three books, all published by Harper Collins imprint, Harper Perennial. They include: In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars (2007), The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers Won’t Tell You  About What They’ve Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War  (2013) and his  latest book, Swimming with Warlords: A Twelve Year Journey Across the Afghan War to be released in October 2014. He’s a contributor to many online and print publications including, Aeon, Vice and Men’s Health magazines.   

He’s also an Associate Professor of Practice at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong, teaching courses in international news and online journalism.

 

This article was originally published in Aeon Magazine on 9 April 2014.