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The War Is Over but the Moral Pain Continues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2022

David Wood
David Wood*
Affiliation:
Texas, United States ([email protected])
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Abstract

Almost five million Americans volunteered to serve in the U.S. armed forces between 2001 and 2021 and returned home as discharged veterans. Among them, 30,177 men and women have taken their own lives, an awful toll that is more than five times the number of Americans killed in combat in our twenty-first century wars. As part of the roundtable, “Moral Injury, Trauma, and War,” this essay argues that the reasons are many, but one major factor may be the moral pain that many experience in wartime and the vast emptiness they often encounter when their military service ends. Our society has an obligation to the post–9/11 veterans to understand their experiences and truly welcome them back. The rising toll of veteran suicides suggests there is little time to lose.

Keywords

wartime moral injurysuicidemoral paincombatAfghanistanmarinepenanceguiltshameself-recrimination
Type
Roundtable: Moral Injury, Trauma, and War
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 7 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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References

NOTES

1 U.S. Department of Defense, “Casualty Status,” last updated October 4, 2021, www.defense.gov/casualty.pdf/.

2 Thomas Howard Suitt III, High Suicide Rates among United States Service Members and Veterans of the Post-9/11 Wars (Providence: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, June 21, 2021), watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2021/Suitt_Suicides_Costs%20of%20War_June%2021%202021.pdf.

3 U.S. Department of Defense, “Immediate Release: Casualty Status,” last accessed January 18, 2022, www.defense.gov/casualty.pdf.

4 Verkamp, Bernard J., The Moral Treatment of Returning Warriors in Early Medieval and Modern Times (Scranton, Ill.: University of Scranton Press, 2005), p. 6Google Scholar.

5 Institute of Medicine, Returning Home from Iraq and Afghanistan: Assessment of Readjustment Needs of Veterans, Service Members, and Their Families (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

6 All of the quotes included from veterans in this essay were made directly to the author in interviews that took place over the course of many years and in a variety of settings including in the United States in Camp Lejeune, N.C.; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia, Penn.; Manteca, Calif.; and the Meadowlands, N.J.; and in Afghanistan in Kandahar, Kabul, and Garmsir; and in the case of the interviews with Jeff Sexton in Farmland, Indiana, by telephone. These interviews took place between 2008 and 2021.

7 Maguen, Shira, Lucenko, Barbara A., Reger, Mark A., Gahm, Gregory A., Litz, Brett T., Seal, Karen H., Knight, Sara J., and Marmar, Charles R., “The Impact of Reported Direct and Indirect Killing on Mental Health Symptoms in Iraq War Veterans,” in “Psychological Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” special issue, Journal of Traumatic Stress 23, no. 1 (February 2010), pp. 86–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Sonya B. Norman and Shira Maguen, “Moral Injury,” U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/cooccurring/moral_injury.asp.