Clint Eastwood’s much praised movie “American Sniper,” is based on the life and tragic death of highly decorated Navy Seal and sniper, Chris Kyle, who served four tours of duty in the Iraq war. In the film, an adaptation of Kyle’s autobiography, Chris wants nothing more than to be a rodeo cowboy but, after 9/11 feels called to be and do more and better with his life. He is a highly moral person who chooses to be a Seal and a sniper so he can protect not just his country but his fellow service people as well.
In the first scene depicting him in his role as a sniper, however, he finds himself in a situation where, to protect his fellow troops, he must kill a woman and a child, both of whom he suspects are carrying bombs.
Later in the film, after Kyle has come home and is suffering from PTSD, he says that he does not regret any shot that he made nor any life he took. Yet, one cannot help but wonder if those first two kills aren’t at least part of what is haunting him and waking him up in a cold sweat.
We raise our children to believe that life is sacred.
We take them to church where we sing hymns about the awesome love of God and to Sunday School where they are taught that “Jesus loves the little children of the world.”
We repeat with them the sacred endowments which God has bestowed upon us, primary of which is life. Even lives that have not been born, yet, we tell them, are sacred, and to be protected.
And then, when they’re old enough, we dress them up in uniforms and send them off to war where taking life is not just okay, where killing people is not just acceptable, where violence is not just an unfortunate necessity, but a good thing, a thing to be proud of, a moral and heroic act which we celebrate and praise and honor with parades and medals. An act for which we thank them profusely with firm handshakes and hardy pats on the back.
Our moral attitude toward the value of life, they learn, is nothing less than situational, pliable, even schizophrenic. And the result of these fluctuating values is a kind of psychological damage we have only recently discovered called “Moral Wounds.”
The concept is not an old one. Greek and Shakespearian tragedies are peopled with heroes who sacrifice their morality on the altar of heroic action and the psychological damage such a sacrifice brings upon them. But, for some reason, it is a notion that has been shunted aside in the treatment of our own service people as they return from Afghanistan. PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury are the Veterans Day darlings of the media and they deserve as much of our attention and our resources as we can muster in the treatment of them. Moral injury, however, has generally been treated, when it’s recognized and treated as all, as a symptom of PTSD.
The understanding that Moral Injury is a separate and equally debilitating kind of injury and one that must be treated with special and specific kinds of care appeared in the literature as early as 2008 but has continued to struggle finding broad understanding and acceptance.
Our service people deserve better. It’s time we took up the cause of this horrible outcome of war and the effective treatment of it.
For more information I recommend:
Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers, by Nancy Sherman
The War Within by Michael Yandell, Christian Century Magazine, 01.02.15
David Wood in the Huff Post
The Grunts: Damned if they kill, damned if they don’t. 03.18.14
The Recruits: When right and wrong are hard to tell apart. 03.19.14
Healing: Can we treat moral wounds? 03.19.14
Moral injury is the “signature wound” of today’s veterans https://www.nhpr.org/post/moral-injury-signature-wound-todays-veterans#stream/0
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