moral injury – I Ain't Marching Anymore

some musings on moral injury

War’s damage to one sense of self as a moral being could even be conceived as one of humanity’s core dilemmas.

As what one writer has called “this insult of a month” comes to an end, a baker’s half-dozen to keep us warm: Famous Veteran: Leonard Nimoy. As many of us mourn the guy who made smart cool, IVAW’s Geoff Millard points out this Military.com Q&A in which Nimoy offered vets tips on making their dreamsContinue reading “Friday news dump, belated”

Moral injury in real time

There’s a reason why one of my chapters is tentatively titled “The Moral Injury of the Long War.” The great Jonathan Shay may have coined the term, based on the accumulated grief of Vietnam, but this generation has claimed it as they try to parse what honor means when it also means killing for uncertainContinue reading “Moral injury in real time”

bowe bergdahl, who walked away from Omelas

Despite all the time and spilled pixels, it feels like we know less about Bergdahl than we did when he was still a Taliban prisoner and we had only Michael Hastings’ vivid 2012 Rolling Stone portrait. What we have instead is speculation, and the understandable anger from members of the unit he walked away from, never to return, and measured words from his parents and his attorneys.

Veterans Day musings on moral injury

Moral injury, Jonathan Shay reminds us, puts land mines in a soldier’s heart: “The body codes moral injury as physical attack and reacts with the same massive mobilization” in response.