The Stars and Stripes covered the “Navy and Marine Corps’ annual conference on combat and operational stress,” and indicates new “buzzwords” — “moral injury” — are causing some consternation:

One Marine commander roped into a panel discussion at the last minute bluntly took issue with the phrase: “As a Marine, I’m insulted.”

Lt. Col. James “Hall” Bain…said he thought the term implied that Marines were stressed as a result of immorality.

The Corps trains Marines to have “the skill and the will to kill,” he said. “It’s based on an ethical standard.”

In his defense, LtCol Bain seems to take issue with the terminology, not the concept.  In other places, the term “moral injury” has been used to describe the dissonance that occurs when one man kills another: 

In the mental health community, moral injury is defined as stress arising from witnessing, perpetrating or failing to stop actions that violate a person’s deeply held belief system.

Man (even areligious man) does not inherently accept the killing of another man, despite some assertions to the contrary.  (Those that do are generally considered deviant, and they may end up in prison or on death row.)  The violence of war is generally in conflict with the internal moral strictures of even areligious men.  Yes, it is entirely true the military’s role is to kill people and break things, but such a mission does not (and should not) normalize that role in the mind of US troops.

Whether called moral injury, moral conflict, or “inner conflict,” as the article indicates some suggest, the concept is important.  A “filter” of right and wrong is a good thing, as most Americans and the rest of humanity would likely attest (and as previously discussed).  My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and “hit squads” in Afghanistan can occur when the moral discriminator is either absent or so dulled that a Soldier no longer knows (or cares) about the difference between right and wrong.  In that regard, the lack of moral injury may very well be more of a concern than its presence.

Historically, Chaplains have been well-equipped to address the moral conflict from those who have recognized it within themselves, though a push to “secularize” those concepts has even affected some Chaplains.

The moral filter will be assaulted (or “injured”) in war, and it is good the US military is taking steps to address that “injury.”