As has been highlighted here before, troops may come home from war with many types of wounds — physical, mental, and even spiritual. Much of the non-physical wound care has focused on PTSD, but for a few years advocates have been trying to raise the importance of the moral injuries that troops may bring home:

Moral injury is when veterans feel extreme guilt and shame from something they did or witnessed in conflict that goes against their values…The term was introduced in the 1990s by a now-retired Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Shay, who diagnosed the problem in Vietnam veterans he was treating. Shay has identified two kinds of moral injury: service members blame themselves for something that violated their own moral code, or someone of trust did something that went against a service member’s beliefs.

In one regard, the character of man recognizes, even if unconsciously, the incongruity of the value of life and the necessity of death in war. It is natural, then, to have some degree of internal struggle with the taking of life in war. (In fact, those who have no issue taking life in war are probably more worrisome.) An individual’s ability to cope with that struggle likely plays into their propensity for or degree of “moral injury” over the conflict.

For others, it is simply participating in physical and moral struggles they could have never previously conceived — and then questioning for the rest of their life how they handled those challenges.

The Associated Press recently published a “Q&A” on moral injury, noting that moral injury is not officially diagnosable and has few official treatment options, though the Navy has one program and Brite Divinity School has been working on a “Soul Repair Center” (previously noted).

The natural question, of course, is what role religious leaders and counselors should play in such treatment, given that “moral injury” is, at its core, a “moral” conflict of soul.

Also at the Stars and Stripes.

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