Spirit in Action

Soul Repair - Recovering From Moral Injury After War - Rita Nakashima Brock

Rita Nakashima Brock is a theologian, teacher, and co-author of Soul Repair- Recovering From Moral Injury After War. She was an organizer of the 2010 Truth Commission on Conscience in War, and she recently became the co-director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School. Her thoughts and stories are profound and transforming..

Broadcast on:: 01 Dec 2013
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - I encounter such rich ideas and dedicated workers for the good of this world weekly for spirit in action that I hesitate to hold one above the others. Yet I can confidently say that the book co-written by this week's guest has had an especially profound and eye-opening impact on me. My guest is Rita Naksim Braque, her co-author is Gabriela Latini, and the book is Soul Repair, recovering from moral injury after war. I heard a news item a couple of years ago about this thing called moral injury was intrigued, but this book has a power to transform the reader, filled as it is with the first-hand stories of real soldiers wrestling in their depths with moral issues most of us get to skate by for our entire lives with only the barest consideration. Rita Naksim Braque is a theologian and the co-director of the Soul Repair Center of Bright Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas, and she now joins us by phone from the center. Rita, I'm absolutely delighted to have you here today for spirit in action. - Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. - I don't think it could possibly be as much of a pleasure as it was to read Soul Repair, recovering from moral injury after war. It is a tremendous book you and Gabriela have done a magnificent job of bringing a really compelling issue to life with real people's stories. So first of all, thank you tremendously for the book. - Oh, you're welcome. It was a life-changing experience to work on it, actually. - I do wanna ask you a little bit later something about that life-changing experience. I know at the end of the book, you talk about some of the insights that you gained because of having been part of all of this, but I also think that we need to start out by defining for people what Soul Repair is about and particularly what this thing is, moral injury because a lot of people have heard, I'm sure, about PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder and that after-effective war. Could you talk about what moral injury is and how that contrasts or compares to PTSD? - Sure, PTSD is a kind of brain, it affects your brain. Let me put it that way. The areas of your brain that handle emotion and help you integrate and remember and handle emotions gets damaged in some way or interfered with so that the ability to suppress and calm down fear, that that capacity in the brain is suppressed in some way. And so instead of being able to remember an incident in a way where you might feel some of the things you felt, but you know you're just remembering it, instead you flash back and you're suddenly in that moment of terror again or you live in a hyper-vigilant state because you just can't calm down from the fear in you. Those are forms of PTSD and there are treatments for it and there's been better research on it so that there are more effective treatments. And moral injury is not that problem in your brain. Moral injury actually is difficult to get to if you don't have a coherent narrative memory of an incident, but when you do you start to think about not just feel, but think about what happened, that something you did might have violated your core moral values and you start to feel chained or you feel sad or guilty that there are these other feelings that come up from reflecting on the incident. So it's not a fear-victim reaction to life-threatening terror. It's more coming to terms with what happened. So it's not something like PTSD that responds well to just clinical treatment. Sometimes that can help, but it's really rebuilding a new identity after you come back from war because you know you've been changed so deeply by the experience that you're not the same person anymore. - Do we have any clear idea of the magnitude of this problem? In particular because I think it's probably been masked because a lot of people who have had moral injury are probably treated for PTSD-related problems. - That's right, I think that's right. And the reason that we think that well, the Veterans Administration clinicians started to puzzle over how come the suicide rate in veterans was not going down even though they're getting better at treating PTSD. So at the end of 2009, a group of clinicians proposed that there might be a different factor in the suffering after war that is contributing more to the suicide rates than PTSD, and they called it moral injury. This feeling of having transgressed your most core moral values or failed them in some way. And we think that they are probably right. That the reason that veterans and even active duty military folks may be killing themselves at alarming rates now has to do with this moral injury because if you can get your PTSD under control, that doesn't help you come to terms with feeling like you don't deserve to live because you did something awful or you failed to do something right. - Well, how big is the issue of suicide or? And you say it's growing? - Yes, the average suicide rate is approximately 18 veterans a day, which is three times the civilian population rate. And between around 2005 and 2007, the national suicide rate in veterans under 30 increased 25% and in Texas, they went up 40%. So in young veterans, the suicide rates are climbing and there are probably a lot of complicated reasons why including multiple deployments. But we think the effect of both multiple deployments and the impact of war on ordinary moral human beings who are healthy human beings because they have moral values and empathy that war is so morally ambiguous that affects healthy people in a negative way. - I think you may have betrayed your own point of view. You said war is morally ambiguous and I'm imagining there's at least two camps out there. One camp that says, you know, war is patriotic, go kill for king and country. And there's another side of the people that says every soldier is a baby killer and they're all horribly stained morally. - And both of those are caricatures. The military itself teaches serious moral values. The military teaches moral integrity, courage, personal discipline, humility, loyalty to your comrades, love for your fellow soldiers, a sense of purpose and responsibility to something larger than your own individual life. These are moral values, the armed services teach really, really well to people in the military. The problem is that then if they send them into war, war compromises so many of those values, especially the kind of wars we've been having since Vietnam where soldiers are taught that you shouldn't kill civilians and they're innocent people and you don't kill innocent people, you kill other soldiers. But in these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are no soldiers, there's no army, we're fighting a civilian insurgency. That creates profoundly morally ambiguous situations that can't be helped. It's not that war is inherently immoral, although some people believe that. It's that under these conditions of these wars, you're faced constantly with morally ambiguous choices in which nothing you do is probably gonna be very good. So, if you don't shoot that dog that's walking out in front of the truck, it might have an explosive and be triggered with a cell phone and blow up part of your unit. But if you do shoot the dog and then it's just somebody's pet, it's not a good feeling either. - You know, a question that came up from me when I was reading the book, I wondered if there was any war that would not produce moral injury. Is there any war that would be 100% free of that? - Absolutely not. We've talked to World War II vets. And Nancy Sherman in her book, The Untold War, describes her own father who was a vet of World War II and other vets that she's talked to, who feel these morally ambiguous feelings about what they did. And this is another interesting fact about World War II is that when General Marshall did his study of combatants, he found that only one fourth of the soldiers ever fired at the enemy. So now that's an interesting conundrum. So if you're in the 25% that shot to kill and you actually killed somebody, you might feel kind of awful about that, even though it was the right thing to do, for example, because they're such a taboo in human societies against killing another human being. So even if you knew you did the right thing and it was your duty, that doesn't necessarily mean you feel good about it. But then you have to think about, well, what about that 75%? Did they feel good if they were welcomed home as heroes? And they didn't really feel like they had done what they should have done? So it goes both ways. That's why it's such an entrapping problem. If there's not some simple solution. - How do you go about gathering information on something like this? Because my impression is that most of that's shy away from talking about the nitty gritty of what they did or what they saw or what they maybe felt they were part of or didn't do? - Yeah, well, and I think part of that is because that when there are a number of reasons why, one is just horrible to even think about it. You just kind of drink or take drugs or just kind of try to put it behind you and not deal with it. But it's also true that if they get welcomed as heroes and valorize with parades and things and they don't really feel very good about what they did, they're not gonna talk about it. They're too ashamed to talk about it. And then there's a third reason, which is that there's also a kind of titillation factor that some people just wanna hear war stories. It's what some people call war porn. And in fact, one of the veterans we worked with, Mac Bica, said that he stopped telling war stories that he got a feeling like a lot of people just like to hear them, sort of like going to a violent movie or something, that they were not exactly entertained, but they didn't get the point of why he was telling them. So I think that there's a lot of reasons why vets don't wanna talk about what happened. And it takes a fair amount of development of friendship and trust. You have to earn the right to help someone. It's not like they're sitting around waiting for people to just come and help them. They have a lot of pride. They have a lot of sense of their own integrity and honor. It takes a lot to earn the trust of someone who was willing to share what happened to them. - So how did you go about gathering the folks who shared as part of that 2010 Truth Commission on Conscience and War? - We were very lucky. We knew these people at Luna Productions, a documentary film company, and they had made a film called Soldiers of Conscience in which they, with the permission of the army, interviewed soldiers in Fort Jackson who had deployed to Iraq. And they picked eight out of the ones they'd interviewed because they were very articulate about their moral decision-making process, and four chose to go back in flight, and four chose to take a CO, content to subject your status. And so they knew a lot of vets, and they knew people in the military, and we wanted a number of the vets in the film to come because they had already been willing to share in public their experiences. And then the filmmakers had also, because of their promotion of the film, and meeting a lot of other vets, and had identified some other really strong vets who had talked about moral injury themselves in their books or in public. So we had a good pool of vets to work with, thank goodness, and almost all the ones we invited agreed to come and speak. We've tried to be very careful. We did this with also with the book. We tried to be very careful only to ask and tell the stories of vets that we regarded in some way as friends, so that we weren't just exploiting some stranger's story. But these are people we care about, and they've been willing to talk to us in some form and have their stories told in our book "Soul Repair." That's part of the way we feel like talking to vets has to go, you have to care about the person, and you have to be willing to accompany them on a long and difficult journey. And if you're not willing to do that, you really haven't earned the right to have them speak to you. - We're speaking with Rita Naksimabrak. She and her co-author Gabriela Latini are authors of "Soul Repair," recovering from moral injury after war. The website is brightsoulrepair.org. Bright is B-R-I-T-E, and that is the Bright Divinity School, which is in Fort Worth, Texas, where Rita teaches. The topic is moral injury after war, and actually the title of the book is recovering from moral injury after war. I'm not sure I felt really clear how the recovery actually happens. I have clues about it. I mean, I understand that these people have to be in trusted circles where they can work out and have support. It talks more about what are the conditions to recovery. I don't think it's a one-size-fits-all, so I wouldn't want to say that it works the same way for every person. But I think that it's really important that they have some kind of support system of friends, of people not therapists or people who are trying to, like, heal them or take care of them in that way, but really friends who are willing to accompany them on a long-life journey and hang in there with them and understand that they are struggling to regain some sense of themselves as good people and are willing to talk about the struggles they're in, their moral questions, the things that broke apart for them that they're not sure they can ever put back together, and just support that process. And just often talking about their doubts and talking about the things that they experience, not to tell stories, but to really talk about the feelings involved in their moral questions is a really important process for them. Often they can't do that with their own families, but this is another thing that I've learned from talking to a mother-son-taire. The mother had been in the military herself and then her son signed up and then wound up going to Iraq, and she is a military person. She just knew a lot more about what he was going through than some people do, and she just worried about him all the time, and she said he barely wrote letters home once a month, maybe they get a letter, and she just was in anguish, and then when he came home, he didn't say very much to her, and she wanted to respect his right not to talk, but she also wanted him to know that she was there if he needed her, and so she called him a lot to check in and make sure he was all right, but she didn't learn all the things that he went through in Iraq until I interviewed the two of them on the phone, and he told me what had happened, and she listened in. So it can be useful for a vet to talk to other vets, and of course they're the front line of help is other vets, and then other times it's clergy. It's very interesting how even a non-religious vet sometimes will prefer to talk to a chaplain than a clinician, and in fact the statistics are that both active duty military troops and veterans more often seek to talk to clergy than to talk to a clinician or a psychiatrist. - You know, you say that part of this talk, I mean, it really has to happen with people who deeply understand what you're going through. - Or want to understand. - Or want to understand. When you're talking with other soldiers, I imagine that cuts both way because there's also, we've got to keep up a good front or the bravado, or there's so much of group behavior that works that way on the army field not. - That's right, yeah, and it usually happens after they've left military service because in a war zone, you can't have people sort of falling apart. You know, the whole point is that you help your unit and you get out alive together. So this is another interesting thing we sort of figured out from talking to people and in the book is that the kind of camaraderie that a unit, a combat unit forms is an intense bond because you have to trust these people with your life and they have to trust you with their life. And you all are in this together and most soldiers would rather take a bullet for a friend than kill somebody else. And so there's this incredible tight bond. It's almost like an all consuming romantic love of fear almost is how I would describe it. It just takes up everything. It's your life 24/7, it's your unit. And so become home and lose that. To lose that unit and come home can be heart wrenching. At the same time, those relationships have a very strong structure to them that do not allow for certain things. Do not allow for intense times of lamentation and grief because you have to carry on. And so the kind of vulnerabilities and things that actually contribute to long-term sustainable relationships are things that have to form when they come home. And they sometimes are disillusioned when they can't form those with people in their unit. But sometimes they form them with other veterans, not necessarily from their own unit, but other veterans who understand what they're going through. - I think that's a good point in that when you're in a unit together, you're not necessarily similar people, but you've got these deep bonds. And then when you get back into mainstream society back in the USA, you may find people who are just widely divergent from you in lifestyle and attitudes and opinions, the whole thing. So I suppose that's one of the reasons it's so hard to trust them or to work with them or to form the deep bonds in this society, even though you have deep bonds. - That's right. In other words, I do know that whose battle buddies are their closest friends when they came home and they've deepened those relationships and they're a major support system for each other and that can happen. But just as easily, you can come home and realize that. In fact, you really don't have very much in common. - In the book, you highlight stories from a handful of folks who were part of the 2010 Tooth Commission on Conscience and War. The people that you highlighted there, I'm not sure I have a clear sense of their stance or their opinions about military and about war. It's not like there's a single slice. It's not like these are anti-war activists or pro-war supporters. It's not clear to me that people who are suffering from moral injury fall anywhere on that continuum. - I think they fall everywhere on that continuum. You know, Joshua Castile was an evangelical Republican. He's been president of his Republican club in high school and he got a commission to West Point and he wasn't too sure about the rigidity of military life so he switched the University of Iowa and was in the ROTC and was actually having second thoughts about a military career when 9/11 happened and he loved his country and he wanted to serve. So he learned Arabic and he went ahead with his commission and then he was sent to Abu Ghraib two months after the scandal as he said to be part of the cleanup crew to sort of resuscitate the image or whatever revives it, the honor of the place and so he spent eight months in Abu Ghraib interrogating people. It was his assessment that 95% of the people he was interrogating weren't terrorists at all. They were just a taxi driver or a farmer or a high school kid who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. You know, one of his high school kids was just worried he was gonna miss his school exams. So he was not feeling real good about what he was doing as an interrogator there and then he finally got a thick file on somebody who really was a self-proclaimed Muslim who crossed the border from Saudi Arabia into Iraq to shoot at American troops. And the man who was, about Joshua's age, it was in his early 20s, had actually never fired a gun before but he was prepared to do this. And so Joshua in interrogation with him, he'd already confessed to a lot of this. So Joshua was just trying to get more information out of him. He couldn't get the guy to be scared. He was very calm and answered the questions but he couldn't rattle him and that kind of bothered him that he couldn't rattle him. And so he finally just said, why did you cross the border to kill? And the man said, because as Muslims, we are obligated to defend other Muslims from non-Muslim armies. So I was doing my religious duty as a Muslim when I came to Iraq. And then he said to Joshua, why did you come here to kill? Joshua was brought up short because he actually took being a Christian seriously. And he said, well, I didn't come here to kill. I came here to help the Iraqi people. And the Muslim said, this person said back to him, well, if the US government wanted to help the Iraqi people, they wouldn't have sent soldiers, soldiers sent to kill. And Joshua realized he didn't have an answer to that comment but that what he really wanted to do was to have a conversation with this person as a person of faith to understand how his faith pushed him to come to Iraq to defend other non-Muslims and how Joshua was struggling with his own Christianity. And then the Muslim said to him, I thought you were a Christian and Joshua said, I am. And he said, well, then why are you here? You're supposed to turn the other cheek and love your enemies and you're a Christian. Why are you here? And Joshua realized he didn't really have a good answer to that question. And so he left the room. And he said to his superiors that he'd lost objectivity and he couldn't interrogate the guy anymore. And eventually he applied for conscientious objector status and became a Catholic and left the military. So he didn't go in there thinking he was doing anything immoral or bad, but he came to that as a slow process of what happened to him at Abu Ghraib. Some of the soldiers had that happen. Some of them that we've worked with don't regret signing up and they don't actually regret having fought, but that doesn't mean that they don't feel really horrible about some of the things they witnessed or did. And then there are others like Joshua and Camilla Mejia who after a deployment realized they couldn't go back. They just wasn't possible what had happened to them and just wrecked their ability to fight. And Camilla applied for conscientious objector status but didn't get it because he went AWOLF first and he spent eight months in jail. He was the first non-commissioned officer enlisted man to refuse to redeploy. So I think they made an example of him, but in any case, he did go to jail. And he's an interesting story just because he grew up in Nicaragua and his parents were sent beneath the revolutionary. And he grew up with liberation theology and his family knew the cardinals. And so he came from a family that wasn't pacifist, but he's come to oppose all war and such violence from his experience in Iraq. So it's a journey for everyone and there's no ideological position that necessarily protects you from moral injury. - If you believe strongly enough that God's on your side and that the other side God doesn't care about, does that protect you? - Well, I think it would only protect you if everything you prayed for came true. If you believe God is on your side and protecting you and you're doing God's will and then your best friend that you love is killed, it doesn't feel so good. Or if you, I think to believe that God is on your side, you have to believe that everything happens because God wills it, right? Otherwise, it's really hard to understand how losing your best friend in battle is somehow part of God being on your side. A lot of people actually lose their faith in war for that reason. I think it sort of comes out two ways. Either they lose their faith or they feel like somehow they've failed their faith and they don't deserve to live. - There's something that you say in the intro that I found very interesting. You talk about a Navajo cleansing ritual called in English, The Enemy Way. - That's right. - Could you share what that is, what its function is and do we have anything in mainstream American culture that could serve the same purpose? - The Enemy Way, it's very interesting if you know the novelist Tony Hillerman, he writes all these murder mysteries on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. And the first book he wrote, he was a World War II vet and he got very interested in what the Navajo did for vets who came home from the war, which was this In The Enemy Way ceremony. And he thought it was really cool. So he wrote a novel about it and his publishers wouldn't let him call it The Enemy Way. So it's called The Blessing Way. And The Blessing Way actually described some of this ritual. They believe that if you come home from war and you've killed or if you've handled human remains or done, and in fact, it turns out handling human remains is a major cause of moral injury. And they figured that out a long time ago that you can't just come home like nothing happened to you. And so they have a whole ritual kind of cleansing process where they take people through a sort of process of imagining enemies or they have a lot of different ways they do it and sometimes it takes two or three days. I think it depends on what's being treated. Sometimes it takes a few days and sometimes it can take as long as two weeks. And they come out of that process, richfully cleansed, as it were, and then they can be restored to the community without, as it were, infecting the community with this moral injury. What's interesting is the U.S. military doesn't really do anything much like this at all. They do some exit interviews to see if you have PTSD and they try to treat the PTSD. But I was talking to General Zinnakus, a psychiatrist who works with detainees in Guantanamo. He's retired, but he was a military psychiatrist. And he said, what's interesting is Canada, which is not a religious country at all, actually requires its troops who've been in combat to spend a week at this resort island place. And they're required to go there. They can't just go home. And he says, and so for two or three days, they just get blind drunk. They just blot out everything and just drink. And then they start to sober up about halfway through the week. And the first thing they want when they sober up is they wanna talk to a chaplain. So the Canadian military has all these chaplains on standby at these places because they know that the troops are gonna wanna talk about what happened and sort of debrief it. And that seems to help. We don't do any of that for people coming back from war. They're put on a plane and then they land and their families greet them. And of course, they wanna go with their families, but I think it actually, if we had some ritual process or some way to decompress them a little, it would be very helpful. It's not gonna fix everything, but I think it is a good first step. Well, we discovered in our research for the book, Gabrielle and I, and I discovered this also working on an earlier book on the ancient Christian traditions around shedding human blood and war, that the church for a thousand years regarded shedding human blood for any reason, whether it was for self-defense and it was a good reason, or you just murdered somebody, it was a sin. And it broke your soul in some way, that you couldn't act like you were the same person after having done that. And so they had a therapeutic process of helping the person say to the whole community what they had done and what they're feeling ashamed or guilty or bad about, so that everybody could understand what had happened to them. And then the whole community would commit to praying for them, talking to them, to holding them accountable for their behavior, helping support them if they wanted to make amends. And through that process, they would be rehabilitated to the community. And that system was called penance, but we now think of penance as some kind of punishment system, but they actually in the ancient church talk about penance in therapeutic and medicinal terms, like Justin Martyr says if a snake bites you and you don't tell somebody you have that poison in you, you will die. So you have to tell us also, we can help draw that poison out of you, which is a nice, I think an interesting metaphor for the community process of supporting somebody recovering from moral injury. - We're speaking today with Rita Nakashim Brock, and she is co-author of Soul Repair, recovering from moral injury after war. And this is Spirit in Action. Our website is northernspiritradio.org because this is an Northern Spirit radio production. On the site, you'll find more than seven years of our archives of great people doing good work in the world. And you can listen to or download them. You can also get us via iTunes and other ways. Also on the site, you'll find links to our guests. So for instance, to connect up with Soul Repair and Rita Nakashim Brock, you might want to go to the website brightsoulrepair.org and that's bright B-R-I-T-E because Rita teaches at the Soul Repair Center at Bright Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. Also on the site, you'll find a place to leave comments and we'd love to have your comments. We'd love to have this conversation be two way. There's also a place to donate and donations are what make this system run. So please do help out so that we can continue sharing these stories of people doing good work in the world. Again, Rita Nakashim Brock is here with us today. Her co-author, Not With Us, is Gabriela Latini and the book is Soul Repair, recovering from moral injury after war. I think Rita, you wanted to say a little bit about what the Soul Repair Center is. When did that originate? What is it? - It's a center dedicated to public education and research on moral injury. We opened our doors June 1 this year in 2012 because we received a generous grant from the Lillian Dalmon Incorporated in Indianapolis and they really believe in our project, which is gratifying to us and we're grateful for their support. And we opened our doors June 1 and I started to put together a staff and Harm Kaiser and I co-directed. He's a retired military chaplain. And on November 12th, we had a big launch celebration that included an interfaith service and a luncheon and then a conference with six veterans who talked about their experiences in moral injury. And we live streamed it and the tape is available at bright soulrepair.org. We also have a videographer that's gonna prepare some edited materials from it, but if you didn't make it to the launch, all is not lost, you can still see what happened online. - And again, that's bright, B-R-I-T-E from down there in Fort Worth, Texas, Bright Divinity School. You were talking and you talked about penance and that struck me, I grew up Catholic and so I'm very used to confession. So one of the things I was wondering about is if confession of some sort was helpful in this, that what I grew up believing, I've been a Quaker basically all my adult life, but what I grew up believing is that if you said the proper prayers and you said the proper penance and the priest forgave you that your sins were gone, is there any magic anti-bullet for the people who are suffering from moral injury? Is there a time when they feel completely absolved? - I don't think it's about getting over it or being absolved exactly. I think most of our vets talk about how they were really changed forever by what happened to them in war. It's not, they're not gonna go back to who they were before. And in fact, to think that they could is a kind of denial of what really happened in war and they don't wanna do that. They don't wanna make it go away as it were and act as if nothing had happened to them. But what they wanna do is to figure out how their lives can mean something to other people and they can make a contribution to the world that in some way makes up for or makes a certain kind of amends for the terrible things they experienced in war. So lots of vets do this. They undertake service projects or they volunteer for disaster relief or things like that because they wanna make a positive contribution. And I think that's actually, there are a lot of nonprofit organizations including religious organizations that offer that opportunity to people who do wanna make a positive contribution to the world. I don't think it's enough for somebody to just say to a vet, oh well, I forgive you. First of all, because if that harm wasn't done to me myself, it's really inappropriate for me to say I forgive them for harm they did to somebody else. That's in fact a strong Jewish principle that even God cannot forgive you for harm. You didn't do to God, but you did to someone else. You have to figure out how to work it out with the person you harmed. Then if it's someone you killed, then you have to figure out, I think, how to forgive yourself. Clearly you weren't raised Catholic. I mean, if the priest says you're forgiven, it's forgiven and you go away, your conscience is clean. Maybe that doesn't work for everybody. And I think it's good. I actually respect the vets we work with because they don't want it to just be made to go away like that. They're willing to take responsibility for what they did and they want to make some positive contribution. The other thing is that in the Catholic tradition, there's the whole thing about the confidentiality of the confessional. In the ancient church, you were expected to share with other people in your community so they could support you, that it wasn't up to just a priest. I actually think that's healthier. I think that in some ways, I think the better model is AA is Alcoholics Anonymous, where you have to face into who you are and be honest about your limits, honest about what you've done. And then a whole community tries to help you stay sober and they're willing to do that and you get a sponsor, but the other people that know about you, and so they hold you accountable for trying to be your best self. And I think that in healthy communities, that's what really works to support people who are struggling with what we would call a injured soul. - I'm going to suggest something that'll probably be a little bit anathema to you. - Sure, okay. - And to me as well because I believe strongly in morality, I believe in this core to our existence, is part of the problem that we teach people to be moral. I mean, if they grew up thinking that killing and torturing other people, et cetera, was just fine, would there be less moral injury? Would it be better if they were less thoughtful and less reflective? Would they just not have to deal with this kind of issue? - I actually think that human beings are hardwired for moral conscience. I think there's some evidence that the capacity for empathy isn't taught, that there's some brain function around empathy that human, who you have empathy for may be taught, but this capacity to feel another person's feelings and feel a resonance with that is something familiar to you and something that you might want to care about. I think that's pretty deep. Even little children have that. And then every society teaches some set of moral values and societies differ on what's most important and what's least important. But the effective bonds of family, the kind of bonds of affection, which is also part of this hardwired for empathy, these are actually essential to survival. A mother has to bond with her infant for her to keep it alive. And so I think that this is something that is optional. And in fact, human beings resist violence and resist these horrible kinds of things and have a deeper version to them. It's almost a visceral reaction to having a deal with human remains. And most human societies, people who do deal with dead bodies are kind of regarded as creepy or they're stigmatized because it's such a taboo. So I don't think that, I think first of all, if you had a society that taught people to kill and torture, you wouldn't have a decent society or a society in which people thrive and maximize their creative and other potentials. Irenaeus has said the glory of God is a human being fully alive. I don't think a person can be fully alive but they're terrified of their neighbors. I think that it's not a question of anathema or not anathema. I just think that that's just not how human beings are made. We're social animals and we bond. And I think it takes a lot, you know, the military to have trained people to kill in World War II and then find out three-fourths of them wouldn't do it anyway was a bit disturbing to the military and they had to actually change some of their training processes to actually train people to shoot without thinking because if they thought about it, that's when they got into trouble. But the problem is that you can train a human being to shoot to kill without thinking but you can't train them after the fact to just not think about it. So I think that it's actually a function of being a healthy human being to experience forms of moral injury after war. I think the only people who would find it impossible to experience moral injury are sociopaths. - You know, one of the things that we talked about at the beginning was how many suicides perhaps result from this? And I know we don't have an exact number of how many of them are called by people reacting to moral injury. But we didn't talk about some of the other ways that people get affected. I'm assuming that drinking and other drug abuse, that there's divorces, all of these things result from that. Is there some evidence about that or the degree of the damage that's caused? - There are certainly in the veteran population, they're disproportionately divorced, incarcerated, poor and homeless. And I think that's a national disgrace actually, especially the poor and homeless part. But I think that that's part of the consequence of the trauma of war. And some of that's PTSD, but I think some of it's also moral injury, especially how deeply depressed people get and how they drink to cover up their pain. Or big dope or whatever they do. So I do think that those statistics are partly impacted by moral injury. But the other thing about the suicide rates, I wanna say is we don't really actually know how high the suicide rates might really be because there are ways that you can tell yourself that don't look like suicide. So your family can get military benefits or your family can collect life insurance. Somebody said to me, the most popular vehicle of choice are a lot of vets as a motorcycle. And one of our vets in his book, Logan Lighttree, wrote a book called Reborn on the Fourth of July. And he became a conscientious objector after a deployment to Iraq. But he describes after he came home, he lived in Hawaii and he surfed. And he said, his ability as a surfer was it, he could handle maybe a 10 foot wave at the edge of his ability. And when he came back from war, he was out trying to do 40 foot waves in doing things in the water. He had no business trying to do that would have killed him. And he was just lucky. - In other words, he was looking for the way to leave perhaps unconsciously. - Yeah, or sometimes I think it's actually conscious. I think sometimes motor vehicle accidents or other things, things that look like accidents might have been a deliberate decision to die. - There's been a lot made historically of the people who reacted to the soldiers coming back from the Vietnam War. Toward the end of the war, certainly there are a number of people who discussed it with the war turn that on returning soldiers. There are always now and then people who would champion and applaud loudly the person who comes back. Is there any sense of which side or which end of the spectrum is more disrespectful to a person dealing with moral injury? - That's a complicated, I mean, there's no yes or no to that. I think that a lot of vets that come home from war, they're happy to be welcomed home, but they're not always happy to be cheered as heroes or to be thanked, especially if they're being thanked for something that they didn't want to do. So a lot of people who wound up being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan thought they were going to get out and they got caught in stop loss or they deployed once and really hated those wars, but they were redeployed because stop loss and so they wound up having to do things they didn't really want to do and to be thanked for that is a little weird. I remember one of our vets said he came off a plane from Iraq and he was just feeling pretty miserable at the whole thing and especially since the whole time he thought it was an immoral war and all he wanted to do was to keep his unit alive. That was his duty and he worked his butt off to keep his unit alive but he knew that he participated in an illegal war and so he wasn't feeling too good. He said if that wasn't feeling real happy about it and he came off a plane and there were all these people standing there cheering with sign show thank you and welcome home and he remembers thinking why are they cheering? Don't they know what we did over there? And I know they meant well and they were, but he said it didn't make them feel good. So I think it's mixed. I mean, I think some people are happy to be cheered and welcomed but I think, you know, the cities that are holding thank you parades for the vets. I think, you know, not all the vets show up for the parade to be thanked. For me, it's not so much having a pat thing I say to vets but just treating them as people and asking them how they are or how they're feeling or how they're day going. When I meet one for the first time, I'll often say, well, I bet you're glad to be home or something like that or it's good to get home okay or I'll say what was your job over there? What did you do? I mean, I just sort of, you know, like you would talk to an ordinary person rather than trying to have a formulaic response but I think the thing to do is to not treat them as if they're not human beings. And I think that in Vietnam, that was a serious mistake that a lot of religious people made because there was such a deep opposition to that war that we made our churches and religious communities an unwelcome place for veterans and we lost the whole generation. - Perhaps it's appropriate here, Rita, for you to share a little bit of your story because as you mentioned early on in the interview, you were changed by this research and by the writing of the book. You have your own, I mean, you grew up in a military family. - I did and I had a father who I didn't know was a stepfather. I mean, he's the father I was raised by. I had a birth father who fought in Korea but I didn't meet him until I was in my 30s. So the man who raised me was a veteran of World War II and a veteran of Vietnam. When he came back from World War II, he'd been a, I didn't know any of this until recently. He'd been a POW and so he had been given electroshock treatments at Walter Reed and was sent home pretty much trembling and catatonic for months. And my cousin's family took him in because my father's natal family really didn't know what to do with him and my cousin's mother was an epileptic. So they were used to handling somebody who sometimes wasn't all there. And so they just took my father and it took care of him. And so he was very close to that side of the family, closer to her than he was to any of his siblings. So I guess he told her things that he didn't tell anybody, he didn't tell me, for example, he was a good father. And then he went to Vietnam as a medic in his 40s. He did a tour and he went back for another tour and when he came back from a second tour, he was not the person I knew. He was really different. He was kind of cold and controlling and withdrawn. Of course, I didn't know what had happened to him. I just found him really hard to live with and eventually chose not to live at home anymore after I went to college because he was so awful. I was actually talking to that cousin who knew him well about this project on moral injury. And she was very interested in that because she had heard someone talk about what it was like to be a prisoner of war in a Nazi POW camp and how horrible that was and what my father must have gone through. And I had no idea. And so she told me some of that. But then she said, and I think the real bad war for him was Vietnam. I think that kind of wrecked him. I think he kind of had that thing you're calling moral injury. And I said, what do you mean by that? And she said, well, you know, he had that young girl who was an informant or a guide or something and he found her body. And I said, wait a minute, what about the body? Because I knew my father had had a young Vietnamese teenage girl, about my age actually, who had given him guidance in how to get to the Vietnamese villages around his medical station. And he would take penicillin and aspirin and do some basic medical care to the Vietnamese villagers nearby where his aid station was in the field. And he used this young woman as a guide. And he had told me about her and how great she was and how smart and committed to her people. And I could tell he really thought a lot of her. And I thought that was kind of neat that he had befriended a Vietnamese person in the middle of this war. And then he came home and he was horrible. And she said, well, you know, he found her body. And she had been tortured and raped and mutilated by somebody in his unit, somebody in the military and a U.S. military there. And I thought, oh my God, what that must have been like for him? I had no idea that it happened to him. But it helped me understand, first of all, why he was frantic to try to get a whole control of me. He was very controlling. And I think, well, maybe he was like trying to make up for what had happened to her that he couldn't save her. He was gonna save me or something. But I began to really rethink who he was to me when he came home from that war. And I really deeply regret that we never had a conversation in a way that we could be reconciled to each other before he died. I think maybe you were too close to your teens or your youth there, a little bit of Strapras maybe? Well, he and I had always had big arguments. That, I mean, we just went loggerhead sometimes when we argued about things. So my standing up to him and being pretty stubborn about things was not new behavior on either of our parts. It was that he actually tried to force me to do things that I didn't wanna do physically, like punishing me and things. And this was like not how he had behaved before. I mean, it was really awful. And I was by then in college. I graduated from high school while he was in Vietnam and he came back that summer I went off to college. And he didn't like what I was doing in college because I was protesting the war. And I had boyfriends that he didn't approve of or something. It just silly things like that. So I was 18. I said, well, then I'm just not coming home anymore. I don't have to put up with this. So it was really hard 'cause my mother then had cancer and she wanted me to stay home and be with her. Back then Rita, you were protesting the Vietnam War. Large part of the country was protesting it, certainly by the end. Right. What have your views on war come to be? And has this moral injury project, has this changed how you look at war? Better or worse? I think I would say that I used to be more polemically anti-war. I personally still think war is a bad idea. I think it's a stupid, actually, it's a sort of a failure to figure out another alternative. And I think in a nuclear age, it's probably untenable anymore. And these insurgency wars make it really clear that it's horrible on the people have to fight them anyway. But I know that we have a standing military and I benefit from that. Every time I cross an international border with a US passport, the reason I don't get hassled and I don't have to pay a huge amount of money most of the time or are blocked from entering another country is because we have a very powerful government and a military that has something to do with our standing in the international community. It's not because we're really nice to people. I know that my life as a person who travels around lecturing places would be much harder if I came from a different country. And I think that as long as we have a standing military and I'm a citizen of this country and I still pay my taxes that I have a kind of responsibility to do the best by our military and to not send them into bad wars and to send them into things that will be horrible for them unless it is absolutely necessary in some way to descend our borders. And I can't imagine in case the situation of when that would happen. I think the so-called war on terror is basically a struggle with an international crime cartel and a wage war on countries when it's an international movement is just stupid. But what I would say is that I have come much more deeply to appreciate the moral conscience and idealism of many of the people who volunteer for our nation's military. They're not people who wanna kill. Maybe some of them wanna kind of get in a fight to prove themselves. But most of them that's that we've worked with join the military because in a consumer culture that's very narcissistic, there are very few places in our society where as a young person you can actually commit yourself to something bigger than yourself that might mean something. And a lot of people join the military for that reason. Or they want an education or they want some financial stability in their lives but they're not joining to go to war. It's not why they're in the military. And I wanna respect that in human beings. I wanna respect that sense of call to something bigger. - And if you buy the book, so I'll repair recovering from moral injury after war by Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriela Latini, you'll find a lot of the moral ambiguities there. You'll find the reasons people go to war. They're moral fiber, how deeply it resonates and the places where they feel like it, they fell short. It's not a one-sided story. It's a vibrant capturing of the reality of what happens to people at war and when they come back and try and reinsert into society. Again, website you wanna go to is brightsoldrepair.org. That's B-R-I-T-E, solrepair.org. You'll find out more about Rita and you'll find more about the Sol Repair Center at Bright Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. Rita, it's an awesome book. I'm so moved by so many of the stories. I think you've changed my life by preparing this book, by sharing these stories with it. One last thing that I had a question about was, is there a way to find the testimony, the stories, the full panoply of what was shared at the 2010 Truth Commission on Conscience More? Is there full transcripts or anything? - All of the witnesses that testified are posted at conscienceinwar.org. If you just click the dropdown menu that says videos, you will see all of the testimony. It's all up at YouTube, but the easiest way to find it all is at conscienceinwar.org. - Again, it's an amazing book and your work and your witness to spirit in the world is just really so impressive to me. And I thank you so much for joining me for a spirit in action. - Oh, well, thank you. And I've had so many good partners in this, especially my co-author Gabrielle Dini, who worked tirelessly on this project with me, but also all the volunteers who've helped this and the amazing veterans who were willing to tell their stories in our book. - Yes, thanks to all of them. And thanks to you again for joining me for spirit in action. - Well, thank you, it was a pleasure to be with you. - The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]