Image by Chad Madden.

It’s been a while since I’ve written and there’s a reason for that. About 16 months ago, I experienced a catastrophic car crash. An SUV veered across the double yellow line of the highway I was traveling on and hit my little Chevy Spark head-on — on the driver’s side. I’ve been told that I’m lucky to be alive. I was left with multiple injuries and have been on the slow road to recovery.

I’ve always seen myself as a person who pushes forward to overcome obstacles. Since the collision, however, doing so has become more complicated, because I’m learning that recovery is a long road, filled with detours I couldn’t have predicted. Time and again, my expectations have been turned upside down. I’ve had to take deep breaths, sit back, and pay close attention.

A few months into recovery, I was invited to attend a day-retreat organized by a local veterans’ moral leadership group. Those vets live with what’s known as military moral injury (in some cases going back decades). For years now, I’ve been researching and writing about the devastating consequences of the militarization of this country and the armed violence we loosed on the world in the twenty-first century. I’ve been listening carefully and trying to more deeply understand the stories of veterans from America’s disastrous wars in my own lifetime.

Now, given my own condition, a new window has opened for me. I can’t help but see more clearly the visceral experience of recovery, including moral recovery. So, I found myself sitting in that circle of a dozen vets, the only woman among them. And I soon had to catch my breath, because, as I briefly described what I was experiencing, they responded in a way I hadn’t expected, expressing their own profound vulnerability, understanding of, and empathy for my plight. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at how they “got it” in a way that even my loved ones struggled to grasp when it came to my own journey through the challenging nature of recovery.

Intolerable Suffering

Most civilians know little or nothing about the experiences of vets who live with what’s become known as “military moral injury.” It’s been described as “intolerable suffering” that arises from a deep assault on one’s moral core. Think about facing horrific suffering caused by violence you not only had to witness, but could do nothing to stop. You probably were even trained and mandated to perpetrate it. Sooner or later, such a dystopian world invariably slices through whatever bedrock values you’ve been taught and begins dissolving your sense of self. That’s military moral injury and it’s been linked to the epidemic of self-harm and suicide among former members of the U.S. military that continues to this day.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that military moral injury is rooted in being exposed to unsparing violence. It erupts as a consequence of witnessing violence, perpetrating it, and/or being on the receiving end of its death-dealing forms of betrayal. Moral injury bursts forth as people find themselves powerless to stop the suffering violence begets. War is a deep assault on life itself (both figuratively and literally) and violence isn’t a tool that a person picks up or sets down without consequences.

Admittedly, in this century, we in this country became woefully adept at denying the impact of our own violence on ourselves and the rest of the world. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called that phenomenon “

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