by Eyal Press
Unlike office park employees, drone operators could not reveal much about how their day went because of classification restrictions. Unlike conventional soldiers, they weren’t bolstered by the group solidarity forged in combat zones. Richard told me that when he was in the U.S. Marines, “there was a lot of camaraderie, esprit de corps.” Although drone operators could get close to their coworkers, at the end of every shift they went home to a society that had grown increasingly disconnected from war. The disconnect was especially profound at Creech, where the desert scrub surrounding the base soon gave way to billboards advertising live entertainment and gambling resorts in Las Vegas, where many of the service members lived. An hour after visiting the base, I wandered the Strip, watching tourists snap selfies in front of various landmarks—the Fountains of Bellagio, the High Roller at the Linq—before making their way to the endless procession of lounges, nightclubs, casinos, and all-you-can-eat buffets. The atmosphere of gaudy excess underscored the strangeness of the fact that forty-five minutes away a war was being fought in the name of these very same revelers.
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Before the drone personnel at Creech made their way home, some dropped by the Airman Ministry Center, a low-slung beige building equipped with a foosball table, some massage chairs, and several rooms where pilots and sensor operators could talk with clergy. A chaplain named Zachary told me that what most burdened the airmen he spoke to was not PTSD. It was inner conflicts that weighed on the conscience. Zachary mentioned one pilot he met with who asked, “I’m just curious: What is Jesus going to say to me about all the killing I’ve done?” Despite their distance from the battlefield, drone operators’ constant exposure to “gut-wrenching” things they watched on-screen—sometimes resulting directly from their own split-second decisions, other times from their inability to act—could cause them to lose their spiritual bearings and heighten their risk of sustaining a very different kind of battle scar: a wound Zachary described as a “moral injury.”
The term was not new. It first appeared in the 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam, by the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who drew on Homer’s epic war poem, the Iliad, to probe the nature of the wounds afflicting veterans of the Vietnam War. Shay read the Iliad as “the story of the undoing of Achilles’ character,” which, he argued, changes when his commander, Agamemnon, betrays his sense of “what’s right,” triggering disillusionment and the desire “to do things that he himself regarded as bad.” Experiencing such disillusionment might not seem as traumatic as being shot at or seeing a comrade die. Shay disagreed. “I shall argue what I’ve come to strongly believe through my work with Vietnam veterans: that moral injury is an essential part of any combat trauma,” he wrote. “Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as ‘what’s right’ has not also been violated.”
After 9/11, the term “moral injury” began to appear more frequently in the literature on the psychic wounds of war, but with a slightly different meaning. Where Shay emphasized the betrayal of what’s right by authority figures, a new group of researchers expanded the focus to include the anguish that resulted from “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs,” as a 2009 article in the journal Clinical Psychology Review posited. In other words, from wounds sustained when soldiers wading through the fog of war betrayed themselves, through harmful acts they perpetrated or watched unfold. This definition took shape against the backdrop of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, chaotic conflicts in which it was difficult to distinguish between civilians and insurgents and in which the rules of engagement were fluid and gray.
One author of the Clinical Psychology Review article was Shira Maguen, a researcher who began to think about the moral burdens of warfare while counseling veterans at a PTSD clinic in Boston. Like most Veterans Affairs psychologists, Maguen had been trained to focus on the aftershocks of fear-based trauma—IED blasts that ripped through soldiers’ Humvees, skirmishes that killed members of their unit. The link between PTSD and such “life-threat” events was firmly established. Yet in many of the cases she observed, the source of distress seemed to lie elsewhere: not in attacks by the enemy that veterans had survived, but in acts they had observed or carried out that crossed their own ethical lines.
Soldiers were not, of course, the only people who risked committing such transgressions. All of the counselors I interviewed at the Dade Correctional Institution struggled with inner conflicts related to horrifying things they’d witnessed but failed to prevent. What kind of person was she? Lovita Richardson wondered after seeing a prisoner bound to a chair get bludgeoned and not intervening to help him. “Why didn’t I do more?” Harriet Krzykowski asked herself after learning about the “shower treatment.” Many of the prison guards I’d interviewed had alluded to incidents where they’d done things they knew they shouldn’t, as when Bill Curtis slammed a man to the ground, nearly fracturing his skull. Moral injuries were an occupational hazard for anyone whose job involved “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs.” For most dirty workers, that is.
Among the veterans she counseled, Maguen grew particularly interested in the emotional toll of killing, which was sanctioned in the military but not when defenseless civilians were involved. “I was hearing about experiences where people killed and they thought they were making the right decision,” she told me, “and then they found out there was a family in the car.” To find out how heavy the burden of killing was, Maguen began combing through the databases in which veterans of conflicts dating back to the Vietnam War were asked if they had killed someone while in uniform. In some cases, veterans were also asked whom they killed—combatants, prisoners of war, civilians. Maguen wanted to see if there might be a relationship between taking another life and debilitating consequences like alcohol abuse, relationship problems, outbursts of violence, PTSD. The results were striking: even when controlling for different experiences in combat, she found, killing was a “significant, independent predictor of multiple mental health symptoms” and of social dysfunction.
Later, when she started directing a mental health clinic at a VA hospital in San Francisco, Maguen convened groups where veterans came together and talked about the killing they had done. In the VA no less than in the military, this was a taboo subject, so much so that clinicians often referred to it euphemistically, if at all. To ease the tension, a scene from a documentary was shown at the beginning of each session in which a veteran said, “Out there, it’s either kill or be killed. Nothing can really prepare you for war.” Afterward, Maguen would ask the veterans in the room a series of questions about how killing had impacted their lives. Some reacted angrily. Others fell silent. But many seized the opportunity to talk about experiences they later told Maguen they had never spoken about with anyone, not even their spouses and family members, for fear of being judged.
The veterans in Maguen’s groups didn’t talk a lot about fear and hyperarousal, emotions linked to PTSD. Mostly, they expressed self-condemnation and guilt. “You feel ashamed of what you did,” one said. Others described feeling unworthy of forgiveness and love. The passage of time did little to diminish the depth of these feelings, Maguen found. Geographic distance didn’t lessen them much either. Maguen recounted the story of a pilot who was haunted by the bombs he had dropped on victims far below. What troubled him was, in fact, precisely his distance from them—that instead of squaring off against the enemy in a fair fight, he had killed in a way that lacked valor. Obviously not all pilots felt this way. But the story underscored the significance of something Maguen had come to regard as more important than proximity or distance in shaping moral injury—namely, how veterans made sense of what they had done. “How you conceptualize what you did and what happened makes such a big difference,” she said. “It makes all the difference.”
Unlike PTSD, moral injury was not a medical diagnosis. It was an attempt t
o capture what could happen to a person’s identity and soul in the crucible of war, which is why it struck a chord among veterans who did not feel their wounds could be reduced to a medical disorder. “PTSD as a diagnosis has a tendency to depoliticize a veteran’s disquietude and turn it into a mental disorder,” observed Tyler Boudreau, a marine officer who served in Iraq and came back haunted by doubts about the war’s morality. “What’s most useful about the term ‘moral injury’ is that it takes the problem out of the hands of the mental health profession and the military and attempts to place it where it belongs—in society, in the community, and in the family—precisely where moral questions should be posed and wrangled with. It transforms ‘patients’ back into citizens and ‘diagnoses’ into dialogue.”
Not everyone welcomed this transformation. The meaning and magnitude of moral injury remained contested. “It is not a term widely accepted by the military or the psychological community,” Wayne Chappelle, of the School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, told me, adding that he did not believe it was prevalent among drone operators. This was somewhat surprising, because Chappelle was an author of the study revealing that many drone warriors struggled with unresolved negative emotions after strikes, feeling “conflicted, angry, guilty, regretful.” Then again, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising. The idea that war may be morally injurious is a charged and threatening one to many people in the military. Tellingly, Chappelle described moral injury as “intentionally doing something that you felt was against what you thought was right,” like the wanton abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The definition used by researchers like Maguen was at once more prosaic and, to the military, potentially more subversive: moral injury was sustained by soldiers in the course of doing exactly what their commanders, and society, asked of them.
“MORAL HAZARD”
By the time I met Christopher Aaron, he had spent several years recuperating from his experience in the drone program. We first talked at length in a pub, not far from where he was living at the time. Chris was in his mid-thirties, with thick dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. He had a calm, Zen-like bearing, honed in part through yoga and meditation, but there was a trace of worry in his eyes and a degree of circumspection in his voice, especially when pressed for details about particular missions (he could not talk about anything classified, he told me). At the pub, we spoke for two hours and agreed to continue the conversation over lunch the next day so that he could pace himself. As I was heading to that lunch appointment, my cell phone rang. It was Chris, calling to reschedule. Our meeting the previous day had triggered a flood of anxiety, aggravating the pain in his back during the night.
Some analysts in the drone program sensed immediately that their work left an emotional residue. In Chris’s case, the feeling unfolded gradually, coinciding with a shift in worldview, as his gung ho support for the “war on terror” gave way to glimmers of doubt. The disillusionment crept up in stages, starting, he realized in retrospect, a few months after he returned from Afghanistan. Although he felt proud of the work he’d done to help establish the drone program, he also started to wonder when the war’s objective was going to be achieved. It was around this time that his manager asked him if he wanted to obtain resident CIA employment status and become a career intelligence officer, which required taking a lie-detector test used to screen employees. Chris said yes, but halfway through the test, after losing circulation in his arms and feeling hectored by the questions, he got up and abruptly left. The next day, Chris told his manager that he had reconsidered.
Chris ended up taking a trip to California instead, renting a motorcycle and riding all the way up the coast to Alaska, where he spent a week at a monastery on a small island, sleeping in a wood-framed chapel surrounded by spruce trees. Chris had grown up attending an Eastern Orthodox church, and the experience was faith reaffirming. When he went back to the East Coast, he felt refreshed. But he was also out of money, which led him to apply for a job at the only company he figured would hire him—a military-and-intelligence contractor involved in the drone program and the war in Afghanistan.
By now, Chris’s idealism had waned. It receded further when, at the end of 2008, the contractor sent him back to Afghanistan. The first time he was there, in 2006, the “war on terror” seemed to be hastening the defeat of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Now it seemed to Chris not only that progress had stalled but that things were sliding backward. “We were actually losing control of vast areas of the country,” he said, even as the number of drone strikes was “four or five times higher” than before. The escalation under President Obama had begun.
As it happened, Chris had taken a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 with him to Afghanistan. He had read the book in high school and, like most people, remembered it as a dystopian novel about a totalitarian police state. This time, what stuck in his mind was the book-within-the-book written by Emmanuel Goldstein, the rumored leader of the resistance, titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. In the book, Goldstein describes the onset of a “continuous” war waged by “highly trained specialists” on the “vague frontiers” of Oceania—an opaque, low-intensity conflict whose primary purpose was to siphon off resources and perpetuate itself. (“The object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war,” Goldstein observes.) Chris had an eerie sense that a perpetual war was exactly what the “war on terror” was becoming.
As his disillusionment deepened, events that Chris dismissed before as unavoidable in any war began to weigh more heavily on him. He recalled days when the feed was “too grainy or choppy” to make out exactly who was struck. He remembered joking with peers that “we sometimes didn’t know if we were looking at children on the ground or chickens.” He also thought back to the times when he would be asked “to give an assessment of a compound where they had suspicion: there was fill-in-the-blank low-level Taliban commander in a remote region in the country. And we had seen other people come in and out of the same compound over the course of the preceding two or three days. They come and say, ‘We’re getting ready to drop a bomb on there. Are there any people other than the Taliban commander in this compound?’ I’d just say no because they don’t want to hear ‘I don’t know.’ And then two days later, when they have the funeral procession in the streets that we could observe with the Predators, you’d see, as opposed to carrying one coffin through the streets, they’re carrying three coffins through the streets.”
Chris kept his misgivings mainly to himself, but his friends noticed a change in him, among them Chris Mooney, who picked him up at the airport when he returned from Afghanistan in 2009. Mooney and Chris had been friends since college, when Chris had exuded a robust sense of confidence and enthusiasm. “He was magnetic,” said Mooney, who recalled taking road trips with Chris and marveling at his energy and assertiveness. At the airport, Mooney could scarcely recognize his friend. His affect was flat, his face a solemn mask. They went to dinner, where, at one point, a patron who overheard them talking came up to Chris to thank him for his service. Chris thanked him back, Mooney said, but in a muted tone. Mooney didn’t press him for details, but he knew that something was seriously wrong. “It wasn’t the same guy,” he said.
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The renewed interest in moral injury could be viewed as an effort to revisit ethical issues that had been lurking in our narratives of war all along—and to address sources of trauma that some veterans and military analysts recognized before the “war on terror” even began. In his influential 1995 book, On Killing, Dave Grossman, a retired army lieutenant and former professor of psychology at West Point, drew on historical studies and the personal accounts of ex-combatants to argue that the psychological costs of killing were often devastating. The novels and memoirs of veterans were filled with characters haunted by such incidents. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, for example, the narrator confesses that he can’t shake the image of the Vietnamese man he killed on a footpath with a
grenade—his body splayed, blood glistening on his neck. Later, the narrator indicates that he didn’t actually kill the man, but he was there and watched him die, “and my presence was guilt enough.” Literature could evoke the inner conflicts that played on a loop in the minds of veterans tormented by their troubled consciences.
In the early 1970s, some psychiatrists listened to soldiers talk about such incidents at “rap groups” organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Until this point, soldiers bearing psychic wounds tended to be dismissed by the military as cowards and malingerers. (“Your nerves, hell—you are just a goddamned coward,” General George Patton snapped at a soldier in a hospital during World War II.) The Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who sat in on the VVAW rap groups and wrote about the disfiguring effects of killing and participating in atrocities in his 1973 book, Home from the War, helped to recast these veterans as sympathetic figures. The participants in the rap groups were burdened not by cowardice but by the guilt and rage they felt at their involvement in a misbegotten war, Lifton argued, “a filthy and unfathomable war” from which they returned “defiled … in the eyes of the very people who sent them as well as in their own.” In Lifton’s view, moral and political questions were inseparable from Vietnam veterans’ psychic wounds, to the point that he believed activism to end the war could lessen their guilt and foster healing.
When PTSD was officially recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in 1980, many hoped it would lead society to reckon more honestly with the ethical chaos of war. The first definition of PTSD included among the potential symptoms not only survivor’s guilt but also guilt “about behavior required for survival,” language that addressed acts soldiers perpetrated that went against their own ethical codes. Over time, however, the moral questions that animated reformers like Lifton were reduced to “asterisks in the clinician’s handbook,” notes the veteran David Morris in his book The Evil Hours, as military psychologists shifted attention to brain injuries caused by mortar attacks and roadside bombs. One reason for this may be that focusing on such injuries, and on harmful acts in which veterans were the victims, was less threatening to the military. Another is that it might have been less fraught for VA clinicians, who weren’t trained to address veterans’ moral pain and who “may unknowingly provide nonverbal messages that various acts of omission or commission in war are too threatening or abhorrent to hear,” noted the authors of the 2009 article on moral injury in Clinical Psychology Review. Avoiding such conversations was particularly untenable with service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, who were enmeshed in counterinsurgency campaigns that often involved close-range killing and noncombatants. According to Brett Litz, a clinical psychologist at Boston University and an author of the 2009 article, “35 percent of the traumatic events that led soldiers to seek treatment for PTSD in a recent study were morally injurious events.”