To the Editor:
In “For Veterans, a Path to Healing ‘Moral Injury’ ” (The Stone, Sunday Review, Dec. 10), Aaron Pratt Shepherd creates a false dichotomy between forgiveness and recompense.
Forgiveness can profoundly alleviate moral injury, and includes confession, remorse and recompense in its full form. But while recovery for the guilty begins with forgiveness, it does not end there.
It requires involvement from those who have been harmed. Recompense to a damaged community is not possible for the same reason: Damage was done to strangers long dead and in a far distant land.
No single fix exists for moral injury. While some veterans feel conflicted loyalties, they cannot simply return their loyalty either to childhood faith or military values. They can feel alien in their families and even to themselves because they experience a disruption in their core sense of being a decent human being.
Recovery is the process of rebuilding a moral identity, which requires trustworthy relationships of many kinds.
Continue reading the main storyRITA NAKASHIMA BROCK
ALEXANDRIA, VA.
The writer is senior vice president for moral injury programs at Volunteers of America.
To the Editor:
The American public and Congress are willing to let our volunteer military bear the cross of moral injury and more because so few Americans and members of Congress have any “skin” in the world of military service.
The guilt felt by many veterans due to combat experiences that violated their moral and ethical beliefs is a soul-searing pain that few of us have had to endure.
I escaped combat during my four years in the Marine Corps from 1962 to 1966, but as a volunteer, I was not alone in being put in harm’s way because there were draftees in the same boat. Not anymore.
There will never be a reconnect between the American public and its military until a mandatory military requirement of some type is expected of all able-bodied Americans.
But until that era (without dubious deferments) happens, those who are serving will be the ones suffering and carrying the load for all of us. Because the cynical attitude seems to be that if you have nothing invested, why should you care about those who do?
JIM GIZA, BALTIMORE
To the Editor:
As a decorated Special Forces Vietnam veteran who saw a 4-year-old shot three times by an M-16 rifle, I persuaded other compassionate Americans to redirect a chopper headed to pick up a general.
I saw a grandmother who was being sent to a resettlement camp cursing a Vietnamese soldier, and I picked her up and put her on the chopper before she was killed.
I became a paramedic for 24 years to atone for being there. It helped, but the distress never goes away.
Aaron Pratt Shepherd is right. He understands the heart. We can help one another give beauty to the world and ourselves.
STEVE RICE, MARSHALL, N.C.
To the Editor:
Aaron Pratt Shepherd helpfully argues that forgiveness might not be sufficient for healing moral injury.
The sense of atonement drawn from the philosopher Josiah Royce he mentions is rich, but this notion alone still isolates our veterans, suggesting that this is their problem to solve.
Moral injuries — while localized in deeply personal ways in the lives of individual service members — should be owned by the community as our shared responsibility because we sent these service members to act on our behalf, to risk moral wounds so we don’t have to.
We do that by listening, sharing experiences and working together to enrich the world in the way that atonement is so aptly described.
CHRISTA ACAMPORA, WILLIAM NASH
NEW YORK
Ms. Acampora is a professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Nash, a psychiatrist, is director of psychological health at Marine Corps Headquarters.
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