Beyond the Battlefield: ‘Moral Injury’ and Moral Defense in the Psychic Life of the Soldier, the Military, and the Nation

Matthew H. Bowker (M.H. Bowker)

[[This is a revised version of a paper submitted to Biosocieties in fall 2017]] The basic structure of contemporary military biopolitics, in which military bodies and minds are kept alive and allowed to die, entails both an institutional problem of how to shore up life that is exposed to harm and a cultural problem of how to reckon with a routinized trade in life and death that happens not incidentally, but on purpose. Amidst this tension, the military psyche becomes both an inhabited, embodied site and an imaginative point of reference for the question of how to feel about war. This article takes stock of the contemporary landscape of war-related mental affliction via three relatively novel interventions: military suicide prevention, the framing posttraumatic stress as "moral injury," and resiliency training meant to inoculate soldiers against the stress of the battlefield. Drawing on a range of clinical and media sources and ethnographic research with post-9/11 military personnel, I show how each of these efforts constructs specific forms of war-related psychic destruction as objects of public and institutional concern, normalizes the institutional arrangements that produce it, and informs public perceptions of what war is by constructing figures of what it does to those who fight it.

The concept of ‘moral injury’ is revolutionizing the study and treatment of psychological trauma, but its theoretical promise has been limited by methodological misconceptions of the social and political nature of morality. By focusing on the ways moral belief and practice are mediated by institutions, I offer an institutional theory of moral injury trauma as a crisis of embodied belief in a moral authority. This theory implies that the mental health crisis among Iraq War veterans is the result of moral and ideological contradictions between American individualist culture and war’s demand for collective sacrifice. As these contradictions have been written into the US military’s moral doctrine, the causal responsibility for veterans’ psychological trauma must fall in large part upon the military institution and its ethicists. Moral injury demands that military ethicists reconcile the ideological gap between military necessity and American political ideals, and establish a consistent and militarily effective ethic to serve as a legitimate source of moral authority across all domains of the military profession.

The overwhelming majority of theorists addressing questions of the morality of war do so from within the moral framework provided by Just War Theory (JWT): a normative account of war that dates back over 1500 years in the Western Tradition. However, today’s iterations of Just War Theory are markedly different from those of its intellectual ancestors. Specifically, today’s accounts tend not to consider matters of moral virtue, personal excellence, moral psychology, or human flourishing – that is, aretaic matters – to be worthy subjects of discussion. Instead, they prefer to focus overtly on questions of law, justice, and human rights – deontological questions – as if they were the entire purview of a comprehensive morality of war. I explore some of the major theorists in the history of Western JWT, showing that the ancestors of today’s just war theories did consider aretaic matters – in particular the moral virtues – to be of central importance to the morality of war. I also show how and why it came to be that deontological and aretaic discussions became fragmented in contemporary JWT. In order to demonstrate how this fragmentation is problematic, I consider deontological ethics’ connection to aretaic ethics. I explain how contemporary JWT tends to conceptualise rights, emphasising the central place of intention in those theories. I show how aretaic ethics can enrich deontological appraisals of ongoing debates in military ethics. Finally, I make a positive case for aretaic ethics by identifying new questions that aretaic ethics reveals to JWT, those being: the complexity of the identity of soldiers, how moral character and identity can help prevent moral transgressions, and the moral and psychological trauma suffered by many soldiers and veterans. I argue that aretaic modes of thinking help to explain moral transgressions of soldiers and the psychological difficulties that veterans can experience post-war. Deontological and aretaic ethics also interact in the three professions most relevant to waging war: soldiers, commanders, and political leaders. I show how the virtues are necessary character traits in order to guarantee that warfighters and their political leaders can be relied on to fulfil their professional duties. Aretaic ethical analysis is also able to provide conceptual understanding of supererogatory actions. Contemporary just war theorists would be wise to re-integrate aretaic ethics into their considerations of the morality of war. Aretaic ethics can be combined seamlessly and productively with deontological ethics, yielding more robust and intelligible responses to the most pressing controversies facing military ethics today. Rights and deontology present crucial elements of the ethics war, but they can be ably complemented by insights from aretaic ethics; specifically, matters of character and the moral development of the agent. Furthermore, incorporating aretaic ethics into JWT enables theorists to utilise that framework to consider matters currently outside of its purview, but which are of growing relevance to military practice.

Beyond the battlefield: ‘Moral injury’ and moral defense in the psychic life of the soldier, the military, and the nation Forthcoming in Organisational and Social Dynamics 16(2), 2016 Matthew H. Bowker Medaille College David P. Levine University of Denver Abstract In this paper, we apply Ronald Fairbairn’s notion of a “moral defense” to the idea of “moral injury,” a construct lately advanced by American psychiatrists and researchers to account for the psychological suffering of soldiers in and after combat. By limiting discussion of the causes of “moral injury” to battlefield experiences, and by leaving out of account the states of mind individuals bring with them into the military, as well as the psychic and moral meanings invested in the military as an institution, the construct of “moral injury” currently obscures as much as it illuminates. We argue that limiting causation to combat experience is a way of hiding more complex issues concerning the moral relationship between the soldier, the military, and the ideal of goodness, as well as the ambivalent role the soldier occupies in the fantasy life of the nation. Keywords moral injury, military psychology, W.R.D. Fairbairn, morality, internal bad object, victim Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense Moral Injury The idea of “moral injury” has gained currency in clinical circles, academic literatures, and the popular press. It refers to a psychological or spiritual wound suffered by soldiers, medical officers, or others exposed to combat or disaster zones (see e.g., Currier, Holland, and Malott, 2014; Nash and Litz, 2013; Shay, 2012; Shay, 2014; Litz, Stein, Delaney et al., 2009). Several prominent researchers associated with the psychiatric treatment of soldiers and veterans now claim that although “moral injury is not officially recognized by the Defense Department [nor the DSM]… it is moral injury, not PTSD, that is increasingly acknowledged as the signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the soul, akin to grief or sorrow, with lasting impact on the individuals and on their families” (Wood, 2014). Morally injurious events, or “MIEs” as they are sometimes called (recapitulating the military penchant for acronyms), have been distinguished from psychic traumas, although not always for clear reasons. The most frequent explanation for differentiating the two constructs is that moral injury, unlike the traumas that qualify for PTSD diagnoses, do not necessarily involve the survival of life-threatening events. Other differences include presentations of guilt and anger, rather than fear, and the apparent absence of nightmares or intrusive memories of the event (Currier, Holland, and Malott, 2014, p. 2). Operational definitions of “moral injury” are vague and varied. Most, however, rely on the notion that sufferers have done, witnessed, or in some way experienced things that “violate their own sense of who they are, their own sense of right and wrong, their own sort of moral compass” (Wood, 2014). In a widely-cited study, Litz, Stein, Delaney et al. define moral injury as “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations” (2009, p. 700). Currier, Holland, and Malott understand moral injury to be “the constellation of inappropriate guilt, shame, anger, self- handicapping behaviors, relational and spiritual/existential problems, and social alienation that emerges after witnessing and/or participating in warzone events that challenge one’s basic sense of humanity” (2014, pp. 1-2). The authors of the recently-developed Moral Injury Questionnaire – Military Version (MIQ-M) characterize moral injury as covering “several different types of betrayals (i.e., by peers, leadership, trusted civilians, or self), acts of disproportionate violence in the warzone,… 2 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense incidents involving death/harm to civilians, acts of violence committed within military ranks,… inability to prevent death/suffering, and ethical dilemmas or moral conflicts from deployment- related decisions/actions” (Currier, Holland, and Malott, 2014, 2). Common examples of moral injury therefore include “losing a loved comrade” (Wood, 2014), “handling or uncovering human remains” (Litz, Stein, Delaney et al., 2009), the experience of “loss of meaning” (Currier, Holland, and Malott, 2014, p. 3), witnessing a “poor decision made by those in charge” (Wood, 2014); and, perhaps most commonly, the act of killing another human being, particularly a child (Shay, 2012, 2014). Former US Marine Stephen Canty, who shot and killed a middle-aged man dragged into his outpost, explains how “morals start to degrade.” Describing the scene, Canty recalls: I just lit him up… One of the bullets bounced off his spinal cord and came out his eyeball, and he’s laying there in a wheelbarrow clinging to the last seconds of his life, and he’s looking up at me with one of his eyes and just pulp in the other. And I was like twenty years old at the time. I just stared down at him… and walked away. And I will… never feel anything about that. I literally just don’t care whatsoever… You learn to kill, and you kill people, and it’s like, I don’t care. I’ve seen people get shot, I’ve seen little kids get shot. You see a kid and his father sitting together and he gets shot and I give a zero fuck. (Wood, 2014) Canty asks: “Once you’re able to do that, what is morally right anymore? How good is your value system if you train people to kill another human being, the one thing we are taught not to do? When you create an organization based around the one taboo that all societies have?... Your values do change real quickly. It becomes a war of moral injury” (Wood, 2014). To refer to the psychological consequences of combat as “moral injuries” is to place military experience on a moral plane. It is to recognize the connections between moral consequences and psychological consequences, and to draw attention to the power of moral values and moral imperatives in shaping psychic life. The starting point, then, for understanding moral injury is not acute experiences of combat, but, rather, the link between the moral status and psychic meaning of the military. It is that link we propose to explore here by approaching the military as a moral institution.1 3 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense As retired VA psychiatrist Jonathan Shay reminds us in his 1995 study, Achilles in Vietnam, military authorities hold profound moral power over soldiers: “The moral power of an army is so great that it can motivate men to get up out of a trench and step into enemy machine- gun fire” (p. 6). Through a variety of techniques, ranging from the motivational to the sadistic, drill instructors instill in recruits a moral code of courage, honor, and sacrifice, with the goal, according to official US Marine Corps literature, of producing young Marines “thoroughly indoctrinated in love of Corps and Country … the epitome of personal character, selflessness, and military virtue” (Wood, 2014). If such techniques are successful, they produce in recruits “the required esprit de corps,” which is, in Hanson Baldwin’s words, the knowledge “that the fate of any individual Marine [is] of far less importance than the principle of fidelity to authority, to ideals, to country” (Shatan, 1977, p. 592). But that is not all. To say that the military is a moral institution is to recognize that it is infused with moral meaning and moral language, serving aims related to beliefs about duty, justice, right and wrong, good and evil. The military is tasked, both explicitly and implicitly, with developing, preserving, and symbolizing a moral code, not only among recruits and soldiers, but as an institution embedded within the nation it serves, and sometimes even within the foreign countries in which it operates. Therefore, in order to understand the issues raised by the idea of moral injury, we must begin with the idea that, as Shay puts it, the military, itself, is “a moral construction” (1995, p. 5). The Fantasy of Moral Renewal The idea of moral injury focuses our attention on traumatic experiences that occur during military service in times of war (see e.g., Wood, 2014; Shay, 2012, Litz, Stein, Delaney et al., 2009). This focus can, however, be too narrow in that it fails to take into account the state of mind individuals bring with them into their military service. The literature on moral injury assumes that soldiers start out in a state of innocence. This presumption is an essential element in an account that focuses entirely on the harm done to them by their experiences subsequent to enlistment. Yet, if we do not take into account soldiers’ experiences, states of mind, and expectations about military service prior to enlistment, then we cannot understand how experience in the military is mentally appropriated and invested with a psychic meaning consistent with the idea of moral injury. To get at this investment of meaning, it will prove 4 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense helpful to consider the narratives surrounding the individual’s entrance into the military and how these narratives might interact with recruits’ subsequent experiences. One way to do this is to consider the messages the military sends in its effort to attract recruits. In recruitment messages, the military typically makes it clear that, in its pursuit of future soldiers, it has in mind not just able-bodied individuals willing to enlist, but individuals with the potential to develop specific qualities of character, even if, in the end, the military is willing to accept a wider range of recruits than strictly fits its image of a soldier. How, then, does the military envision its soldiers? What is the fantasy of the soldier conveyed in military recruitment and, of necessity, embraced to some degree by those who enlist? In its recruitment literature, the Army offers the following answer to this question: Many people know what the words Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage mean. But how often do you see someone actually live up to them? Soldiers learn these values in detail during Basic Combat Training (BCT), from then on they live them every day in everything they do — whether they’re on the job or off. In short, the Seven Core Army Values listed [above] are what being a Soldier is all about. (US Army, 2014) There are two key elements in this fantasy. One has to do with specific qualities of character; the other has to do with the way individuals can go about acquiring those qualities of character. Both are important. The most vital element in the message is the idea that the individual can become other than he is, can become a different and better person. We may assume that the power of this message is inversely related to the individual’s satisfaction with the person he has already become and positively related to the intensity of the hope to fulfill his wish to become someone different. The Army, in this case, taps into the prospective recruit’s hope when it insists that it has the power to remake him according to a new and better model. This remaking of the individual occurs in the process of “Basic Combat Training.” The idea of a ‘basic’ training might be taken to imply that, to become a soldier, one must go ‘back to basics.’ By going ‘back to basics,’ the individual imagines that he will rebuild himself from the ground up. The idea that a fundamental rebuilding is required, in turn, suggests 5 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense that the Army intends to appeal to those who believe, or who will come to believe, that the ‘training’ they have already received in life has been inadequate, and in no small way. The promise of renewal appeals to those who believe, or hope, that their problem can be corrected by a training process, that, as the US Marine Corps’ website and a complementary television commercial promise, a new, better, stronger person will be “forged in the crucible of training” (US Marine Corps, 2012). This new, stronger person is needed, ostensibly, because the nation is under threat. But the individual with faulty training in life is also under threat: from workplace competition, personal challenges, daily stress and anxiety, and more. The military promises the recruit a means to cope with these threats as well. In other words, the military directs its appeal at young men and women who hope, or who are susceptible to the hope, that they can become stronger, better persons by (re)turning to a special, and basic, learning process, the one referred to as basic combat training. How is the moral renewal of the soldier achieved? First and foremost, to become a soldier, the individual must sever contact with the self. This loss of contact with the self is formulated in the language of “sacrifice,” most notably self-sacrifice for the sake of the group that the individual serves. The solider subordinates himself and his needs to a greater end: the nation and its ideals, its goodness and, perhaps especially, its ‘freedom.’ Part of basic training involves the identification of the recruit with the drill instructor, officer, unit, division, code of conduct, branch of service, and nation (Shatan, 1977). The differentiation between soldier, leader, and moral code is both emphasized and blurred in military training and military life. In fact, the same rigid hierarchy that makes one’s rank absolutely clear and that enforces an unquestionable code of conduct on soldiers also reinforces the merging of psychic boundaries between individual, leader, group, and group-ideal. Individual soldiers, after all, are expected to behave not as individuals but as instinctively obedient extensions of the wills of their leaders, and, in this sense, as a ‘corps’ (see e.g., Foucault, 1975; Shatan, 1977). In the famous 1956 court-martial of Staff Sergeant Matthew McKeon, whose “disciplinary” night march resulted in the deaths of six recruits at Parris Island, PFC David MacPherson recounted this exchange: “Sergeant McKeon called me in… I stood at attention. He said, ‘What’s the matter with you out there? You are acting like an individual.’ Then he slapped me twice… I said I thought we had it too easy… I definitely felt that the platoon was very 6 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense undisciplined and had no spirit at all. The men acted as individuals’” (Shatan, 1977, pp. 592- 593). Yet, despite the emphasis on self-repression and self-sacrifice, earning respect and self- respect remain important goals of training. By serving the group, the soldier sacrifices himself in order to gain respect. Respect may become a substitute for self-respect if the solider can internalize the image of his self reflected in the eyes of others who recognize the sacrifice he has made for them. In other words, the self-respect promised through sacrifice derives from the respect afforded an individual who has gained a morally-invested identity by finding a means of serving a moral group. Wearing the uniform signals the soldier’s special standing in the moral group as well as his possession of the qualities to which we have just referred. A currently-airing television commercial for the US Marines shows a young, handsome, black man in his dress uniform walking proudly on a small-town street. The people in his community, the older men sitting on a bench, an attractive white family walking down the sidewalk, and, particularly, their smiling child, stop what they are doing and look up at him with respect, even reverence (US Marine Corps, 2014). These visible reactions to his presence are antithetical to what recent events across the nation would suggest to be a more common experience for some similarly aged, non- uniformed, black males: disapproval, suspicion, fear, or outright hostility. By offering a path to service and standing, the military offers the recruit a path to respect in the community, possibly overcoming a painful self-state in which the absence of self-respect is mirrored and confirmed by the absence of the respect of others. That respect and self-respect are goals of military recruitment and of potential recruits is also suggested by the emphasis in recruitment materials on the acquisition of job skills, both technical (preparation for a vocation) and emotional (discipline, leadership, and readiness to be part of a team). Thus, in addition to earning a respectable place by serving the military and the nation, future employment and income may be considered important rewards of service. Employment and income represent not only the ability to make a living, but the ability to gain standing within the community. This appeal seems to be directed primarily at those who feel socio-economically disenfranchised and who hope that the military will assure them a place in society (Mariscal, 2007). 7 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense While the emphasis in recruitment seems to be placed on what the recruit stands to gain by joining the military, more important, we would argue, is the message conveyed about the personal deficits that need to be made up. It is this message of what is wrong, lacking, or impaired in the individual that is the other side of the positive message detailing with what the recruit may become. We might say that the military recruitment effort is aimed not so much at individuals who possess exceptional grit or potential, but at individuals who possess specific flaws and limitations. Most significant among these flaws and limitations is the individual’s conviction that he is flawed and limited. The idea of a “mission” is perhaps the central element in the list of qualities potential recruits lack and stand to gain by joining. Thus, it is of unique importance in understanding the appeal to the impaired. The military promises the recruit that he will become someone special by pursuing and accomplishing a higher purpose or mission. This mission is not, however, easily accomplished. To accomplish the mission, the soldier has to enter into combat, and, to be successful in combat, he must be trained for a life-and-death struggle. In pursuit of this mission, the soldier must not waver or yield to opposition; he must not give in to fear, nor succumb to his own desires and baser instincts (US Army, 2014). Prior to enlistment, the individual had no mission, no clearly-defined purpose in his life. He experienced fear or apathy rather than courage and, as a result, lacked the resolve needed to succeed. He had neither a purpose nor the tools required to achieve that purpose. Prior to enlistment, the individual was unable to dedicate himself to a mission, discipline himself, or “master [his] fear,” and was, at best, driven by impulse.2 It is also for this reason that the recruit feels a lack of self-respect and is convinced that others do not respect him. It is important that the military concurs with the recruit in his suspicion that he is flawed and in need of discipline and training to fix his flaws. The military has a mission, which is to defend a way of life and a nation. The military has resolve; it has no fear; it is not driven by base instincts; it has discipline. The military represents the nation’s resolve and the soldier the embodiment of resolve. But the military also has a moral mission with respect to recruits and soldiers: It is to train them to meet a moral code. Insofar as the sought-after recruit is an individual who is or feels flawed and in need of repair, we may say that moral injury precedes recruitment, if by moral injury we mean an event or series of events that either prevented the building of the desired character or that caused the 8 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense individual to lose connection with desirable qualities of character. If the individual comes out of the military further damaged, then the military has failed to fulfill its promise of repair, and exhibited a lack of the very qualities it promised to instill in the recruit: “duty,” “loyalty,” etc. If military service makes the consequences of earlier moral injuries more acute and threatening, then the military, rather than fixing what is wrong with the recruit, re-enacts earlier events in the recruit’s life that resulted in loss of character, purpose, resolve, and self-respect. In such cases, the solution sought through enlistment turns out to be a repetition of events that caused the original moral damage. The soldier returns from war not with enhanced resolve, but with confusion; not with a sense of purpose but with a sense that what he has done served no purpose; not with self-respect but with contempt for himself. At the end of the mission, morally injured soldiers find themselves “doubting the mission, doubting the fundamental nature of who they are,” feeling they “did it all for nothing.” “Mired in the swamp of moral confusion,” the morally injured soldier asks: Why am I still “such a bad person” (Wood, 2014)? The “confused” soldier has lost his mission. His moral injury has interfered with his ability to know what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, whether responsibility for bad acts is internal or external, whether the authority of the military, which is defined as the good, really is good or not. He does not know whether following orders is good or bad, and therefore whether in following orders he is good or bad. The moral injury literature insists that this confusion originates in specific combat experiences, that morally troubling events occurring in the context of combat and military duty are the cause. However, a more helpful way to think about the confusion that is so central to symptomology of moral injury and its literature is to link it to a more fundamental problem, one the recruit brought with him into the military. This is the problem of coping with what, in psychoanalytic literature, are referred to as internal bad objects. The Moral Defense The term ‘internal object’ is used to speak about an internal or mental construct of the target of an emotional investment.3 The ‘object’ is the mental appropriation and personification of a relationship. This object plays a role in an internal drama, or fantasy, either as a source of or obstacle to gratification. In the simplest terms, good objects provide gratification, while bad objects withhold or block gratification. When the individual occupies a role in the internal 9 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense drama, he is identified with either good or bad objects. Identification means equating the self with the object and exhibiting its defining characteristics. The idea of identification with good and bad internal objects suggests that the role occupied is not a matter of choice but, rather, depends on a set of complex, especially unconscious, factors. In his paper, “The Repression and the Return of Bad Objects,” Ronald Fairbairn suggests that the “moral defense,” also called “the defence of the super-ego” and “the defence of guilt” (1952, p. 66), deserves standing alongside classic defenses. Specifically, the moral defense is a defense against the anxiety associated with the loss of the source of gratification, or good object. This anxiety is provoked by experiences of neglect and abuse that signal that the object on which the child depends is not good but bad. The moral defense operates by splitting off the bad experiences with the good object, taking responsibility for them (internalizing them), thereby assuring that the source of gratification is always and altogether good. The cost of deploying the moral defense is that the child assures the goodness of the good object by becoming bad himself, or, in the language used above, by identifying himself with the bad internal object. The aim of the moral defense is “the conversion of an original situation in which the child is surrounded by bad objects into a situation in which his objects are good and he himself is bad” (p. 68). Of course, “in becoming bad he [the child] is really taking upon himself the burden of badness which appears to reside in his objects. By this means he seeks to purge them of their badness; and, in proportion as he succeeds in doing so, he is rewarded by the sense of security which an environment of good objects so characteristically confers… Outer security is thus purchased at the price of inner insecurity” (p. 65). We might ask, as Fairbairn asks: why does the child make this purchase of the goodness of the object at the cost of his own? After all, identification with internal bad objects can be considered synonymous with inescapable feelings of persecution, anger, and self-hatred. To this question there are three primary answers. First, the individual desperately needs and depends on his objects, externally and internally, lest he be left objectless and desolate. Second, the child’s internal state is already gravely threatened by the presence of external bad objects. Because early object-relationships are based largely on identification, bad objects in the world are experienced in a way that is equivalent to badness in the self. “[I]f the child’s objects present themselves to him as bad, he himself feels bad; and indeed it may be stated with equal truth that, if a child feels bad, it implies that he has bad objects” (Fairbairn, 1952, p. 64). Third, and most importantly, the 10 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense moral defense establishes a path back to the good object, which is a path out of his identification with his internal bad objects. The availability of this path indicates that the child is not irredeemably or unconditionally bad, but only conditionally so. The child finds it preferable to be conditionally bad vis-à-vis internal good objects than to be unconditionally bad, which was the original threat to the self. At this point, Fairbairn uses religious language to help define the essence of the moral defense, which he believes is in operation both in psychopathology and in health (p. 64). “It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil” because, in a world ruled by the devil, there is “no security and no hope of redemption. The only prospect is one of death and destruction” (p. 67). Later, Fairbairn suggests that the suffering generated by reliance on the moral defense is a kind of ‘pact with the devil,’ signed not for greed but for need of love: “[I]f a True Mass is being celebrated in the chancel, a Black Mass is being celebrated in the crypt,” for the individual must remain devoted to and possessed by the devil below, as it were, in order to preserve the good above, in order to do his part in sustaining a “true mass” devoted to the good object with which he connects with increasing difficulty. The bargain at the heart of the moral defense hinges on the transformation of unconditional badness into conditional badness, which Fairbairn refers to as “moral” badness. Although continuous and psychologically devastating, the badness represented by the devil within is conditional because this badness can, at least theoretically, be expiated or repaired. The individual can manage his own moral badness through self-punishment, or by hoping to train his badness out of him, or by striving to be like the objects purged of their bad aspects, or, as we will discuss later, by finding external forms to contain his badness which he can fight and possibly destroy. The moral defense, then, fosters a special way of relating both to self and to others. The purpose of this way of relating is to provide the individual the opportunity to enact imperatives driven by the moral defense, to cast self and others in the roles that affirm the terms of the defense. The Mission Earlier, we briefly discussed the importance of the idea of a ‘mission’ in the fantasy of the soldier’s life and training. The idea of the moral defense helps clarify the underlying nature of this ‘mission’ that plays such a central role in the psychic meaning of being a soldier. The 11 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense soldier’s mission is to defend the nation or the homeland, its constitutive values, and its “way of life” against its enemies. To be a US Marine, for instance, involves believing that “your Marine Corps’ way of life is to defend the American way of life” (US Marine Corps, 2014). But, in the constellation of psychic factors that make up the moral defense, what does this defense of the nation and its way of life represent? The answer, we think, is that, while, at the level of relating in the external world, the mission is a mission to defend and serve the nation, its interests, and its virtues, at the level of psychic experience, the mission is to defend and serve the good object. Here, it is important to bear in mind that the moral defense has been put in place because the objects in an individual’s environment are not good, or not good enough. Thus, it would be most accurate to say that, at the level of psychic experience, the mission is to defend a fantasy of an object made good by the transfer of what is bad about it onto the child, who then becomes the soldier. If the soldier’s explicit mission is to defend the nation, the soldier’s explicit enemies are those who pose a mortal threat to the nation or its interests. These enemies must be defeated in order to create a safe environment for the nation. But an internal battle against the soldier’s internal enemies is being waged as well. In this battle, the soldier has made himself the repository of the threat to the putatively good object by taking on its badness. Thus, the soldier faces the threat that the object’s badness will return or reappear, and its apparent goodness will be revealed for what it is: the bad object posing as the good. Since, however, the soldier has proven himself capable of incorporating the object’s badness, the more dangerous threat to the good object is the soldier himself. In other words, the soldier’s destructive impulses, born of his identification with his internalized bad objects, put the good object at risk. The soldier must protect the fantasized good object from his own badness, which originated in the putatively good object, was absorbed from that object, and established an internal bad object with which the soldier identifies, typically at the cost of his ability to experience himself as fully alive, good, and real. Unfortunately, the soldier’s experience of military life, particularly his initiation and training, tends only to intensify his difficulties. Basic training reenacts his relationship with an original external bad object while demanding his identification with that object. In basic training, the original ambivalent object reappears as the fearsome drill instructor, who insists on the soldier’s essential badness in an environment that is, itself, “harsh, pitiless, and persecutory.” 12 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense “The heart of basic Marine Corps training,” writes Chaim Shatan, is “incessant humiliation and degradation” (1977, pp. 594-595). Constant physical and psychological “assault at the roots of [the recruit’s] civilized existence” leads not to relief from the dilemma rooted in the moral defense, but to the confirmation of it (1977, p. 597). The military offers an alluring promise for the individual seeking a way to cope with the dilemma embedded in the moral defense. This dilemma, once again, is that the individual cannot simply accept identification with his bad objects, but at the same time cannot give up that identification without putting the fantasized good object at risk. His situation is confusing and agonizing because his incorporation of bad objects into himself is both “intolerable” and “indispensable” (Fairbairn, 1952, p. 74). Individuals faced with this dilemma may seek out military institutions or other comparable organizations because they offer a way to resolve a dilemma that can no longer be tolerated. By providing individuals with a mission in the world outside, the military, and similar organizations, offer individuals a way to externalize internalized bad objects. The military offers the solider relief from his dilemma in the form of a set of external bad objects acting as what Vamik Volkan terms “suitable targets of externalization” (1985). These targets permit the soldier to enact the moral defense in the world outside. The soldier’s internal enemies are projected into the world in the form of the nation’s enemies. At the same time, of course, the military also offers the solider “the right, indeed, even the encouragement, to eventually visit the same unspeakable evil (cruel destructiveness) on others” that has been inflicted on him, both in basic training and, perhaps more importantly, in his pre-enlistment life (Shatan, 1977, p. 595). If the bad objects confronting the individual are sufficiently threatening, then incorporating them into the self via the moral defense means repressing authentic and valued parts of the self, an experience that is tantamount to self-murder. And the more intense the individual’s experience of self-murder, the more intense and terrifying must be the external targets or containers for the individual’s bad internal objects. This logic helps us understand why the ultimate act within the fantasy system surrounding the moral defense is the killing of bad objects. To kill the bad object, to purge the world of its badness, to destroy the evil enemy, would seem to free the individual from the agonizing imperatives and contradictions built into the moral defense. But, if we take seriously 13 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense the literature of moral injury, the result of soldiers’ acts of killing enemies seems not to be that of release from an intolerable dilemma, but rather, the psychic wound of “moral injury.” Why does the enactment of the moral defense fail? The answer, in brief, is that killing the enemies of the nation is, psychologically, a re-enactment of, the self-murder at the heart of the soldier’s dilemma. Identification with the Victim The signature case of moral injury is the soldier who, in the normal exercise of his duties, either by following an order or adhering to a code of conduct, kills a child. This is not the only act that can inflict moral injury on the actor, but it puts the idea into sharpest focus. In his three-part article, “A Warrior’s Moral Dilemma,” David Wood offers an example: Here’s Nick, pausing in a lull. He spots somebody darting around the corner of an adobe wall, firing assault rifle shots at him and his Marines. Nick raises his M-4 carbine. He sees the shooter is a child, maybe 13. With only a split second to decide, he squeezes the trigger and ends the boy’s life. The body hits the ground. Now what? ‘We just collected up that weapon and kept moving,’ Nick explained. ‘Going from compound to compound, trying to find [the insurgents]. Eventually they hopped in a car and drove off into the desert.’ There is a long silence after Nick finishes the story. He’s lived with it for more than three years and the telling still catches in his throat. Eventually, he sighs. ‘He was just a kid. But I’m sorry, I’m trying not to get shot and I don’t want any of my brothers getting hurt, so when you are put in that kind of situation… it’s shitty that you have to, like… shoot him. You know it’s wrong. But… you have no choice.’ (Wood, 2014) Within the context of the idea of moral injury, while violence was committed against a child, the moral injury was inflicted on the perpetrator of the violence by those who directly or indirectly ordered him to commit the violent act. The resulting moral injury and suffering associated with it are understood to involve a soldier who, by following an order issued by the moral authority of the military, commits an act that violates the moral code the military is meant to defend. Since the soldier is ordered to violate a moral code instilled by a morally-invested authority, the act of harming the innocent (who are by definition good) is carried out in defense of the good object. 14 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense And yet, violation of the moral code separates the soldier from the good object and, with it, the possibility that he may be or become good. Put another way, the fantasized good object is, itself, innocent because it has been cleansed of its badness through the processes of the moral defense. But these processes negate any innocence the soldier might otherwise have claimed for himself, since becoming bad to protect the good object means becoming guilty to assure its innocence. The killing of a child, then, reenacts an internal drama in which the individual killed his own innocent self in order to protect the innocence of the good object. This means that, if we are to understand the experience of moral injury, we need to consider how the solider identifies with the victims of his own violent acts. The impact of the act of killing a child on the soldier depends on the nature of the identification formed between the soldier and the child. While this identification with the child always represents the soldier’s own innocent self, the soldier may relate to that self in a positive or negative way. His relation with the child may be an expression of rage toward his own vitality, or an expression of remorse for the death of the self; or, it may be both. Where the protective urge dominates, the soldier experiences the act of killing a child as a violation of his duty to protect the innocent. Where the destructive urge dominates, the soldier who kills a child may find that doing so reveals his unconscious desire to destroy the vitality of others as a way of sharing his own suffering with them. If a soldier were to become aware of this, guilt and shame would result, and while, consciously, the act may be deemed an act of duty, undertaken without ‘choice,’ and thus not a true act of volition, unconsciously the soldier may know he desired to do it, suggesting that it was indeed an act for which he ought to be held responsible. It should be clear that interpreting the problem of moral injury in terms of consciously chosen moral codes, or orders given and received, is not sufficient, for the soldier faces a problem over which he has relatively little control. Driven by the terms of the moral defense, he is divided against himself in a way he cannot will himself to overcome. Can the individual soldier really protect himself from moral injury by opting out, refusing to follow orders, refusing to defend his “brothers” in arms, or setting down his weapon?4 In ethics and in law, moral responsibility exists only insofar as volition exists. In the inner world, however, the matter of volition is more complicated. What is missing in the construction of moral injury, as it is 15 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense currently discussed, is the individual’s unconscious identification with internal bad objects. It is this unconscious identification that promotes the oft-cited ‘symptoms’ of confusion, guilt, and self-hatred. Since this identification is unconscious, the individual cannot exercise choice or will, cannot think his way out of a moral dilemma and simply decide on a morally appropriate course of action. Thus, while externally and consciously the individual soldier does much of what he does as a matter of following orders and honoring the moral code those orders represent, unconsciously the individual who kills or participates in morally injurious behavior is identified with bad objects; and, as Fairbairn notes, we all are to one degree or another identified with our bad objects. The individual who kills, even the individual who kills a child, is doing what a part of him greatly desires: to inflict suffering upon and destroy others. So, unconsciously, the individual is guilty apart from any institutional moral code, but according to a fundamental inner code associated with the moral defense. This code might be called the unconscious moral code built of the primitive struggle to be related to, and worthy to be loved by, the good object. The external moral code and the orders associated with it are much less operative emotionally than the fundamental need to preserve the relationship with the good object. It is this unconscious moral code that impels the individual to adopt a moral defense and, along with it, the defense of the nation.5 Fantasy Betrayed When the soldier leaves the military with nothing but confirmation, through re-enactment, of his identification with internal bad objects, the moral defense has failed and he finds himself unconditionally bad. He is unconditionally bad in that he has taken in the bad object, but in so doing has failed to protect the good, and, indeed, has caused harm to it. Furthermore, this is harm he desired to do, however unconsciously. To be sure, he may blame the military for ordering him to harm the innocent, and in this way may seek to absolve himself. But the terms of the moral defense do not allow him to displace his badness and blame without also giving up the possibility of living in “a world ruled by God.” The original moral-emotional contract he entered into with the military, a contract based on the terms of the moral defense, has gone irretrievably bad, and there is no hope for redemption. The mission has failed. 16 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense The problem of moral injury arises, then, from the precarious nature of the contract or bargain implicit in the moral defense. If the act of internalizing bad objects does not issue in the preservation of the good object, then not only has the individual taken in more than his share of badness, but his badness has not purchased any outer security: He is bad, the world is still “ruled by the devil,” and, in some sense, he is responsible for returning the devil to the world. Perhaps the literature on moral injury is useful in that it reminds us that there are situations, both within and beyond the theatres of war, so replete with violence, cruelty, and destruction that individuals find themselves incapable of absorbing the badness around them and so protecting their good objects. And, perhaps this literature draws our attention to the moments when external targets or containers of internal bad objects fail to contain them. It is easy to imagine the jarring difference between the fantasy of an exaggerated, horrifyingly bad object and a confrontation with a hungry and ill-armed civilian or a thirteen-year-old combatant. In either case, after the arduous labor involved in maintaining the moral defense, the individual remains threatened with a return to the original situation: a self and a world filled with badness and offering no way out. Since the moral defense involves the incorporation and repression of bad objects, the prospect of their breaking free confronts the individual as a grave and terrifying possibility, one Fairbairn equates with a living nightmare or a demonic haunting (1952, pp. 75-79). Thus, the prospect of a breakdown in the moral defense results in feelings of impotence at containing the quantity or extremity of badness, terror at the prospect of releasing the bad and so destroying the good, despair at the prospect of living in an unredeemable world of evil, betrayal and rage at those who promised to help in the project of self-strengthening and moral renewal, and outrage at the injustice of having borne so much badness to no avail. To understand moral injury, therefore, we must look well beyond the combat experiences typically associated with it and toward the breakdown in the relationship between the individual and the moral institution of which he is a part. Recall that repair of his moral flaws was the military’s promise to the recruit, and was the fantasized outcome of the relationship between the soldier and the moral training offered by the military and its leaders. Since the soldier is devoted not merely to abstract codes, but to specific leaders and authority figures who embody such codes, part of the injury of moral injury lies in the individual’s diminished capacity to relate to others as good objects. This aspect of moral injury finds expression in difficulties soldiers 17 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense encounter upon returning home and ‘re-entering’ civilian life (see e.g., Lifton, 1973), and at soldiers’ oft-noted feelings of hopelessness. If the soldier or veteran finds it difficult or impossible to relate to family, friends, or co- workers because he is ashamed or full of rage, he is, in spite of his service and sacrifice, alienated from his nation and the good objects it symbolizes and contains. Hopelessness about the possibility of redemption for himself and his world, may express a loss of the ability to conceive good objects. In other words, the abject failure of his good objects in the world outside reenacts and confirms the failure of his original good object and leaves him doubting he knows what a good object is, or how such an object could ever exist for him. Thus, the repairing and redeeming promise of the military, which is the promise of renewed connection with the good object via the killing of the bad, fails on multiple counts. Although this promise is made explicit in recruitment materials, it is important to remember that it remains a fantasy. Had either the solider or the military been willing to admit it, the promise of redemption and release from the dilemma of the moral defense could have been recognized as a fantasy incapable of finding fulfillment in reality. In this sense, we may say that “moral injury” results from collusion of the military with a hope embedded in a fantasy the recruit brings to military, the terms of which make fulfillment impossible. Currier, Holland, and Malott, then, may be right to conceive of moral injury as a form of “betrayal” (2014, p. 2). Collective Moral Defense In the end, the literature on moral injury places responsibility not on the solider, nor on his tactical commanders, nor even on high-ranking military authorities who make decisions about military engagement, but on the nation as a whole. For it is the nation, as a putatively good object, that is imagined to require and benefit from the soldier’s sacrifice. Consider the following scene from the latest installment of the Bourne films (2012), where soldiers are transformed into covert assassins by a brutal training-regimen and a chemically-induced disconnection from their former selves: Colonel Byer confirms to a visibly shaken Private Kitsom that the morally questionable assault the unit has just undertaken, involving the deaths of several civilians, was indeed morally wrong. Nevertheless, Colonel Byer defends the action by explaining: “We are the sin eaters. It means that we take the moral excrement we find in this equation and we bury it 18 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense down deep inside of us, so that the rest of our cause can stay pure. That is the job. We are morally indefensible, and absolutely necessary.” Here, a bargain along the lines of the moral defense is made explicit. The soldier eats the sin necessitated by the cause he has taken on, accepting responsibility for the most egregious forms of badness, violence, and immorality, so that the rest of the nation, its ideals, and its goodness can “stay pure.” Of course, at a rational level, this argument is patently flawed, relying on an indefensible separation of one part of the “cause” from another: A cause cannot be “pure” if it requires then disavows atrocious acts. But at an emotional level, we imagine that the soldier’s dedication to the nation compels him to offer himself up as a sort of moral sacrifice, and that the nation, perhaps tacitly, accepts this arrangement. In such fictional accounts, as in the academic and popular discourses of moral injury, then, we find two seemingly opposed trends. On one hand, the discussion of moral injury ignores broader historical, institutional, and unconscious correlates of the moral defense and, in so doing, makes moral injury a battlefield injury, one that the civilians in the nation, those who have not shared the soldier’s experience, cannot and must not comprehend. On the other hand, the assertion of widespread moral injury among soldiers implicates the nation in a sort of collective moral defense, for it offers a means for civilians in the nation to absorb the badness enacted by soldiers who ostensibly act on the nation’s behalf. Not only has the nation required soldiers to harm or kill its enemies, sometimes even children, but, because of the nation’s need to “stay pure” while demanding such behavior, the nation has asked the solider to become its “sin eater” and has thereby caused moral harm to the dedicated, courageous, and selfless soldiers who defend and protect it. The literature on moral injury abets a process by which the nation absorbs an abstract (and therefore more tolerable) form of guilt, the full force of which will never reach civilians, since the moral injuries sustained in battle are imagined to be incomprehensible to them. The civilian cannot, and must not, identify with the soldier at war because the soldier’s experience is thought to transport him across a moral border, to set him apart from civilian life, even to make him something alien. To say that the construct of moral injury is involved, therefore, with both the protection of the nation and the recapitulation of the moral defense at a national level is to say that civilians, researchers, clinicians, and those members of the public inclined to consider these issues are encouraged to take on the badness of the solider in order to 19 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense protect the fantasy of the soldier as the good object, while, at the same time, affirming a shared conviction that the soldier has lost his claim to the virtues that would make him deserving of a place in the larger community. Even when critical of the military or of a war, the national moral defense protects the fantasy propagated by the military and enforced by political and cultural authorities who demand that the nation always “support the troops” (see Salaita, 2013; Lifton, 1973). Citizens do honor and support the image of the solider as the symbol of what is best in the nation, in spite of their suspicion that the soldier’s putatively unknowable and morally devastating experience has set him apart from civilians. Perhaps it is because of the soldier’s inevitable moral exile that the citizens of the nation feel compelled to offer the soldier such gestures of unwavering support. Recalling the powerful ambivalence Freud noted in the quality of taboo (1938), or Giorgio Agamben’s well-known use of homo sacer to mean a person who is both sacred and cursed (1998), may help to illuminate the exceptional and paradoxical status of the solider in the context of the national moral defense. Soldiers, like the individuals of whom Agamben speaks, are both “august and damned” (1998, p. 48), and are used by the nation to demarcate civilized, political life from brutal, “bare life” in ways not dissimilar from the imagination of the solider who lives through horror and dies ‘to protect our freedoms.’ If, as Durkheim noted, “the pure and the impure are… two varieties of the same genus that includes sacred things” (2001, p. 306), then we may say that the clinical, academic, and journalistic corps who treat, study, and publicize the moral agony of soldiers employ constructs such as moral injury to protect the nation by transforming soldiers into “homines sacri,” sacred yet profane individuals who are revered by, yet excluded from, the nation. In this light, it is less surprising that such constructs and the treatment plans associated with them offer little in the way of alleviating soldiers’ actual psychological and spiritual suffering. Conclusion If, as Jonathan Shay suggests, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey reveal the dangers of moral injury inflicted by tactical commanders, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War reveals a broader and, in some sense, more contemporary political aim to which the discourse of moral injury may be put. Thucydides is explicitly concerned, of course, not merely with relating the events of the Peloponnesian War, but with narrating and even fictionalizing events in order to 20 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense teach a moral lesson, which involves assigning blame to the Athenians themselves for the collective moral injuries sustained in the Athenian defeat (see Thucydides, 1954, Bks. II, III, VI – VII). Likewise, in the twentieth century, one might argue that shared guilt and outrage at atrocity have become signature themes in literature, cultural criticism, and ethical theory (Bowker, 2013). Modern and postmodern readers cannot help but be well-acquainted with the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its terrible legacy, genocides around the globe, the trenches of the great wars, extermination camps and gulags, and the oppressive conditions suffered by women, minorities, and autochthonous populations both in distant colonies and within ‘civilized’ and ‘developed’ nations. This template of dramatic moral injury has then been applied, with powerful effect, to virtually all forms of suffering: personal, historical, local, familial, intra-psychic, even the vicarious suffering of those who witness or listen to the suffering of others (see e.g., Fassin and Rechtman, 2009; Caruth, 1995). Writers like Albert Camus (1991), Primo Levi (1996), and Frantz Fanon (1963) represent a tradition of contemporary thought contending with the meaning of moral injury, typically by applying ‘lessons’ learned in horrific events to broader social, political, and philosophical concerns. Indeed, Robert Lifton’s Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans – Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), takes its subtitle from Camus’ argument that it is imperative to be “ni victime, ni bourreau,’ neither victim nor executioner. Unfortunately, the sought-after balance implied in this moral stance tends to become one of self-victimization, whereby the ‘lesson’ learned is that the only way to confront atrocity, which is imagined to be pervasive, is to accept responsibility for the cruelty and destructiveness around us, and to insist that others do so as well. In perhaps the most significant monologue of Camus’ famous allegorical novel, The Plague, former activist Jean Tarrou tells his friend Dr. Bernard Rieux that he is “mortally ashamed” of his complicity in the violence he has witnessed and tacitly condoned. Tarrou concludes that “we can’t stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody,” and thus feels a “desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death. Pending that release, I know I have no place in the world of today; once I’d definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end. I leave it to others to make history” (1991, pp. 252–253). Tarrou’s identification with killers, and his assumption of 21 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense the guilt for their killing, threatens to exile him from life, from history, and from his active, vital self. This exaggerated and self-inflicted guilt offers a poignant account of the psychological consequences of identification with bad internal objects. Throughout contemporary ethical thought we find the fantasy of a nation purged of its badness — including its bad history — by those who willingly take on guilt for its sins, who internalize its badness in order to protect the purity of a fantasied good object.6 Only when all individuals within the nation collectively accept responsibility for badness, argues Judith Butler, will we develop a “point of identification with suffering itself” (2004, p. 30). It is imagined that only by “bringing ourselves to grief” over violence, loss, and other manifestations of badness (McIvor, 2012), and “tarrying with grief… remaining exposed to its unbearability” (Butler, 2004, p. 30), will we regenerate a connection with the good object of the nation that contains the (fantasized) elements of innocence, purity, and goodness. At the level of political discourse, the defender of such a position imagines the nation’s goodness to be protected by his willingness to be wounded. This is the fantasy of the solider seeking a way to resolve the dilemma of the moral defense via service to the moral group, and of civilians who insist that the nation take on a form of guilt for its soldiers. The defender of such a position preserves a fantasy of the good object by dispersing, as it were, the painful burden of containing the self’s own internal bad objects. The idea that civilians can never truly understand the horrors of war for which they nevertheless feel responsible only makes it easier for guilt to be shared, to remain mysterious, and to serve its broader psychic functions. A collective moral defense of the solider as a representative of a fantasized nation that adheres to a moral code, and as one who sustains a connection with the good object, then, seems to require a collectively guilty nation that condemns itself and others. This defense requires the identification of the self with bad objects and, therefore, the equation of subjectivity with destruction. The ever-popular anti-subjective trends in contemporary ethical and political thought serve this purpose no less than the discourse of moral injury, which connects acts of violence committed against enemies to the soldiers who commit them, and then to the nation that sponsors its soldiers, all in the popular languages of injury, wounding, and victimization. Although (or perhaps because) the discourse of moral injury defines it as an exceptional experience, it has yet to offer much help in understanding and treating moral injuries. Lt. Col. 22 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense Stephen W. Austin, an Army chaplain, claims that “there are no answers – we just want to start the conversation, getting the troops comfortable talking about these things… That’s the most important thing of all, that people feel they can talk about these issues with their buddies.” Similarly, the idea that an effective form of treatment for moral injury consists of merely “listening to a Marine’s story,” or saying, “you did your job… and I am proud of you” (Wood, 2014), seems to demonstrate the poverty of thought devoted to the complicated issues involved with moral injury. More than that, it suggests that while the soldier may be idealized, his moral injury and his moral core are objects of fear that must not receive sustained attention. If they were comprehended, it might become difficult to use the solider as the sacred yet exiled container of bad objects relied upon by the national moral defense system we have outlined here. We have tried to show that the source of moral injuries lies much deeper than may be apparent, that explicit acts of violence committed in times of war may activate ‘symptoms’ of moral injury, but that the moral defense mounted against the presence of badness at the level of psychic experience necessitates, confirms, and perpetuates morally injurious experience both within the military and without. We have also sought to demonstrate that the society as a whole partakes in a moral defense in which the solider serves as both a symbol of the good object to be protected and an alienated or abject figure, whose moral sacrifice helps to purge the nation of its badness, but only if the guilt for the soldier’s actions in combat as well as for his own moral agony is internalized and shared by all. 23 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. D. Heller-Roazen (Trans.) Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press. 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Retrieved Dec. 6, 2014. 25 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense Volkan, V.D. (1985). ‘Suitable targets of externalization’ and schizophrenia. In D.B. Feinsilver (Ed.) Toward a comprehensive model for schizophrenic disorders, pp. 125-153. New York: Analytic Press. Wood, D. (2014). A warrior’s moral dilemma. Huffington Post (Three-Part Series). http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/moral-injury. Retried Nov. 20, 2014. Notes 1 We use the term “military” to refer to all branches of the United States armed forces (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, National Guard, Coast Guard) and, more broadly, to the armed forces of other nations, with no particular emphasis on one specific branch. Similarly, we use the word “solider” in its generic sense, to refer to members of the armed services. 2 The phrase “master your fear” appears in a 2006 US Marine Corps television commercial in which a recruit runs through a video-game-like gauntlet populated by fire and swinging blades and monster, ultimately to slay an enormous beast-like creature made of fire. The fantasy offered to the recruit is: “It is more than a trial by fire. It is a rite of passage… If you can master your fear, outsmart your enemy, and never yield, even to yourself, you will be changed forever.” 3 The idea of internal good and bad objects was first developed in the work of Melanie Klein. For a discussion of the origin of the idea in Klein’s work and its subsequent development, see Greenberg and Mitchell (1983). 4 Christopher Browning’s (1998) insightful archival work on the activities of Reserve Police Battalion 101 clarifies a dynamic relevant to groups involved in morally compromising situations: The reserve soldiers in his study often felt that their moral duty to the group included committing their fair share of immoral acts, so that their comrades do not have to commit them all. 5 James Krantz (2006) makes a compelling case that “virtuous” betrayal within organizations differs significantly from betrayal of a “sinister” or “venal” sort (p. 222). Virtuous betrayals are those that violate the trust of individuals and parties in an organization, transgressing the norms and defenses embedded in the status quo ante for the sake of preserving the institution’s integrity. Yet, although it may be true that, in some cases, “betrayal occur[ing] in the context of institutional purpose,” is “more easily overcome” by betrayed parties (p. 236), this does not seem to apply in the present case as any perceived or real ‘virtue’ driving the military’s purpose is likely to have little moderating effect on the soldier’s moral injury. The soldier’s moral injury, as we have argued, likely precedes his enlistment and involves unconscious and longstanding relationships with internal good (virtuous) and bad (vicious) objects. Since the soldier has already established a pattern of relating rooted in the moral defense, betrayal and self-betrayal undertaken for the sake of a putatively virtuous institution only repeats and affirms the necessity of such a pattern, one that has led the solider to a point of moral ‘confusion’ too severe to bear. What is more, as we discuss in more detail in the latter sections of the paper, since both the 26 Beyond the battlefield: Moral injury and moral defense military and the nation use the solider as something of a scapegoat (see Gold 2014), violating his trust and colluding with his worst fears about himself, the betrayal of the solider even in a hypothetically ‘just war’ could hardly be considered “virtuous” in either Krantz’s or any usual sense. That is, such betrayal constitutes not the betrayal of individual or social defenses for the sake of truth, integrity, and the fulfillment of vision, but very nearly the opposite: a reliance upon defense, mystification, and confusion resulting in a dis-integrated state both for the solider and with the military as an institution. 6 Camus’ other well-known work on this subject speaks directly to this problem. His play, The Just Assassins, tells the story of the 1905 Russian rebel-terrorists who make a pact to kill themselves in order to absorb the responsibility for the violence they inflict upon others. Their internalization of the badness they nevertheless choose to enact in the world is imagined to free a future (fantasized) Russian nation from corruption, so that the petits-enfants or “children’s children” of Russia (1958, p. 295) will be innocent and free (see Bowker 2013). Of course, in doing so, Dora and Kaliayev, the leaders of the group, lament that after Kaliayev’s execution, “nous ne serons des enfants” [we will never be children again] (Camus, 1966, p. 177). 27

Organisational & Social Dynamics 16(1) 85–109 (2016) Beyond the Battlefield: “Moral Injury” and Moral Defence in the Psychic Life of the Soldier, the Military, and the Nation Matthew H. Bowker and David P. Levine* Abstract In this paper, we apply Ronald Fairbairn’s notion of a “moral defence” to the idea of “moral injury”, a construct lately advanced by American psychiatrists and researchers to account for the psychological suffering of soldiers in and after combat. By limiting discussion of the causes of “moral injury” to battle- field experiences, and by leaving out of the account the states of mind indi- viduals bring with them into the military, as well as the psychic and moral meanings invested in the military as an institution, the construct of “moral injury” currently obscures as much as it illuminates. We argue that limiting causation to combat experience is a way of hiding more complex issues con- cerning the moral relationship between the soldier, the military, and the ideal of goodness, as well as the ambivalent role the soldier occupies in the fantasy life of the nation. Key words: moral injury, military psychology, W. R. D. Fairbairn, morality, internal bad object, victim. MORAL INJURY The idea of “moral injury” has gained currency in clinical circles, aca- demic literatures, and the popular press. It refers to a psychological or spiritual wound suffered by soldiers, medical officers, or others exposed to combat or disaster zones (see e.g., Currier et al., 2014; Litz et al., 2009; Nash & Litz, 2013; Shay, 2012, 2014). Several prominent researchers associated with the psychiatric treatment of soldiers and veterans now claim that although “moral injury is not officially recog- nized by the Defense Department [nor the DSM] . . . it is moral injury, not PTSD, that is increasingly acknowledged as the signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the soul, akin to grief or sor- row, with lasting impact on the individuals and on their families” (Wood, 2014). Morally injurious events, or “MIEs” as they are sometimes called, have been distinguished from psychic traumas, although not always for clear reasons. The most frequent explanation for differentiating the *Address for correspondence: E-mail: david.levine@du.edu or mhb34@Medaille.edu 85 86 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE two constructs is that moral injury, unlike the traumas that qualify for PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) diagnoses, do not necessarily involve the survival of life-threatening events. Other differences include presentations of guilt and anger, rather than fear, and the apparent absence of nightmares or intrusive memories of the event (Currier et al., 2014, p. 2). Operational definitions of “moral injury” are vague and varied. Most, however, rely on the notion that sufferers have done, witnessed, or in some way experienced things that “violate their own sense of who they are, their own sense of right and wrong, their own sort of moral compass” (Wood, 2014). In a widely-cited study, Litz and col- leagues define moral injury as “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bear- ing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations” (2009, p. 700). Currier and colleagues under- stand moral injury to be “the constellation of inappropriate guilt, shame, anger, self-handicapping behaviors, relational and spiritual/existential problems, and social alienation that emerges after witnessing and/or participating in warzone events that challenge one’s basic sense of humanity” (2014, pp. 1–2). The authors of the recently-developed Moral Injury Questionnaire— Military Version (MIQ-M) characterise moral injury as covering “sev- eral different types of betrayals (i.e., by peers, leadership, trusted civilians, or self), acts of disproportionate violence in the warzone, . . . incidents involving death/harm to civilians, acts of violence commit- ted within military ranks, . . . inability to prevent death/suffering, and ethical dilemmas or moral conflicts from deployment-related deci- sions/actions” (Currier et al., 2014, p. 2). Common examples of moral injury therefore include “losing a loved comrade” (Wood, 2014), “han- dling or uncovering human remains” (Litz et al., 2009), the experience of “loss of meaning” (Currier et al., 2014, p. 3), witnessing a “poor decision made by those in charge” (Wood, 2014); and, perhaps most commonly, the act of killing another human being, particularly a child (Shay, 2012, 2014). Former US Marine Stephen Canty, who shot and killed a middle- aged man dragged into his outpost, explains how “morals start to degrade”. Describing the scene, Canty recalls: I just lit him up . . . One of the bullets bounced off his spinal cord and came out his eyeball, and he’s laying there in a wheelbarrow clinging to the last seconds of his life, and he’s looking up at me with one of his eyes and just pulp in the other. And I was like twenty years old at the time. I just stared down at him . . . and walked away. And I will . . . never feel anything about that. I literally just don’t care whatsoever . . . You learn to kill, and you kill BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 87 people, and it’s like, I don’t care. I’ve seen people get shot, I’ve seen little kids get shot. You see a kid and his father sitting together and he gets shot and I give a zero fuck. (Wood, 2014) Canty asks: Once you’re able to do that, what is morally right anymore? How good is your value system if you train people to kill another human being, the one thing we are taught not to do? When you create an organization based around the one taboo that all societies have? . . . Your values do change real quickly. It becomes a war of moral injury. (Wood, 2014) To refer to the psychological consequences of combat as “moral injuries” is to place military experience on a moral plane. It is to recog- nise the connections between moral consequences and psychological consequences, and to draw attention to the power of moral values and moral imperatives in shaping psychic life. The starting point, then, for understanding moral injury is not acute experiences of combat, but, rather, the link between the moral status and psychic meaning of the military. It is that link we propose to explore here by approaching the military as a moral institution.1 As retired Veterans Administration psychiatrist Jonathan Shay reminds us in his 1995 study, Achilles in Vietnam, military authorities hold profound moral power over soldiers: “The moral power of an army is so great that it can motivate men to get up out of a trench and step into enemy machine-gun fire” (p. 6). Through a variety of tech- niques, ranging from the motivational to the sadistic, drill instructors instil in recruits a moral code of courage, honour, and sacrifice, with the goal, according to official US Marine Corps literature, of produc- ing young Marines “thoroughly indoctrinated in love of Corps and Country . . . the epitome of personal character, selflessness, and mili- tary virtue” (Wood, 2014). If such techniques are successful, they pro- duce in recruits “the required esprit de corps”, which is, in Hanson Baldwin’s words, the knowledge “that the fate of any individual Marine [is] of far less importance than the principle of fidelity to authority, to ideals, to country” (Shatan, 1977, p. 592). But that is not all. To say that the military is a moral institution is to recognise that it is infused with moral meaning and moral language, serving aims related to beliefs about duty, justice, right and wrong, good and evil. The military is tasked, both explicitly and implicitly, with developing, preserving, and symbolising a moral code, not only among recruits and soldiers, but as an institution embedded within the nation it serves, and sometimes even within the foreign countries in 88 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE which it operates. Therefore, in order to understand the issues raised by the idea of moral injury, we must begin with the idea that, as Shay puts it, the military, itself, is “a moral construction” (1995, p. 5). THE FANTASY OF MORAL RENEWAL The idea of moral injury focuses our attention on traumatic experi- ences that occur during military service in times of war (see e.g., Litz et al., 2009; Shay, 2012; Wood, 2014). This focus can, however, be too narrow in that it fails to take into account the state of mind individu- als bring with them into their military service. The literature on moral injury assumes that soldiers start out in a state of innocence. This pre- sumption is an essential element in an account that focuses entirely on the harm done to them by their experiences subsequent to enlistment. Yet, if we do not take into account soldiers’ experiences, states of mind, and expectations about military service prior to enlistment, then we cannot understand how experience in the military is mentally appropriated and invested with a psychic meaning consistent with the idea of moral injury. To get at this investment of meaning, it will prove helpful to consider the narratives surrounding the individual’s entrance into the military and how these narratives might interact with recruits’ subsequent experiences. One way to do this is to consider the messages the military sends in its effort to attract recruits. In recruitment messages, the military typ- ically makes it clear that, in its pursuit of future soldiers, it has in mind not just able-bodied individuals willing to enlist, but individuals with the potential to develop specific qualities of character, even if, in the end, the military is willing to accept a wider range of recruits than strictly fits its image of a soldier. How, then, does the military envi- sion its soldiers? What is the fantasy of the soldier conveyed in mili- tary recruitment and, of necessity, embraced to some degree by those who enlist? In its recruitment literature, the Army offers the following answer to this question: Many people know what the words Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honour, Integrity, and Personal Courage mean. But how often do you see someone actually live up to them? Soldiers learn these values in detail dur- ing Basic Combat Training (BCT), from then on they live them every day in everything they do—whether they are on the job or off. In short, the Seven Core Army Values listed [above] are what being a Soldier is all about (US Army, 2014). There are two key elements in this fantasy. One has to do with spe- cific qualities of character; the other has to do with the way individuals can go about acquiring those qualities of character. Both are important. BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 89 The most vital element in the message is the idea that the individ- ual can become other than he is, can become a different and better per- son. We may assume that the power of this message is inversely related to the individual’s satisfaction with the person he has already become and positively related to the intensity of the hope to fulfil his wish to become someone different. The Army, in this case, taps into the prospective recruit’s hope when it insists that it has the power to remake him according to a new and better model. This remaking of the individual occurs in the process of “basic combat training”. The idea of a “basic” training might be taken to imply that, to become a soldier, one must go “back to basics”. By going “back to basics”, the individual imagines that he will rebuild himself from the ground up. The idea that a fundamental rebuilding is required, in turn, suggests that the Army intends to appeal to those who believe, or who will come to believe, that the “training” they have already received in life has been inadequate, and in no small way. The promise of renewal appeals to those who believe, or hope, that their problem can be corrected by a training process, that, as the US Marine Corps’ website and a complementary television commercial promise, a new, better, stronger person will be “forged in the crucible of training” (US Marine Corps, 2012). This new, stronger person is needed, ostensibly, because the nation is under threat. But the individual with faulty train- ing in life is also under threat: from workplace competition, personal challenges, daily stress and anxiety, and more. The military promises the recruit a means to cope with these threats as well. In other words, the military directs its appeal at young men and women who hope, or who are susceptible to the hope, that they can become stronger, better persons by (re)turning to a special, and basic, learning process, the one referred to as basic combat training. How is the moral renewal of the soldier achieved? First and fore- most, to become a soldier, the individual must sever contact with the self. This loss of contact with the self is formulated in the language of “sacrifice”, most notably self-sacrifice for the sake of the group that the individual serves. The solider subordinates himself and his needs to a greater end: the nation and its ideals, its goodness and, perhaps espe- cially, its “freedom”. Part of basic training involves the identification of the recruit with the drill instructor, officer, unit, division, code of conduct, branch of ser- vice, and nation (Shatan, 1977). The differentiation between soldier, leader, and moral code is both emphasised and blurred in military train- ing and military life. In fact, the same rigid hierarchy that makes one’s rank absolutely clear and that enforces an unquestionable code of con- duct on soldiers also reinforces the merging of psychic boundaries 90 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE between individual, leader, group, and group-ideal. Individual sol- diers, after all, are expected to behave not as individuals but as instinc- tively obedient extensions of the wills of their leaders, and, in this sense, as a “corps” (see e.g., Foucault, 1975; Shatan, 1977). In the famous 1956 court-martial of Staff Sergeant Matthew McKeon, whose “disciplinary” night march resulted in the deaths of six recruits at Parris Island, Private First Class David MacPherson recounted this exchange: “Sergeant McKeon called me in . . . I stood at attention. He said, ‘What’s the mat- ter with you out there? You are acting like an individual.’ Then he slapped me twice . . . I said I thought we had it too easy . . . I definitely felt that the platoon was very undisciplined and had no spirit at all. The men acted as individuals” (Shatan, 1977, pp. 592–593). Yet, despite the emphasis on self-repression and self-sacrifice, earn- ing respect and self-respect remain important goals of training. By serving the group, the soldier sacrifices himself in order to gain respect. Respect may become a substitute for self-respect if the solider can internalise the image of his self reflected in the eyes of others who recognise the sacrifice he has made for them. In other words, the self- respect promised through sacrifice derives from the respect afforded an individual who has gained a morally-invested identity by finding a means of serving a moral group. Wearing the uniform signals the soldier’s special standing in the moral group as well as his possession of the qualities to which we have just referred. A currently-airing television commercial for the US Marines shows a young, handsome, black man in his dress uniform walking proudly on a small-town street. The people in his community, the older men sitting on a bench, an attractive white family walking down the sidewalk, and, particularly, their smiling child, stop what they are doing and look up at him with respect, even reverence (US Marine Corps, 2014). These visible reactions to his presence are anti- thetical to what recent events across the nation would suggest to be a more common experience for some similarly aged, non-uniformed, black males: disapproval, suspicion, fear, or outright hostility. By offering a path to service and standing, the military offers the recruit a path to respect in the community, possibly overcoming a painful self-state in which the absence of self-respect is mirrored and con- firmed by the absence of the respect of others. That respect and self-respect are goals of military recruitment and of potential recruits is also suggested by the emphasis in recruitment materials on the acquisition of job skills, both technical (preparation for a vocation) and emotional (discipline, leadership, and readiness to be part of a team). Thus, in addition to earning a respectable place by serving the military and the nation, future employment and income BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 91 may be considered important rewards of service. Employment and income represent not only the ability to make a living, but the ability to gain standing within the community. This appeal seems to be directed primarily at those who feel socio-economically disenfran- chised and who hope that the military will assure them a place in soci- ety (Mariscal, 2007). While the emphasis in recruitment seems to be placed on what the recruit stands to gain by joining the military, more important, we would argue, is the message conveyed about the personal deficits that need to be made up. It is this message of what is wrong, lacking, or impaired in the individual that is the other side of the positive mes- sage detailing what the recruit may become. We might say that the military recruitment effort is aimed not so much at individuals who possess exceptional grit or potential, but at individuals who possess specific flaws and limitations. Most significant among these flaws and limitations is the individual’s conviction that he is flawed and limited. The idea of a “mission” is perhaps the central element in the list of qualities potential recruits lack and stand to gain by joining. Thus, it is of unique importance in understanding the appeal to the impaired. The military promises the recruit that he will become someone special by pursuing and accomplishing a higher purpose or mission. This mis- sion is not, however, easily accomplished. To accomplish the mission, the soldier has to enter into combat, and, to be successful in combat, he must be trained for a life-and-death struggle. In pursuit of this mis- sion, the soldier must not waver or yield to opposition; he must not give in to fear, nor succumb to his own desires and baser instincts (US Army, 2014). Prior to enlistment, the individual had no mission, no clearly- defined purpose in his life. He experienced fear or apathy rather than courage and, as a result, lacked the resolve needed to succeed. He had neither a purpose nor the tools required to achieve that purpose. Prior to enlistment, the individual was unable to dedicate himself to a mis- sion, discipline himself, or “master [his] fear,” and was, at best, driven by impulse.2 It is also for this reason that the recruit feels a lack of self- respect and is convinced that others do not respect him. It is important that the military concurs with the recruit in his sus- picion that he is flawed and in need of discipline and training to fix his flaws. The military has a mission, which is to defend a way of life and a nation. The military has resolve; it has no fear; it is not driven by base instincts; it has discipline. The military represents the nation’s resolve and the soldier the embodiment of resolve. But the military also has a moral mission with respect to recruits and soldiers: it is to train them to meet a moral code. 92 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE Insofar as the sought-after recruit is an individual who is or feels flawed and in need of repair, we may say that moral injury precedes recruitment, if by moral injury we mean an event or series of events that either prevented the building of the desired character or that caused the individual to lose connection with desirable qualities of character. If the individual comes out of the military further damaged, then the military has failed to fulfil its promise of repair, and exhibited a lack of the very qualities it promised to instil in the recruit: “duty”, “loyalty”, etc. If military service makes the consequences of earlier moral injuries more acute and threatening, then the military, rather than fixing what is wrong with the recruit, re-enacts earlier events in the recruit’s life that resulted in loss of character, purpose, resolve, and self-respect. In such cases, the solution sought through enlistment turns out to be a repetition of events that caused the original moral damage. The soldier returns from war not with enhanced resolve, but with confusion; not with a sense of purpose but with a sense that what he has done served no purpose; not with self-respect but with contempt for himself. At the end of the mission, morally injured soldiers find themselves “doubt- ing the mission, doubting the fundamental nature of who they are”, feeling they “did it all for nothing”, “Mired in the swamp of moral confusion” the morally injured soldier asks: why am I still “such a bad person?” (Wood, 2014). The “confused” soldier has lost his mission. His moral injury has interfered with his ability to know what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, whether responsibility for bad acts is internal or external, whether the authority of the military, which is defined as the good, really is good or not. He does not know whether following orders is good or bad, and therefore whether in following orders he is good or bad. The moral injury literature insists that this confusion originates in specific combat experiences, that morally trou- bling events occurring in the context of combat and military duty are the cause. However, a more helpful way to think about the confusion that is so central to symptomology of moral injury and its literature is to link it to a more fundamental problem, one the recruit brought with him into the military. This is the problem of coping with what, in psy- choanalytic literature, are referred to as internal bad objects. THE MORAL DEFENCE The term “internal object” is used to speak about an internal or men- tal construct of the target of an emotional investment.3 The “object” is the mental appropriation and personification of a relationship. This BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 93 object plays a role in an internal drama, or fantasy, either as a source of, or obstacle to, gratification. In the simplest terms, good objects pro- vide gratification, while bad objects withhold or block gratification. When the individual occupies a role in the internal drama, he is iden- tified with either good or bad objects. Identification means equating the self with the object and exhibiting its defining characteristics. The idea of identification with good and bad internal objects suggests that the role occupied is not a matter of choice but, rather, depends on a set of complex, especially unconscious, factors. In his paper, “The repression and the return of bad objects”, Ronald Fairbairn suggests that the “moral defence”, also called “the defence of the super-ego” and “the defence of guilt” (1952, p. 66), deserves standing alongside classic defences. Specifically, the moral defence is a defence against the anxiety associated with the loss of the source of gratification, or good object. This anxiety is provoked by experiences of neglect and abuse that signal that the object on which the child depends is not good but bad. The moral defence operates by splitting off the bad experiences with the good object, taking responsibility for them (internalising them), thereby assuring that the source of gratifi- cation is always and altogether good. The cost of deploying the moral defence is that the child assures the goodness of the good object by becoming bad himself, or, in the lan- guage used above, by identifying himself with the bad internal object. The aim of the moral defence is “the conversion of an original situa- tion in which the child is surrounded by bad objects into a situation in which his objects are good and he himself is bad” (p. 68). Of course, “in becoming bad he [the child] is really taking upon himself the bur- den of badness which appears to reside in his objects. By this means he seeks to purge them of their badness; and, in proportion as he suc- ceeds in doing so, he is rewarded by the sense of security which an environment of good objects so characteristically confers . . . Outer security is thus purchased at the price of inner insecurity” (p. 65). We might ask, as Fairbairn asks: why does the child make this pur- chase of the goodness of the object at the cost of his own? After all, identification with internal bad objects can be considered synonymous with inescapable feelings of persecution, anger, and self-hatred. To this question there are three primary answers. First, the individual desper- ately needs and depends on his objects, externally and internally, lest he be left objectless and desolate. Second, the child’s internal state is already gravely threatened by the presence of external bad objects. Because early object-relationships are based largely on identification, bad objects in the world are experienced in a way that is equivalent to badness in the self. “[I]f the child’s objects present themselves to him as 94 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE bad, he himself feels bad; and indeed it may be stated with equal truth that, if a child feels bad, it implies that he has bad objects” (Fairbairn, 1952, p. 64). Third, and most importantly, the moral defence estab- lishes a path back to the good object, which is a path out of his identifi- cation with his internal bad objects. The availability of this path indicates that the child is not irredeemably or unconditionally bad, but only conditionally so. The child finds it preferable to be conditionally bad vis-à-vis internal good objects than to be unconditionally bad, which was the original threat to the self. At this point, Fairbairn uses religious language to help define the essence of the moral defence, which he believes is in operation both in psychopathology and in health (p. 64). “It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil” because, in a world ruled by the devil, there is “no security and no hope of redemption. The only prospect is one of death and destruc- tion” (p. 67). Later, Fairbairn suggests that the suffering generated by reliance on the moral defence is a kind of “pact with the devil”, signed not for greed but for need of love: “[I]f a True Mass is being celebrated in the chancel, a Black Mass is being celebrated in the crypt”, for the individual must remain devoted to and possessed by the devil below, as it were, in order to preserve the good above, in order to do his part in sustaining a “true mass” devoted to the good object with which he connects with increasing difficulty. The bargain at the heart of the moral defence hinges on the trans- formation of unconditional badness into conditional badness, which Fairbairn refers to as “moral” badness. Although continuous and psy- chologically devastating, the badness represented by the devil within is conditional because this badness can, at least theoretically, be expi- ated or repaired. The individual can manage his own moral badness through self-punishment, or by hoping to train his badness out of him, or by striving to be like the objects purged of their bad aspects, or, as we will discuss later, by finding external forms to contain his badness that he can fight and possibly destroy. The moral defence, then, fos- ters a special way of relating both to self and to others. The purpose of this way of relating is to provide the individual the opportunity to enact imperatives driven by the moral defence, to cast self and others in the roles that affirm the terms of the defence. THE MISSION Earlier, we briefly discussed the importance of the idea of a “mission” in the fantasy of the soldier’s life and training. The idea of the moral defence helps clarify the underlying nature of this “mission” that BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 95 plays such a central role in the psychic meaning of being a soldier. The soldier’s mission is to defend the nation or the homeland, its constitu- tive values, and its “way of life” against its enemies. To be a US Marine, for instance, involves believing that “your Marine Corps’ way of life is to defend the American way of life” (US Marine Corps, 2014). But, in the constellation of psychic factors that make up the moral defence, what does this defence of the nation and its way of life rep- resent? The answer, we think, is that, while, at the level of relating in the external world, the mission is a mission to defend and serve the nation, its interests, and its virtues, at the level of psychic experience, the mission is to defend and serve the good object. Here, it is impor- tant to bear in mind that the moral defence has been put in place because the objects in an individual’s environment are not good, or not good enough. Thus, it would be most accurate to say that, at the level of psychic experience, the mission is to defend a fantasy of an object made good by the transfer of what is bad about it on to the child, who then becomes the soldier. If the soldier’s explicit mission is to defend the nation, the soldier’s explicit enemies are those who pose a mortal threat to the nation or its interests. These enemies must be defeated in order to create a safe environment for the nation. But an internal battle against the soldier’s internal enemies is being waged as well. In this battle, the soldier has made himself the repository of the threat to the putatively good object by taking on its badness. Thus, the soldier faces the threat that the object’s badness will return or reappear, and its apparent goodness will be revealed for what it is: the bad object posing as the good. Since, however, the soldier has proven himself capable of incorpo- rating the object’s badness, the more dangerous threat to the good object is the soldier himself. In other words, the soldier’s destructive impulses, born of his identification with his internalised bad objects, put the good object at risk. The soldier must protect the fantasised good object from his own badness, which originated in the putatively good object, was absorbed from that object, and established an inter- nal bad object with which the soldier identifies, typically at the cost of his ability to experience himself as fully alive, good, and real. Unfortunately, the soldier’s experience of military life, particularly his initiation and training, tends only to intensify his difficulties. Basic training re-enacts his relationship with an original external bad object while demanding his identification with that object. In basic training, the original ambivalent object reappears as the fearsome drill instruc- tor, who insists on the soldier’s essential badness in an environment that is, itself, “harsh, pitiless, and persecutory”. “The heart of basic Marine Corps training,” writes Chaim Shatan, is “incessant humiliation and 96 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE degradation” (1977, pp. 594–595). Constant physical and psychological “assault at the roots of [the recruit’s] civilized existence” leads not to relief from the dilemma rooted in the moral defence, but to the confir- mation of it (1977, p. 597). The military offers an alluring promise for the individual seeking a way to cope with the dilemma embedded in the moral defence. This dilemma, once again, is that the individual cannot simply accept iden- tification with his bad objects, but at the same time cannot give up that identification without putting the fantasised good object at risk. His situation is confusing and agonising because his incorporation of bad objects into himself is both “intolerable” and “indispensable” (Fairbairn, 1952, p. 74). Individuals faced with this dilemma may seek out military institutions or other comparable organisations because they offer a way to resolve a dilemma that can no longer be tolerated. By providing individuals with a mission in the world outside, the mil- itary, and similar organisations, offer individuals a way to externalise internalised bad objects. The military offers the solider relief from his dilemma in the form of a set of external bad objects acting as what Vamik Volkan terms “suit- able targets of externalization” (1985). These targets permit the soldier to enact the moral defence in the world outside. The soldier’s internal enemies are projected into the world in the form of the nation’s ene- mies. At the same time, of course, the military also offers the solider “the right, indeed, even the encouragement, to eventually visit the same unspeakable evil (cruel destructiveness) on others” that has been inflicted on him, both in basic training and, perhaps more importantly, in his pre-enlistment life (Shatan, 1977, p. 595). If the bad objects confronting the individual are sufficiently threat- ening, then incorporating them into the self via the moral defence means repressing authentic and valued parts of the self, an experience that is tantamount to self-murder. And the more intense the individ- ual’s experience of self-murder, the more intense and terrifying must be the external targets or containers for the individual’s bad internal objects. This logic helps us understand why the ultimate act within the fan- tasy system surrounding the moral defence is the killing of bad objects. To kill the bad object, to purge the world of its badness, to destroy the evil enemy, would seem to free the individual from the agonising imperatives and contradictions built into the moral defence. But, if we take seriously the literature of moral injury, the result of sol- diers’ acts of killing enemies seems not to be that of release from an intolerable dilemma, but rather, the psychic wound of “moral injury”. Why does the enactment of the moral defence fail? The answer, in BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 97 brief, is that killing the enemies of the nation is, psychologically, a re-enactment of the self-murder at the heart of the soldier’s dilemma. IDENTIFICATION WITH THE VICTIM The signature case of moral injury is the soldier who, in the normal exercise of his duties, either by following an order or adhering to a code of conduct, kills a child. This is not the only act that can inflict moral injury on the actor, but it puts the idea into sharpest focus. In his three-part article, “A warrior’s moral dilemma,” David Wood offers an example: Here’s Nick, pausing in a lull. He spots somebody darting around the cor- ner of an adobe wall, firing assault rifle shots at him and his Marines. Nick raises his M-4 carbine. He sees the shooter is a child, maybe 13. With only a split second to decide, he squeezes the trigger and ends the boy’s life. The body hits the ground. Now what? ‘We just collected up that weapon and kept moving,’ Nick explained. ‘Going from compound to compound, trying to find [the insurgents]. Eventually they hopped in a car and drove off into the desert.’ There is a long silence after Nick finishes the story. He’s lived with it for more than three years and the telling still catches in his throat. Eventually, he sighs. ‘He was just a kid. But I’m sorry, I’m trying not to get shot and I don’t want any of my brothers getting hurt, so when you are put in that kind of situation . . . it’s shitty that you have to, like . . . shoot him. You know it’s wrong. But . . . you have no choice.’ (Wood, 2014) Within the context of the idea of moral injury, while violence was committed against a child, the moral injury was inflicted on the per- petrator of the violence by those who directly or indirectly ordered him to commit the violent act. The resulting moral injury and suffer- ing associated with it are understood to involve a soldier who, by fol- lowing an order issued by the moral authority of the military, commits an act that violates the moral code the military is meant to defend. Since the soldier is ordered to violate a moral code instilled by a morally-invested authority, the act of harming the innocent (who are by definition good) is carried out in defence of the good object. And yet, violation of the moral code separates the soldier from the good object and, with it, the possibility that he may be or become good. Put another way, the fantasised good object is, itself, innocent because it has been cleansed of its badness through the processes of the moral defence. But these processes negate any innocence the sol- dier might otherwise have claimed for himself, since becoming bad to protect the good object means becoming guilty to assure its innocence. The killing of a child, then, re-enacts an internal drama in which the 98 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE individual killed his own innocent self in order to protect the inno- cence of the good object. This means that, if we are to understand the experience of moral injury, we need to consider how the solider identifies with the victims of his own violent acts. The impact of the act of killing a child on the soldier depends on the nature of the identification formed between the soldier and the child. While this identification with the child always represents the soldier’s own innocent self, the soldier may relate to that self in a positive or negative way. His relation with the child may be an expression of rage toward his own vitality, or an expression of remorse for the death of the self; or, it may be both. Where the protective urge dominates, the soldier experiences the act of killing a child as a violation of his duty to protect the innocent. Where the destructive urge dominates, the soldier who kills a child may find that doing so reveals his unconscious desire to destroy the vitality of others as a way of sharing his own suffering with them. If a soldier were to become aware of this, guilt and shame would result, and while, consciously, the act may be deemed an act of duty, under- taken without “choice”, and thus not a true act of volition, uncon- sciously the soldier may know he desired to do it, suggesting that it was indeed an act for which he ought to be held responsible. It should be clear that interpreting the problem of moral injury in terms of consciously chosen moral codes, or orders given and received, is not sufficient, for the soldier faces a problem over which he has relatively little control. Driven by the terms of the moral defence, he is divided against himself in a way he cannot will himself to overcome. Can the individual soldier really protect himself from moral injury by opting out, refusing to follow orders, refusing to defend his “brothers” in arms, or setting down his weapon?4 In ethics and in law, moral responsibility exists only insofar as volition exists. In the inner world, however, the matter of volition is more compli- cated. What is missing in the construction of moral injury, as it is cur- rently discussed, is the individual’s unconscious identification with internal bad objects. It is this unconscious identification that promotes the oft-cited “symptoms” of confusion, guilt, and self-hatred. Since this identification is unconscious, the individual cannot exercise choice or will, cannot think his way out of a moral dilemma and simply decide on a morally appropriate course of action. Thus, while externally and consciously the individual soldier does much of what he does as a matter of following orders and honouring the moral code those orders represent, unconsciously the individual who kills or participates in morally injurious behaviour is identified with bad objects; and, as Fairbairn notes, we all are to one degree or BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 99 another identified with our bad objects. The individual who kills, even the individual who kills a child, is doing what a part of him greatly desires: to inflict suffering upon and destroy others. So, unconsciously, the individual is guilty apart from any institutional moral code, but according to a fundamental inner code associated with the moral defence. This code might be called the unconscious moral code built of the primitive struggle to be related to, and worthy to be loved by, the good object. The external moral code and the orders associated with it are much less operative emotionally than the fundamental need to preserve the relationship with the good object. It is this unconscious moral code that impels the individual to adopt a moral defence and, along with it, the defence of the nation.5 FANTASY BETRAYED When the soldier leaves the military with nothing but confirmation, through re-enactment, of his identification with internal bad objects, the moral defence has failed and he finds himself unconditionally bad. He is unconditionally bad in that he has taken in the bad object, but in so doing has failed to protect the good, and, indeed, has caused harm to it. Furthermore, this is harm he desired to do, however uncon- sciously. To be sure, he may blame the military for ordering him to harm the innocent, and in this way may seek to absolve himself. But the terms of the moral defence do not allow him to displace his bad- ness and blame without also giving up the possibility of living in “a world ruled by God”. The original moral-emotional contract he entered into with the military, a contract based on the terms of the moral defence, has gone irretrievably bad, and there is no hope for redemption. The mission has failed. The problem of moral injury arises, then, from the precarious nature of the contract or bargain implicit in the moral defence. If the act of internalising bad objects does not result in the preservation of the good object, then not only has the individual taken in more than his share of badness, but his badness has not purchased any outer security: he is bad, the world is still “ruled by the devil”, and, in some sense, he is responsible for returning the devil to the world. Perhaps the literature on moral injury is useful in that it reminds us that there are situations, both within and beyond the theatres of war, so replete with violence, cruelty, and destruction that individuals find themselves incapable of absorbing the badness around them and so pro- tecting their good objects. And perhaps this literature draws our atten- tion to the moments when external targets or containers of internal bad objects fail to contain them. It is easy to imagine the jarring difference 100 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE between the fantasy of an exaggerated, horrifyingly bad object and a confrontation with a hungry and ill-armed civilian or a thirteen-year- old combatant. In either case, after the arduous labour involved in maintaining the moral defence, the individual remains threatened with a return to the original situation: a self and a world filled with badness and offering no way out. Since the moral defence involves the incorporation and repression of bad objects, the prospect of their breaking free confronts the indi- vidual as a grave and terrifying possibility, one Fairbairn equates with a living nightmare or a demonic haunting (1952, pp. 75–79). Thus, the prospect of a breakdown in the moral defence results in feelings of impotence at containing the quantity or extremity of badness, terror at the prospect of releasing the bad and so destroying the good, despair at the prospect of living in an unredeemable world of evil, betrayal and rage at those who promised to help in the project of self-strength- ening and moral renewal, and outrage at the injustice of having borne so much badness to no avail. To understand moral injury, therefore, we must look well beyond the combat experiences typically associated with it and toward the breakdown in the relationship between the individual and the moral institution of which he is a part. Recall that repair of his moral flaws was the military’s promise to the recruit, and was the fantasised out- come of the relationship between the soldier and the moral training offered by the military and its leaders. Since the soldier is devoted not merely to abstract codes, but to specific leaders and authority figures who embody such codes, part of the injury of moral injury lies in the individual’s diminished capacity to relate to others as good objects. This aspect of moral injury finds expression in difficul- ties soldiers encounter upon returning home and “re-entering” civil- ian life (see e.g., Lifton, 1973), and in soldiers’ oft-noted feelings of hopelessness. If the soldier or veteran finds it difficult or impossible to relate to family, friends, or co-workers because he is ashamed or full of rage, he is, in spite of his service and sacrifice, alienated from his nation and the good objects it symbolises and contains. Hopelessness about the possibility of redemption for himself and his world may express a loss of the ability to conceive good objects. In other words, the abject failure of his good objects in the world outside re-enacts and confirms the fail- ure of his original good object and leaves him doubting he knows what a good object is, or how such an object could ever exist for him. Thus, the repairing and redeeming promise of the military, which is the promise of renewed connection with the good object via the killing of the bad, fails on multiple counts. BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 101 Although this promise is made explicit in recruitment materials, it is important to remember that it remains a fantasy. Had either the solider or the military been willing to admit it, the promise of redemp- tion and release from the dilemma of the moral defence could have been recognised as a fantasy incapable of finding fulfilment in reality. In this sense, we may say that “moral injury” results from collusion of the military with a hope embedded in a fantasy the recruit brings to military, the terms of which make fulfilment impossible. Currier and colleagues, then, may be right to conceive of moral injury as a form of “betrayal” (2014, p. 2). COLLECTIVE MORAL DEFENCE In the end, the literature on moral injury places responsibility not on the solider, nor on his tactical commanders, nor even on high-ranking military authorities who make decisions about military engagement, but on the nation as a whole. For it is the nation, as a putatively good object, that is imagined to require and benefit from the soldier’s sacri- fice. Consider the following scene from the latest instalment of the Bourne films (Bourne Legacy, 2012), where soldiers are transformed into covert assassins by a brutal training-regimen and a chemically- induced disconnection from their former selves: Colonel Byer confirms to a visibly shaken Private Kitsom that the morally questionable assault the unit has just undertaken, involving the deaths of several civilians, was indeed morally wrong. Nevertheless, Colonel Byer defends the action by explaining: “We are the sin eaters. It means that we take the moral excrement we find in this equation and we bury it down deep inside of us, so that the rest of our cause can stay pure. That is the job. We are morally indefensible, and absolutely necessary.” Here, a bargain along the lines of the moral defence is made explicit. The soldier eats the sin necessitated by the cause he has taken on, accepting responsibility for the most egregious forms of badness, vio- lence, and immorality, so that the rest of the nation, its ideals, and its goodness can “stay pure”. Of course, at a rational level, this argument is patently flawed, relying on an indefensible separation of one part of the “cause” from another: a cause cannot be “pure” if it requires then disavows atrocious acts. But at an emotional level, we imagine that the soldier’s dedication to the nation compels him to offer himself up as a sort of moral sacrifice, and that the nation, perhaps tacitly, accepts this arrangement. In such fictional accounts, as in the academic and popular discourses of moral injury, then, we find two seemingly opposed trends. On one hand, the discussion of moral injury ignores broader 102 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE historical, institutional, and unconscious correlates of the moral defence and, in so doing, makes moral injury a battlefield injury, one that the civilians in the nation, those who have not shared the soldier’s experience, cannot and must not comprehend. On the other hand, the assertion of widespread moral injury among soldiers implicates the nation in a sort of collective moral defence, for it offers a means for civilians in the nation to absorb the badness enacted by soldiers who ostensibly act on the nation’s behalf. Not only has the nation required soldiers to harm or kill its enemies, sometimes even children, but, because of the nation’s need to “stay pure” while demanding such behaviour, the nation has asked the solider to become its “sin eater” and has thereby caused moral harm to the dedicated, courageous, and selfless soldiers who defend and protect it. The literature on moral injury abets a process by which the nation absorbs an abstract (and therefore more tolerable) form of guilt, the full force of which will never reach civilians, since the moral injuries sustained in battle are imagined to be incomprehensible to them. The civilian cannot, and must not, identify with the soldier at war because the soldier’s experience is thought to transport him across a moral border, to set him apart from civilian life, even to make him something alien. To say that the construct of moral injury is involved, therefore, with both the protection of the nation and the recapitulation of the moral defence at a national level is to say that civilians, researchers, clinicians, and those members of the public inclined to consider these issues are encouraged to take on the badness of the solider in order to protect the fantasy of the soldier as the good object, while, at the same time, affirming a shared conviction that the soldier has lost his claim to the virtues that would make him deserving of a place in the larger community. Even when critical of the military or of a war, the national moral defence protects the fantasy propagated by the military and enforced by political and cultural authorities who demand that the nation always “support the troops” (see Lifton, 1973; Salaita, 2013). Citizens do honour and support the image of the solider as the symbol of what is best in the nation, in spite of their suspicion that the soldier’s puta- tively unknowable and morally devastating experience has set him apart from civilians. Perhaps it is because of the soldier’s inevitable moral exile that the citizens of the nation feel compelled to offer the soldier such gestures of unwavering support. Recalling the powerful ambivalence Freud noted in the quality of taboo (1912–1913), or Giorgio Agamben’s well-known use of homo sacer to mean a person who is both sacred and cursed (1998), may help to illuminate the exceptional and paradoxical status of the solider in BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 103 the context of the national moral defence. Soldiers, like the individu- als of whom Agamben speaks, are both “august and damned” (1998, p. 48), and are used by the nation to demarcate civilised, political life from brutal, “bare life” in ways not dissimilar from the imagination of the soldier who lives through horror and dies “to protect our free- doms”. If, as Durkheim noted, “the pure and the impure are . . . two varieties of the same genus that includes sacred things” (2001, p. 306), then we may say that the clinical, academic, and journalistic corps who treat, study, and publicise the moral agony of soldiers employ con- structs such as moral injury to protect the nation by transforming sol- diers into “homines sacri”, sacred yet profane individuals who are revered by, yet excluded from, the nation. In this light, it is less sur- prising that such constructs and the treatment plans associated with them offer little in the way of alleviating soldiers’ actual psychological and spiritual suffering. CONCLUSION If, as Jonathan Shay suggests, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey reveal the dangers of moral injury inflicted by tactical commanders, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War reveals a broader and, in some sense, more contemporary political aim to which the discourse of moral injury may be put. Thucydides is explicitly concerned, of course, not merely with relating the events of the Peloponnesian War, but with narrating and even fictionalising events in order to teach a moral les- son, which involves assigning blame to the Athenians themselves for the collective moral injuries sustained in the Athenian defeat (see Thucydides, 1954, Bks. II, III, VI–VII). Likewise, in the twentieth century, one might argue that shared guilt and outrage at atrocity have become signature themes in litera- ture, cultural criticism, and ethical theory (Bowker, 2013). Modern and postmodern readers cannot help but be well-acquainted with the hor- rors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its terrible legacy, genocides around the globe, the trenches of the great wars, extermination camps and gulags, and the oppressive conditions suffered by women, minori- ties, and autochthonous populations both in distant colonies and within “civilised” and “developed” nations. This template of dramatic moral injury has then been applied, with powerful effect, to virtually all forms of suffering: personal, historical, local, familial, intra-psychic, even the vicarious suffering of those who witness or listen to the suf- fering of others (see e.g., Caruth, 1995; Fassin & Rechtman, 2009). Writers like Albert Camus (1991), Primo Levi (1996), and Frantz Fanon (1963) represent a tradition of contemporary thought contending 104 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE with the meaning of moral injury, typically by applying “lessons” learned in horrific events to broader social, political, and philosophical concerns. Indeed, Robert Lifton’s Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans— Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), takes its subtitle from Camus’ argument that it is imperative to be “ni victime, ni bourreau”, neither vic- tim nor executioner. Unfortunately, the sought-after balance implied in this moral stance tends to become one of self-victimisation, whereby the “lesson” learned is that the only way to confront atrocity, which is imag- ined to be pervasive, is to accept responsibility for the cruelty and destructiveness around us, and to insist that others do so as well. In perhaps the most significant monologue of Camus’ famous alle- gorical novel, The Plague, former activist Jean Tarrou tells his friend Dr Bernard Rieux that he is “mortally ashamed” of his complicity in the violence he has witnessed and tacitly condoned. Tarrou concludes that “we can’t stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody”, and thus feels a desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death. Pending that release, I know I have no place in the world of today; once I’d definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end. I leave it to others to make history. (1991, pp. 252–253) Tarrou’s identification with killers, and his assumption of the guilt for their killing, threatens to exile him from life, from history, and from his active, vital self. This exaggerated and self-inflicted guilt offers a poignant account of the psychological consequences of identification with bad internal objects. Throughout contemporary ethical thought we find the fantasy of a nation purged of its badness—including its bad history—by those who willingly take on guilt for its sins, who internalise its badness in order to protect the purity of a fantasied good object.6 Only when all individuals within the nation collectively accept responsibility for bad- ness, argues Judith Butler, will we develop a “point of identification with suffering itself” (2004, p. 30). It is imagined that only by “bring- ing ourselves to grief” over violence, loss, and other manifestations of badness (McIvor, 2012), and “tarrying with grief . . . remaining exposed to its unbearability” (Butler, 2004, p. 30), will we regenerate a connection with the good object of the nation that contains the (fanta- sised) elements of innocence, purity, and goodness. At the level of political discourse, the defender of such a position imagines the nation’s goodness to be protected by his willingness to be wounded. This is the fantasy of the solider seeking a way to resolve the dilemma of the moral defence via service to the moral group, and BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 105 of civilians who insist that the nation take on a form of guilt for its sol- diers. The defender of such a position preserves a fantasy of the good object by dispersing, as it were, the painful burden of containing the self’s own internal bad objects. The idea that civilians can never truly understand the horrors of war for which they nevertheless feel respon- sible only makes it easier for guilt to be shared, to remain mysterious, and to serve its broader psychic functions. A collective moral defence of the solider as a representative of a fan- tasised nation that adheres to a moral code, and as one who sustains a connection with the good object, then, seems to require a collectively guilty nation that condemns itself and others. This defence requires the identification of the self with bad objects and, therefore, the equa- tion of subjectivity with destruction. The ever-popular anti-subjective trends in contemporary ethical and political thought serve this pur- pose no less than the discourse of moral injury, which connects acts of violence committed against enemies to the soldiers who commit them, and then to the nation that sponsors its soldiers, all in the popular lan- guages of injury, wounding, and victimisation. Although (or perhaps because) the discourse of moral injury defines it as an exceptional experience, it has yet to offer much help in under- standing and treating moral injuries. Lieutenant Colonel Stephen W. Austin, an Army chaplain, claims that “there are no answers—we just want to start the conversation, getting the troops comfortable talking about these things . . . That’s the most important thing of all, that people feel they can talk about these issues with their buddies.” Similarly, the idea that an effective form of treatment for moral injury consists of merely “listening to a Marine’s story”, or saying, “you did your job . . . and I am proud of you” (Wood, 2014), seems to demon- strate the poverty of thought devoted to the complicated issues involved with moral injury. More than that, it suggests that while the soldier may be idealised, his moral injury and his moral core are objects of fear that must not receive sustained attention. If they were comprehended, it might become difficult to use the solider as the sacred yet exiled container of bad objects relied upon by the national moral defence system we have outlined here. We have tried to show that the source of moral injuries lies much deeper than may be apparent, that explicit acts of violence committed in times of war may activate “symptoms” of moral injury, but that the moral defence mounted against the presence of badness at the level of psychic experience necessitates, confirms, and perpetuates morally injurious experience both within the military and without. We have also sought to demonstrate that the society as a whole partakes in a moral defence in which the solider serves as both a symbol of the good 106 MATTHEW H. BOWKER AND DAVID P. LEVINE object to be protected and an alienated or abject figure, whose moral sacrifice helps to purge the nation of its badness, but only if the guilt for the soldier’s actions in combat as well as for his own moral agony is internalised and shared by all. Notes 1. We use the term “military” to refer to all branches of the US armed forces (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, National Guard, Coast Guard) and, more broadly, to the armed forces of other nations, with no particular emphasis on one specific branch. Similarly, we use the word “solider” in its generic sense, to refer to members of the armed services. 2. The phrase “master your fear” appears in a 2006 US Marine Corps television commercial in which a recruit runs through a video- game-like gauntlet populated by fire and swinging blades and monster, ultimately to slay an enormous beast-like creature made of fire. The fantasy offered to the recruit is: “It is more than a trial by fire. It is a rite of passage . . . If you can master your fear, out- smart your enemy, and never yield, even to yourself, you will be changed forever.” 3 The idea of internal good and bad objects was first developed in the work of Melanie Klein. For a discussion of the origin of the idea in Klein’s work and its subsequent development, see Greenberg and Mitchell (1983). 4. Christopher Browning’s (1998) insightful archival work on the activities of Reserve Police Battalion 101 clarifies a dynamic rele- vant to groups involved in morally compromising situations: the reserve soldiers in his study often felt that their moral duty to the group included committing their fair share of immoral acts, so that their comrades do not have to commit them all. 5. James Krantz (2006) makes a compelling case that “virtuous” betrayal within organisations differs significantly from betrayal of a “sinister” or “venal” sort (p. 222). Virtuous betrayals are those that violate the trust of individuals and parties in an organisation, transgressing the norms and defences embedded in the status quo ante for the sake of preserving the institution’s integrity. Yet, although it may be true that, in some cases, “betrayal occur[ing] in the context of institutional purpose”, is “more easily overcome” by betrayed parties (p. 236), this does not seem to apply in the pre- sent case as any perceived or real “virtue” driving the military’s purpose is likely to have little moderating effect on the soldier’s moral injury. The soldier’s moral injury, as we have argued, likely BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD 107 precedes his enlistment and involves unconscious and long-stand- ing relationships with internal good (virtuous) and bad (vicious) objects. Since the soldier has already established a pattern of relat- ing rooted in the moral defence, betrayal and self-betrayal under- taken for the sake of a putatively virtuous institution only repeats and affirms the necessity of such a pattern, one that has led the solider to a point of moral “confusion” too severe to bear. What is more, as we discuss in more detail in the latter sections of the paper, since both the military and the nation use the solider as something of a scapegoat (see Gold, 2014), violating his trust and colluding with his worst fears about himself, the betrayal of the solider even in a hypothetically “just war” could hardly be con- sidered “virtuous” in either Krantz’s or any usual sense. That is, such betrayal constitutes not the betrayal of individual or social defences for the sake of truth, integrity, and the fulfilment of vision, but very nearly the opposite: a reliance upon defence, mys- tification, and confusion resulting in a disintegrated state both for the solider and with the military as an institution. 6. Camus’ other well-known work on this subject speaks directly to this problem. 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Beyond the Battlefield: ‘Moral Injury’ and Moral Defense in the Psychic Life of the Soldier, the Military, and the Nation

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Beyond the Battlefield: ‘Moral Injury’ and Moral Defense in the Psychic Life of the Soldier, the Military, and the Nation

Beyond the Battlefield: ‘Moral Injury’ and Moral Defense in the Psychic Life of the Soldier, the Military, and the Nation

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