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Moral Injury is a new field of study looking beyond the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder often suffered by military personnel. It occurs when an individual is asked to do something which breaches their conscience. All recent conflicts have the prerequisites or the potential to cause significant Moral Injury: A government’s decision to involve its forces in unjust wars where either the cause or the conduct is wrong or open to serious conscientious objection, the deployment of forces in pursuit of a mission that is ambiguous with a mandate that is vague; where the translation of political aspirations to military objectives is imprecise or impractical; and when the deployed forces are ill-prepared, poorly structured and inadequately equipped. And when the loss of moral ascendancy within the force reflected in indifference to the rule of law and manifested in an erosion of discipline.
With an increasing number of Australian military personnel being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, this collection of insightful essays examines the unseen wounds sustained by Australian personnel deployed to armed conflict, peacekeeping missions, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief for the first time.
Included are pieces from top historians Peter Stanley, Jeffrey Grey, Tom Frame, David Horner and Peter Rees. They examine the moral injury sustained by Australian personnel since 1990. Wile there are no easy answers or simple solutions, the contributors shed light on which existing approaches are misguided and the specific research, analysis and multi-disciplinary approaches needed to gain a better sense of moral injury, an unseen wound of military personnel.
Editor Tom Frame was a naval officer for 15 years before being ordained to the Anglican ministry. He served as Bishop to the Australian Defence Force from 2001-2007 and is the author/editor of 27 books on a range of topics including the ethics of armed conflict. He is a regular media commentator on naval, religious and ethical affairs.
He writes: Asking ‘what was it all for?’is not a sign of mental illness but of human maturity. To find the answers do not come all at once, or in an instance, does not signify that someone cannot cope with life. Of the many unseen wounds. Of the many unseen wounds sustained by uniformed personnel during deployments, interest has naturally returned to the incidence of moral injury. I use the word ‘returned’ because there is evidence in ancient texts that war was considered a morally alienating experience, irrespective of whether it was an offensive or defensive campaign, and that homecoming warriors needed to undergo a moral cleansing after their experience to recover their moral self ahead of re-entering a moral community.”
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Reviewer Charles Sheedy writes:
A soldier in the Australian Army is posted to Somalia, a country ranked among the world’s most troubled states and where the capital, Mogadishu, is known as the “city of death”. Life is cheap and warlords rule over clan-based militia who cause widespread lawlessness.
Another soldier is sent to Afghanistan, where atrocities like suicide bombings are commonplace, and where 32 Australians have been killed and 218 wounded since 2001.
Having come from a society in which order, reason and respect for human life are givens, the scenes these soldiers witness throw everything they believe into disarray. The psychological, emotional and spiritual repercussions are profound.
Armed conflict damages human beings on many levels. In war, even the best resilience training can’t protect us.
Moral injury is not new, but it is becoming more acute as more soldiers return from deployments in anarchic places like Afghanistan, Bougainville, Somalia, East Timor, Rwanda and Cambodia, says UNSW professor of military history Tom Frame. Few Australians have an understanding of these conflicts or personal empathy with the men and women who’ve been deployed to them. Only 0.1% of the population even knows somebody who has served in the defence force, says Frame, who is director of UNSW Canberra’s Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society.
“During the World Wars, and to some degree during the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea, large numbers of Australians returned from overseas and were absorbed into a society that was aware of their experience and conscious of their needs,” he says. But these days the general public is largely uneducated about conflict and its complex legacies.
“Soldiers are returning to the community having seen and heard things that are morally devastating. The world is not as they thought it was or ought to be and their responses are uneven at best.”
One of the most devastating submissions in Moral Injury is about the conflict in Afghanistan and comes from a returned soldier who wished to remain anonymous: “We received a report there had been a strike. Instinctively I knew it was the Sarab Pass. I also knew that I could have prevented it … We waited for the casulaties to arrive … When the dual cab utility vehicle stopped next to the RAP, the police and some of our troops started unloading the wounded children from the back seat. I didn’t want to look at the children and focused my attention on the tray. I could see two large mounts in the back of the vehicle, covered by blankets.
“My first nightmare about this incident happened a few days later. I often dreamt that the ‘mounds of flesh’ in the back of the ute came to life like zombies and started chasing me, determined to get their revenge for what I had done to them. The dreams evolved to include my family members in place of the Afghan civilians. On one occasion the woman in the back of the ute became my sister and I killed her with a broken broomstick. It entered her head through the mouth and came out the back of her skull.
In those dreams the ‘living dead’are always trying to bite me. The only way I can stop them is to drive something through their mouths.
Moral Injury is the first in a series produced by the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society.
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