The Guilt They Carry: Wounds of Iraq and Afghanistan

The announcement by Barack Obama of the surge in U.S. troop deployment to Afghanistan—from a two-thousand-strong force in 2001 to one hundred thousand troops sometime this year—came bundled with a provision for a quick drawdown starting in July 2011. The commander in chief’s timetable, coming eight years after the U.S. campaign to crush al Qaeda and topple the Taliban, was a gesture toward closure and a signal of the gradual transfer of responsibility to the Afghans. But for most of the troops returning home, there will be neither emotional closure nor relief from the burden of personal responsibility that soldiers carry in war. Even when their conduct is just by the best standards of war, soldiers often judge themselves not by what they did but by what they wished they had done but couldn’t do—because of the moral fog of war, or the whimsy of luck and accident, or the commingling of innocent and combatant in the crosshairs. Many feel profound guilt, perhaps irrationally given the limits of human agency, though all too reasonably given the need to assume personal responsibility in an inherently violent and chaotic environment.

Talk of soldiers’ guilt is not often part of polite conversation. Talk about a soldier’s psyche is usually in clinical terms of post-traumatic stress—flashbacks and nightmares, numbing and disconnection, hypervigilance and sensory overload—rather than in moral terms of conflict and guilt or shame. Yet psychological anguish in war is often moral anguish. Good soldiers worry about whether they did everything they could to save a buddy or whether they should have used more restraint at a checkpoint. They anguish over whether they deserved to come home alive or physically whole when others returned in body bags or without limbs. They feel morally queasy about manipulating detainees whom they have come to know from months of interrogation, even though their methods fall far short of harsh coercion. At least, this is what I heard in some thirty interviews I conducted with soldiers who have returned from the current wars. What they carried home with them is an indicator of what is to come.

Moral Fatigue and the Tight Timetable
Right now, there are new background factors to take into account. One army colonel in Washington, with on-the-ground experience in counterinsurgency operations, expressed concerns about morale and morals on the battlefield. Although he stressed that his comments should not be taken as a criticism of the president’s plan or as in any way representing the U.S. government, he wondered about troop reaction to Obama’s tight timetable: “If you are thinking, I’m only there for a year, you may not be willing to make the emotional investment required to make the necessary sacrifices.” He worried that the sense of mission “futility” would, in turn, lead to moral laxity on the battlefield—“with pressure to bend the restrictive rules of engagement...