Some people call them heroes, but most veterans don’t feel like heroes, so there’s a disconnect between the actual experience of war and the perceived experience of it. That disconnect makes veterans feel isolated and misunderstood. Others question veterans’ moral character for participating in wars started on false pretenses, or in any war at all. A small but vocal minority calls veterans leeches or lazy. They say veterans are taking advantage of the government, and subsequently taxpayers, when they partake in the benefits promised to them for their service. When faced with these accusations, misunderstandings, and questions, veterans start to question themselves.
Moral injury is emotional, psychological, and spiritual. This makes it different from post-traumatic stress disorder, which is more of a physiological reaction — the brain and body’s responses to extreme, prolonged stress or fear. Some of the symptoms of PTSD — nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia, disassociation — can be stabilized with medication. But moral injury doesn’t seem to respond to medication, at least not permanently. Not at the soul level.
Time in and of itself is also not enough to heal the suffering of moral injury. Time can soften the sting of moral injury, but it can also harden memories, making emotional scar tissue even tougher to heal. That’s what happens if you leave a wound to fester without tending to it. And that’s why so many Vietnam veterans take psychiatric medications for decades and then, when they retire or divorce, or are otherwise forced to face themselves and their past, still find a world of pain waiting for them. The medication has only treated their symptoms, not the root cause of those symptoms. The wound can grow so big, so consuming, it feels like the only way to escape it is death.
The VA estimates that in the United States, twenty veterans take their lives every day.* While the majority of those who die by suicide are over the age of fifty, the number of younger vets who contribute to that twenty-a-day statistic is steadily increasing. If the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fail to acknowledge and heal moral injury, the millennial generation of veterans will continue to face the same fate as those who’ve gone before.
This book offers an unexpected antidote to moral injury. It shows how healing is possible even when traditional methods like talk therapy, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and medication have failed. It reveals a healing method that is accessible to anyone who’s willing to sit still for a few moments and just breathe. It shows how, as soon as an individual is willing to take responsibility for his or her own healing, grace rushes in to relieve the pain, unravel traumatic memories, and release the past for good. It shows how meditation, breath work, and the body’s natural intelligence can help heal deep trauma in ways the mind can’t. You can’t think yourself into feeling better. You can’t will yourself to heal. But in taking on a discipline like meditation, you create the space where healing can happen, naturally. This book shows how the act and discipline of meditation can redeem a life — no matter how deep the wound.
The responsibility to acknowledge, accept, and heal from moral injury doesn’t just belong to those suffering from moral injury. When we send our youth into battle on our behalf, we are complicit in their actions. We are responsible for bearing our portion of the pain those actions cause. And in taking responsibility, we are empowered to help these women and men rebuild their moral scaffolding, reclaim their place in the society they volunteered to protect, and remember what it means to be human — and to belong.
— Tom Voss and Rebecca Anne Nguyen
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*Office of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs, “VA Releases National Suicide Data Report,” US Department of Veterans Affairs, June 18, 2018, https://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/pressrelease.cfm?id=4074.
From 2003 to 2006, I served on active duty in the US Army. In October 2004 I was deployed to Mosul, Iraq, to support Operation Iraqi Freedom. I served as an infantry scout in the battalion scout-sniper platoon in the 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, an element of the 1st Brigade 25th Infantry Division — one of the army’s first Stryker infantry brigades. During the twelve months I spent in Iraq, I participated in hundreds of combat missions, convoys, security patrols, raids, area-clearance operations, and humanitarian-relief operations. In 2006 I separated from the army with an honorable discharge.
And then I came home.
This book is about what happened next. It’s about the feelings I carried inside that no one, including me, talked about: feelings of grief, shame, guilt, and sorrow about the things I’d seen and done in Iraq. Those feelings didn’t change or go away, no matter what I tried. And I tried everything: talk therapy, EMDR, peer-support groups, alcohol, legal drugs, illegal drugs, you name it.
I decided to walk across the country because I had no other choice. I knew that if I didn’t take an extreme step to heal from trauma, the trauma I had experienced in Iraq would consume me and I would end my own life.
Walking across the country gave me the time and space I needed to heal. Walking was a way to convene with nature, which had always been a healing, uplifting force in my life. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of taking long walks in the forests and trails of northern Wisconsin. My dad taught my sister and me to respect the natural world and to view it with wonder. The wind in the trees, the deer hiding in the brush, the ripples on the surface of a still pond: all had something to teach us, if only we’d get quiet and listen. So I decided to walk from Milwaukee to Los Angeles to get back to that place — a place where the movement of my body on the outside made me still enough on the inside to learn the lessons nature had to teach me.
On that walk, nature became my healer and my teacher again. And like any good teacher, nature led me to other teachers — Native American healers, meditation instructors, and spiritual devotees. Nature even threw in a controversial Trappist monk and a world-renowned Indian guru for good measure.
It was about a month after I finished my 2,700-mile journey across America that I first learned about something called moral injury. This was the answer I’d been looking for — the cause of the symptoms I’d been battling for so long. Moral injury was the root of all the grief, shame, sorrow, and guilt I’d been feeling. It was a wound to the soul that had destroyed my sense of morality, demolished my moral architecture, and confused my moral place in society. Once I knew what had been causing those deep, emotional symptoms — what was beneath the depression and behind the anxiety — the healing process could truly begin.
During the five months I spent walking across the country, and in the years that followed, I’ve learned healing methods that I believe can help people who suffer from moral injury and extreme trauma. Meditation, yoga, and breath work have offered relief and healing I never could have imagined, both for me and for the other veterans I’ve worked with. I truly believe that if you’re willing to put in the time, these methods will work for you, too.
The end of my walk across America was just the beginning of a healing journey that I’m still on, and that I’ll continue on for the rest of my life. I hope that reading my story or watching my story in the documentary film Almost Sunrise will help you on your own journey to heal from moral injury. At the very least, I hope your sense of hope will be renewed by learning about someone who knows what it is to give up on life, and himself, completely.
It only takes a single flicker of light to cut through the darkness. And it only takes a single glimmer of hope to start healing from moral injury.
It’s