Sherman - The untold war: inside the hearts, minds, and souls of our soldiers

T HIS BOOK is not a political tract for or against a war. It is about the inner battles soldiers wagethe moral weight of war that individual soldiers carry on their shoulders and dont usually talk about. Soldiers go to war to fight external enemies, in Afghanistan and Iraq today, or in Europe and the Pacific in my fathers era. But most, at least the honest among them, fight inner wars as well. They wrestle with the guilt of luck and accident, and the uneasy burden of killing and leaving the killing behind. For some, what weighs heavy is the sense of betrayal that is part of the moral shadowland of wartime interrogationof building intimate rapport with a detainee only to exploit it. For others, the moral burden comes with killing civilians, as part of the permissible but no less wrenching collateral damage of war. These are feelings felt by the best soldiers. But they are feelings that are oft en unexposed, borne privately, and sometimes with shame.

That psychological anguish in war is also moral anguish is a fact too often ignored. Studies of war trauma tend to focus on the acute psychological hardship of crossing the borders of peace and war. But what that research typically leaves to the side are the ordinary moral and emotional tensions of that passage. It misses the ubiquity of the inner war and its subtle moral contours. It overlooks the full humanity of soldiering, and the healthy struggle in the best soldier to remain alive to civilian sensibilities without losing the soldiers steel and resilience.

This book digs deep into the moral conscience of soldiers. It moves beyond the traditional study of war in philosophy, which from Augustine and Aquinass time forward has focused narrowly on the justice of going to war and prosecuting it. But it also moves beyond clinical psychological study on trauma to probe the broader issues of moral character in putting on and taking off the uniform.

At the heart of the book are testimonials from soldiers, not only from the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but also from the Vietnam War, World War II, and World War I. The story soldiers tell over and over again is about the battle to reclaim personal accountability within the bureaucracies that armies are. Soldiers fight in units, wearing uniforms effacing individual difference in the name of solidarity, for missions meant to rally and unite. And yet soldiering, with its residue, is always about what each individual sees and does on his watch. It is about the individual moral record, etched in emotions, like honor and pride, revenge, guilt, and shame. It is about the things a soldier has seen and done on the battlefield, and the way these things come home with him.

As a professional philosopher whose area of focus is ancient ethics, military ethics, and the emotions, I have listened to soldiers stories through the dual perspectives of moral philosophy and psychoanalysis. Philosophy and the history of ethics have long offered a way of analyzing the moral texture of our lives that is unparalleled by other discourses. To make sense of our experiences, it is not enough to tell the story and narrate the events. Philosophy sharpens the distinctions, maps the conceptual terrain, presses us to make more systematic or coherent what confuses or defies sense or seems like one feeling or thought but really is another. It is a way of knowing oneself, as Socrates insisted, and of understanding the world. It is a form of discernment and enlightenment. But like all exercises in reason and argument, traditional philosophy can also obfuscate, rationalize, puff up, push us away from ourselves. It can turn its back on what seems irrational or too steeped in the upheaval of feeling.

Yet the irrational can have its own logic, as Freud taught us. It can be understood and, oft en, force us to recognize a different and deeper kind of reasonableness and humanity. And this is where my psychoanalytic training comes in. About fifteen years ago, I realized that to probe more deeply the nature of emotions and moral development, I needed the framework of a deep moral psychology, and so I sought out research training in psychoanalysis at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. My view then, and now, is that emotions need to be understood not only in the context of a conceptual, philosophical analysis but also in the lived life and in the stories individuals tell about their families and friends, the conflicts they wrestle with, and their attempts to resolve them. The ancients, whose work I have specialized in during most of my academic life, knew nothing of a sharp boundary between philosophy and psychology. In understanding the full moral psyche, we are at peril if we try to erect one.

And so I have listened to soldiers with both a philosophers ear and a psychoanalysts ear. Soldiers are genuinely torn by the feelings of warthey desire raw revenge at times, though they wish they wanted a nobler justice; they feel pride and patriotism tinged with shame, complicity, betrayal, and guilt. They worry if they have sullied themselves, if they love their war buddies more than their wives or husbands, if they can be honest with the generation of soldiers that follow. They want to feel whole, but they see in the mirror that an arm is missing, or having bagged their buddies body parts, they feel guilty for returning home intact. I suspect many have talked to me so openly because they sense they are being listened to by someone who may help them find, in the chaos of war, a small measure of moral clarity.