Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the book’s content. Opening with an illustration attending the issue of killing in war, it gestures toward the important link between killing and psychic trauma. To interrogate this linkage, it introduces critical distinctions between different kinds of killing, divergent warfighter attitudes toward killing, various Christian responses to killing and war, and between moral injury and posttraumatic stress disorder. Because it endorses a definition of moral injury as a psychic trauma that occurs when one does something that transgresses a deeply held moral norm, it stresses a critical understanding of the difference between grief and guilt and posits an important distinction between “moral injury” and what it terms “moral bruising.” To elaborate on these distinctions, it introduces the just war tradition as a Christian realist perspective best able to help warfighters navigate the morally bruising battlefield without becoming irreparably injured morally.

War and the Soul

Chapter 1 explores in greater detail both the medical and phenomenological foundations of moral injury and its consequences upon the morally injured. It examines the clinical history that led to the recognition of the need for a diagnosis different than, though related to, posttraumatic stress disorder, and it zeroes in on moral injury’s relationship to killing in combat. It goes on to demonstrate the ubiquity of the belief, even among warfighters, that killing is morally evil—even if it is also morally necessary in war. Through again referencing clinical work, and introducing some of the key clinicians focusing on the moral injury construct, the paradoxical relationship between killing and moral injury is then linked to the suicide crisis afflicting combat veterans.

Neither Sin nor Paradox

Chapter 3 demonstrates how the just war tradition can help warfighters navigate the moral complexities of combat without compromising deeply held normative commitments. Drawing on the classical imagination of C. S. Lewis, it drafts a portrait of the just warrior as a marbling of the characteristics of Venus and Mars—the personifications of love and war. Such a union of dispositions demonstrates the possibility of attending to both the necessity of war and the requirements of love without contradiction. The just war tradition is shown to be committed to both moral realism—the view that what is good in the world is determined by a moral order grounded in objective reality—and to a moral vision that is essentially eudaemonist, or deeply concerned with the promotion of human flourishing, including enemy flourishing. This leads to a theological examination of enemy love and to a distinction between moral and nonmoral evil.

The Mournful Warrior

Chapter 5 defends against the challenge that the attitudinal requirements the just war tradition demands of just warriors are so severe as to be impracticable in actual combat, thus rendering moral injury practically unavoidable, even if in principle unnecessary. Against more extreme forms of dehumanization, callousness—the thickening of one’s skin—is presented as an important moral insulation for the warfighter, even as a martial virtue. Pushing against a popular taxonomy of four “images of the enemy” (perceived as the only possible ways that warfighters view those they war against and each of which is incompatible with the just war tradition), a fifth image is identified—that of the mournful warrior. Articulating the common-sense distinction between grief and guilt, this image is shown to be both compatible with the just war attitudinal mandate and regularly employed by warfighters in actual combat.

Conclusion

The book concludes by acknowledging that while just war realism provides resources for overcoming guilt, it simultaneously recognizes war’s inherent tragedy. Human beings rarely act with absolute purity of intention. It is here that the distinction between moral injury and moral bruising comes back into view. It is entirely likely—possibly even desired—that while warfighters can pass through the battlefield without suffering moral injury, they cannot, in fact, emerge without impact traumas of some kind. Therefore, this conclusion points to the need for social and institutional practices for the moral treatment of returning warfighters.

Just War in the Midst of Combat

Chapter 4 deals with the conceptual challenge of whether the just war ethic can properly be described as retributive. The just war view of killing is defended against charges that it is conceptually incoherent, especially when it presents killing as an element in the process of reconciliation. In defense of the just war stance, this chapter examines the Augustinian notion that love can be harsh and severe as it seeks the flourishing of the object of its love. With Thomas Aquinas and Paul Ramsey coming into the conversation, just war is presented as an act of love in the last resort. Continuing to track with the Augustinian stream, this chapter offers a focused engagement with the contemporary just war ethicist Nigel Biggar and his work on the nature of evil, agent intention, and double effect as it intersects with the question of killing and enemy love.

The Problem of Paradox

Chapter 2 helps uncover why so many warfighters hold the belief that killing is wrong. It does so by linking this belief to a particular kind of ethical paradox, commonplace in Western Christianity and the wider culture. This paradox is grounded in the twentieth-century American public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr. This chapter introduces the Niebuhrian tension placed between the Christian conceptions of love and justice, sometimes cast as contradictory obligations to a law of love and a law of responsibility. This chapter proceeds in two parts. The first part illustrates Niebuhr’s view of love, which, rooted in pacifism, illuminates his belief that killing is morally wrong. The second half, however, demonstrates how Niebuhr’s commitment, rooted in realism, to responsibility leads him to willingly suspend the law of love. After showing how the Niebuhrian paradox renders warfighting inherently morally injurious, this chapter concludes by challenging it.