Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 8454 Plough Quarterly • Spring 2016 spirit – I believe that moral injury has much to do with the question of “who.” Describing who I am requires remembering the stories that have shaped me, some of which cause me as much pain as the one above. Of course, there was more to my war experience than throw- ing a bottle at a young boy. There were better things, and there were worse things. In his address to the nation on September 11, 2001, then- President George W. Bush declared, “We go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.” At the time, I thought that “we” included me, and I really believed that as part of the army I was going forward to do something good. Yet many of the memories I carried home still cause me guilt and shame. I remember walking past bound detainees sitting in the heat indefinitely behind the building where I stayed with my team. I remember respond- ing to calls that came in late at night to pick up weapons or ordnance, and seeing men led hooded from their homes in the dark. I remember seeing a civilian who’d been shot dead in the street one night. I do not know who shot him; he was there when we got there, and he remained there when we left. I remem- ber when, while recovering from exposure to a chemical weapon,5 I watched the Abu Ghraib prison scandal unfold on the news. These memories have blurred in the time since my deployment. Nonetheless, taken together, the feeling they produce is grief. I know I am not who I thought I was. I am something different, something I never planned on being. Moral injury results from exactly this kind of irreversible schism between one’s perceived moral self and one’s actions. A person is morally injured when she comes to recognize herself – when she has witnessed herself failing to live by her own moral convictions, especially in profoundly demanding circumstances. For veterans, this circumstance is war, however directly or indirectly it is experienced. Simone Weil, in her essay “The Love of God and Afflic- tion,” describes affliction as something beyond and differ­ ent than suffering. Rather, it’s an uprooting of a life; it’s something that takes hold of a person’s body and soul. Weil writes: “God can never be per- fectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But [God] can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme afflic- tion. This is the only possibility of perfection for us on earth.”6 Moral injury is an affliction in Weil’s sense, because the schism – the moral identity crisis – at the root of moral injury is a type of moral absence. In my case, the moral self I thought I had been cultivating my whole life went missing in the moment when I saw fear in the eyes of a young boy’s grandfather. In that void, God seems absent too. Weil describes the afflicted person: She struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. But through all the horror [she] can continue to want to love. . . . [She] whose soul remains ever turned toward God, though the nail pierces it, finds [herself] nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; it is not in the middle; it is beyond space and time; Moral injury is not a veil that obscures what really happened: it is a ripping away of the veil, a permanent showing, a continuous truth-telling.