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 8456 Plough Quarterly • Spring 2016 Americans manage so well to pretend that their lives are not deeply intertwined with ongoing global warfare. When I enrolled in an under- graduate music program after leaving the army, I used to envy other students for whom war was a distant, seemingly unconnected concept. Now, as I study theology, I wish I could pursue thoughts of God and good without seeing permanently through the lens of a past war. I wish I could be free of the idea, which still gnaws at me, that – regardless of whatever good I may do in the future – my greatest impact on the world will be the things I did to other human beings as a young and naïve soldier. I wish I could be rid of the haunting idea that my realest self is the one I saw then. Yet having once seen into the void of moral injury, there is no unseeing it. To find hope in the midst of moral injury, veterans must seek out encounters with people who, like us, wish to hold on to what really happened: other soldiers, teachers, mentors, family. What really happened when our nation indulged in a fantasy of bouncing back, of getting even, of acting with force across the globe? What really happened to those we fought? What happened to the people who sent us into combat? We must ask the hard questions and go on living, constantly turning our heads to catch a glimpse of the good – or of God. Veterans must continue to try to articulate the void of moral injury. Their neighbors must continue to try to see it, to hear it, and to come to terms with it. There must be people and insti- tutions capable of bearing that responsibility in order to open pathways of hope. The church can be one of those institutions, if it makes the effort. As Bonhoeffer said in his Ethics: The church today is that community of people which is gripped by the power of the grace of Christ so that, recognizing as guilt towards Jesus Christ both its personal sin and the apostasy of the Western world from Jesus Christ, it confesses this guilt and accepts the burden of it. It is [in the church] that Jesus realizes his form in the midst of the world. That is why the church alone can be the place of personal and collective rebirth and renewal.10 It is clear that Bonhoeffer thought much of Jesus Christ, but this should not be taken to mean that Christianity offers the only pathway to hope. Bonhoeffer wrote of the church in this way because it was the Christian church that had so horrifi- cally failed, in his time, to address the world around it. It was the Christian church that had failed to hold on to what really happened, that had wrapped itself in a fantasy of empire. In our time, the Christian church and other places of faith can serve as pathways of hope through individual and collective guilt. Murdoch suggests that we can “make a spiritual use of our desolation” and that “in the more obscure labyrinths of personal relations it may be necessary to make the move which makes the void appear.”11 In places of worship, the void can be permitted to appear and can be confronted face to face. Religious communities are unique in this ability. Will the Department of Defense or the US Army hold on to what has really happened in war? Will political leaders dispel their By casting all veterans as heroes, even as flawed or tragic heroes, our culture makes them easy to ignore.