I remember talking with the grieving family of a young Marine killed in Iraq five years ago. As we stood in the cemetery, a snow-swept knoll in northeastern Montana, his mom recalled her son’s last visit home a few months before and how devastated he’d been by an incident there.
            The 20-year-old had told his family that he and his friends had been tossing candy to a bunch of Iraqi kids when one pressed too close. Warned to stay away, one kid kept advancing. And finally, remembering the stories of bad guys who carried knives or guns or bombs strapped across their chests, this young Marine shot the kid.

When they checked the kid’s body, he was unarmed. “Mom, I killed an innocent Iraqi goat-herd,” her son had said over and over again.

 That trauma is what some psychologists are calling a “wounded soul,” a moral injury that pierces a person’s sense of himself, his relationship to society and his relationship to God

Killing goes against the moral code of virtually every society, so what a soldier does in a combat situation redefines him in his own mind. He knows he has crossed a moral line. And he knows that having done it once, he can always do it again.

Worse, he knows that his family and friends will also know that about him.

As a Christian, there’s only one thing that’s worse. I believe that God handed down a set of laws written in stone that say very explicitly: “Thou shalt not murder.” Later, that commandment was imprinted on our hearts, hard-wired into our psyche, as it were. So breaking that law also separates me from my Creator, providing a triple whammy.

Ed Tick, a psychotherapist who heads the private group Soldier’s Heart, says conventional medicine doesn’t take that aspect into account. “I’ve talked with a number of vets who say they are treated as victims, but that they know they were the perpetrators,” he said.

It’s no wonder that the mental health casualty rates are so high for warriors.

In September 2010, the Rand Corporation updated its 2008 report which had estimated that 30 percent of America’s 1.64 million servicemen/women would require mental health care after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Rand Corporation stands by its projection of nearly one vet in three needing help, which to me is a staggering number.

Still, I think that number should be broken apart for better understanding.

Fear of being injured or killed remains a significant part of the vet’s psyche, even in a supposedly safe civilian world, but his soul can also be wounded by what he has done – or failed to do. There’s an unseen but very real wound when your buddy dies beside you; could you have steered him clear of danger, could you have shot the enemy first, could you have stepped in front of the bullet yourself, could you have stopped his bleeding faster and saved his life? And as you question yourself, you also begin to question the leaders who put you in that position.

Tick, author of War and the Soul, told me that the “wounded soul” half of PTSD actually includes a number of traumas. After killing someone, love and intimacy and attachment are altered; perhaps a war buddy is more important than family because a vet feels his buddy can understand what he had to do in combat.  Killing wounds the heart and violates a vet’s moral code. “A chaplain at Walter Reed (Medical Center in Washington, D.C.) told me once that healing involves renegotiating your covenant with God,” said Tick.

Those are some very different traumas, and they require very different therapies. We’ll examine those next.

I remember talking with the grieving family of a young Marine killed in Iraq five years ago. As we stood in the cemetery, a snow-swept knoll in northeastern Montana, his mom recalled her son’s last visit home a few months before and how devastated he’d been by an incident there.
            The 20-year-old had told his family that he and his friends had been tossing candy to a bunch of Iraqi kids when one pressed too close. Warned to stay away, one kid kept advancing. And finally, remembering the stories of bad guys who carried knives or guns or bombs strapped across their chests, this young Marine shot the kid.

When they checked the kid’s body, he was unarmed. “Mom, I killed an innocent Iraqi goat-herd,” her son had said over and over again.

 That trauma is what some psychologists are calling a “wounded soul,” a moral injury that pierces a person’s sense of himself, his relationship to society and his relationship to God

Killing goes against the moral code of virtually every society, so what a soldier does in a combat situation redefines him in his own mind. He knows he has crossed a moral line. And he knows that having done it once, he can always do it again.

Worse, he knows that his family and friends will also know that about him.

As a Christian, there’s only one thing that’s worse. I believe that God handed down a set of laws written in stone that say very explicitly: “Thou shalt not murder.” Later, that commandment was imprinted on our hearts, hard-wired into our psyche, as it were. So breaking that law also separates me from my Creator, providing a triple whammy.

Ed Tick, a psychotherapist who heads the private group Soldier’s Heart, says conventional medicine doesn’t take that aspect into account. “I’ve talked with a number of vets who say they are treated as victims, but that they know they were the perpetrators,” he said.

It’s no wonder that the mental health casualty rates are so high for warriors.

In September 2010, the Rand Corporation updated its 2008 report which had estimated that 30 percent of America’s 1.64 million servicemen/women would require mental health care after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Rand Corporation stands by its projection of nearly one vet in three needing help, which to me is a staggering number.

Still, I think that number should be broken apart for better understanding.

Fear of being injured or killed remains a significant part of the vet’s psyche, even in a supposedly safe civilian world, but his soul can also be wounded by what he has done – or failed to do. There’s an unseen but very real wound when your buddy dies beside you; could you have steered him clear of danger, could you have shot the enemy first, could you have stepped in front of the bullet yourself, could you have stopped his bleeding faster and saved his life? And as you question yourself, you also begin to question the leaders who put you in that position.

Tick, author of War and the Soul, told me that the “wounded soul” half of PTSD actually includes a number of traumas. After killing someone, love and intimacy and attachment are altered; perhaps a war buddy is more important than family because a vet feels his buddy can understand what he had to do in combat.  Killing wounds the heart and violates a vet’s moral code. “A chaplain at Walter Reed (Medical Center in Washington, D.C.) told me once that healing involves renegotiating your covenant with God,” said Tick.

Those are some very different traumas, and they require very different therapies. We’ll examine those next.