Vets with wounded souls have been self-medicating themselves for centuries to dull the pain of what they’ve done – or what they’ve not done. And many psychologists have followed suit by prescribing anti-depressants or anti-anxiety drugs.

But there has to be a better way to help. “Pharmaceuticals are just a mask because they don’t deal with a problem,” says Hardie Higgins, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served 20 years as a chaplain. He has written a book, To Make the Wounded Whole: Healing the Spiritual Wounds of PTSD.

Note the use of the word “spirit” (pnuma) rather than “soul” (psyche). Since man is made in the image of the spirit (pnuma) of God, Higgins believes a spiritual wound is deeper than a wounded soul. One may be cognitively aware of a wounded soul, but unable to deal with spiritual wounds without God’s help.

Higgins argues that the battlefield strips away the belief system that soldiers grew up with, leaving them empty. “The key to recovery for victims of PTSD is, I believe, to assist them in discovering the redemptive meaning of their suffering and how to use that suffering to add meaning to their future life,” he says.

One of the vets he has been counseling was crippled emotionally for decades by the memory of clubbing a Vietnamese boy to death with a rifle butt. Higgins reached out for healing by setting two chairs in a room, then asking the vet to sit in one and explain why he did what he did to the boy, then move to the other chair to let the boy talk with the soldier.  “He explained to the kid that he was just a soldier doing his job and he was sorry,” Higgins says. “Then I put him in the other chair and said, ‘Now you’re the little kid. What do you want to say to the soldier?’ And it was amazing how much more forgiving that little kid was. He said, ‘I know you were just a soldier and you didn’t know what you were doing.’ When you hear that kid talking about forgiveness, there’s some real healing going on.”

Higgins also uses the Bible to help vets lift their levels of guilt. He reminds them of that familiar verse in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  That’s a deceptively simple phrase, but it really means that God will forgive me if I forgive others. And if God forgives me, I have to forgive myself, too. 

Drawing on the Native American culture, Ed Tick, founder of Soldiers’ Heart and author of War and the Soul, also counsels a path of atonement to healing. He notes that the Lakota Sioux have a term for combat stress that can be translated as “his spirit has left him” or “his spirit has been emptied.”  And he cites a Flathead Indian “victory song” in which a returning warrior asks forgiveness for the damage he has done to the cosmos.

War creates an identity crisis for returning vets, Tick told me; they initially transform from civilians to warriors, but they never can return to being civilians again, So healing involves asking atonement for what they have done, creating a new post-warrior identity for themselves, and sharing their experiences with the community. That lifelong journey can lead to acceptance and spiritual peace again. Failure to do that leads to nightmares and flashbacks as the suppressed combat experiences struggle to be recognized, but also fear it. “Holistic medicine looks for true healing, not just symptom management,” says Tick.

In the years to come, we must also recognize and provide special help to vets whose souls have been wounded by what they’ve done – or not done.