Lt. Col. Bill Edmonds was shattered four years ago when he made a personal moral inventory and came to the realization that he had done too little to prevent Iraqi interrogators from abusing or torturing jailed suspects, some of whom may have been innocent.<\/p>\n
It only deepened his devastation that he had recommended an investigation into the torture of suspected Iraqi insurgents, apparently with American troops being complicit, but the investigation by our military officials cleared all the interrogators.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came to the brink of insanity and quite literally lost my mind,\u201d Edmonds writes in his book, god is not here<\/u>. \u201cDesperate and within an inch of losing my life, I reached out for help, to both mental-health professionals and my military superiors \u2013 and they rolled their eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Talk about a triple whammy! Just about all the elements for moral injury are present here.<\/p>\n
Edmonds\u2019 journey into hell started in 2005 when, as a major and a U.S. Army Special Forces officer, he was assigned to be an adviser to an Iraqi intelligence office who conducted interrogations in the basement of a palace in Mosul that Saddam Hussein used to call the Guest House.<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t just questioning. Interrogators regularly lied to the insurgents, telling them that their wives, brothers or children had been killed and that unless they confessed, they\u2019d be stuck in prison during the funerals.<\/p>\n
Edmonds had forbidden extreme interrogation techniques in the wake of the recent scandals at Abu Ghraib, but the Iraqi interrogators constantly argued for more extreme measures, arguing that without using force to get confessions, these killers would be back on the streets within days to ramp up lawlessness and violence against American soldiers.<\/p>\n
It got harder to resist, until Edmonds reached a breaking point.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel a fracture slide down the center of my chest,\u201d he wrote. \u201cTonight, for the first time in my life, I passionately, fervently want to kill another human being. I want to reach across this small prison cell and let my shadow fly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Edmonds was able to walk away without losing it, although he wrote: \u201cI became a man I no longer recognize. I\u2019ve lost myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then came a new challenge: one of the Iraqi interrogators slapped a suspect in front of Edmonds. \u201cRegardless of my excuses to ignore what I know is right, I am overwhelmed by the atrocity and the inhumanity of these killers and here, in these cells, I have the power to stop them,\u201d he writes. \u201cAnd I\u2019m morally wrong when I do, and when I don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
His response was to quit going to the prison, but that only increased his sense of guilt as he thought about what was probably happening to the suspects being held there.<\/p>\n
Then Edmonds discovered that eight Iraqi prisoners were missing from another of the Iraqi prisons where other American advisers worked. When he finally tracked them down in another part of Iraq, the abuse was apparent.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose eight prisoners \u2026 were horribly tortured: burns, knife wounds, broken bones, electrical burns and welts from slashing cables,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
He suspected the Iraqis tortured these prisoners at another prison overseen by Americans and sent them to a different location where they couldn\u2019t be found. His conflict over what was right vs. what might save lives paralyzed him for a long time, but he finally forced himself to report his findings to the military authorities.<\/p>\n
A full-scale investigation was ordered, and everyone was exonerated, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cGod help me,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBecause I still so desperately want to torture, to kill, these evil people: I can already feel purgatory stalking me. But I have never done what I uncovered and then covered it up by vanishing them! And then this? I finally sensed a light in the distance and then I find out that no one gives a shit?\u201d<\/p>\n
So here you have a terribly conflicted man trying to force himself to do what he knows to be morally right, but being betrayed by his superior officers.<\/p>\n
Dr. Jonathan Shay, the psychologist credited with coining the phrase moral injury, defines a situation like that as betrayal of trust. And he says that a betrayal of what is right by a person in legitimate authority can impair the capacity to trust and elevate despair, suicidality and interpersonal violence.<\/p>\n
Five years later, Edmonds began a month-long meltdown. He tried desperately to fix his problem himself because he didn\u2019t want to jeopardize his top-secret security clearance, but he couldn\u2019t function.<\/p>\n
When he sought help at a base mental health clinic, a psychologist listened to as much of the story as he was able to tell, then told him there was nothing wrong with him and sent him home. That\u2019s likely because his symptoms were those of someone suffering from a moral injury, and the medical definition of PTSD doesn\u2019t include moral injuries. The traditional diagnosis of PTSD is only about what others are trying to do to you \u2013 moral injury is about what you have done to others, or failed to do for others. PTSD should encompass both aspects, but it currently doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
So Edmonds said the docs told him he didn\u2019t have a problem, just go home and get a grip. And that, of course, was another betrayal.<\/p>\n
When he reported for work, Edmonds told his bosses what he figured they\u2019d find out anyway, that he had gone to a mental health clinic seeking help for PTSD. With that, he said, they concluded he was a security risk and made his life an even greater hell for a month until they told him that if he would transfer out of the unit voluntarily, the episode wouldn\u2019t be reflected in his personnel file.<\/p>\n
Huge betrayal and a gaping moral injury.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know how to put Iraq in words,\u201d Edmonds wrote. \u201cI don\u2019t have the words to describe that inner fight, how my many selves struggled to navigate a year-long moral battlefield. How every day I was forced to make a choice \u2013 do I torture another human being or not \u2013 and how every day, over and over again, no matter the decision, I made a soul-crushing wrong choice, and how the other stresses of war, the daily expectation of death, the failing war strategy, the isolation, the austere environment, and the girlfriend back home, how these other things only compromised my mental immunity, lowered my resistance. Over time, my mind slowed, and then I just \u2026 turned off. I shut down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Did you notice that phrase, \u201cI don\u2019t have the words\u201d?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s exactly what Bessel van der Kolk was talking about a couple of months ago in Philadelphia. When a brain is traumatized, the prefrontal cortex \u2013 the center of rational, ethical decision-making \u2013 shuts down. In particular, the brain\u2019s language center \u2013 the Broca\u2019s area \u2013 shuts down. \u201cWithout a functioning Broca\u2019s area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words,\u201d van der Kolk said.<\/p>\n
If Edmonds couldn\u2019t talk about it, he could at least try to write about it. And writing became his therapy.<\/p>\n
Getting up well before dawn, he thought about each of the moral quandaries he had found himself in. Slowly, he analyzed each of the actions he had taken \u2026 or failed to take. And when he felt his analysis was honest and accurate, he wrote it down on a pad over the kitchen table while his wife and children slept.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe main lesson I took away from my moral examination is that it\u2019s not the person that\u2019s bad \u2013 it\u2019s the situation,\u201d Edmonds told me over dinner one night recently in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
His book ends with one challenging statement: \u201cThe never-ending search for redemption is how I survive my purgatory.\u201d I asked if that meant he was seeking to make atonement for what he had done, or failed to do, and Edmonds said that was right.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy decision to write was my therapy, just for me,\u201d he said. \u201cBut my decision to publish that writing was my way of seeking redemption.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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