This is a paper based on work with combat veterans over many years and addresses some of the most difficult and painful concerns people can have, the difficulty of which is magnified by involvement in war. It includes discussion of forgiveness of others and the self, with the decision to forgive, not all or nothing, and not a foregone conclusion.
Recently the phrase “moral injury” has been applied to some of the issues addressed in this paper. While I’m glad the moral and emotional reactions to participating in combat are being more fully considered by psychologists who used to only talk about the fear related to traumatic experiences, I’m not sure that the injury metaphor is most useful way to consider them. The term moral injury appears to be about what is already considered when we talk about guilt. Guilt people feel related to trauma, whether it seems justified to others or not, or necessary or not, has already been subject of much psychotherapeutic work, written about for a long long time and undoubtedly considered even longer.
