Book Review: Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War

Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War. By Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2012. xxvii + 144 pp. $16.00 (paper).Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini have written a difficult book to read. Its difficulty stems not from its style, which is disconcertingly clear, but from its subject matter-the moral injury-which is a distinct and often devastating category of suffering that affects large numbers of veterans.Both authors speak honestly of the ways war has affected their own families. Brock, now co-director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School, is the daughter of a Japanese mother and an American medic whose experiences in Vietnam took a profound toll on him and, by extension, his family. Lettini, a member of the faculty at Starr King School for the Ministry, lost two members of her family to postwar violence.Their growing awareness of moral injury-its reality, depth, and pervasiveness-led them to organize a "Truth Commission on Conscience in War," which was held at Riverside Church in New York in 2012. That event brought together five "truth commissioners," as well as a Virginia psychiatrist, a legal expert on conscientious objection, three religious leaders, and a number of veterans, fourteen of whom testified about their own experience. One outcome of that event is the Soul Repair Center at Brite; another is this book, which tells the stories and provides lengthy quotations of four of the participants. They include an Italian American veteran of Vietnam; a soldiertumed-chaplain with special interest in selective conscientious objection; an African American woman, a veteran herself, now a pastor, whose son was deployed in Iraq; and a Nicaraguan-born son of revolutionary parents who refused redeployment, went AWOL, and received a dishonorable discharge and prison term.The authors define moral injury as the result of either behavior which violates the soldiers own moral values or which contradicts the stated values of their leaders and the institutions that support them. Neither Brock nor Lettini is an absolute pacifist; they take the Christian tradition of just war theory and its criteria with great seriousness and point out that official American military policies affirm strong principles for the appropriate conduct of war. But they describe how the training recruits receive, deeply instilled bonds of loyalty to each other and to the group, and the actual practice of anti-insurgency warfare ignore such definitions and instead lead to behavior which is brutal and erodes the ability to make critical decisions.Five chapters form the body of this book. The first describes the motivations that lead young men and women to serve in the military, and reminds us of the role of economic inequality in recruitment. The second chapter looks at the ways in which participating in war, especially the types of military action where the distinction between friends and enemies is unclear, permanently changes people.In the third chapter, "Coming Home Is Hell," the authors explore what it is like for veterans to return home after a period of military action which not only contradicts their expectations and belies the promises made to them at the time they entered the armed forces, but also leaves them with a legacy of profound guilt for behavior that violated their own moral standards. "Veterans return from combat to solitary confinement. …