When I was growing up in a family headed primarily by my mother, I knew something was terribly wrong, only I didn’t know what. The only thing my mother would ever say about my father’s absence was that he had become ill. She never elaborated beyond that. But one time I did overhear something about him being involved in The Battle of Anzio in WWII. Last month I overcame my longtime squeamy abhorrence of history and did some research on The Battle of Anzio. In doing so, I came to more deeply understand the roots and nature of my father’s specific illness: moral injury.
Here’s the key piece from Wikipedia that briefly describes the botched military strategy at The Battle of Anzio:
Due to faulty intelligence, when daylight arrived American Rangers were engaged and cut off. A brutal battle with elements of the Hermann Göring division followed. After several hours of fighting which saw the Ranger’s ammunition supplies run low, the Germans drove a group of US prisoners at bayonet point towards the US position, demanding surrender. Each time a German was shot, a prisoner was bayoneted. Rangers began surrendering individually or in small groups prompting other (Rangers), acting on their own authority, to shoot them. Of the 767 men in the 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions, (only) 6 returned to the Allied lines and 761 were killed or captured.
Even simply reading about this experience catches my breath and generates a tension in my stomach and a rigid tightness in my throat. At a minimum my father not only witnessed his friends being killed by German soldiers, but he was forced to witness his friends killing his friends. Not to mention what he might have done.
Deep Soul Wounding
We are all carrying our parents’ trauma histories, as Victoria Costello traces and documents in her recent book, A Lethal Inheritance. But not all trauma results in moral injury. According to Jonathan Shay, a retired VA psychiatrist and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, moral injury is a deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, his or her sense of morality, and additionally disorganizes their relationship to society. Shay and six colleagues published an article in the December 2009 Clinical Psychological Review in which they define moral injury as a wound that can occur when people participate in, witness or fall victim to actions that transgress their most deeply held moral beliefs. While the severity of this kind of wound differs from person to person, moral injury can lead to deep despair. It can also turn your very best life option into: abandon your family.
Dr. Alice Hunt with the Soul Repair Project at the Chicago Theological Seminary elaborates further: Moral injury is an inner conflict based on a moral evaluation of having inflicted harm, a judgment grounded in a sense of personal agency. It results from a capacity for both empathy and self-reflection. Judgments pertain not only to active behavior, such as killing, but also to passive behavior, such as failing to prevent harm or witnessing a close friend being slain. Moral injury can also involve feeling betrayed by persons in authority. Even when an action may have saved someone’s life or felt right at the time, a person may come to feel remorse or guilt for having had to inflict harm that violates his or her inner values. Just having to view and handle human remains can sometimes cause moral injury. Jonathan Shay sums up the damage succinctly: “Moral injury corrodes the soul.”
Soul Corrosion
My father clearly came back to civilian life with his soul corroded. With no formal education beyond elementary school, little skilled job training and a long history of physical and emotional abuse that happened long before the war – he was imprisoned and forced to work on a chain gang in Louisiana in the late 30s – he was set up early for stressors neither his soul nor his neurobiology were equipped to handle.
And even in his absence, I inherited significant aspects of that neurobiology and that soul corrosion. When I look in the mirror these days, it’s difficult not to see many physical reminders of my father. But more importantly, I appear to have “inherited” his acute awareness of the suffering that permeates the world. I see evidence of it everywhere I look: from a nation of people attempting to use food (and information as food) as medicine and generating unprecedented levels of obesity and severely damaging their health in the process, to the massive radioactive “water cloud” making its way across the Pacific in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, killing untold amounts of sea life along way. Despite government assurances, it’s difficult not to imagine this and other inevitable unintended consequences as serious wounds humanity might ultimately fail to recover from. Some small sliver of soul recovery hopes and prays that I’m wrong. And so long as I’m able to pray and work in the service of relief from suffering, it seems the recovery struggle will continue. For even in his absence, I’ve managed to somehow grow the “persistence muscle” that research suggests fathers play a major role in strengthening.
Finally, here’s something my father didn’t consciously know that I do know: human beings and their brains are unfathomably complex creations. And it is the nature of networks and matrices that all it takes is one crucial connection to set a Eureka-Aha Experience ablaze. And one single experience can completely change the course of personal history and correct the sometimes lethal ingenuity of my confusion. And thus I remain ever-hopeful.
Good work, Friend. Happy Father’s Day to a wonderful man.
Hi Mark. What an elegant and powerful post, reminding me of the best and worst of our dads who understood that the War to End All Wars did not have that result, and so lived its offspring (WWII) as we now live their legacies. Our world has become a complexity of wars…the war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on hate, the war on drugs….not to mention other nations’ wars and genocides. Yet, despite the Pandora’s box of evils, we somehow manage to find the hope that is in the bottom of the box and come from that place. It is an exercise of putting our attention there and not getting lost in the other confusion, for sure. The brain is complex and your refocusing on the Eureka is a powerful reminder to me to focus on what we do have and to put our power, individually and collectively behind what we can do in our circumstances.
I appreciate how your dad came to believe the loss of his right to a family and happiness after his experiences, witnessing, and loss of his ability to protect. I also appreciate how well and wisely you carry those rights and share them with all of us. Muscle strength indeed. Thank you for reminding me that even in strife there is strength and that hope fuels love. I will carry that message this Father’s Day. Thank you! Julie
Dear Mark,
This blog post: “Struggling to Recover From My Father’s Moral Injury” struck a deep chord within me. The term ‘moral injury’ is a powerfully evocative one, and I appreciate your highlighting it, not just in the context of the original injury, but in your pointing out so clearly the long-lasting damage that reverberates through the generations that follow the original injury.
I was saddened to hear the story of your father’s grievous moral injury. I too had not heard of that particular awful incident in WWII, and even though I share with you an ‘inherited acute awareness of the suffering that permeates the world,’ I was shocked, but sadly, not surprised by the account from Wikipedia.
The picture of G.I.’s thrusting bayonets evoked memories in me of being in Basic Training in early 1968…standing with all the other trainees being screamed at by DI’s to: “Kill that bastard! Kill Charlie, or he’ll kill you!” as we stabbed our bayonets into the targets we faced…and being quite disturbed by the insanity being demonstrated by my ‘captors….’
Coincidental to reading your post, I’m engaged in my usual Sunday activity, listening to my local AM station’s broadcasts of two of my favorite radio programs: “Soundprint” (found at http://www.soundprint.org/) and “The State We’re In,” a Radio Netherlands production that’s subtitled “How We Treat Each Other Around the World.”
(found at http://www.rnw.nl/english/dossier/thestatewerein)
“Soundprint” this morning is running two stories in a feature called “War and Forgiveness.” (http://war_forgiveness.soundprint.org/) which was produced collaboratively by Soundprint, WNYC, and Radio Netherlands.
The first story is about the Korean ‘Comfort Women’ – the women kidnapped by the Japanese Army that were forced to sexually service their troops…definitely ‘moral injury’ territory…
In part two, “Holland’s Black Page,” Producer Dheera Sujan from RADIO NETHERLANDS, traces the stories of four former soldiers who tortured and killed Indonesian prisoners. Now in their seventies, they remember the details of quieting an open rebellion in the late 1940’s. They remember the electrocutions, the torture and the killing. They also remember how they had to live in shame with the secrets. They call for the Dutch government to accept some measure of responsibility for what they say they were ordered to do. Their solace lies in being able to publicly discuss the events.
This segment included moving interviews of the four soldiers, during which they clearly evidence their shame and awareness of their moral injuries. Though they never use that term, I hope that it comes into wider use, as it so clearly describes their condition… I’m certainly going to do my best to bring wider attention to it.
Hi Sandy,
Thanks for taking the time to offer this comment.
When I look at the ramifications that this isolated incident has had in my life and in many other lives that my father touched, it becomes much clearer how dharma and karma work. What also becomes clear is how skillful, meritorious actions can also have widespread ramifications.
Again, thanks.
~ Mark
Mark ~
This excellent post broke my heart today. I had no idea about this horrible Battle of Anzio!
Your words affirm what I came to understand about my father at the end of his own life. He survived both the Battle of the Bulge, as well as Omaha Beach, but never spoke of any of his experiences to my brother and me until he was a few months away from death. Then we began to learn of the horrors he had witnessed. He suffered tremendously from “survivor’s guilt” as well. His thoughts and actions regarding ethics, values, and morals always confused me. I couldn’t formulate or grasp a clear understanding of him in most ways.
It took dad a long time to work up enough nerve to go view the film, “Saving Private Ryan.” He went by himself and sat in the back of the theater so that he could make a hasty exit if necessary. He told my husband later that as he waded ashore from the landing craft that dumped them there, he chose to shield his own body with that of one of his fallen comrades to deflect the bullets that were coming from every direction.
I remember he pulled out a black & white photograph to share with us that we had never seen before. It was a photo of him, in his early 20’s, coming off one of those battlefields. It was taken by a Time Life photographer. I barely recognized him, but I was chilled to see the distinctive checked-out look on his face of what was previously known as the “1,000 yard stare” – which we now know is PTSD.
He was largely unavailable emotionally to my family and was cruel at times. At the end of his life he ate meals with some other WWII vets at the retirement place where he lived out his final days. He loved those guys and I couldn’t believe the camraderie and respect they exhibited to one another. When he was actively dying, it wasn’t very apparent. I remember the hospice nurse listening to his erratic heartbeat and taking his pulse. She shook her head and said to me, “I can’t believe how these old vets manage to hide their distress and pain. Most of the time they just keep it well hidden.”
We have so much to learn and face… and I appreciate your fine work and inquiry that includes this deep wounding.
Thank you for this post on Father’s Day.
Gratefully,
Melissa
Hi Melissa,
Thanks for taking the time to post this comment to the blog.
I’m guessing your father’s war experiences colored much of his
life back home while you were growing up. Whatever cruelty showed
up for you was unfortunately the best he could manage given the ways
that moral injury profoundly disorganizes the brain. The battle for him
did not end once the war did. Nor did it end for my father. And I would
disagree with the hospice nurse: soldier’s wounds are rarely well-hidden
when we refine our ability to turn toward and tune in to the suffering of
others. It becomes visible in every pore of their skin, in every grimace that
appears on their face, in every interaction that is emotionally over the top,
in all the things such warriors don’t say when things really need to be said.
Been there, done all of it, learned well on the battlefield of the housing
projects where I grew up.
Continued blessings to you going forward.
~ Mark
A powerful tribute to the many wounded fathers who went to serve their country, and keep the democracy they believed in secure. What a sad travesty it all was…and still is. Thanks Mark, for the story and admission of that troubling mix of apprehension and hope. I too am in that intersection.
Judy
Mark, I am deeply moved by this post, it re-arranges my own interior and consciousness. I pause deeply and wonder and too hope. The expression “moral injury” is new to me but it grabbed at me, caught my stomach and breath.
Thank you for being able to shine light in such dark spaces.
A simple statement of deep appreciaiton for this post and the healing that allowed it to be offered.
Thanks, Linda. I often find, when I look deeply into things, that the best outcome for all, while perhaps not my personal preference, is what actually the Universe, in all its wondrous complexity, has unfold.
XOXOX Mark
Me 2 ! The growing awareness of that “deep looking” makes it easier and easier and easier to relax into Radical Appreciation and “Loving What Is.” An excellent way to expand one’s comfort zone …. eh what?
An excellent way, indeed. With new invitations for appreciation showing up regularly.
XOXOX Mark
Mark, thank you for the link to this commentary from today’s blog. I work with Veterans and First responders who suffer from PTSD and moral injury in a program named Warriors Ascent. This was helpful in elucidating more of the dynamics of moral injury.
Studiously yours!
Walt
PS the program is free so send em if you got em!