Moral Injury

By Dr. Sara Hart ,

Published September 25, 2026 at 4:02 PM PDT

Sign outside a building reads "Department of Veterans Affairs" and "To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan."

"Moral injury is a relatively new term for a very ancient idea that people can be damaged to the cores of their personhood by life experiences that violently contradict deeply held, and deeply necessary beliefs about themselves and the world." - Bill Nash, USMC/UCSD

Welcome back to SNAFUBAR, a podcast on American militarism and national myths. What do veterans, psychiatrists, and ancient Greek authors have in common? They help us understand and define the complexities of moral injury and post traumatic stress. The United States is a martial nation, the military and its pageantry is everywhere. But is that same energy found in the Veterans Affairs Offices? As a martial nation, the United States is quick to deploy and send troops abroad. But when soldiers return home, where is that same energy and support? Where are the benefits and social programs for our servicemembers returning home from war? Do we only ‘support our troops’ as servants to fight in wars? Only when it is relevant in a nationalistic way? We’ll discuss this episode of SNAFUBAR.

SNAFUBAR is hosted by ⁠⁠⁠Sara Hart⁠⁠⁠, Chair of the Applied Humanites Department at Cal Poly Humboldt, and ⁠⁠⁠Jeff Crane ⁠⁠⁠who is an Environmental Historian and Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.

Research and writing for the show by Liam Salcuni and Roman Sotomayor. SNAFUBAR is produced by Abigail Smithson and brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.

Works Cited:

♪♪

>>Dwight D. Eisenhower (Archival Audio): You are about to embark upon the great crusade.

>>John F. Kennedy (Archival Audio): The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.

>>Douglas MacArthur (Archival Audio): Only the dead have seen the end of war.

>>Dwight D. Eisenhower (Archival Audio): We will accept nothing less than full victory.

[MUSIC]

>>Sara Hart: You're listening to SNAFUBAR at Cal Poly Humboldt. Hello listeners and welcome to the SNAFUBAR, a show about American war and American myth about the nation's military history and its shared sense of meaning, value, and purpose.

>>Jeff Crane: I'm Jeff Crane, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt and a peacetime veteran of the US Army, Airborne baby. [LAUGHTER] All the way.

>>Sara Hart: How's your knees?

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, you know, they're sore.

>>Sara Hart: Uh huh. And I'm Sara Hart, chair of the Applied Humanities Department, also at Cal Poly Humboldt, the daughter of a Marine combat veteran from Vietnam.

>>Jeff Crane: And today, we're talking about shared meaning and about moral injury and American militarism.

>>Sara Hart: The psychological and spiritual reintegration of America's veterans is inconceivable without a functional national self understanding, one that's broadly shared enough to provide a meaningful cultural world in the context of which combat experience might be integrated, and combat injuries might be healed. The nation needs a functional shared sense of what's right, a shared sense of purpose in which combat experience might be understood by those who have it, as necessary for a greater good. As meaningful, if painful. So we're going to look at a lot of different writers today. But Marine Corps Veteran Karl Marlantes from Vietnam, whom we'll hear more from later, points straight to this need, and he describes his own experience like this. "When I did eventually face death," he writes, "the death of those I killed and those killed around me. I had no framework or guidance to help me put combat's terror, exhilaration, horror, guilt, and pain into some larger framework that would have helped me find some meaning in them later."

>>Jeff Crane: That's a powerful statement, not only the quote from Marlantes but also, you know, what you wrote here. That whole passage is great. You're assuming a premise I think we need to discuss carefully. That is that Americans actually think about and care about reintegrating combat veterans into society. You know, and I have questions, as you know. So maybe today this episode can help with that issue.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, and, Jeff, today's topic is one that you and I have been talking about for a long time, and it's something that each of us has been thinking about for a lot longer. We've presented together on moral injury. We've worked on projects dedicated to addressing moral injury and to providing spaces in which moral injury might begin to heal.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, we have. I mean, we just recently had this incredible opportunity to give a talk on moral injury at the ancient Roman and Macedonian Theater in Stobi, Macedonia. And we had students read excerpts from Homer's Iliad.

>>Sara Hart: Which we're also going to talk about today.

>>Jeff Crane: Which I could talk about on and on and on. Yes, the Iliad, a story about the rage of Achilles, a combat leader who faces betrayal in the middle of the Trojan War, at the end, really, right? Nine years in. And we also had students with us, students and staff related to the archaeological programs we have in Macedonia. They're at Stobi and they read from the Iliad and they read from Euripides' The Trojan Women. And that's his tragedy about the impacts of the Trojan War on noncombatants, on women mostly and also children. One thing that was so cool about this experience, is that these same works would have been performed or orated at the Stobi Theatre when it was first built nearly 2000 years ago.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, we really just got to stand in the thick of history for a minute there in the ruins of the time we were talking about, which was also a time that we were kind of using as a lens to look at our own time. So that was a real trip.

>>Jeff Crane: And the students dug it.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah

>>Jeff Crane: They were all coming up to us one on one saying, that was amazing.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah

>>Jeff Crane: That was amazing. That was so cool. And, you know, it's a great approach, to you know, what we do is we give a lecture context, we talk about a concept, then we have them read from the text, and then we discuss what was in the text. We've seen the Trojan Women used before here at Humboldt in Bryan Doerries' Theater of War Project, which as a project is really amazing. And Dorries is a classicist. He uses Greek tragedies to help spur public conversations about moral injury and other related issues to help people navigate their feelings about, and psychological health, and responses to war and suffering, grief, and the possibility of reintegration. He puts professional actors together with some locals up on the stage. He chooses excerpts, which they read dramatically, and then he facilitates a conversation with the audience and with the readers on the stage. He'd already been working on these things for a few years, but it was after 2008, when he led Marines in San Diego in stage readings from Sophocles that the Theater of War Project was born.

>>Sara Hart: And the Arts and Service events. Those have been a lot of fun, too, very rewarding. And in those, we bring together veteran and professional artists to offer hands on, public facing, art making opportunities. Those events have given us a chance to recognize and honor military service, while also highlighting veterans continuing post military service and thinking together about what service and war mean to each of us.

>>Jeff Crane: But this kind of work and therapy through art, for example, and engagement, these are some of the most effective therapeutic practices for post traumatic stress disorder. And we're going to talk about that word later.

>>Sara Hart: We will.

>>Jeff Crane: And for moral injury. And at all these different venues, it's art that has given us and those with us a way to talk about trauma and betrayal, to talk about war and its effects, and talking about it and listening are integral to reintegration for combat veterans. So yeah, we've been thinking about moral injury for quite a while. Go arts, go humanity. We rule.

>>Sara Hart: Woop woop. So listeners, here's the thing. What brought us here to this episode on moral injury is Vietnam and Iraq. We didn't say, "Hey, let's do an episode on moral injury." What we have said a bunch of times--

>>Jeff Crane: We've been kind of wandering our way towards it, right?

>>Sara Hart: We've talked about it. It's been on the table, but what we have said really directly is, "How are we going to talk about Vietnam?"

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah.

>>Sara Hart: "And how are we going to talk about Iraq?" Yeah. And we've said that a lot. And since the early days when we first started planning for this project, the show, we've spent, who knows how many hours talking about so many different wars, and figures, and events, and stories that would be right at home here in the SNAFUBAR. We spent a disproportionate amount of that time talking about Vietnam and Iraq. Both of our fathers were in Vietnam, so we are familiar in an experiential way with some of the impacts of that war.

Jeff Crane: I watched it on TV. I'm that old.

>>Sara Hart: I watched it on TV.

>>Jeff Crane: Yes. Vague memories. My dad commenting from the living room, yeah.

>>Sara Hart: Flagposting, Jeff is old.

[LAUGHTER]

>>Jeff Crane: I'm seasoned.

>>Sara Hart: Not me.

>>Jeff Crane: Like a great wine.

>>Sara Hart: And for Iraq, you know, we were both well into adulthood, politically aware, in the early stages of being academics. And so, you know, we were both by then, thinking a lot about war and its human cost. These are two American wars that we really just haven't been able to approach in terms of putting together an episode. But we've known from the beginning that they are two American wars that have a lot to offer to the SNAFUBAR. So we've decided to come to them here for now in one of the ways that we experience them, through the lens of moral injury. I suppose that starting here is something of an acknowledgment of our own difficulty with these wars, or at least mine, for sure. We hope that entering this topic through moral injury will give us a kind of foundation, maybe a tonal foundation for future episodes. Our process of research, writing, editing, and producing is continuously evolving, and we really do want to be on top of our game when we take these on.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, and aside from being able to give that tonal foundation, to maybe start us off on an increasingly or intentionally empathetic footing, picking up moral injury makes sense for the two of us for a lot of reasons. It's an entry point that allows us to be honest, maybe more so than we could be otherwise. Sara and I, we are skeptics, when it comes to American militarization and the superficial patriotism of the civilian culture that supports it or purports to support it, right? If you've listened to SNAFUBAR before, you probably already know this about us. But in this show, we're not trying to dunk on the military. Part of what brings us to these topics is a shared respect for the military, a recognition of its value, an appreciation for service, and for those who undertake it, a desire to truly honor sacrifices that have brought each of us here today.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah.

>>Jeff Crane: We don't want to fall into unfair or lazy criticism. We do want to shine a light on how often the ideals and the values that we use to drum up and to justify wars are not ideals or values that we actually practice as a nation. They're not the ideals or values that we see being practiced by the ones who make the decisions to send our young people into war. Most of these “war deciders”, I'm thinking of some old phraseology, have not actually served themselves. We do want to consider ways that we as individuals might contribute to the society and the culture that we say we want. We don't want to score some easy points through knee jerk anti-militarism. It's a little lazy, a little too easy, right?

>>Sara Hart: And not always true.

>>Jeff Crane: And not always true. And with Vietnam and Iraq, there are just soooo many mistakes to talk about. Sooooo many failures and sooo many snafus from first conception to post-return. Lies and abuses and hypocrisies and at the end of it all, extensive suffering. And we also want to shift that light from Americans because in this country, we talk about war, we tend to talk about American numbers. There's a little trick I do when I teach Vietnam. I say, "How many people died in Vietnam?" I say, "How many people died in Vietnam?" They say, "52, 50," I said, "That's funny. I recall saying the word people not Americans." [OVERLAPPING] It's more like 3 million, right?

>>Sara Hart: It's up to 4 million.

>>Jeff Crane: So we have to keep in mind that millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis and others who have died and suffered due to our actions. To not do this, to not consider them is to engage in brute nationalism and imperial ideology.

>>Sara Hart: Too much suffering, too much of it unnecessary. Today, we're going to focus on one kind of suffering and on the American veterans who have endured it. We're introducing moral injury as a concept. We're going to talk a little bit about its history through the work of Jonathan Shay and others. Moral injury is connected to post traumatic stress, but distinct from it. We'll talk some about that. And we'll turn to a few veteran authors, Tim O'Brien, Karl Marlantes, and Bill Russell Edmonds, as we try to think about where to go from here, how our society and each of us in it might work toward diminishing the impacts of combat injuries, at least so long as we continue to send Americans into war.

>>Jeff Crane: It's worth remembering that this concept is not new. Since the earliest human stories, we've seen a recognition that combat is powerful, dangerous, often debilitating psychological, and spiritual effects on the people who experience it. Iraq Veteran and Army Special Forces counterinsurgency specialist Lieutenant Colonel Bill Russell Edmonds served in Mosul as an interrogator advisor, working closely with the Iraqi security forces. And he wrote a book called "God Is Not Here", in which he recounts his experiences in Iraq and his post-service psychological and spiritual collapse.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, it's gripping. It's pretty heart rending. This book, it's highly recommended.

>>Jeff Crane: And we'll read a little from that book later. But for now, I want to look at the introduction to that book. The introduction is written by a former Director of Combat and Operational Stress Control for the US Marine Corps and Professor Of psychiatry at UC San Diego, Dr. Bill Nash. And he's currently working for the VA, Veterans Affairs, in LA. This introduction is one of the best things ever written on moral injury. It's brief, it's clear, and it's written by someone with training and decades of direct experience dealing with combat stress and its effects. And in it, Nash brings us back to our main point.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, good. Let's hear what Nash has to say.

>>Jeff Crane: Nash writes this, "Moral injury is a relatively new term for a very ancient idea that people can be damaged to the cores of their personhood by life experiences that violently contradict deeply held, and deeply necessary beliefs about themselves and the world."

>>Sara Hart: Wow. It's an ancient idea in the Greek epics and tragedies, as in so many other myths and sacred texts, war involves the sacred, the infinite, the ultimate concerns of any people who wage it. Some of the authors we're looking at today make this point strongly that you're either open to that as a society, you recognize it and deal with it openly, or you're repressing a lot, and that'll have effects. The ancient Greeks, well, it turns out that the ancient Greeks were pretty exemplary in how they handled it.

>>Jeff Crane: Okay, listeners, welcome back to SNAFUBAR a show about America, war, militarization, and the culture that supports it. Today, we're talking about moral injury, a relatively new phrase for a very ancient concept. Now we're going to turn to the work of Jonathan Shay, who introduced this phrase, and to the ancient Greek world that he uses as an interpretive tool to help us understand today's wars and to think about how we might manage the suffering caused by those wars. So let's go ancient Greeks.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, and we're going to start with Themis. She's both a goddess and a concept, having a personalized and also a generalized form, and she's not alone in this. It's pretty common in the Pantheon. You know, we can think of examples from all over the world. But Themis, she's already alive as a goddess in the earliest Greek texts. So she's old. She shows up in Homer's Iliad, the eighth century BCE epic of the Trojan War. Where her role is to summon the gods and to maintain order between them at their meetings.

>>Jeff Crane: Because they were always fighting--

>>Sara Hart: They always fought.

>>Jeff Crane: So she's like the Robert's Rules of Order of the ancient sacred world?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, but with gravitas and grace.

>>Jeff Crane: Or like me in the early days of deaning here?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, but with gravitas. I--

>>Jeff Crane: [LAUGHTER] But with gravitas and grace.

>>Sara Hart: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. I imagine Roberts as a kind of a stodgy dude, not you, of course. Themis is beautiful. She's the daughter of the Earth and the sky, and we could totally get all metaphorical and interpretive about that, if we wanted to.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, it's good stuff, but I want to hear the next part.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, okay, so by the time we get to Hesiod's Theogony, which is a poem about the origin of the gods and of the cosmos, that's from 700 BCE or about 100 years after Homer. And, okay, listeners, Homer and Hesiod, these are our earliest Greek texts. This is the oldest stuff from the Greek classical world. So by the time we get to Hesiod, Themis is the mother of the Fates. And the Fates, remember, one of them spins the yarn, one of them measures it, and one of them cuts it, and the yarn is your life. Oh, yeah. And she's the mother of the civic virtues, justice, peace, and good order.

>>Jeff Crane: Shakespeare says mortal coil, is that what he's referencing?

>>Sara Hart: There's a coil and they spin the yarn and I don't remember their names.

>>Jeff Crane: Never understood that phrase.

>>Sara Hart: That's pretty good, right. So Romans-- the Romans sometimes depict her, Themis, as holding scales, though our modern day blindfolded scales holding Lady Justice is more directly linked to Themis' daughter, Dike, or justice, than it is directly to Themis. But, there's a link. So that's the goddess.

>>Jeff Crane: And she's also, I think you note, the mother of civic virtues, justice, peace, and good order.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah.

>>Jeff Crane: Right.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the goddess. The concept really follows from that, and it's the concept we'll be paying most attention to today. As a functional concept, one that we live by and depend on, Themis is quote "what's right." It's the moral code or the sense of social trust shared by members of a community. It's moral reliability, mutual responsibility. It's the code of behavior, and it's also faithfulness to that code. It's what's right within a community, the rightness upon which the community sees itself to depend.

>>Jeff Crane: And that's how Jonathan Shay picks up the concept in his work. He says, "Normal adults wrap Themis around themselves as a mantle of safety in the world." unquote, I love that.

>>Sara Hart: That's a good one.

>>Jeff Crane: It's the moral glue that holds a community together that allows each member to continue to trust, and be part of that community, in a meaningful way. We often speak of this in an ethical frame when we discuss social contracts, for example, but these are predicated on a moral approach, right? Themis.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, Themis describes something that people see as meaningful, and that gives their own lives meaning. What's right contextualizes a person's experience within a framework where virtues can be identified, where purpose can be held to. It's got a sacred and not only a social significance, and that's really important. It's not personal. It's way more than that. It's communal and it's cosmic.

>>Jeff Crane: That's really at the center of Shay's work. He takes it seriously, the role that trust plays in enabling a person to maintain a sense of virtue and purpose in their lives. And he looks at how a serious erosion of trust compromises all of that, how it can damage a person's moral judgment and undermine their sense of identity, how it leaves them isolated and disconnected. Shay is an American psychiatrist who's deeply involved with the classics, especially the Greek ones. He retired from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the VA, after we said before, after two decades of working in Boston with, as he describes them, "a group of American combat veterans of the Vietnam War who have severe chronic post traumatic stress disorder." His 1994 book, Achilles in Vietnam, introduces the concept of moral injury as distinct from PTSD or, as we've noted, post traumatic stress disorder, which is already named and being treated increasingly and in different ways across the country.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, 1994, this book comes out, and at that time, my dad, who served two tours in Vietnam, as a Marine combat infantryman in the late 60s, early 70s. At that time, 1994, he was being treated for PTSD and evaluated for a disability rating across the country from Shay with the VA in San Diego. It was 1996, I think, when he was certified with 100% permanent total disability.

>>Jeff Crane: So roughly 25 years after he served.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah.

>>Jeff Crane: Okay.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah.

>>Jeff Crane: Yay, America.

>>Sara Hart: Progress is slow. Um, yeah, and that at the time was identified as severe service-connected post traumatic stress, that's what he had. And so this is a really new concept. So reading Shay's book, where he quotes from a lot of the veterans he's working with, I can definitely relate to it. Especially the experiences that the veterans described with their families, the way they describe their own perspective and challenges.

>>Jeff Crane: You basically identified moral injury in your father.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah.

>>Jeff Crane: That wasn't something the VA identified.

>>Sara Hart: No, moral injury, you know, as I've learned about it, I can look back at him and really see it, but moral injury is not on the books as a clinical diagnosis in the way that PTSD is. Some people think it should be, and I can see why. I can also see why others would rather keep moral injury out of, and apart from, clinical pathologies. You know what I'm not really sure where I fall on that. Mostly, I'm trying to understand, and I'm in a position where my life isn't going to be impacted by the diagnostic insurance codes, you know?

>>Jeff Crane: Well, you assume that. [LAUGHTER] You assume that--

>>Sara Hart: Today does not seem to be--.

>>Jeff Crane: You may have attracted the attention of the gods, a little hubris there.

>>Sara Hart: I know.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah.

>>Sara Hart: Oh, well, hopefully, okay, so moral injury has a Z code right now, which and that's recent. That just happened in 2025.

>>Jeff Crane: What is a Z code?

>>Sara Hart: A Z code, it means that it shows up in the back of the book that lists clinical disorders in a sort of appendix. It allows clinicians to code a circumstance or context that might affect a person's health, but it isn't itself a coded disorder, which impacts billing for insurance. So I can sort of see it both ways. I don't know. But anyway, okay, let's get back to Shay and his definition of it. How does he identify moral injury?

>>Jeff Crane: Shay describes moral injury as the "Undoing of character", that results from betrayal of "what's right".

>>Sara Hart: That Themis.

>>Jeff Crane: Right. Betrayal of Themis, especially when the one doing the betraying is someone with authority, a trusted leader, for example. He uses the experience of Achilles in the Iliad to get at this. In the story, Achilles is betrayed by his commanding general Agamemnon, when Agammnon takes for himself Achilles' own lawful war prize, the woman Briseis. And this is the opening, of-- this is year nine of a ten year war at the city of Troy, and this is the opening of this epic poem. So for Achilles, this is a great dishonor, a violation of his moral expectations, a violation of Themis. In response, he flies into a rage that defines the arc of the story. The book opens with a line, Sing goddess, the rage of Achilles. That rage and its consequences, that's what the Iliad is about. Achilles ends up betraying his own men, isolating himself, sitting out the fight while his men are losing, and dying, and begging for his help. I remember when Odysseus went and basically begged him, and he's like, No. He even prayed to his mother, who's a goddess to let his own men get so badly defeated - i.e. die - that Agamemnon will recognize his betrayal and return his prize. He also wants fellow soldiers to care about how much he's been wronged.

>>Sara Hart: So basically, Achilles turns into a petulant killing machine.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. Awesome. And Shay uses.

>>Jeff Crane: We need more of those.

>>Sara Hart: We need more of those. It is a really great story, if anyone out there hasn't read it. And Shay uses this epic, this classic story of combat, and betrayal, and rage as an interpretive lens for understanding the experience of the veterans he worked with.

>>Jeff Crane: Correct. And he follows it up in 2002 with a book called Odysseus in America, where he uses the Odyssey, which is also by Homer, and which follows the Iliad describing one combat veteran's ten-year journey home. No surprise. Odysseus. He uses that text and Odysseus' experience in it as a way to understand how the veterans he's working with have experienced their return from war and their reintegration into civilian life. One reason to keep reading this classic text is that they speak to the conditions of daily life now, as much as then. They definitely speak to the human challenges that are faced when a nation goes to war, and when that nation's veterans return from combat. It also provides some distance from current conflicts, which, given our ongoing culture war society, helps us have productive discussions.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, sometimes a little bit of distance can make things possible.

>>Jeff Crane: I mean, we've got people that, you know, fought in the wars that are happening right now, and so it's going to be hard to emotionally distance themselves when you say, "This is everything that went wrong and what you did...".

>>Sara Hart: Right.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah.

>>Sara Hart: But you can look at an ancient Greek text and see things.

>>Jeff Crane: Right.

>>Sara Hart: And Shay uses the Homeric epics. Brian Dorrie's Theatre of War Project uses the Greek tragedies. You know, we could also turn to David's Psalms and the Hebrew Bible for insights into combat, betrayal, moral failure in return. I think David and Achilles would have a lot to talk about.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, well, you know, I appreciate you bringing in one of the great texts, the Bible, good religious studies approach. But, as the Bible also says, nothing new under the sun.

>>Sara Hart: There's nothing new under the sun. We can read-- these old texts have something to tell us. They are... The Bible and the classics, perennially relevant, you know?

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, absolutely. And Themis for the ancient Greeks, as we said, is what's right. It's the shared moral order that holds a community together, upon which that community depends. Violations of it can have catastrophic impacts, and understanding those impacts is one step toward healing. For society, understanding those impacts can be a step toward understanding the moral order that has been betrayed, and living more honestly according to it, and then trying to find ways to repair that break in the moral order, right?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, and even maybe, like, shift the moral order towards something that you want to live more honestly according to.

>>Jeff Crane: Oh.

>>Sara Hart: Oh.

>>Jeff Crane: Oh. That's another show.

>>Sara Hart: Ooh. So Shay is the first one who identified moral injury as distinct from PTSD. And we might know that he quibbles with that acronym with the name post traumatic stress disorder, which he says, "sounds like an ailment, even though it is evident from the definition that what we are dealing with is an injury", end quote. He writes, "We do not refer to a veteran who has his arm blown off by a grenade, as suffering from missing arm disorder." But he goes on to say, "I'm not going to fight it, PTSD, it is, even though I much prefer psychological injury."

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, that's pretty good. There was an earlier name for this, and it was shell shock. Yeah. So we can look back in earlier wars and see the terminology used for the impact of combat on people. So the impact of war has been understood. And in fact, to famous director John Huston. He made a documentary about shell shock as part of his work producing, I think four or five films, for the Signal corps during World War Two.

>>Sara Hart: The Army Signal Corps?

>>Jeff Crane: The Army Signal Corps, Correct. It was produced in '46. And so the military was concerned about veterans of World War Two returning to society with shell shock or what they called psycho-neurosis. I'm sure Johnson Shay would love that term. Yeah. And how they would be reintegrated. So Huston was tasked with making a film that would convince the public that those veterans treated for mental instability were completely normal. I'm watching this great show, and they have a great lines like "everyone looks normal from across the street." Like, what's normal, right? The title originally was, and are you ready for this, Sarah?

>>Sara Hart: Uhhh, maybe.

>>Jeff Crane: The Returning Psycho-Neurotics.

[LAUGHTER]

>>Jeff Crane: It's like, you're welcome. I shut down the death camps, but thanks for calling me psycho-neurotic.

>>Sara Hart: Basically a translation of "thank you for your service."

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, jeez.

>>Sara Hart: It's very strange.

>>Jeff Crane: And, you know, it's funny because I was working on this script. What we do is one person writes a script and a couple of other people edit it, right? So I'm going through editing, and I just vaguely remember that Huston had made a film that had been shut down. I could not remember the details. So I did a deep dive, right? Um. So for this film, he recorded about 70 hours of veterans being treated at a hospital in Long Island, and the film is very honest in its depictions. In fact, some people believe that the fact that they were being filmed really helped many of these guys with their therapy as they talked about their experience. Army was furious because it showed the psychological issues from war, and they thought it would undermine the ability of the veterans to be reintegrated if this movie was actually shown. Huston argued that they were angry about the film because it undermined their perpetuation, the military and our society's perpetuation of the warrior myth, the idea that war tempers you and purifies you and strengthens you and that you return stronger militarily and spiritually. They confiscate the film. In fact, to the degree that when Huston tried to show it to some of his friends at the Museum of Modern Arts, military police came and took the film away. It wasn't released until the 1980s. James Agee, some people might know him as the author of the classic study, Let us Now Praise Famous Men. And I learned also he wrote the screenplay for one of the great movies, The Night of the Hunter. He managed to see the film before it was banned. And he wrote the following about the documentary in The Nation, "John Huston's Let There be Light, a fine, terrible, valuable nonfiction film about psycho-neurotic soldiers has been forbidden civilian circulation by the War Department. I don't know what is necessary to reverse the disgraceful decision, but if dynamite is required, then dynamite is indicated." And I think what he's saying there is, we need to see this. Yes. Right?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, I mean, MPs at the Museum of Modern Art, MPs at the MOMA.

>>Jeff Crane: Well, they might have grabbed it before they showed up at the-- They might have gone to his house, right? Yeah.

>>Sara Hart: So we've understood the issue and chosen not to act as a society. That completely tracks, unfortunately, And I do want to pause on this disorder issue. Like Shay, I'm really uncomfortable with the disorder part. I don't like it. Shay points to the difference between a disorder and an injury. Disorder suggests that there's something wrong with the person, that there's an internal ailment. Injuries suggests something happened to the person and that its effects can be traced and recognized. The symptoms of PTSD are normal responses to abnormal circumstances. They're definitely out of place when a person returns from combat, which is, you know, a very abnormal circumstance, right, to the so called normal circumstances of the civilian world. But it doesn't make sense to expect people to just untrain when the training is what kept you alive. And it's kind of like that sits under disorder for me. Seeing it as a disorder also, and maybe more-- maybe this is my main issue, is that seeing PTSD or post traumatic stress as a disorder to be individually treated, I think that skips over something. It skips over the need for thoughtful, careful, community connected reintegration. It skips over the role that society plays in the disorder, something that it it doesn't sound like Huston skipped over in his thoughts on, you know, the warrior myth. Understanding it as an individual disorder skips over society's role in the circumstances that created it, and in the post combat context of return, where the disorder, so called, finds expression. So, I don't know. Anyway, I use the full acronym for ease and because then people know what I'm talking about. But when I spell it out, when I say the actual words, I tend to say post traumatic stress. Let's just go ahead and leave the disorder part off, I think, unless we're all going to take a little piece of that disorder to ourselves.

>>Jeff Crane: Oh, nice. I like the way you close that out. That's really good. Yeah. Yeah, let's leave disorder off. You know, as we're working through all this material on America and its wars, this is the kind of thing that we find ourselves paying attention to that we notice most often in our discussions and our readings. The way that our society relates to war and to its effects, there's just so much that we ignore, or assume, or sweep under the rug. So much that we distance ourselves from one way or another, so much that goes unthought and really also unsaid, right?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah.

>>Jeff Crane: Edward Tick is another clinical therapist who, like Shay, has spent his career working with combat veterans, mostly from Vietnam. He began treating veterans in 1979, and along with Shay, he was an early advocate for thinking about treatment in terms of what he called soul wounding or moral trauma. In his 2014 book, Warriors Return: Restoring the Soul After War, he speaks to this possibility that civilian or non military society might have a more significant role than we usually think when it comes to PTSD and moral injury. Tick writes, "When we are not united as a nation in pursuit of a necessary shared goal demanding collective sacrifice, when we feel helpless in changing or responding towards crises and casualty lists, when it does not express our values and beliefs, when a society is internally in turmoil over the righteousness or necessity of a military action, when we seriously question whether our leaders are telling us the truth, leading us astray, or pursuing unjust ends, then any of us may become a depressed casualty. The wound that today we call PTSD may not be primarily to the individual, but to the body politic, the nation's soul. Individual servicemen and women who enact the nation's policies may collapse because they are made to carry the collective wound as though it were their individual pathological condition to be treated and endure." Unquote.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, wow, reminds me of Tim O'Brien and The Things They Carried. "They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried."

>>Jeff Crane: "The things they carried were largely determined by necessity." Jimmy Cross "carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men."

>>Sara Hart: "They carried catch-as-catch-can."

>>Jeff Crane: "They all carried ghosts."

>>Sara Hart: Such a good story. Such a good collection. The things they carried, listeners, it's the name of the book and one of the stories in it. It's by Tim O'Brien. But back to Tick's quote, Wow. "The wound may not primarily be to the individual but to the body politic." He writes, "Individual servicemen and women who enact the nation's policies may collapse because they are made to carry the collective wound as though it were their individual pathological condition to be treated and endure." He really pulls no punches there, and he brings us back to Themis, to our national sense of meaning, value, and purpose, and to the-- what he calls, the quote, "necessary shared goal, demanding collective sacrifice that a functional national self understanding might support." That passage asks us how capable or prepared we are to use some united values or beliefs, a shared truth as we evaluate our nation's policies and wars, and as we accept a collective responsibility for the return of the ones who we've sent to fight in those wars. Okay, it's also true, you know, we're hammering on the disorder part of PTSD a little bit in its name, but it's also true that the diagnostic recognition of PTSD was a giant step in the right direction. It didn't draw American culture broadly into any real ownership of that shared responsibility that Shay and Tick and others will point to, but it did allow veterans, especially those who had recently returned from Vietnam, to be treated, to receive a clear disability rating, and therefore to receive some financial support as they work to collect and put back together the pieces of their lives.

>>Jeff Crane: That made an incalculable difference in a lot of people's lives, and it continues to. Post Traumatic Stress entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the DSM as PTSD in 1980, with the book's third edition. And like you've said, Sara, inclusion in the DSM mattered, not only because it increased public recognition and awareness, but also, because we provide a shared clinical language and also made treatment billable to insurance. That's crucial, right? It gave VA doctors a recognized diagnostic category for symptoms that veterans had long been experiencing, and had long been seeking treatment for. And the primary symptoms of PTSD in veterans include hyper-vigilance, sleep problems, the intrusion of unwanted memories, emotional numbing, anger, irritability, and isolation.

>>Sara Hart: Boston University Humanities Professor Joshua Peterson, who wrote a book called Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature, he describes these classic PTSD symptoms as quote, "a healthy fear response stuck in overdrive." And that makes sense to me. Shay describes them as quote, "the persistence of valid adaptations to danger into a time of safety afterward." So if you're trying to stay alive in a combat situation, then it pays to be exceedingly vigilant or persistently alert. You want to be constantly monitoring your surroundings, noticing unidentified objects or unfamiliar faces, watching the exits. It's only hyper-vigilance once you return to civilian life, and it's normal not to be concerned about these unseen threats.

>>Jeff Crane: And, of course, all of us civilians, we don't know or see any of that, right?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah.

>>Jeff Crane: All these behaviors seem weird.

>>Sara Hart: Yes.

>>Jeff Crane: Right. So in that context, return from war. If you can't turn off or turn down the vigilance, if your sleep is interrupted by any noise, and sometimes or often by nightmares, then that wreaks havoc on your nervous system, which can lead to a whole cascade of other physical and psychological problems, including the anger and irritability, the numbing, the isolation. And just to know, we're not talking about all the other issues like traumatic brain injuries, and physical injuries, and therapy, and the drugs related to dealing with those, we're just talking about this mental impact of this thing, right?

>>Sara Hart: It's one of the examples of how mutually cross fertilizing all of these conditions can be, you know? And in Achilles in Vietnam, back to Shay a little bit, one of the veterans Shay is working with tries to describe what that numbing and isolation is like for him. He says, "At Christmas, I try to make it perfect for the kids with a big, fresh tree, trimmed just right. Lots of presents. But it's like I'm watching it through a dirty window. I'm not really there, and they're not really there. I don't know which is which. Maybe none of us is real. It's like I'm wrapped up in some kind of transparent cocoon, and everything gets to me kind of muffled. Oh, expletive. I don't know how to explain it."

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, you can feel that frustration that he has with himself in this experience, how he sees that this is a time for closeness and connection, even though he can't access that or participate in it, the pain that he's experiencing, and the distance they doesn't know what to do with. When we're reading what veterans have written about their experiences and how they've worked to process them, this distance or isolation in a crowd, it shows up a lot, and it's one of the most common symptoms of PTSD in veterans. One of the symptoms they live with with the greatest regularity. Another one is the unwanted and uncontrolled intrusion of traumatic memories. Back to, The Things They Carried, O'Brien writes, "The bad stuff never stops happening. It lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over", unquote.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, and that response that O'Brien describes there is, it's not isolated to Vietnam. It's also one of the classic PTSD symptoms that overlaps with moral injury. Iraq veteran Bill Russell Edmonds, we quoted from Nash's introduction to his book earlier. Edmonds opens that book with this, "Memories from war never fade. If left alone, they come alive and seep and reach through time with searching and grasping claws, ignored, they consume, just as they now consume me." Edmonds is like a picture of persistence. He's determined in his quest for healing, for finding some peace, for becoming the person who can be present for his wife and his daughters. He doesn't get a lot of help from the VA, and he describes that struggle, but he finds his way, and he does it through writing, through an intentional creative act. He doesn't let the memories consume him, as he describes it. He asks with the courage that kind of strains imagination, mine anyway, reading it. "How do I make this right?" And he answers, "By rethinking every thought, every word, every choice, and finally accepting that I'm a good person forced to make many horrible choices, and that I made the best of an impossible situation. I will walk out the door. I will move forward."

>>Jeff Crane: And these are things we need to understand, right? If we're going to be part of a community that supports the reintegration of veterans. So something we're struck by over and over in these books, and in our conversations, is the incredible, just enormous force of will that so many combat veterans have demonstrated, just making it through the day in families, jobs, communities, and in a world that rolls forward as a war had never happened, is not happening. And what they often describe as a jarring disorientation, or discontinuity between combat experience and the experience of return, all of us who have no eyes to see what they're going through.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. And that discontinuity, you know, for them, it's in the world. It's in your surroundings. But you don't necessarily change your deeply ingrained habitual behavior in response. Sometimes those behaviors persist. So the behaviors have continuity. It's the context that doesn't. We mentioned hyper-vigilance a minute ago. It's one of those classic PTSD symptoms. It's one I'm pretty familiar with. It involves continuing the habits of intense, sustained alertness that are developed in combat, into non-combat environments.

>>Jeff Crane: Did you experience this with your father?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, he had this a lot. It's "hyper" because it's considered excessive vigilance for the circumstances you're actually in. It was something that I just thought of as normal until I realized it was not. Veterans who experience hyper-vigilance are constantly scanning the scene for danger. They're on guard, likely to see potential threats where none exist, likely to have a hard time relaxing and even the most controlled environments. And it's another symptom or experience through which we can see that discontinuity. If you're threat expectant at the kids baseball game or scanning the grocery store for friendlies, you know, it's exhausting. It's--

>>Jeff Crane: You're ready to pop smoke and lay down, suppressing fire at any minute.

>>Sara Hart: You have sandbags in your windows, you know, it's exhausting. And it's a disincentive to be around crowds, to be around loud noises, to be around anyone. It keeps you at home a lot. You keep your shades closed.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, I imagine 4th of July is rough.

>>Sara Hart: 4th of July is rough.

>>Jeff Crane: These days, it's like the whole week leading up to and the week after.

>>Sara Hart: The week after. It's like, mortars everywhere. It's the "Rockets red glare" people. It's from battle. This is combat simulation.

>>Jeff Crane: And for those of us, the vast, vast majority who have not been to combat, understanding this behavior can be challenging and really almost impossible, to be honest. Here's where we can take a page out of the Greek's playbook and know that literature can help. Literature gives us access to understandings that we might not otherwise have. It gives us access to perspectives that we don't share. And through that to increased empathy. Here's a passage, again from Tim O'Brien. This time from his book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, which comes from a popular Cadence song you sing in the military, right? "C130 rolling down the strip, airborne daddy going to take a little trip." That's the opening. This is a literary moment that gives us a meaningful background or context for hyper-vigilance. It goes like this. "When you were ordered to march through such areas as Pinkville, which is GI slang for Sơn Mỹ, parent village of My Lai. Or what was called the athletic field, appropriately named for its flat acreage of grass and rice paddy, when you step about these pieces of ground, you do some thinking. You look ahead a few paces and wonder what your legs will resemble, if there's more to the earth in that spot than silicates and nitrogen. Will the pain be unbearable? Will you scream or fall silent? Will you be afraid to look at your own body, afraid of the sight of your own red flesh and white bone? You wonder if the medic remembered his morphine, you wonder if your friends will weep. It is not easy to fight this sort of fear, but you try."

>>Sara Hart: This is--

>>Jeff Crane: Talking about stepping on mines.

>>Sara Hart: He's talking about stepping on mines, Bouncing Bettys and--

>>Jeff Crane: Bouncing Bettys, oof those are rough, yeah.

>>Sara Hart: And this is day after day. I mean, what O'Brien's describing here is an experience that he had repeatedly, over the course of a year long deployment. It's not a one off. And the cumulative effects of that upon habit formation, and your relationship to your own potential survival, yeah, that's the context or the backstory for hyper-vigilance. If you want to give a person hyper-vigilance, that's how you do it. Put him through that. And Shay tells us, "Continuous mental and physiological mobilization for attack is the result of having learned too well how to survive in combat."

>>Jeff Crane: We have to explain that Bouncing Betty was a type of mine that when you stepped on it, it bounced up in the air to about the waist level, and then it exploded. So then sort of ripping you open. That was one type of mine, that they had to deal with. And even if the combat veteran is not experiencing hyper-vigilance, a constant awareness of mortality is likely to persist, and that awareness isn't part of the standard civilian way of perceiving the world. It isn't considered a topic or an observation for polite conversation, in American society in particular. Marlantes writes, "Most combat veterans keep this awareness that death is just around the corner. We know that when we drive the freeway to work, we could be dead, within the next hour. It's just that the odds have changed greatly in our favor from when we were in combat. It's the difference in the odds of getting killed that makes combat a noticeable experience of one's mortality and going to work on the freeway an unnoticed one", unquote.

>>Sara Hart: Oh, I mean, that's got such a ring of truth to it. Death, it's something we might all benefit from practicing a little awareness of.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. So the tone is so even, so measured. There's no extra pathos, no undue stress attached to it. It's just an observation. I could die on the way to work. And of course, that's true for all of us. He's describing what some might think of as a hyper awareness of mortality, though. He's not describing it as a condition that's in any way debilitating. If anything, Marlantes' book Here and Elsewhere, reads like a thoughtful, stoic engagement of deeply traumatic experiences. He observes symptoms that might easily become debilitating, but he's found a way to contextualize those experiences.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah and this is the thing about Marlantes' book. He was diagnosed with PTSD. It's something he's experienced and he is intimately familiar with, in himself and in others. But in this book, What it Feels Like to go to war, what he writes about are the psychological, moral, and spiritual consequences of combat experience. And he's writing 40 years after his return, so he's done a lot of intentional work psychologically, and especially spiritually. He says, you know, we prepare people really, really well, physically, before we send them into combat. We do not prepare them spiritually, and that's a failing, and it's one that causes increased suffering. As he puts it, "you can't have a successful homecoming without preparing for it, before you send people out to fight in the first place." The preparation that he describes involves a shared moral world, an overt recognition of this whole society's relationship to the war that the young man or woman will be sent to fight in, and that they'll hopefully return from.

>>Jeff Crane: A shared Themis if we want to go back to the Greek term. And this goes to the point we often make that the discussion about preparation and the cost needs to include all the cascading costs that we need to take those seriously before listening to government narratives about the ease of an upcoming war, and rushing into the conflict. If we were to prepare the families for their children to go off to war and bringing them back and might actually beg the question of why are we doing this and should we be doing it?

>>Sara Hart: People might take it more seriously. I mean, I think that's the idea, right? So sometimes it might be worth it, but there just can't be any meaningful or true preparation of the sort that Marlantes is talking about without the larger society being aware of the war and aware of the massive undertaking that we're asking of the young people sent to combat. No true preparation that doesn't involve a purpose, a higher shared societal goal for which the violence must be undertaken, a shared sense of what's right, to which that violence and its attendant suffering is dedicated, and in which it can be contextualized. And so we tip into moral injury, which Marlantes' book definitely helps us to do. I mean, he really blends the two things in describing his own experience and in advocating for ways to mitigate against future unnecessary suffering. And remember, moral injury is a concept that was first named and fleshed out by people who were spending their whole professional lives, day after day, treating combat veterans with severe PTSD. Moral injury is a way of identifying and peeling away from the big, messy physiological and psycho-spiritual bundle, something that was different, that was not quite the same as post traumatic stress. The Venn diagram that presents the two, it's got a lot of overlap. So really stress reactive responses like startle reflexes, hyper-vigilance, those are going to show up on the PTSD side of the Venn diagram. In the middle, the overlapping part, we're likely going to see depression, anxiety, and intrusion of unwanted memories, social withdrawal, isolation, like those are common indicators for both. A person dealing with moral injury, but not with PTSD, is going to be less jumpy, less reactive. But as far as building relationships with people, with a community, whether that's in a job or in a family, whatever side of the Venn diagram you're on here, a lot of those challenges might look the same.

>>Jeff Crane: We're whole beings, so the whole overlap makes sense. The whole person is being affected. That's part of the point. It's not possible to cleanly divide a person. But moral injury is distinct, enough to be peeled off for understanding and treatment. So let's get back to what's specific to moral injury and what doesn't generally overlap with PTSD. And what is distinctive in this condition, this experience, first and foremost, on the moral injury side, we see that sense of betrayal, that we talked about, a betrayal of what's right of Themis that's at the center of moral injury.

>>Sara Hart: Right? And we saw that in early formulations with Jonathan Shay and the betrayal of Achilles and the Iliad, and the rage that follows, the isolation and the grief.

>>Jeff Crane: And this betrayal of what's right involves a corollary loss, or breakdown trust in institutions and authorities, maybe even in the possibility that the world is good, because we can't trust Themis, if we can't trust what's right, what we've known has been right and what we've trusted all along, then the foundation for who we are and what we're doing falls away, dramatically. When our fundamental beliefs are betrayed, then our identity and our purpose are compromised. That's what war does to you, right? It breaks you. Right? Even if you're like, you know, the good war or something like that, you're just doing things that are in complete violation of everything you've taught and learned. And then when you find out that it's a war that was meaningless and everything else, and that no one's helping you reintegrate, where do you go?

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>>Jeff Crane: Okay, listeners, welcome back to the SNAFUBAR. I'm Jeff Crane. I'm here with Sara Hart. Today, we're talking about moral injury. Though it overlaps quite a bit, it is distinct from post traumatic stress. We just finished looking at some of the most common symptoms or indicators of each. Let's go back to the Greeks. We started there with the role of Themis or what's right? In Homer's epic of a war, betrayal and rage, the Illiad, and in Euripides' tragedy the Trojan Women, which is about the effects of that war on the women and the children of the defeated, their families. Let's talk about that for a minute.

>>Sara Hart: Okay, you know, a lot of us are familiar with the classic Greek tragedies in one way or another, the stories about Oedipus, or Orestes, Antigone, or Medea. These are part of our shared cultural heritage. You know, we know about the Oedipus complex, we know about Hubris, you know, we know about the Fates or about Cassandra. These tragedies are books to us. We pull them off the shelf, we turn the pages.

>>Jeff Crane: That's not how they were received by the cultures that created them, right?

>>Sara Hart: No, no, it's not. So the tragedies were performed as plays, as parts of festivals, with plays often in competition with one another. They were the show in town, and everyone came out for them at these large, open air public spaces, usually built into a natural hillside. They were constructed largely of limestone, marble, or whatever local stone they could quarry to shove against the earthen walls and what, because of these ancient Greek constructions, we now think of as theater seating. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And they were huge. The Dionysus Theatre in Athens, which hosted the tragedies of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus and okay, it was one of the biggest ones, could hold more than 15,000 people. Where we lectured in Stobi, Macedonia, that theater could sit 7,600.

>>Jeff Crane: So viewing tragedies was a cultural experience, a community experience, shared broadly. And again, we'll turn to Shay who reminds us that Athenian tragic Theater "was a theater of combat veterans by combat veterans and for combat veterans." The stories they told were of war and its effects on people, and those stories were real to the people who were watching them. The audience would have been full of combat veterans and their families. And what this meant for the community was that the experience of combat was shared through what Shay has called "a communalization of the trauma." Aristotle described the effect in terms of catharsis, experiencing these dramatic performances together, the audience was drawn through fear, suffering, loss, and grief. It was a practice.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, a practice. These were ritual enactments in dramatic form, and the audience had a role. And one would imagine that returning home from these performances, families might have asked their fathers and their brothers about their experience in war, giving them a further opportunity for sort of personal catharsis.

>>Jeff Crane: Yes, this public catharsis would have facilitated these kind of discussions. The audience's role was to give themselves over to these war torn characters, to open themselves an empathetic engagement to witness and to participate in the process of returning from war. Shay describes the tragic theater as "a distinctive therapy of purification, healing, and reintegration of returning soldiers that was undertaken as a whole political community", unquote. His point is that, this wasn't just entertainment. He says of Athens that "Sacred theater was one of its primary means of integrating the returning veteran into the social sphere as citizen", unquote.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah and here in the 21st century American context, we just don't have any practice comparable to that. We basically have war porn movies and once in a while a thoughtful film that usually doesn't really land with viewers.

>>Jeff Crane: And I still don't know of a good, thoughtful war movie about the Iraq war. I can't think of one, right? Each war has, like, the movies that usually that's the movie associated with, right? And for these reasons.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, I got to do some more watching. There's some good books, which some of them have been made into movies.

>>Jeff Crane: We don't have these practices, at least not in the same way, not at the same scale. Shay tells us that, "healing from trauma depends on the communalization of the trauma", unquote. And that's what this practice was. We're not saying that today's America needs to go build an open air theater in every town and start showing up for Euripides. We're probably not saying cause we know it would never happen. That's not going to be the right format for us. But just because we aren't likely to come together every Saturday for Greek tragedy, doesn't mean there aren't other things we can do. It doesn't mean that there aren't other ways that we can work toward a shared recognition and engagement. Shay tells us we must create new models of healing, which emphasizes communalization of the trauma, right? We use this phrase a lot. Communalization of the trauma is what we need to really emphasize in the work we do when we decide to go to war, and when we bring the veterans back. The arts are a powerful pathway into this kind of engagement. I frankly don't know of a better one. And one of the points we've been making today is that this isn't new. This work needs to be done. When it comes to war and those who are sent to wage it, today's America practices a performative celebration that is also a sidelining of any real or true participation in these processes.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, what we're seeing a lot of as we look at the society around us is not a cultivation of or adherence to a shared Themis.

>>Jeff Crane: It's not. And it takes place in a context where beliefs and values are at odds, sometimes belligerently so.

>>Sara Hart: This is part of the reason I think that you and I are drawn to moral injury as a topic. It's part of what's led us to call this an episode on moral injury, even though we spent a lot of time talking about the therapeutic context, and the overlapping symptoms, that draw post traumatic stress so centrally into the conversation. As an historian and a religious studies scholar, you know, the two of us were inclined to look at broad social and cultural development over time. We're trained to look at how cultures behave, and to see that expressed and challenged in the experiences of individual people. We see patterns. That's--.

>>Jeff Crane: We try to anyways, right?

>>Sara Hart: We try to, sometimes. You know, when we look at our own culture, which heaven knows others do and will see differently, like, we know that. But when we look at our own culture, and when we think about war, we see a large scale debilitating betrayal.

>>Jeff Crane: I like that line.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, if we're going to take seriously the pragmatic or functionalist approach to societal belief that I described earlier, and we're going to imagine that we can know them by their fruits, that we can see belief through behavior. If we're going to do all that, then 21st century America looks a lot like a culture that believes in consumer excess, and that maintains a global militaristic presence to pay for it.

>>Jeff Crane: Ouch.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah.

>>Jeff Crane: And kicks the cost of future generations in terms of massive actual debt.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, oucher, right? It's honestly hard for me to imagine our national debt in terms of actual dollars.

>>Jeff Crane: The numbers are huge. My dad and I used to argue about how the debt was going to kill us when it was 1 trillion.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, yeah, now we're going close to 40 trillion dollars. If that were dollar bills laid lengthwise, they would go to the sun and back, Twenty times.

>>Jeff Crane: They'd probably catch on fire, though. And the defense budget for 2026 is just shy of $1 trillion. Proportionally, I think we have the largest budget in the world for the military, by far.

>>Sara Hart: Oh, yeah.

>>Jeff Crane: Very confident saying that.

>>Sara Hart: Yes, we definitely do. We have-- Our budget is greater than the next, I think, seven nations combined.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, that's right.

>>Sara Hart: Yeah, and so 1 trillion. That's like $2 million a minute.

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. War is costing us, financially. We're saddling future generations with massive monetary debts of these wars. At the same time, we're leaving the human burden of war to the veterans. They carry it. Just like The Things They Carried, and they do that without their home culture, American civilian culture, meaningfully sharing in any of the bearing of this burden.

>>Sara Hart: And that tugs moral injury a little bit into the front of our frame, every time we notice it.

>>Jeff Crane: Which is all the time, right? All the time. Americans, you and I, right? Americans are constantly practicing a studied ignorance of the nation's wars, even though we're constantly at war. And this drives Sara and I a little bit crazy. Marlantes frames this ignorance like this. "We are a very aggressive and warlike nation, denying our collective responsibility for these activities, whether they are right or wrong, it's like scurrying around the house of an alcoholic, hiding empty bottles, and never mentioning the drinking," Whoa. That's a great quote.

>>Sara Hart: That's good, right?

>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. Good.

>>Sara Hart: I like the whether it's right or wrong part, too. Like, that's not the point he's making.

>>Jeff Crane: So the work has to be done in the wars that make sense, right?

>>Sara Hart: Yeah. So I guess what we're asking for here today in the SNAFUBAR, is just that we stop doing that, that scurrying around the house hiding bottles. There's no easy way to handle the trauma that war brings back to the home front. That's hard work, and we stumble towards it. But that's part of being human. And we've got to keep stumbling as best we're able, because the alternative is that we increase the suffering of the men and the women who fight our wars. Patterson, again here, "Stateside civilian's ignorance of, or failure to witness to these conflicts, is a contributing cause of service members' moral injury", end quote. There have been a lot of complicated things today. There's a lot of complicated things in this topic, but that one is simple.

>>Jeff Crane: And there's a thing that Sara and I both believe, too, is that if we do that work, and we have that understanding, we're less likely to go to war, and less likely to inflict the suffering on people around the globe. So the start is listening, and learning. Really just mostly listening, being there to listen. And for most Americans who don't have a combat veteran in their immediate circle, because we're not ancient Athens with a citizen Army, we're Americans with an all volunteer force, which is 1% of the population, For the rest of us, there's a lot of good literature out there, academic books, but sure, short stories, novels, memoirs, maybe a few podcasts here and there, where you can learn about this, and it can inform how you think about our nation's proclivity for war.

>>Sara Hart: And the experience of it, you know? So we've looked at some of these authors today, O'Brien, Marlantes, Edmonds, their books or any of the books you find next to them on the same shelf, that's a good place to start. And keep your eyes out for more awareness programs rooted in the arts, like the ones we've mentioned.

>>Jeff Crane: Arts and service.

>>Sara Hart: Arts and service. If you see one coming up near you, mark your calendars. You'll be glad you did.

>>Jeff Crane: And we'll be glad to see you there. Thanks for listening to SNAFUBAR. We are signing off.

>>Sara Hart: Until next time. You've been listening to SNAFUBAR, a Cal Poly Humboldt production brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Our team includes me.

>>Jeff Crane: And me.

>>Abigail Smithson: Abigail Smithson, producer.

>>Liam Salcuni: Liam Salcuni, writer and researcher,

>>Roman Sotomayor: Roman Sotomayor, writer researcher.

You can find more information about SNAFUBAR on khsu.org.

Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.