Iraq veteran confronts the spiritual toll of war
ZELIENOPLE — Many people who serve in the U.S. Armed Forces find themselves charged with commands that challenge their beliefs.
In the case of Lee Wagner, who deployed to Iraq as a Marine Corps sergeant in 2003, his very arrival led to an unforeseen dread.
“When we were entering into Iraq, the first few hours, few days of entering into Iraq, there was a lot of children along the side of the road,” he said. “There were a lot of people along some of the roads.”
“We were kind of driving through there, and one particular young Iraqi girl was standing on the side of the road, very much crying,” he said. “And I don’t know why she was crying. I don’t know if something really bad just happened in her life, or if she just stubbed her toe. I don’t know.”
“But just the wherewithal of the situation hit me there,” he said.
“I was like, ‘I’m here to do a good thing. I want to do good things, but I’m now witnessing firsthand the possible negative impact of what we’re doing,” he said.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines moral injury as “the damage done to one’s conscious or moral compass when that person perpetuates, witnesses or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values or ethical codes of conduct.”
For many service members this can mean acting on orders from military commanders and political leaders whose ethics don’t align with theirs, who might compel them to make choices that cross a moral line for them, Wagner said at a Passavant Retirement Community presentation Wednesday.
“The military is a violent industry,” he said. “The Department of Defense has a mission. Fight battles. Win wars.”
“Whatever gets broken, somebody else will fix,” he said.
That mission differs from the same one the Veteran Affairs Department, chaplains and other civic leaders have, he said.
The problem of moral injury often contributes heavily to the problem of suicide. Wagner, who works for the Northwestern Pennsylvania Veterans Suicide Prevention Program, said people mainly die by suicide because they believe suicide is the only solution to their problem.
Their problem, he said, often involves a long story, and while moral injury does play a role in that, so do a range of other factors, including mental health conditions like depression.
Wagner also said military sexual assault trauma often causes a kind of moral injury, too.
“Having a leadership that doesn’t stand up for you, or leadership that creates an environment where sexual harassment is allowed to take place — that is very much a moral injury that we can see within the military community.”
But veterans and families can find help for moral injury in a variety of forms, he said. They can seek clinical treatments at VA clinics and other forms of therapy, spiritual treatments (which can involve religion but also do not need to) and community-based treatments, he said.
Several community-based services for veterans enrich Butler County. This includes the VA Health Care system based at 353 N Duffy Road in Butler.
“What the VA does offer is a variety of physical and mental health, as well access to chaplaincy, and psychology and therapy that can work with this,” he said.
“Within community you have camaraderie, men and women who have served,” he said.
Throughout Butler County, he said, numerous Veteran of Foreign War outposts, American League offices and Marine Corps Leagues also enrich the region.
