Hearing Moral Injury: Life Histories of U.S. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan

Hearing Moral Injury: Life Histories of U.S. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan

Helen Zoe Gibb

A thesis submitted to the faculty of Columbia University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Oral History

New York, New York

January 2015

Acknowledgements Firstly, thanks to Prof. Sean Field for introducing to me to oral history and inspiring this journey through your passion and commitment to all stories. To the Oral History Masters of Art (OHMA) cohort of 2015: I could not have done this without you. Special mentions to Katherine Brenner and Liz Strong for cups of tea, conversation and weekly writing workshops- your encouragements and perspectives were invaluable. And to Layla Vural for her fine editing work on the final draft. Thank you to my OHMA alum mentor, Sara Wolcott, for your insights into trauma theory and oral history. Heartfelt thanks to Prof. Philip Napoli, for connecting me with interviewees at Brooklyn College, and going above and beyond as an unofficial mentor. To the OHMA Faculty, you showed me that academic rigor and self-reflection are essential for the work that we do. And my advisors Professors Marianne Hirsch and Mary Marshall Clark who guided and shaped my work from near and far, and accommodated much-needed extensions and modifications - your comments and critiques pushed me to clarify and refine at every stage. Thanks to Ellen Brooks, Kathryn White and the rest of my new Wisconsin family who sustained me through the final chapter. Of course, to my narrators, who shared more than I could have imagined: I hope this work provides a glimpse into the legacy of warfare that you live with every day. Lastly, my family, for being there always, no matter the distance.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

1

Chapter 2: Methodology 2.1. Defining Moral Injury 2.2. Differentiating Moral Injury from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

6 6 11

Chapter 3: Historical Background 3.1. Introduction 3.2. Oral History and Psychology: Affirming Boundaries 3.3. Trauma from “Soldier’s Heart” to PTSD

14 14 15 19

Chapter 4: Analysis

25 4.1. Introduction 25 4.2. Biographies of U.S. Army Veterans Galo Calderón & Denise Williams 26 4.3. Hearing Moral Injury 36 4.3.1. Galo Calderón’s Story

38

4.3.2. Denise Williams’ Story 43

Chapter 5: Conclusion

49

Bibliography

51

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Chapter 1: Introduction Interviews with veterans make up a substantial portion of the oral histories held in archives across the United States. The Library of Congress Veterans Oral History Project alone has more than 25,000 audio recordings of women and men who have served in conflicts since the turn of the last century. In History of Oral History: Foundations and Methodology, Rebecca Sharpless acknowledges an early relationship between conflict and oral history through the work of historians such as Forrest C. Pogue and Samuel L. A. Marshall. Pogue “spent D-Day aboard a landing ship interviewing wounded soldiers who had participated in the assault”. During wartime, oral history has been a crucial way for historians embedded with troops to collect “accounts of recent battlefield experience”1 with a focus on acquiring a verified account of engagements. This method has been replicated in subsequent theaters of war including Iraq and Afghanistan.2

In the decades since World War II, oral history has become recognisable as a field in and of itself rather than simply a tool of enquiry as it had been previously.3 Oral history built on its relationship with American veterans. In 1985, Studs Terkel’s “The Good War”, an oral history of World War II won a Pulitzer demonstrating the capacity of interviews to convey the richness of the war experience. Veterans histories have been particularly accessible for school and college students, able to interview their parents, grandparents and neighbors about their service, supported by national institutions such as the 1

Thomas L. Charlton et al., eds., History of Oral History : Foundations and Methodology (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 12.

2 Donald A. Ritchie, The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.

3 Alistair Thomson, “Dancing through Memory of Our Movement: Four Paradigmatic Revolutions in Oral History,” in 14th International Oral History Conference. International Oral History Association, Sydney, 2006, 1, http://www.oralhistorynsw.org.au/files/media/readlisten_dancing_through_the_memory_of_our_movement__a_thomson.pdf.

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Library of Congress.4 Emphasis has also shifted from an event driven account towards appreciating how veterans’ “memories, and the relative composure of memory, [has] shifted over time…[and] how post-war events…[affect] identity and memory.”5 In some cases such as the Vietnam War it has also been about “highlighting the gap between public discourse and the war the veterans say they really experienced.”6

Over two months in the fall of 2014, I undertook interviews with four United States military veterans of different eras. I conducted them as part of a project at Brooklyn College run by Prof. Philip Napoli, assistant professor of history and author of Bringing It All Back Home: An Oral History of New York City’s Vietnam Veterans7. The project's aim was to record the experiences of the college’s student veterans, many of whom have served in recent conflicts. Like many other higher education institutions, Brooklyn College has been enrolling increasing numbers of students with military experience, many of whom are taking advantage of the Post 9/11 GI Bill to continue their learning.8 Listening to the experiences of this diverse group of students is important for their peers and educators, as they often have additional needs that should be addressed.9

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Ritchie, The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 451., “The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress actively seeks out students from middle school to graduate school to achieve its ambitious mission of “collecting the memories, accounts and documents of war veterans of those who served in support of them during World War I, World War II, and the Korean, Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars.” The only possible means to achieve this project’s mission of preserving the experiences of 19 million American war veterans of whom, some 1,500 die each day, has been to enlist the service of students.”

5 Alistair Thompson, “Anzac Memories: Putting Popular Memory Theory into Practice in Australia,” in The Oral History Reader, ed. R. Perks and A. Thomson, Routledge Readers in History Series (Routledge, 2006), 246.

6 Philip F. Napoli, Bringing It All Back Home: An Oral History of New York City’s Vietnam Veterans (Macmillan, 2013), 3.

7 Napoli, Bringing It All Back Home: An Oral History of New York City’s Vietnam Veterans.

8 David T. Vacchi, “Considering Student Veterans on the Twenty-First-Century College Campus,” About Campus 17, no. 2 (May 1, 2012): 15.

9 For more on the transition of service members into higher education see David DiRamio, Robert Ackerman, and Regina L. Mitchell, “From Combat to Campus: Voices of Student-Veterans,” NASPA Journal 45, no. 1 (2008): 73–102.Vacchi, “Considering Student Veterans on the Twenty-First-Century

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Brooklyn College is not alone in undertaking an oral history project with this population. Many, like the University of Kentucky’s From Combat to Kentucky10, aim to bridge gaps between veterans and civilians on campus as well as to record the experiences of individual veterans.

The interviews I conducted also gave me an opportunity to investigate the phenomenon of moral injury in returned service personnel. This thesis presents the biographical life history interviews of Galo Calderón and Denise Williams, two veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), as a way to “hear” moral injury. Moral injury, explored in more detail in Chapter 2, is: (a) a betrayal of “what’s right”; (b) either by a person in legitimate authority, or by one’s self—“I did it”; (c) in a high stakes situation.11 It is the result of transgressing “one’s basic moral identity and violated core moral beliefs”12 and presents oral historians with a potentially new discourse through which to speak about, and analyze the experiences of, veterans with whom we conduct oral history interviews. Shaped as we have been by that of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, more broadly, trauma, there is much to be said for exploring the boundaries of these two enormously influential paradigms in the humanities.

The term moral injury is found within the writings of clinical psychologists and medical professionals, a handful of journalistic pieces such as military correspondent David

College Campus.”J. Arminio, T. K. Grabosky, and J. Lang, Student Veterans and Service Members in Higher Education, Key Issues on Diverse College Students (Taylor & Francis, 2014).

10 http://www.nunncenter.org/c2ky/ 11 Jonathan Shay, “Moral Injury,” Psychoanalytic Psychology: The Official Journal of the Division of Psychoanalysis, American Psychological Association, Division 39 31, no. 2 (April 2014): 182.

12 Rita Nakashima Brock, Soul Repair : Recovering from Moral Injury after War / (Boston : Beacon Press, 2013), 3.

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Wood’s three-part essay for The Huffington Post13, and veteran-civilian dialogue groups.

In the public and political discourse surrounding veterans of the United States’ recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, post-traumatic stress disorder has become the “predominant symbol of the suffering of military personnel”.14 Arising out of more 150 years of psychological thinking, the disorder is practically paradigmatic of the way we perceive and interact with trauma in contemporary times. With a heavy focus on fear of imminent death as a response to the experiences of life-threatening situations, it exemplifies how the academy has thought of trauma in both practical and theoretical terms. This has often been done at the expense of other conceptualizations that consider emotional, spiritual and psychological wounds that are not primarily based in fear.

Oral historians have adopted and adapted trauma theory in a variety of ways since the early 1980s. Even early on, critiques were made as theories continued to marginalize non-Western or minority traumatic experiences, and assumed universal applicability.15 These concerns have only become more prevalent. Today, we must continue to seek new understandings with regards to difficult memories. Moral injury has recently entered into the field of vision for oral historians working with veteran populations although as yet there is no published work that grapples with it as a potential new tool of analysis. Given the field I am working within, this paper does not intend to argue for moral injury as a medical diagnosis alongside PTSD, although some clinicians and medical practitioners certainly do make this argument, and in Chapter 3, I will offer some of that on-going discussion. Instead, my project here is to demonstrate a clear framework that provides one way of moving beyond the trauma paradigm in our work, 13

D. Wood, “Moral Injury: The Grunts. The Huffington Post,” Retrieved March 20 (2014): 2014.

Sarah Hautzinger and Jean Scandlyn, Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles with the Wars on Terror (Left Coast Press, 2013), 16.

15 Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–2.

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to one that centers narrators as moral agents who have experienced “human-based events that represent a breakdown in social norms”.16

As medical anthropologist Erin P. Finley writes in Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD Among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, “War does not mean suddenly stepping outside of life as we know it...A soldier’s time in Iraq or Afghanistan is as deeply shaped by his own personal history as it is by the gun (or mechanic’s wrench, or medic’s kit) he carries with him into combat.”17 To really understand how, and why, a particular event might become a morally injurious one for an individual, we need to look as far back into their histories as possible. In Chapter 4, I will explore the interviews I conducted with Calderón and Williams to consider the ways that moral injury presents itself in the life events, language, feelings and actions they describe. I will argue that oral historians can make a contribution to the understanding of moral injury through the analysis of biographical life histories that takes into account the fullness of an individual's life experience, as well as benefit from moral injury’s agency-centred model in exploring the lived experience of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

16

Brett T. Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 8 (December 2009): 699.

17 Erin P. Finley, Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan (Cornell University Press, 2011), 22.

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Chapter 2: Methodology 2.1. Defining moral injury Combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was first defined in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) 35 years ago. Through the Department of Veterans Affairs, veterans diagnosed with mental health issues including PTSD are eligible for treatment and in some cases service-connected disability benefits. Despite this, mental health issues remain somewhat stigmatised within the armed forces. This is due, in part, to combat stress models emphasising weakness of character as the driving force behind stress problems. These models persisted within the armed forces until the end of the 20th century.18 Today, diagnosis and treatment of PTSD in those returning from conflict zones has become a key task of medical practitioners in the last decade.

My job as an oral historian is not to deny the reality of PTSD— gaining recognition for mental health issues has, and continues to be, an important task. Fundamentally, a diagnosis provides many veterans with a clear explanation for erratic and seemingly uncontrollable behaviors. However, as a psychological theory, post-traumatic stress disorder is firmly rooted in fear; fear as a response to experiences of life-threatening situations. In this conceptualization, the individual “becomes a passive victim of a traumatic event”.19 By centring post-combat mental health around fear, we have left many other experiences of war in the dark. Subsequently veterans find that they don’t have the language necessary to explore all aspects of their service and the resulting 18

Edward A. Brusher, “Combat and Operational Stress Control,” International Journal of Emergency Mental Health 9, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 5.

19 Hautzinger and Scandlyn, Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles with the Wars on Terror, 103.

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psychological, spiritual, social and behavioral problems they experience. In response to this gap, some medical practitioners have begun to seek alternative explanations for the distress they have seen in their patients that cannot be adequately described by PTSD.

In recent years, moral injury has begun to gain traction as a framework for understanding the impact of experiences of veterans that “do not fit into traditional models of trauma”.20 It is an emerging concept in the field of military studies, although the phenomenon it describes is considered to be as old as warfare itself.21 Those working with service members and veterans acknowledge that in contemporary times little work has been done to understand and address the moral and ethical conflicts that military personnel may face in the line of duty. The term moral injury is often attributed to United States-based clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, best known for his works Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America which explore his interactions with combat veterans in the therapeutic context.

As far back as the early 1990s, Shay identified the limitations of contemporary posttraumatic stress diagnoses: “Pure PTSD, as officially defined, with no complications, such as substance abuse or danger seeking, is rarely what wrecks veterans’ lives, crushes them to suicide, or promotes domestic and/or criminal violence. Moral injury…does.”22 In Shay’s conception, moral injury is the betrayal of “what’s right”, by a person who holds legitimate authority, while in a high stakes situation.23 Crucial for Shay is that the betrayal is the result of someone in a superior position- a commanding 20

Alison Flipse Vargas et al., “Moral Injury Themes in Combat Veterans’ Narrative Responses From the National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study,” Traumatology 19, no. 1 (2013): 248.

21 Edward Tick, War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Quest Books, 2012), 99.

22 Shay, Moral injury, 2014 23 Jonathan Shay, “Moral Injury,” Intertexts 16, no. 1 (2012): 59.

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officer for example. As moral injury has come under scrutiny from other clinicianresearchers, we have seen an expansion of this basic definition to include those (in)actions that are the result of individual service personnel themselves. In particular this modification comes from Litz et al. whose work has been at the forefront of new research. Their expanded definition holds that, Potentially morally injurious experiences [include] perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. This may entail participating in or witnessing inhumane or cruel actions, failing to prevent the immoral acts of others, as well as engaging in subtle acts or experiencing reactions that, upon reflection, transgress a moral code.24

Although morality has a particularly religious connotation, each culture and society has values and norms, linked to which are emotions that can be provoked through adherence or transgression.25 For this work, I am using the definition of morals as outlined by Litz et al. as: The personal and shared familial, cultural, societal, and legal rules for social behavior, either tacit or explicit. Morals are fundamental assumptions about how things should work and how one should behave in the world. For example, the implicit belief that “the world is benevolent” stems from the expectation that others will behave in a moral and just manner. Another tacit assumption is that “people get what they deserve”; thus, if someone does not act within the accepted moral code, a punishment should ensue.26

More so than any wars previously, both Afghanistan and Iraq have been epitomised by terrorism, urban conflict, and insurgency and counterinsurgency.27 “Even in optimal operational contexts,” write Maguen & Litz, “some combat and operational experiences 24

Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” 700.

25 Hautzinger and Scandlyn, Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles with the Wars on Terror, 110–111.

26 Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” 699.

27 See for example, A. Hashim, Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, Crises in World Politics (Cornell University Press, 2005).

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can inevitably transgress deeply held beliefs that undergird a service member’s humanity.”28 What medical professionals find is that “unconventional features of war may make it more difficult for service members to decide on the most prudent way to react towards non-combatants (or potential combatants) despite strong battlefield ethics training and the rules of engagement.”29 Just as with PTSD, the types of combat service members have faced in recent conflicts are not guaranteed to result in moral injury, but they do provide good indicators of the risk individuals face.

In particular urban conflict has brought service members into close contact with civilian populations who may be indistinguishable from enemy combatants. In Beyond Posttraumatic stress: Homefront Struggles with the War on Terror, Hautzinger and Scandlyn argue: For service members on the ground, the diffuse geographical nature of the wards finds them battling in low-intensity, urban- and village-based exchanges of fire, in which civilians can be indistinguishable from the enemy and where counterinsurgent combatants are typically not uniformed or aligned with a localized nation-states. When there are no clear battle lines, there can be no truly safe zones either.30

These uncertain situations are more likely to lead to events that are potentially morally transgressive, such as: mistakenly killing civilians, being directly responsible for the death of enemy combatants, and violating previously understood rules of engagement.31 Litz et al. argue that moral and ethical transgressions have been neglected by clinicians until now due to a heavy focus on life-threatening events and possible the belief that 28

Shira Maguen and Brett Litz, “Moral Injury in Veterans of War,” Research Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2012): 1.

29 Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” 696.

30 Hautzinger and Scandlyn, Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles with the Wars on Terror, 23.

31 Litz et al., “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy,” 696.

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“addressing ethical conflicts and moral violations is outside the realm of their expertise, preferring to recommend religious counseling instead.”32 Litz et al. contend this has been to the detriment of the well-being of service personnel as clinicians have not been able to address the full extent of their patient’s experiences in conflict.

Currently, research into moral injury is primarily focused on quantification and medicalization of the concept, much as has already been done with PTSD. Researchers are looking at whether treatment programs are necessary and developing quantitative methods to screen for moral injurious events. In 2013, Currier and associates carried out a study wherein they “conducted an initial psychometric evaluation of the newly developed Moral Injury Questionnaire—Military version (MIQ-M)—a 20-item selfreport measure for assessing MIEs [Morally Injurious Experiences].”33 The questionnaire included statements such as: “Things I saw/experienced in the war left me feeling betrayed or let-down by military/political leaders”, “I feel guilt over failing to save the life of someone in the war”, and “I came to realize during the war that I enjoyed violence.”34 A sample of veterans recorded the frequency in which they had experienced each one. Of the results, Currier’s team reported: [They] provide support for the distinctive effects of MIEs in contributing to psychopathology among military veterans, above and beyond routinely assessed concerns in this population such as exposure to life threat traumas and other background factors...the study lends additional support to the clinical utility of the moral injury construct and provides initial psychometric evidence for the MIQ-M as a tool for assessing MIEs among military veterans.35

32

Ibid.

Joseph M. Currier et al., “Initial Psychometric Evaluation of the Moral Injury Questionnaire--Military Version,” Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy 22, no. 1 (January 2015): bk. 54.

34 Ibid. 57.

35 Ibid. 60–61.

33

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Although research into moral injury is aimed at those in the counselling and psychological professions, this work offers a basis for theory-building across a range of disciplines including oral history. Likewise, an understanding of the framework for moral injury in such depth has the potential to influence the way our field works with veterans’ narratives, as will be discussed further in Chapter 4.

2.2. Differentiating Moral Injury from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Given the existence of post-traumatic stress disorder, which has been formulated to cover disparate symptoms present in a wide range of service personnel, one might wonder why the concept of moral injury is useful. While there is crossover between both concepts, some practitioners and veterans are finding PTSD models to be inadequate. According to Drescher et al., because of their focus on “fear conditioning and extinction models…[they] may be less well suited to help warriors for whom moral conflict, rather than fear, is the most salient source of post-deployment difficulties.”36

Moral injury centers on the destruction of social trust, which leaves behind a litany of emotions, symptoms and reactions. These include, but are not limited to: expectancy of harm, changes in — or loss of — spirituality, guilt, shame and aggressive behaviors.

Unlike moral injury, post-traumatic stress disorder does not allow for perpetration of the “traumatic event”. Within the diagnosis there is no space to experience an identity that encompasses both victim and perpetrator.

36

Kent D. Drescher et al., “An Exploration of the Viability and Usefulness of the Construct of Moral Injury in War Veterans,” Traumatology 17, no. 1 (2011): 9.

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Drescher et al. also comment that one can see moral injury and PTSD as “separate but also frequently co-occurring problems.”37 According to Shira Maguen and Brett Litz, “although moral injury is manifested as PTSD-like symptoms (e.g., intrusions, avoidance, numbing), other outcomes are unique and include shame, guilt, demoralization, selfhandicapping behaviors (e.g., self-sabotaging relationships), and self-harm (e.g., parasuicidal behaviors).”38 They also state that while researchers are beginning to develop measurements, there is currently no “threshold for establishing the presence of moral injury”39. As I mentioned in the previous section, much of the current literature is turning towards quantitative studies that can help clinicians better understand moral injury when it presents itself in patients and its links to other mental health outcomes.

Criticisms of moral injury are mostly focused on the term itself. Healthcare professionals interviewed by Drescher et al. stated that they found the terminology to be inadequate and unclear, in need of “concrete examples of the construct”.40 In a 2010 publication on combat and operational stress control the Department of the Navy chose to use the term “inner conflict”, defined as “stress [that] arises due to moral damage from carrying out or bearing witness to acts or failures to act that violate deeply held belief systems.”41 They clearly acknowledge that this is moral injury under a different term and that it represents the same cluster of symptoms. In the Navy’s color-coded continuum of stress, “inner conflict” is rated in the “Orange Zone”.

The Orange “Injured” Zone can be defined as encompassing more severe and persistent forms of distress or loss of function that signal the presence of some kind of damage to

37

Ibid., 10.

Maguen and Litz, “Moral Injury in Veterans of War,” 1.

39 Ibid.

40 Drescher et al., “An Exploration of the Viability and Usefulness of the Construct of Moral Injury in War Veterans,” 11.

41 Brusher, “Combat and Operational Stress Control,” 11.

38

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the mind, brain, or spirit...to some extent, Orange Zone injuries are like a [tree] branch breaking because it was bent beyond its limits...Although stress injuries cannot be completely undone—one can never become “uninjured”—their usual course is to heal over time like physical injuries...Since stress injuries are not mental disorders, clinical mental health expertise is not required to recognize them.42

Although they do recognised that left unattended, the injury may push service members into a “Red Zone” of diagnosable mental disorders, it is clear that it is conceived as primarily a spiritual challenge for individuals, linked their religious faith. Consequently, the manual recommends that help be sought from military chaplains. Nevertheless, they concede that “the impact can be as profound and long-lasting as...from a life threat or loss.”43

It is clear that moral injury has become a focal point for clinicians on the frontline of veterans’ health services and that conceptions of post-traumatic stress simply do not encompass the complexity of experiences in combat zones. Using a moral injury approach to interviews also presents oral historians with an opportunity to listen in different ways to stories of moral crisis. We cannot, however, repurpose it without being critical of the culturally-based frameworks of knowledge and the medicalization of trauma that it is arising out of, in much the same way that PTSD did over thirty years ago.

42 43

Ibid.

Brusher, “Combat and Operational Stress Control.”

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Chapter 3: Historical Background 3.1. Introduction In their introduction to Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis, Stephen Sloan and Mark Cave write, Recording the experience of crisis is central to what the oral historian does...In recent years there has been a trend to conduct interviews soon after, or even in the midst of, crisis...the process can serve to validate the individual’s traumatic experience and help the survivor begin to make meaning of the event. Oral historians are in a unique position to provide this validation since they are often seen by interviewees as agents of a community’s collective memory.44

Oral historians can act as witnesses to survivors of unimaginable acts of violence and long-endured suffering.45 They can provide nuance to events saturated by sensationalized media coverage as well as offer a platform from which the marginalized voices of refugees, asylum seekers and others can be heard. In many ways crisis oral history is not so dissimilar from the work of humanitarian aid, for at the center there is the “impulse to respond to need.”46 Whether recording the life stories of Holocaust survivors or working with New Orleans residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this fundamental part of our practice has necessarily brought practitioners into contact with the fields of psychology and trauma studies.

In the course of researching moral injury and interviewing veterans, I became curious about this prevalence of psychological frameworks and trauma theory in the writings of

44

Ghislaine Boulanger, “The Continuing and Unfinished Present: Oral History and Psychoanalysis in the Aftermath of Terror,” in Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis, ed. Mark Cave and Stephen M. Sloan (Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–2.

45 Ibid. 122–123.

46 Ibid. 264.

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those creating and using oral histories. It raised an abundance of questions about whether it was possible to step outside of the trauma paradigm, and how our knowledge —or lack thereof— impacted the kinds of questions we asked. Likewise, if our narrators exist in the same culture, or different ones, how may their answers be influenced by the “major signifier of our age”47?

In this chapter, I will address the much-debated question of the boundary between the role of the oral historian and the role of the psychologist. From there, I will look at the growth of trauma over the past 150 years, tracing its genealogy alongside the major conflicts of the twentieth century. Following that, I consider critiques of the trauma theory paradigm, which emerged within the humanities in the 1990s. My purpose is to better understand the impact this trauma paradigm shift has had on the practice of oral history. Finally, I will discuss the potential and limitations that the concept of moral injury may have as a methodology that can move us beyond trauma theory in our work as oral historians.

3.2. Oral history and Psychology: Affirming Boundaries In her article Oral History— 'More Dangerous than Therapy'?: Interviewees' Reflections on Recording Traumatic or Taboo Issues oral historian, Wendy Rickard reflects on what it means to encounter trauma in an oral history setting. Of her experience interviewing people living with an HIV or AIDS diagnosis, she writes, The boundaries set up between oral historian and interviewee are less formal and prescribed than those set up in a formal therapy situation...There always remains an issue for me about where we set those boundaries with each individual interviewed,

47

Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), xi.

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why we often choose to set them very differently depending on the person, and how we maintain or change those boundaries over time, either consciously or unconsciously.48

Asking previous interviewees to reflect on the oral history interview process, Rickard was curious to know “what vital areas of emotional vulnerability the method of pursuing knowledge through oral history can obscure, leave uncontained or, at worst, damaged.” She has not been alone in her contemplation of the oral history interview and its overlaps with therapy. Concerns that have garnered the most interest include the psychological impact talking about trauma may have on narrators, notions of “healing” through oral history49, and the impact on the oral historian themselves.

Addressing this last point - working with stories of violence, experienced and perpetrated, can be difficult and cause a number of reactions, which has sometimes been given the label “secondary traumatization”.50 It is important that oral historians understand clearly their own motivations for doing this type of work. While interviewing veterans both for my master's research and as an interviewer for the Wisconsin Veterans Museum51, I have experienced a “thinning of boundaries”52 between narrators and myself. I argue that emotional investment and deep listening is necessary for this work but having institutional support and the opportunity to debrief — in a similar manner to which counselors may do within their supervision — has been necessary for me to be able to continue to hear stories of loss, fear and “kill or be killed”.

48

Wendy Rickard, “Oral History- ‘More Dangerous than Therapy’?: Interviewees’ Reflections on Recording Traumatic or Taboo Issues,” Oral History 26, no. 2 (1998): 43.

49 For more on this see, Sean Field, “Beyond ‘Healing’: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration,” Oral History 34, no. 1 (2006): 31–42.

50 Boulanger, “The Continuing and Unfinished Present: Oral History and Psychoanalysis in the Aftermath of Terror,” 267–268.

51 www.wisvetsmuseum.com 52 Ibid. 267.

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Anxiety surrounding the blurring between oral history and psychology has not generally been borne out. Of her practice as a psychoanalyst who has worked closely with oral historians in the aftermaths of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Hurricane Katrina, Ghislaine Boulanger comments, I focus on the process, not the product; my emphasis is on the narrator, whereas the oral historian’s is on the narrative53…[there is a difference between] the process of an ongoing psychodynamic treatment, which is continually reviewing the unfinished present and whose intent is to provide an individual therapeutic benefit, and the oral historian's product, which at a certain point is fixed in time but nonetheless provides distinct social and historical value.54

As oral historians, our aim is to take the stories beyond the interview space, to disseminate and share them as widely as possible with the public. Narrators are made as aware as possible of the potential uses of their stories and oral historians, following the ethical and legal guidelines of the field, do all in their power to ensure fair use.55 As Boulanger comments, the stories are always aimed outwards, towards a sometimesinvisible audience.

While oral historians do not pretend to be psychologists, it is undeniable that the crossfertilization among oral history, psychology and the humanities, particularly in the United States, has influenced the work of oral historians. Our field is by no means unique. In Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Violence, Steven High remarks that “the popularity of trauma research and psychoanalytic theory in the humanities and social sciences since the 1990s was tied to the rise of memory

53 54 55

Ibid. 112.

Ibid. 125.

Charlton et al., History of Oral History: Foundations and Methodology, 125–159.

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studies...soon however, questions were raised about trauma theory.”56 Initially, this paradigm promised new ways of listening to histories, in which suffering and responses to it would be understood as universal. On this historiographical moment, Stef Craps comments that Trauma theory confidently announced itself as an essential apparatus for understanding ‘the real world’...With trauma forming a bridge between disparate historical experiences, so the argument goes, listening to the trauma of another can con-tribute to cross-cultural solidarity and to the creation of new forms of community.”57

Since then, it has been adopted and adapted throughout the academy and beyond into the public sphere, upheld by some as a “shared truth”,58 while others, such as Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, have sought to go beyond it.59

It is, however, impossible to “go beyond” without acknowledging just how deep and vast the impact the growth of trauma has been on culture at large and, specifically for this paper, how it has evolved in relation to conflict. In 2014, Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone argued that, “over the course of more than a century, the problem of individual psychic suffering became ‘tangled up’ with an array of the larger problems of modernity, including industrialization, bureaucracy and war.”60 The rest of this chapter, then, is concerned with understanding the genealogy of trauma and consequently, trauma theory before looking at the interdisciplinary influences that are helping to shape its use within oral history in the future.

56

S. High, Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence, Shared: Oral and Public History (UBC Press, 2015), 10.

57 Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–2.

58 Fassin and Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma : An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, 2.

59 High, Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence, 10.

60 Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, eds., The Future of Trauma Theory : Contemporary Literary Criticism (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), xi.

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3.3. Trauma from “Soldier’s Heart” to PTSD According to 19th- and 20th-century intellectual historian, Ruth Leys, post-traumatic stress disorder is hailed as the “culmination of a lineage that is seen to run from the past to the present in an interrupted yet ultimately continuous way.”61 This latest incarnation of medicalized trauma was a result of investigations prompted by various political movements. Research was by no means consistent across time and depended upon individual movements for the scope to discuss the impact of conflict and violence openly.62 Most recently, according to Judith Herman, the rise in “public awareness [of] sexual and domestic violence… [based in] the feminist movement in Western Europe and North America” has been influential in bringing previously private experiences such as sexual assault, into the public sphere.63

The conception of “trauma” as we might understand it today — experience of a life threatening event — is bound up with the beginning of psychoanalysis which “shot forth from a mass of competing theories that had all been thrown up by seismic shifts in philosophy, science and medicine” at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe.64 At this time of Victorian anxiety, medical professional John Erichsen was working with victims of railway accidents in Britain. He saw what he understood as damage to nervous systems caused by contusions or shock to the spine. In his work published in 1866, On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System, he “held that physical shock

61

Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3.

Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York, N.Y.: BasicBooks, 1992), 9.

63 Ibid.

64 George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (HarperCollins New York, 2008), 3.

62

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to neural tissue could result in mental injury”.65 German contemporary, Paul Oppenheimer, named this condition “traumatic neurosis”. Initially this diagnosis was decidedly rooted in the physical.66 However, inspired by Erichsen and Oppenheimer, physicians in North America and on the European continent also observing symptoms of “railway spine” began to consider “the mind as the key pathological site”.67 Medical practitioners began to look at links between physical and mental. For Micale and Lerner, “these…developments occurred in a parallel and often self-reinforcing manner; together they gave birth to the medical and cultural engagement with mental trauma.”68

Concurrently we see the rise in the study of hysteria— at the time understood as the “archetypal psychological disorder of women”.69 During the 1880s, prominent physician Jean-Martin Charcot was based at Paris’ Salpêtrière hospital. He believed that hysteria in women demonstrated a reproduction of traumatic experience.70 Working with male patients, as well as female (many of whom had experienced accidents at work in factories or as passengers on railways) he surmised that “trauma was not a principal, originating cause of the nervous disorders; rather it operated secondarily, as the triggering mechanism of a hereditarily grounded malady.”71 Although it was later rejected, his work on the effects of violence on the mind, heavily influenced the next

65

Kirby Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 7.

66 Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 3.

67 M. Micale and P. Lerner, Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12.

68 Ibid., 11.

69 Hysteria was associated with women as far back as Greco-Roman times. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 9.

70 Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 8.

71 Micale and Lerner, Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 18701930, 119.

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generation of psychiatrists and what they would observe in “shell-shocked” men during World War I.

From “soldier’s heart” of the American Civil War to post-traumatic stress disorder, “development of psychiatry as a field [is] reflected in the evolution of ideas about combat stress across the twentieth century.”72 At the time of the First World War, the reaction by medical practitioners to the variety of psychological and neurological symptoms exhibited by soldiers was inconsistent, ranging from provision of a pension to execution for cowardice. Researching diagnostic classifications from the time, anthropologist Allan Young found that it was not only symptoms that were taken into consideration: Many officers were diagnosed with “neurasthenia” but very few of them were diagnosed “hysteria”...Clinical perceptions of hysteria were shaped by the widely accepted belief that is it the product of suggestion and suggestibility...In the case of the typical officer, such a context was improbable (in the physician’s view) because of what could be assumed about the patient’s breeding and education and the process of selection and monitoring that produced frontline officers.73

According to Finley, observations during this conflict also led medical practitioners to hypothesize that “it was individual predisposition that result in neuropsychiatric disorder, rather than innate challenges of battle itself.”74 As a result, between World War I and II, the U.S. government spent significant amounts of money on developing screenings for soldiers. This effort met with little success as record numbers returned from the fronts to the US with psychological issues that would have lasting impacts.75

72

Finley, Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, 90.

Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 63.

74 Finley, Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, 92.

75 Ibid.

73

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Fassin and Rechtman note that even in 1945, ‘‘the reality of [soldiers’] trauma was still being measured in terms of their personal fragility.”76 It would be a couple of decades yet before traumatic experience would be conceived of as universal and subsequent reactions as not simply the result of individual weakness.

Despite initially having lower numbers of psychiatric casualties than both World War II and the Korean War, “the [Vietnam War] redefined war trauma for the psychiatric community”.77 In the United States at least, this conflict caused the most recent shift in how traumatic experiences and their impact, are viewed. When post-traumatic stress disorder first appeared in the DSM-III this was in response to the “post-Vietnam syndrome” that medical professionals and the public believed was underlying mental health problems and suicides amongst this newest generation of veterans.78 However, this recognition came about more as a result of a political process, a need by the U.S. government to make up for what had been a futile war. From the DSM-III, PTSD has grown to encompass a “wide variety of stressful experiences, whether communally or individually experienced.”79 taking place in disparate corners of the world.

Reflecting on the changing scientific views Hautzinger and Scandlyn argue: [Medical] diagnoses are a product of their history or genealogy: they are socially or culturally constructed. This does not mean that they are not “real” or do not produce changes in the body that are distressful, debilitating, and sometimes fatal, but they cannot be understood apart from their social and intellectual history. Yet once a group of practitioners accepts the diagnosis and the explanation of its causes into medical knowledge as scientific fact, it is easy to forget that it was once new, that someone or 76

Fassin and Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, 67.

Finley, Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, 95.

78 Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, 108–109.

79 Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff, and Graham Dawson, Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives (Routledge, 1999).

77

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some group of people at a particular time in history and a particular place identifies it, described it and names it.80

Arising from discourse that developed almost entirely in Europe and the United States using this “disease of memory”81 in other trans-historical contexts has been seen as problematic. For instance, it assumes that there psychological processes that exist independently of the culture that provides us with ways to interpret and understand the world around us. This approach has led to the practice of psychologists and therapists attending natural and manmade disasters around the world without question, in order to help the traumatized. In a similar manner to post-traumatic stress disorder, moral injury could be considered a “culturally based way of thinking and responding to states of madness and distress.”82 In using it to analyze narrative, would oral historians risk perpetuating a universalist notion of trauma? Perhaps, yet by adapting it to include nuanced conceptualizations from other fields, it can provide us with a useful analytic tool.

Writing about his work in South Africa with those who experienced the disruption of community during the apartheid government’s policy of forced removals83, Sean Field expresses concern over the use of “event-centred trauma theories.”84 Particularly for somewhere such as South Africa where many people have experienced long-standing and on-going oppression, “It is tempting to conceptualize all experiences of forced displacement as traumatic…The individual's family and cultural history prior to violent 80

Hautzinger and Scandlyn, Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles with the Wars on Terror, 98–99.

81 Patrick J. Bracken and Celia Petty, Rethinking the Trauma of War, ed. Bracken, Patrick J. and Petty, Celia (New York: Free Association Books, 1998), 22.

82 Ibid. 40.

83 L. P. Walker and L. Platsky, “The Surplus People: Forced Removals in South Africa” (Johannesburg, 1985).

84 Sean Field, Oral History, Community, and Displacement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 12.

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events shapes whether the psychosocial impact of that violence is experienced and subsequently manifested as trauma.”85

In a similar vein, through engaging with feminist and queer theories, Ann Cvetkovich has been able to examine trauma in the “everyday” within oral histories.86 Structural violence, including poverty, sexism and homophobia amongst others, is often rendered invisible by event-based trauma theory. In her book, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Ann Cvetkovich interrogates the “amnesiac powers of national culture, which is adept at using one trauma story to suppress another.”87 For her it is also a question of the binary of public and private spheres, wherein some forms of trauma are in fact “persistent and normalized.”88

As an interdisciplinary field, practitioners of oral history are active in utilising methodologies and discourses from anthropology, psychology and women and gender studies among others. Thus, trauma theory was adopted in a similar manner and has been used extensively to help understand the narratives of communities and individuals. Now, oral historians have heeded the call to nuance our understandings of the theoretical, striving to uncover the cultural and historical “specificities hiding under the apparently neutral… face”89 of trauma.

85

Ibid.

Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Duke University Press, 2003), 20.

87 Ibid. 16.

88 Ibid. 34.

89 Fassin and Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, 39.

86

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Chapter 4: Analysis 4.1. Introduction I might as well do this [interview] and get it out of the way. I mean, even though it’s hard for me to - because I’ve never done it before and I still have never really talked to my family about my whole Army experience... this might be history in the making for future veterans and other people who might want to understand how we experience our life in the military and outside as well.

Denise Williams. Interview, October 24, 2014

Since the so-called “Global War on Terror” began in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2011, over 1.6 million U.S. service members have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.90 According to Hautzinger and Scandlyn, these wars have been distinguished from previous conflicts through the use of a professional all-volunteer force (AVF), lack of clear measurements of success and the “profile of surviving-butwounded” service members’.91 These factors have been combined with “the inherent ambiguity of declaring a war on terror (an emotion) or on terrorism (a political tactic and practice), has obscured what mission accomplished, or ultimate success in either Iraq or Afghanistan would look like.92

This section will introduce two of the narrators that I interviewed for the Brooklyn College student veterans oral history project - Galo Calderón and Denise Williams93- and focus on in this work. They served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively.

Their stories, while not claiming to represent all those who have served in-country, are by no means exceptional. “War may be all-consuming,” writes medical anthropologist 90

Finley, Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, 1.

Hautzinger and Scandlyn, Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles with the Wars on Terror, 21–26.

92 Ibid. 22.

93 Narrator requested a pseudonym for published works only.

91

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Erin P. Finley in her book Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD Among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, “but it is impossible to understand the experience of combat without understanding the richness of life going on around it.94” More than just looking for examples of moral injury, the stories are surrounded by what those experiences meant to them at the time and continue to do so in the present.

4.2. Biographies of U.S. Army Veterans Galo Calderón and Denise Williams “Make sure to arrive on time,” said Prof. Phil Napoli, as we discussed my interview with Galo Calderón, the first for the Brooklyn College project. “Ex-military have excellent time keeping skill and they’re usually early.” Fortunately for me - still new to the city and the one and a half hour journey on the subway from Upper Manhattan to the end of the 2 line at Flatbush Avenue - neither Calderón nor Williams had maintained that particular trait from their service. Conspicuous, though, was their military bearing and posture. At different times, they sat opposite me - bolt upright, feet squarely on the floor, arms lying parallel along the arms of the chair. Our interview space was a common room for the history department, deserted on Friday afternoons, its large windows looking out onto to the quadrangle, surrounded by trees, their leaves in fall colors.

Both interviews were around three hours. Calderón was more hesitant at the beginning - “I don’t know, I don’t know what else to say. That’s a little bit of me.”95 - but by the end, he was telling me vivid stories and drawing me in. Williams was more comfortable, having done an interview already for the project. She laughed a lot, even when discussing brain surgery in Afghanistan, perhaps a sign of nerves. Towards the end our 94 95

Finley, Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, 23.

Calderón, G. Interview. October 3, 2014

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interview became more conversational. I even proffered my own opinions - “I think it’s a tough world out there.”96 - something I rarely do in interviews. My research agenda was itself a co-interviewer– asking questions that I may not have asked otherwise, leaving interesting tangents behind. I came away with the understanding that they should never be embarked upon lightly.

Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Denise Williams was not the first person in her family to join the military. During World War Two, when the Caribbean nation was still under British colonial rule, Denise’s grandfather was conscripted to serve his country.

Although her grandfather spoke little of his service, her own later experiences serving with the US military in Afghanistan have helped her understand this reticence.

Once I went to Afghanistan, I came back and said “Okay, now I know why,” because some things are really quite horrible… I said, “Now I know how you feel.” Because [my grandfather] didn’t really want to talk about his time in the army.97

As she was growing up, there were other strong military influences that sparked within her a life-long desire to join: My aunt was in the Army, my mom’s older sister. She did, I believe, 20 years and...she retired a long time ago. In that way she influenced me to join the Army in a sense. remember when I was young, back in Trinidad, I used to watch G.I. Joe and I was like, “Oh, I want to do this.”...they had this military style with them. So I was like, ‘Oh, I want to do that.

I want to do the G.I. Joe kind of thing.” And then... I saw pictures of [my Aunt] in her uniform and I was like, “Now I definitely want to do this.” So I kind still wanted to join the Army when I was in Trinidad and then I left Trinidad in ‘96’‘98

After high school, Williams moved to the United States to study at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York. Unable to pay the high tuition costs as an international student, 96

Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2014 Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2014 98 Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2014 97

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she set about applying for her permanent residency. The dream of joining the military never left though and was realized in 2000: [Receiving my green card] was like freedom, you know, freedom to find a legal job...so the first thing I did was sign up for the Army. That’s the first day after I got my green card. I was like, “I’m going into the Army.” I hadn’t told anyone I was going to join at the time. It was like a little secret I had. So I told my mom. It was, I believe a month before I went into the Army. She was kind of scared. Then I told my friends and they were all worried because you know, I’m going in the Army and there’s danger and stuff like that. I’m like, “It wouldn’t be that bad, you know?” So I tried to convince them it’s the right thing to do. I tried to tell my dad the same thing. I mean it was the right thing to do. I wanted to do this. So it’s my choice. That’s why I signed the papers. So I can’t turn back now.99

It is telling of the values that Williams held that her first choice as a U.S. citizen was to volunteer to serve in its military and as will become clear in this chapter, those values would be tested by her experiences throughout her service. Unlike Williams, Galo Calderón was the first person in his family to join the military. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Calderón is an only child. His parents, originally from Puerto Rico, met in New York City in 1972. Growing up there in the 1980s, he remembers the borough as a “different place. It wasn’t as big as it is now in every way”100, and with a community cohesion that has been eroded over time: Brooklyn…it has that bad rap of, you know, gangs and hoods and whatever. People tough and fighting, the Brooklyn accent. To me, that was home...Sure, the people were tough but at the same time, they were kind. They were nice. They liked to joke around. You know, people fall in love, get hurt...It’s the same old stuff. It’s just we might express it differently...I think everybody back then just wanted to belong to something...It was sort of like an identity, something to cling on to, to say, you know, “I’m just like you.”101

99

Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2014 Calderón, G. Interview. October 3, 2014 101 Calderón, G. Interview. October 3, 2014 100

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While Galo was passionate about art in high school, due to parental pressure he went on to Legal Studies at John Jay College in Manhattan. In 2000, between his junior and senior year Calderón left college, something he credits as being “the first time I actually made an independent decision”102. He spent the next year working different jobs:

I had some of the real-life experience, working in a restaurant, busboy, salesman, stores, working in the same shop as my dad…I realized how really tough the real world is and without a college education...face the facts, you’re going to have work really hard for low pay and your aspirations are going to be low.103

Calderón was still seeking a “sense of direction”104 when two hijacked airliners were flown into the New York World Trade Center. For both Calderón and Williams the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York occurred so close to home - separated from them by a narrow stretch of the East River. Unsurprisingly, the event features in both interviews, however it had significantly different meanings for each of them. Williams had already completed her basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and was a reservist with a unit near her home at former Army installation, Fort Totten, Queens.

That was in August of 2001.

Then September 11th happened and I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ I mean it just started with the Twin Towers fell and I was in shock. I mean I was like, “I didn’t sign up for this,” at first, you know. I didn’t sign up for this. And I was scared that they might call me in. I mean if they call me in, they call me in. That’s fine but I was kind of like, “Are you going to call me in to, I don’t know, pull guard duty or paperwork?” I don’t know what’s going to happen. So I waited and nothing happened. I did my drill. I did my two weeks of [reserve] training and that was it.105

Galo nearly lost two close friends in the World Trade Center towers, prompting, in part, his decision to join the military.

102

Calderón, G. Interview. October 3, 2014 Ibid.

104 Calderón, G. Interview. October 3, 2014 105 Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2014 103

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I actually went into the Army with the intention of going to war, with the intention of fighting, with the intention of really taking out my aggression. And that’s not a normal way of going into the Army... I think that [September 11] hit home pretty personal for me in every level...I think the connection between 9/11 and me enlisting...for a temporary moment, it gave me a sense of direction. It was better than being at home and going from one job to another, very unstable and not knowing what to do. I think being in the military gave me that stability, that sense of stability, and still that time to figure out what I want to do.106

Here Calderón states clearly an economic impetus behind his decision to join. In a time without a draft, the military has come to rely, in part, on recruits from areas and backgrounds where the only way out is the military.107 The anticipation of a steady income and further education has been crucial. The result is that there are communities across the United States that have borne the brunt of the toll on those serving and their families. Of this, Finley writes, “The disproportionate recruitment of service-members from among low- and middle-income communities and the reliance placed upon the less privileged to be willing to sacrifice their lives toward the advancements of national interests provide a classic example of… structural violence.”108 New York City is not considered one of these communities. However, data collected by Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen on Iraq War casualties shows that on average they came from block groups (geographic unit of around 1000 residents) with lower income and educational levels than the city as a whole.109 Economic background intersecting with race, class, gender and other social identifiers play their part in not only the decision to enlist, but crucially, the experience individuals have in their military service.

Just as Williams had, Calderón went for basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma - an 106 107 108

Calderón, G. October 3, 2014.

Ibid. 15.

Ibid.

D. L. Kriner and F. X. Shen, The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities (Oxford University Press, 2010), 43–45.

109

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experience few veterans forget - and on to further infantry training in Germany. In the spring of 2003 Calderón’s division arrived in Iraq. They recovered the initial coalition attack comprised of mostly American troops from the Marine Corps, with support from their British Royal Marine counterparts, which occurred over twenty days between March 20 and April 9, 2003.110 The ambiguity and mystery surrounding the justification for the Iraq War is well known at this point. After the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, brought down by coalition forces, the United States took over as administrators and long-term occupiers, setting out to oversee the “formation of Iraq from a tyranny to a functioning democracy.”111 Calderón recalls the entering into the country from Kuwait, which provided “basing and transit facilities”112 to the allies: When we drove those two days, we’re like, “Wow, it’s a war path.” Some of the tanks were still steaming…probably some of the battles just took place...destruction happened just two days before we got there. And then I’ll never forget the Iraqis, their eyes. That first day, there was a lot of hatred. Everybody, even the kids, the women, there was this anger in their eyes…I felt it.113

Initially told he would be there for six months, Calderón actually served fifteen consecutive months in-county- one of the longest recorded114 - and his unit took many casualties over that time. At the end of his contract in 2004 Calderón decided not to reenlist and returned home to his family in Brooklyn. When I met him in the fall of 2014, a decade after he left the service, he was in the final semester of a master's degree in early childhood education using the benefits of the Post-9/11 GI Bill .

I think the only thing the government is obligated to do is the hospital because the wear 110

John Keegan, “The Iraq War, New York, NY, Alfred A” (Knopf, 2004), 134–135.

Ibid. 209.

112 Ibid. 135–136.

113 Calderón, G. Interview. October 3, 2014.

114 See http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR100/RR145/RAND_RR145.pdf 111

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and tear they put us through is enormous…You put us through all that. I feel like you guys have to cover it… But I never felt like I was entitled to [the GI Bil]. I felt this was truly a gift- a gift from the government, a gift from the country, a gift from everybody. And I want to say thank you by becoming a teacher and being the best teacher I can be. And giving that thank you to the children and to the future and doing absolutely the best.115

Although enlisting before Calderón, Williams was not deployed to Afghanistan until 2005. “At least initially” writes Seth Jones, “[It] was the central front of America’s “War on Terror”.”116 Success for the United States in 2002 in overthrowing the Taliban - under whose regime al Qa’ida had planned and trained for the September 11 attacks - was fleeting, as very soon it gave way to insurgency. al Qa’ida took root across the border in Pakistan, from where they coordinated attacks on the US-backed government, civilian targets and the coalition forces117. In fact, the during the time of William’s deployment, “violence was particularly acute between 2005 and 2006. The number of suicide attacks quadrupled, remotely detonated bombings more than doubled, and armed attacks nearly tripled.”118 After going on active duty in 2002, Williams went through a reclassification process as her reservist job was already filled. This time she chose the role of surgical technician.

It was more challenging because I had to learn the instruments, how to dress the table, see about the patients, make sure it’s sterile...I was scared at first, “Oh my god, I’ve never touched a body in my life. What are all these guts?”...I mean it was cool. You get to see the human body up close like that, especially internally but I’m scared too because I’m like, “What if I screw up?”. Because it does happen...I have to be very careful of the instruments I have.

Williams’ first station after training was at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical 115

Calderón, G. Interview. October 3, 2014.

Seth G. Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (WW Norton & Company, 2010), xxii.

117 Ibid. xxii–xxv.

118 Ibid. xxiv.

116

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Center at Fort Gordon, Georgia. In May 2004 she was ordered to prepare for deployment with 249th General Hospital but in the end was given the choice of volunteering to go, which she did.

We had to mentally prepare ourselves for the next--for deployment…this is the real thing…I got my uniform. I did the will...and it was an eye-opener for because, you know, I never thought I might die. That’s the biggest thing for me, I might die on deployment. Because in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq, a lot of soldiers died already….So it was--how should I say this? It was...sad for me because I have to prepare myself mentally “Okay, I might die. Just get my will ready for my family.” And pray, hope for the best I come back, you know.119

In many ways Denise’s experience acts in contrast to those who enlisted in the months and years after the attacks on September 11th in New York City, including Calderón.

While he and others like him were actively seeking combat in some form or another, her motivations for enlisting had been very different. Williams was stationed at Bagram Airfield, north of Kabul surrounded by towering, snow-capped mountain ranges. With the end of operations in Afghanistan, the base has now been closed but at its peak was the largest military base in the country, housing 40,000 personnel, both military and civilian. Her work as a surgical technician brought her face to face with the pain and suffering of not just United States and allied forces but the local Afghan population.

We trained, reintegrated with the hospital, the previous unit was there and that place was a mess to begin with… We cleaned up as much as we can and get right to work. I mean even though we just got there, we got work to do and got right to it because patients are coming in. And that time it was wintertime so we got a lot of burn patients. So what happened with the burn patients now is like they have a kerosene lamp… it burns their skin. They catch fire and burn their skin or they explode sometimes.

Like many who worked on the base, Williams rarely left. Besides her interactions with Afghan patients, her experience of the country was restricted to bartering for goods at

119

Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2014

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the gate to the base, and the two times she was allowed off post. As well as burns, she treated Afghan women who were victims of domestic abuse, and soldiers injured by improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Williams also participated in her first ever brain surgery. Her work was conducted during Taliban rocket attacks which occurred “on a daily basis, almost every month and it’s like, ‘What the hell? You can’t take a break?’”120 She returned home to New York in early 2006, her tour of duty complete.

It was a happy feeling, just to be back home again and wear regular clothes. The simplest things, you know...We had a ‘Welcome back’ ceremony. My friends, my family came…And it was so surreal. I was like, ”I’m actually back alive in one piece.” Well, maybe physically, but mentally I was somewhere else, but nonetheless, I was home.121

Here, Williams captures the dissonance that is a common feature of interviews with veterans of all generations, but perhaps more so with those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. They often find themselves removed from dangerous combat zones, back to the United States within hours, certainly quicker than during World War II or Vietnam. And for many, this is magnified through the multiple deployments often required. Finley remarks in reference to the veterans she talked to, I found it impossible to avoid thinking that many of them spoke as though they had gotten lost somewhere in the space between Iraq or Afghanistan and [the United States].

It was as if, halted prematurely on the journey home, they landed on some muddled middle ground of reality and memory from which they embarked on both dreams and waking life.122

Paraphrasing the words of veteran and playwright, Stephan Wolfert, the military is an expert at wiring soldiers for war however, it has no system in place for “de-cruiting” and it is left up to individuals and communities to do the hard work of reintegrating 120

Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2014 Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2014 122 Finley, Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, 10.

121

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veterans back into society.123 Without a systematic way of doing so, however, the result has been breakdown of relationships, homelessness and in some cases suicide amongst the veteran population.

Edward Tick and Jonathan Shay are just two among many psychologists working with veterans who have written of the need for a formal process of reintegrating veterans into society. In Odysseus in America, Shay writes, As a society we have found ourselves unable to offer purification to those who do the terrible acts of war on our behalf. What I have in mind is a communal ritual...that recognizes that everyone who has shed blood, no matter how blamelessly, is in need of purification...The community as a whole, which sent these young people to train in the profession of arms and to use those arms, is no less in need of purification...All modern soldiers go into battle under constraint - they have enough to carry without being blamed or credited with the political decision to fight that battle.124

Inspired by the traditions of cultures such as the Lakota, which provide extensive communal rituals that “allow opportunities for catharsis”.125 Edward Tick also highlights the role that storytelling can have in bringing soldiers home mentally: Few of our veterans seek a public platform; nor are they offered one. Veterans most often withhold their stories, not only because of the pain evoked in telling them but also because they fear that, in our culture of denial, we won’t properly receive them...they become stuck in the role of scapegoat, carriers of tribal shadow...we can get high on war stories while shunning war’s reality and failing its victims. To counteract this thrillseeking and become healing, veterans’ stories need to be told in a way that transfers the moral weight of the event from the individual to the community.126

While oral historians don’t mistake our work as therapy, we do see ourselves as

123

For more on the De-Cruit program see: http://shakespeareandveterans.org/ Jonathan Shay, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (Scribner, 2002), 245.

125 Tick, War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

126 Ibid., 222–223.

124

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witnesses. Narrators often find sharing their story with an oral historian to be an important experience, even if it in and of itself does not “heal” a wounded soul. We have a part to play as members of the community with a method of transmitting stories of violence and pain to a wider audience. Part of the aim of this thesis, it to offer oral historians another way of hearing their interview with veterans, in the context of more than trauma, and psychological or physical injury. It investigates what happens to what Tick defines as the soul127 of veterans in their experiences of military service.

4.3. Hearing Moral Injury “Hearing” moral injury is about advancing ways that oral historians and potentially medical personnel might use biographical life histories to gain a deeper understanding of how the concept of moral injury may occur within the lives of military personnel. A narrative approach gives a holistic picture of Calderón and Williams’ lives before, during and after conflict, allowing them to reflect on their lived experiences. Using the framework of moral injury - the betrayal of “what’s right”, by someone in authority or oneself, in a high stakes situation - actions and choices acquire different meanings and challenge us to listen more closely to the pain of others.

We each begin to develop a moral code early in childhood, but that code evolves throughout our lives. A moral code is not set in stone; it can change, among other reasons, because we experience situations that challenge our ideas about right and wrong. Ideally, using a biographical life history, an oral historian can explore with the narrator, this evolution. When I was interviewing Calderón and Williams, I began each

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For Tick, soul is the ‘center of human consciousness and experience...the drive to create and preserve life...our intellectual power, that which reasons and understands…[it] is what gives us our ethical sensibilities...our will, our individual volition…those aspects of us judged unacceptable by society, religion or ourselves.” Ibid., 16–22.

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interview by asking about their upbringing. However only Calderón was comfortable with spending much time on the topic. Williams raced through her childhood in a few minutes, signalling that she was uncomfortable talking about this part of her life.

GIBB: Tell me a little bit more about growing up in Trinidad.

WILLIAMS: I spent most of my life in Trinidad until graduating high school. I mean, I didn’t have a really good childhood because my mom left when I was a little girl...I stayed with my dad but he was a police officer at the time...he couldn’t stay with us because he works the night shift. We were home by ourselves. We were like latch-key kids. So we basically took care of ourselves...We tended to move a lot, like Army brats, move from one place to another.

Galo was more forthcoming with stories about his childhood. As a young person he struggled with anger management issues- “I started as a baby. I had a mean temper.”128 - resulting in suspensions from school which impacted on his education.

I think I fought more than I played baseball. That’s how much I fought. And I don’t know. I don’t know where it comes from. It might be easy to blame it on my parents because they were also violent, but I was like that from--almost from the get-go...I was that guy who fought every week and I got so tired of it. I didn’t enjoy it any more...So I don’t want to go to school anymore. I was playing hooky so many times. Of course, I got suspended because of that. And that affected me going to high school and I almost got left back in eighth grade.

Good thing I had good grades. It was the only thing that saved me...I think eventually I started kind of connecting the dots and realizing that maybe it’s my fault too...and it takes a lot to realize maybe it’s my fault in some way. I think once you realize that, you take that big step up, that’s when change can happen. It’s hard to fix the problem when something that’s so deep and innate for you--from you...maybe that’s when you need to start talking to people and share your experiences.129

While childhood can be an appropriate place to begin for chronological comprehension, if we as oral historians are to come to a better understanding of where moral injury originates, we must have the skill, and nuance, to help narrators move between phases 128 129

Calderón, G. Interview. October 3, 2015.

Calderón, G. Interview. October 3, 2015.

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of their lives. We need to be able to guide them with our questions, and our careful listening, as they contemplate how they have changed over time. Morality is not something that people necessarily talk about in a natural way. If an interviewer is interested in understanding how a narrator developed his or her moral code, then they need to ask questions that get at the person’s moral landscape and how it can come into formation. As I will discuss later in relation to Williams, it may be fruitful to revisit childhood experiences after veterans have related their service. This provides an opportunity, for example, to compare and contrast a veteran’s childhood views on war with the reality that he or she has lived through and continues to live with. Our task as oral historians is to find ways that encourage narrators to reflect on changes over their lifetime.

4.3.1. Galo Calderón’s story As our interview turned towards Calderón’s experiences in-country, he talked about the build-up to his deployment: Iraq. There’s a lot I have to say about Iraq. We knew we were going to Iraq about a month or two before the public knew, which made me realize that probably our leaders knew even months before we knew…People were kind of excited to see [bombings] on TV. When I say people, I mean us, the soldiers. And I remember the conversation a lot. It was “Oh, what are you going to do when you’re facing the fire?”...everybody was talking to themselves like they were Chuck Norris or, you know, some super G.I. Joe...reality was, everyone was afraid.

Like many veterans since the completion of their service and the end of formal conflicts within Iraq and Afghanistan, Calderón has begun to see his role in the conflict in relation to larger national debates. This is particularly clear when Calderón recounted to me the feelings amongst his unit of the purpose they had in-country:

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It certainly is not a war like World War II or even maybe Vietnam where there is an actual war. In Iraq, none of us felt like soldiers. We all felt like police. And the police without a real sense of authority. I believed what everybody believed, you know, that they [Iraqis] were a threat, that they were part of the terrorism. And I certainly believed the weapons of mass destruction. I had my stereotypes and I thought everybody was bad, everybody was the enemy. So I went in there wholeheartedly... And I realized how so wrong it was. This is not the enemy. This is people, you know, really people. Very much like you and I.

At the end of the interview he returned to this incongruity.

People were telling me all the time, “Thank you for your service.” And it got to the point where it was a lot...And I kind of didn’t want to hear it anymore...I felt like nobody needed to thank me, not for that, because I really wanted to do it. I was going to do it without anybody’s consent... And there was that conflict too, being in Iraq and knowing the Iraqis are not the enemies, and being confused who the enemy is, not knowing who the enemy is.

And I felt, “What service really am I doing?”...Am I doing a good one, you know? Am I fighting the right side or not? I think another reason why I didn’t want to hear any more “Thank you for your services,” because I started to become confused as to my purpose, our purpose, over there.

While it is outside the scope of this paper, the sentiment that Calderón expresses opens the door for oral historians to look at moral injury in a much larger context— in terms of the political leadership that sent soldiers to war and the betrayal that they feel in the aftermath. This concept is supported by Shay as he writes, “The vulnerability of the soldier’s moral world has increased in three thousand years because of the vast number and physical distance of people in position to betray “what’s right” in ways that threaten the survival of soldiers in battle.”130 The tension that Calderón expresses between the mission he believed he was going over there to fulfil and the reality, which is more ambiguous, has certainly caused him distress over time.

Some weeks after our interview, in the basement of a building on Columbia University's

130

Jonathan Shay, “Achilles in Vietnam (New York,” Touchstone 127 (1994): 5.

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Morningside Campus, I read a particular story Calderón had related to me, in full, to a small group of classmates. Initially, it had not registered with me as morally injurious.

However, for class we were assigned sections of Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam related to moral injury to discuss. While preparing for the discussion, I returned to the transcripts of the interviews I had done and “heard” the story differently. It occurred while Calderón was assigned to his first, and only, quick reaction force. QRFs are small teams that act as rapid response to situations on or near operating bases: And then we heard gunshots, loud and clear. It wasn’t just one or two, it wasn’t a celebratory gunshot. No, it was like going on and on and on. Clearly they were shooting at somebody. And then we heard another QRF and they called in. They were getting shot at…right away, I’m like putting on my gear. I’m already in the Humvee...I’m so excited because...yes, I want to get in the action. I have a lot of aggression. I need to get it out.

What better cause? And the captain goes, “Where are you going?” “Oh, the other QRF. They’re getting shot at. That’s the gunshot. It’s right there. Right there. I’m going to go. I’m ready. Let’s go.” He’s like, “We’re not going to go anywhere.” And I went--all that military bearing that I told you, all that don’t question the leader...keep your mouth shut. The attitude, the tone, all of that went out the window...talk about the disrespect that I did...and the guys kept calling in, they need help.

I went insane and I literally grabbed the radio. One of them like grabbed me or touched me and I flipped out. I know that I hit that person and I don’t even know who it was...maybe it was the captain himself but I went in a complete black mode. Like I wasn’t even seeing or thinking anymore and I just went right away to the radio and I was like, “This captain doesn’t want to go. We’re right here. We’re like less than one click away. We could get there in two minutes. Somebody say something.”...I was so infuriated, I actually cried. And I never cried from anger before...and I think the last thing I said and I said it like five times over and over, “If one person is dead, I’m going to go insane because I know the truth...I still don’t know what happened to those people on QRFs. It makes me mad that I don’t even know. That’s BS. I don’t even know why he didn’t want to go... I can’t even make a logical reasoning out of it. It just reduces me back to exactly how I feel at that very instant moment.

Breaking this story down as an example of moral injury we see first, a betrayal of what’s

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right: “This is not what we’re supposed to do, I know what a QFR is...He’s like, “We’re not going to go anywhere.” Calderón is devastated that his “superior” has the power to reject the expectation and fundamental assumption that as a soldier on a quick reaction force, Calderón is responsible for the safety of his military brothers and sisters who have called to him for help. Secondly, this is by the hand of an authority or oneself. In this circumstance both the captain and Calderón are implicated. Of course, Calderón was taking orders from his captain, as the chain of command in the military required him to do, over which he had no control. However, when talking about his childhood Calderón emphasised that he rarely did as he was told. He also told me that he continued to struggle with this aspect of his temperament even while in the military. For Calderób,, following orders in this instance seemed to violate his own moral “code”.

This episode, even more than a story he told me later on about his first kill, seems to remain in the present with him. Calderón clearly saw the right decision as being rushing out to help his fellow soldiers, but his view was in sharp contrast with the decisions of his superiors, leaving him inconsolable. We can speculate that Calderón’s captain had orders to remain where they were, but this was and is irrelevant to Calderón. Finally, this took place in a high stakes situation: “The fact that they called two or three times meant that they were in trouble...if I call you three times that I need help, my God I think I might be dying.” Given the dangerous nature of the work that many military personnel did in Iraq, there was certainly a perceived potential for loss of life. Calderón still has no answers about the outcome of the firefight.

As I listened to Calderón recount that story, his voice shifted. First it was excitement, as he recalled the sounds of gunshots and the adrenaline coursed, preparing him for a

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firefight. Then the anger built as he recalled the frustration, realising that they were going nowhere. Finally, jaw clenched in the unfinished events of that day. Violating one’s moral code has long-lasting effects. Sitting with me in a room in Brooklyn College ten years later, this story was unprocessed and it may not be the only one. There was no life-threat to Calderón and so PTSD cannot unpack this story in the way that moral injury has been able to. Moral injury allows us to see the deep connections between Calderón and his fellow soldiers, even when they are unknown to him.

Reflecting on the relationship between a military command and their troops, Calderón told me, I think that’s another big thing about the military - it’s a lot about learning how to work with the group that you’re in, being a team player. Knowing your role and sticking to that role and knowing who the leader is, right or wrong, you follow him.

You follow him all the way to the ground. And that one took a long time for me because I was very much, “That doesn’t make sense.”...I always thought, “My inputs matter”...It look a long time for me, but being a leader is taking risks. It’s an incredible amount of responsibility. And it’s not easy. It’s not easy for anybody...Nobody’s going to make 100 percent good decisions. So you have to respect that and I think that when I finally became a leader I realized that the best feeling is to know that people will follow you right or wrong, because that makes you feel like “Okay, it’s safe for me to make decisions.”

As a soldier Calderón understood that in order for the military to function, it relied on his unquestioning ability to follow the leader, and likewise for others to follow him. This is in part the reason why service members are at higher risk of moral injury that other populations. At the same time, Calderón provides a complex take on the ways that both he and his officer were implicated in the decision to remain behind, while they listened to the firefight that continued.

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4.3.2. Denise Williams’ story Prior to my interviews with Williams and Calderon, Philip Napoli briefed me that Williams had been diagnosed with PTSD and that Calderon most likely suffered from it too. I made a conscious choice not to bring the term up in the interview space. Nor did I offer terms like “trauma,” which are loaded with expectations and presumptions. With Williams’ explicit use of the term PTSD, I felt more comfortable probing that area of interest and I felt that it gave me permission to use the term in my questions:

GIBB: You said you were diagnosed with PTSD. Do you think--does that explain everything about you?

WILLIAMS: Yeah, I think it does, because I’m like, “Why am I so angry all the time?”...I even notice with my friend, she was in the Marines and we were in this library and a couple of students, they were talking loud and everything. I was like, “What the hell’s wrong with these kids?” And she was like, “Will you please shut the fuck up?” She was really angry [...] I looked at her and it reminded me of myself too. I was like, “Geez.” It looked like PTSD because we had been deployed and experienced these horrible things and then going back to work and trying to adjust yourself, it’s difficult because I guess you can say we’re scarred, you know. Scarred for life, I guess. I don’t know. And then try to readjusting ourselves back to society, whether it’s military or civilian, especially civilian society, it was hard to adjust because I got angry all the time and shouting and physically fighting somebody. I’d never done that before.

In the above extract I was trying to provide Williams with the opportunity to explore her experiences of life after service beyond the challenges of PTSD including those that could not be explained by the diagnosis. However, it is a challenge to open up such a discussion without stepping over the line into the realm of psychology and possibly reducing an individual to a diagnosis. On reflection my question may have done so as the result of a lack of awareness about the intellectual boundaries. As discussed in the

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previous chapter, PTSD represents the establishment of a “‘shared truth”’.131 Despite the potential limitations of the concept and diagnosis of PTSD, when a narrator uses the term herself, it can be appropriate, and even helpful, because it opens the door to talking about experiences that might otherwise feel unspeakable to the narrator.

However, post-traumatic stress disorder is such a pervasive narrative that it can be a challenge to find ways to encourage veterans to reflect on their experiences as anything other than “traumatic”. If appropriate, oral historians may be able to encourage narrators to reflect in the interview on their knowledge of PTSD, diagnosis (if pertinent) and experiences that may lie outside of its definition.

According to Drescher et al., “some of the symptoms… that might arguably be related to moral injury include...[a] change in, or loss of spirituality… including negative attributions about God’.132 Although not every individual’s moral code is fostered through religion, it is certainly a powerful and common means through which one develops. Naturally in the course of the interview, Williams brought up the topic of her faith while in Afghanistan: Like I said, it was very stressful and I had to go see a chaplain because it was so horrible at times. I couldn’t take it. I was like, “I need to go see somebody.” So I went to the chaplain and I actually went to church because I’m not really a church person. I’m still not. So I went to church and it helped me a lot...It definitely helped me.

Here, Williams indicates a changing attitude towards religion during her deployment in Afghanistan. I asked her to reflect on how serving in a combat zone might have impacted these changes.

131

Hautzinger and Scandlyn, Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles with the Wars on Terror, 105.

132 Drescher et al., “An Exploration of the Viability and Usefulness of the Construct of Moral Injury in War Veterans,” 9.

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GIBB: I just wondered if there’s anything else that--I mean I guess, I don’t know if this is starting a new topic but the one thing I did pick up on, you mentioned your faith a couple of times, the fact that you weren’t particularly [religious] but during the time in Afghanistan, you became [more religious], but that’s gone away again.

WILLIAMS: Well, yeah, that’s true.

GIBB: I’m just curious why that--what you make of that?

WILLIAMS: That’s a good question. I guess because I was in a horrible place and I needed something to--I needed a familiar place, something of comfort. When I was younger in Trinidad, I went to church almost every day. And I hated it. I’m like, “I need a break.” So when I came to New York, I didn’t go to church as much. No, actually before I came to New York, I was at my grandpa’s place and he’s an Anglican. And I’m not really a morning person, because he goes to church at set times and prays and whatnot...I went with my aunt and we went almost every day and I hated it. So when I came here I didn’t really go to church as much...When I went to join the Army and I became active duty, I started going to church down south...I didn’t like it because I think they were trying to force me to become ‘saved’.

I got deployed and I was going through a lot of stress. Even suicide at times and I was like, “What is this?“ So I needed to speak to somebody. I spoke to a chaplain and he invited me to church...the music really helped me a lot...We were in the church a lot because I guess the majority of [my unit] were Black and we tended to be church oriented....We stand out as a group and we participated a lot in church...And it’s funny though because I came back home and never went back to church since then...It’s a serious thing, giving my praise to God...I see my mom pray every day and she went through these hardships at times, and I’d be amazed. ‘You went through hell but you pray to God every day. Why? He should be blessing you by now.” And I tend to be skeptical. I tend to lose faith.

GIBB: It’s interesting to hear you lose faith here [in the United States]...I think a lot of people would say that they would go to somewhere like Afghanistan and lose their faith because of what’s going on there.

WILLIAMS: Right…But even then in Afghanistan…I got angry at times because I’m like “These are innocent people dying. They don’t deserve that.” And I even questioned my faith

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at times. “Why do I see babies dying like this?... Why do they go through hell, women, men and kids, innocent people?”

The concept of moral injury enables the listener, and when a story is shared, the general public, to consider experiences that don’t fit a PTSD diagnosis and to expand understanding of veterans beyond their experiences with war-zone events and actions.

The PTSD perspective can be limiting and potentially work to the detriment of fully understanding the experiences of veterans. While the psychological research I outlined in the Chapter 2 focuses on MIEs (“morally injurious events”), the original framework does not specify that moral injury is caused by one particular event. In that way, it allows for a much more comprehensive understanding of what individuals go through during their service, whether on deployment or not. It can help us examine the “every day” experiences that veterans may have during their service that may not conform to traditional notions of trauma, given that it is a discourse that developed in a particular cultural and temporal moment.

During our interview, Williams described a number of incidents both on and off base in Georgia where she was the subject of racial prejudice, including being ignored by employees in a clothing store, warned by friends not to go to certain places in uniform - “I might be somebody’s strange fruit”133 - and finding fellow soldiers avoided eye contact with her. Looking at Williams’ experience of serving in the Army as a woman of color, through the lens of moral injury opens up her narrative in ways that other trauma theory doesn’t.

133

Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2015.

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WILLIAMS: I got stuck in Georgia...It was wasn’t a good environment...I had to deal with racism in the Army...I had to deal with racist people who smile at your face and talk behind your back.

GIBB: Were you surprised at that?

WILLIAMS: Yeah, I mean I didn’t expect to experience that up close. Because I know here in New York there’s a lot of racism especially with the police. That was one thing. But it was kind of far away from me. I didn’t really experience that. But coming to that work environment and then hearing people especially--I mean, I wasn’t expecting that at all because I was thinking Army, people from different backgrounds, different races. I mean you come to work together and we’re friends. I was kind of shocked and disappointed.

As prevalent as the incidents of racism were from her peers, her superiors were also implicated. The following story fits the conception of moral injury as a betrayal of “what’s right” by a superior, in a high stakes situation.

My co-worker, he’s Hispanic. I think he’s Cuban. He was on-call on the weekends and my sergeant, who was speaking to him [and] another sergeant on three-way. So apparently [my sergeant] forgot to hang up on my co-worker and he told the other sergeant - they’re both White - “You see? This is why the Blacks and the Mexicans keep f’ing up.”...And this is the person who is supposed to have my back…”You’re my sergeant. You’re my supervisor.

You’re supposed to have my back...what do you think about me? I’m a Black person.” And to me, that was an insult to me, like a betrayal in a sense. And then the funniest thing, I really don’t understand it to this day….He was made an EO [Equal Opportunities] rep. The sergeant-major found out and they made him an EO rep...That is a punishment for him in a sense, a learning experience for him to open his eyes and see that we all work together as a military. So regardless if we’re f’ing up, we’re still in the military. We’ve got to support each other.134

Williams makes it clear that she comprehends this experience as a betrayal of “what’s right”. In this case, the assumption that as a member of the armed forces, she would be treated the same as any other service member, regardless of her racial identity or skin 134

Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2015.

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color. Williams described to me in detail what her expectations of being part of the military had been:

WILLIAMS: I never really experienced racism like that in my lifetime. I never--I mean, like I said, it was an eye-opener for me…

GIBB: How does that affect--because the Army is supposed to be one in a sense. You’re supposed to be--you know, have each other’s backs. How does that fit into--?

WILLIAMS: It’s just like--you have to look at this too because the Army itself is majority White and male for one thing, even though yes, we have women and people of color...I thought at least the army would be like a utopian--well, close to a utopian society. Like everybody’s cool. We all work together as a unit. And that’s what it’s supposed to do but in reality, that’s not the case, especially in the South…Because most of the time, even in the hospital field, there’s always a White and male in charge. And I felt like they don’t treat me as a person...I don’t want to say like crap but you’re just invisible to them. So I was kind of like--I felt betrayed because these are the people who are supposed to have my back. God forbid something happened.

Williams did not talk about experiencing discrimination while in Afghanistan. However, she acknowledges the potential risks of being on deployment with commanding officers who are racist — “God forbid something happened”. For Williams, experiencing racism betrayed deeply held moral codes from her life in both civilian and military society. This conflict recalls Erin Finley’s comment that war is not “stepping outside of life.” Issues in American society are reflected in that of the military. As both a person of color and a women, Williams also disclosed incidents that were a result of the intersection of those identities. She admits that the levels of racism and sexism she experienced and heard about were the reason she eventually left the Army: I felt betrayed. I served this country and I served the Army and this is how you treat me, as a Black and a woman?...I mean I guess that’s why I left the Army because the racism thing and the sexism thing, it--I couldn’t take it to be honest with you. Even though it was not as

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severe as other women, but seeing it first-hand, I was like, “Why? Why is this happening in the Army? It’s supposed to be utopian, a kinder utopia.” But it’s not the case.135

For Williams, joining the Army was the culmination of a life long dream, from looking at photos of her role model, to serving her country in Afghanistan, to finding the reality of her situation too much to continue on with. As much as she now deals with posttraumatic stress disorder on a daily basis, the experience of betrayal by the military continues to follow her in her life today.

Chapter 5: Conclusion Historically, oral history has had a close relationship with conflict and those who come home from war, bearing more than just the physical scars of their service. Early on in the development of the professional field, interviewers spoke with those in the midst of the conflict, following them to the front lines of battle. Today, we look to understand not just their combat experiences but before and in their lives afterwards. As the nature of conflict and the impact it has on the individual in has changed over time, we have also begun to ask different questions of veterans and their narratives.

In response to the psychological challenges on veterans, medical professionals have been looking for new ways to explain symptoms that lie outside of the diagnoses they currently have. Post-traumatic stress, until recently seen as the catch-all disorder, is no longer sufficient. Moral injury is a much-needed framework. Through its model of betrayal of moral codes by soldiers and their superiors, under challenging situations, begins to make sense of the guilt, shame and helplessness that many veterans describe.

Oral historians working with veterans can use moral injury to both better inform their

135

Williams, D. Interview. October 24, 2014.

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own work, while also encouraging a more holistic, biographical approach to the use of the model as medical practitioners move into quantitative-focused research.

Our use of moral injury, however, cannot be without critical reflection on the psychological and trauma discourses that produce and inform both its existence and use within the field of oral history. We must consider ways to nuance the framework, looking at how it not only appears in specific events but also in the everyday lives of soldiers and veterans. Using a biographical life history approach in conjunction with moral injury, we see that stories such as Galo Calderon’s and Denise Williams’ take on new meanings. Their moral codes, built from childhood and shaped through their military training are more apparent and pertinent for what they experience during their service.

“War keeps coming back in narratives and memories as the most dramatic point of encounter between the personal and the public, between biography and history,”136 writes Alessandro Portelli. Thus, it is the responsibility of oral historians working closely with veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other conflicts, that we actively seek more nuanced and profound ways to explore their memories together with them, and with the wider public, honouring their stories beyond service and sacrifice.

136

Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Univ of Wisconsin Pr, 1997), ix.

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