Huffington (Issue #92-93, 03.16.14)

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

‘I’m a Good Person and Yet I’ve Done Bad Things’

A WARRIOR’S MORAL DILEMMA By David Wood

MARCH 16-23, 2014

Contents HUFFINGTON 03.16-23.14

SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE

MORAL INJURY

BY DAVID WOOD

Enter POINTERS: Collapse in Harlem... Obama Goes Between Two Ferns JASON LINKINS: Looking Forward in Angst DATA: A Day in the Life of 3.14159265...

Q&A: Kristen Bell MOVING IMAGE

Voices CLAIRE FALLON: The Worst Pieces of Advice From Susan Patton’s Marry Smart ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Getting in Shape Doesn’t Have to Be Such a Drag QUOTED

Exit TV: Who Creates Drama at HBO? Very Few Women or People of Color.

TH E G R U N TS Damned if they kill, damned if they don’t.

THE THIRD METRIC: Highly Sensitive People, This One’s for You

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

MUSIC: Dog Ears

TH E R EC R U ITS When right and wrong are hard to tell apart.

H E A L IN G Can we treat moral wounds?

TFU FROM THE EDITOR: A New Start ON THE COVER: Stephen

Canty photograph for Huffington by Victoria Will

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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ART STREIBER

A New Start I

N THIS WEEK’S double issue, we launch a new series on an issue seldom discussed among veterans: moral injury.

While most conversations about returning veterans focus on PTSD, David Wood puts a spotlight on an affliction that doesn’t receive nearly enough attention — a soldier’s sense that his barometer for what is right and wrong has been thrown off, and the grief, numbness or depression that ensue. David’s thorough investigation reveals that moral injury is a major problem — with consequences that rival those related to physical injuries and PTSD. In this series, told in three parts, David speaks to veterans who are

dealing every day with moral injury.

One struggles with having killed a child; another grapples with knowing he took a man’s life only to find out later that it wasn’t who he was supposed to shoot. They are all disturbed by their past decisions — ethical calls they would have never fathomed outside of the context of war. Their stories are incredibly powerful and give a real sense of the depth of these veterans’ wounds.

David also speaks to researchers and therapists about some of the programs out there attempting to help veterans deal with moral injury.

Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

“We are not going to brush it aside. It did happen and it wasn’t OK,” says Amy Amidon, a staff psychologist at the San Diego Naval Medical Center who oversees its moral injury/moral repair therapy group. “The point is to help them feel OK sitting in the darkness with the evil they experienced.”

Elsewhere in the issue, Maureen Ryan cuts into the True Detective chatter with a harsh indictment of HBO’s diversity. Her extensive research yields some troubling facts about who is creating drama at the popular network.

“With one exception over the course of four decades, HBO has not aired an original one-hour drama series created by a woman,” Maureen writes. “Just under 8 percent of HBO’s original dramas and miniseries came from women, and 2.6 percent came from people of color. Less than 5 percent of its one-hour dramas — one of the most high-profile entertainment products in the world — were created by women. That’s over the course of nearly 40 years.”

In other news, I’m excited to announce that our next issue of Huffington will hit the Apple

HUFFINGTON 03.16-23.14

newsstand on March 28, on a new and improved platform. We’ve listened to your feedback, and we want to bring you the same great stories and design, but in a template that is faster, easier to use,

We’ve listened to your feedback, and we want you to bring you the same great stories and design, but in a template that is faster, easier to use, and available beyond the constraints of the iPad.” and available beyond the constraints of the iPad. We’re launching first on the iPad, with an iPhone release quickly around the corner, followed by other tablets shortly thereafter. After nearly two years on the iPad, our next evolution will continue to bring you the best of The Huffington Post, in a setting that is more conscious of how you read the news. We can’t wait to share it with you.

ARIANNA

ROB BENNETT/OFFICE OF MAYOR OF NEW YORK/GETTY IMAGES

Enter

POINTERS

COLLAPSE IN HARLEM 1 Two buildings collapsed after an explosion in Harlem on Wednesday

morning, leaving at least seven people dead and wounding more than 60 others. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a press conference that the explosion, which occurred around 9:15 a.m., was caused by a gas leak. In a statement to the New York Daily News, Con Edison said neighbors called to complain about the smell of gas 18 minutes before the explosion. “This is a tragedy of the worst kind because there was no indication in time to save people,� de Blasio said. Authorities continued to search through the wreckage Thursday, hoping to find others still alive.

The buildings housed apartments, a church and a piano store.

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Enter

2

FROM TOP: P PHOTO; AP PHOTO/DARKO VOJINOVIC; CHRIS RATCLIFFE/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

3

4

POINTERS

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NO ANSWERS

Officials still haven’t solved the mystery of a Malaysian airliner that vanished last week en route to Beijing. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared from radar screens at about 1:30 a.m. on March 8. It sent no distress signals before its disappearance, and officials have been unable to locate any debris or signs of the missing plane. Officials have widened the search area, and more than a dozen countries have participated in the effort to help find the airliner. Some reports have said evidence indicates the plane may have turned west and stayed in the air for several more hours after it lost contact with the ground.

CRIMEAN CROSSROADS

In Crimea news this week, all signs pointed toward the Black Sea peninsula being annexed by Russia. On Wednesday, Ukraine’s interim prime minister visited Washington, D.C., to request help for Ukraine’s fragile government, which was installed after proMoscow President Viktor F. Yanukovych fled Kiev last month. Crimea is set to vote on March 16 on whether it wants to join Russia... and the ballot reportedly only contains “yes” options. Western powers have called the referendum illegal. The White House issued a statement Wednesday saying President Barack Obama and Ukraine’s prime minister will discuss finding a “peaceful resolution to Russia’s ongoing military intervention in Crimea.”

#BANBOSSY

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s organization, LeanIn.org, partnered with the Girl Scouts of the USA to launch a new campaign encouraging people to stop describing girls and women as “bossy.” A video for the project features female and male leaders including Diane von Furstenberg, Condoleezza Rice and Beyonce, who says, “I’m not bossy. I’m the boss.” The project’s site, banbossy.com, says: “When a little boy asserts himself, he’s called a ‘leader.’ Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded ‘bossy.’ Words like bossy send a message: don’t raise your hand or speak up.”

Enter

5

POINTERS

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OBAMA MOVES ON OVERTIME PAY…

President Barack Obama asked the Labor Department Thursday to create new recommendations on overtime pay for some salaried workers who are exempt from overtime pay requirements. Currently, salaried employees with supervisory duties who are making more than $455 a week cannot collect overtime, even after 40 hours. The White House aims to increase that threshold. Obama is bypassing Congress with the initiative, and his action drew ire from Republicans who said the changes would hurt businesses and employees.

6 ...AND TRIES COMEDY FOR HEALTHCARE.GOV

FROM TOP: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; FUNNYORDIE.COM

President Barack Obama made an appearance on comedian and actor Zach Galifianakis’ online series Between Two Ferns this week. The president plugged HealthCare.gov, the federal portal for those who need individual insurance, and traded barbs with Galifianakis, whose absurdist talk show has featured celebrities from Bradley Cooper to Justin Bieber. The White House said the fake interview helped increase HealthCare.gov traffic by 40 percent after the video was posted.

THAT’S VIRAL 18 THINGS CREATIVE PEOPLE DO DIFFERENTLY

A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories.

HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

EW.

9 MAPS THAT SHOULD OUTRAGE SOUTHERNERS

A SNAKE EATS A CROCODILE. YES, YOU READ THAT CORRECTLY.

ELLEN TIPPED THAT PIZZA DELIVERY GUY $1,000

Enter

LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST

JASON LINKINS

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AP PHOTO/STEVE NESIUS, FILE

WHY OBAMACARE IS THE LEAST OF DEMOCRATS’ WORRIES ILL A MARCH election in a Florida House race be your bellwether for how the 2014 midterms will play out? Be wary!

If this month’s special election in Florida’s 13th district — where

W

Democratic candidate Alex Sink went down in defeat to her GOP rival, David Jolly — is a harbinger of bad news for Democrats ahead of the 2014 midterms, well ... at least the Democrats are putting on a brave face.

A memo circulated by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, bearing the

Republican David Jolly at a campaign rally on Nov. 23, 2013, in Indian Rocks Beach, Fla.

Enter title “In Heavily Republican District, Democrats Proved They Can Compete,” emphasizes that Republicans spent “millions to salvage a district they have held for six decades,” and that “electorate doesn’t reflect the general election landscape Democrats will face in November.”

It’s all too clever by half. While outside groups did dump their ducats into the race on behalf of Jolly, it was the GOP candidate who spent the bulk of the race at a significant financial disadvantage. As the National Journal’s Scott Bland reports, “Sink outspent Jolly about 4-to-1 on the airwaves,” leaving it to “outside groups including the National Republican Congressional Committee, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network, and American Crossroads” to help “close the financial gap.”

More importantly, however, is that the DCCC is glossing over the part where “President Obama won a majority of the vote across the district in 2008 (51.9 percent of the vote) and again in 2012 (50.7 percent),” and how in 2010 “Sink received 51.1 percent of the vote in FL-13 despite losing statewide to Rick Scott.”

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That’s from a 2013 DCCC memo in which these facts were not overlooked, which was surfaced in timely fashion by Slate’s Dave Weigel, who also provides some handy-dandy maps that put the erosion in rather stark relief.

In short, this is one of the districts that Democrats had more than a dim hope of winning. That they couldn’t — and keep in mind that mere months

Jolly’s journey from afterthought to victor probably gives a boost to any GOP candidate running far behind their Democratic contender at this point in the race.” ago, Sink had commanding leads in the polls — should be more than a little unnerving ahead of a midterm election in which none of the underlying fundamentals present themselves as advantageous. Jolly’s journey from afterthought to victor probably gives a boost to any GOP candidate running far behind their Democratic contender at this point in the race. And it will sap the Democrats of what optimism

Enter they may have had. And prior to the Florida result, the Democrats’ task in 2014 was already essentially a daunting triage operation to minimize the coming bloodletting as best they can.

The results suggest that there will be no cakewalks, and that Democrats will have to run some very agile campaigns, spend money intelligently, and minimize mistakes just to have a shot at holding serve. (That DCCC Chairman Steve Israel is encouraging Sink to try this again suggests that they are still in the “denial” stage of grief.)

Of course, the sexier narrative to be spun from this special election is whether or not it’s an early sign of how Obamacare will play in the midterms. I find it hard to implicate Sink, who never actually cast a vote for Obamacare, for the law’s successes or failures. But that likely won’t stop some from spinning a Grand Narrative. Over at The Plum Line, Greg Sargent predicts that “the GOP victory will only deepen Republican certainty that their anti-Obamacare message is a sure winner, meaning hundreds and hundreds of millions of anti-Obamacare ads over the next

LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST

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eight months, with the escalation to begin any day now.”

Probably! Of course, the truth is that, had Sink prevailed, it’s not as if it would have dented the GOP’s fondness for using the Affordable Care Act as a midterm election line of attack, either.

If it matters, Jolly himself is of a different mind on the matter, telling Fox News, “This was a local race. I know the national

Prior to the Florida result, the Democrats’ task in 2014 was already essentially a daunting triage operation to minimize the coming bloodletting as best they can.” pundits will draw from it what they want, I think we saw some message testing from the national parties, particularly by the Democrats ... but this is about more than Obamacare.” Frankly, the fact that Jolly essentially rejected the broad political narrative probably tells you much more about why he succeeded in the special election.

Meanwhile, Florida GOP consultant Rick Wilson urges some

Enter real-keeping, tweeting, “Impt to learn right lessons from #FL13: we got our collective shit together, campaign + outside did operations/media. This race is not test case vs Obamacare. Just thinking it was is magical thinking that will lead to laziness and shortcuts to running good operations.”

If this “magical thinking” could lead the GOP down some blind alleys in the midterms, then by the same token any fretting about the issue is a waste of energy for Democrats. After all, what’s to be done now about having cast a vote for the Affordable Care Act? Nothing, that’s what. Right now, the policy’s success or failure depends heavily on getting the right mix of people enrolled on the healthcare exchanges. Either it does and the law succeeds, or it doesn’t and the plan collapses.

Even if by some stroke of luck Obamacare is running perfectly come October and a majority of voters heartily approve of it, it may not make any difference. The fundamentals of the coming election just surpass any clever Beltway messaging. When I consider the headwinds Democrats are facing, I think about things like

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the historical tendency of midterm elections to run against the party holding the White House, the Democrats’ typical inability to achieve high turnout in midterms, the way that Democratic voters are massed together in a few urban districts, and then I think, “Wow, isn’t that enough?”

To be honest, I’m not even sure Obamacare is going to rate as a factor. I’m sorry I can’t co-sign

What’s to be done now about having cast a vote for the Affordable Care Act? Nothing, that’s what. Right now, the policy’s success or failure depends heavily on getting the right mix of people enrolled.” any clever mysticism for you today, but that’s me — being all insistent that electoral fundamentals matter. And if Florida’s election demonstrates anything, it’s that these fundamentals are grim indeed for Democrats, and that issues like turnout and the bunkering of voters in a limited number of districts will persist long after the shouting over Obamacare subsidies.

Q&A

FROM TOP: CHRIS PIZZELLO/INVISION/AP; ROBERT VOETS/2013 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Enter

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Kristen Bell on Her Encounters With the Paparazzi “I was pulling into [a] garage, he bangs on the window because I didn’t roll it down, he called me the ‘c-word’... People act like animals, and that’s just not OK with me.”

Above: Actress Kristen Bell before the Scientific and Technical Oscars on Feb. 15, 2014. Below: Bell (left) alongside her costars in Veronica Mars.

FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE

DATA

Enter

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A Day in the Life of 3.14159265...

March 14 is an unofficial holiday, known as the day when people celebrate a number by eating pie. As an irrational number, continues infinitely, without any apparent pattern. It has been

calculated to more than one trillion digits beyond its decimal point, and its random nature makes it a popular pasttime for some to memorize its digits. Ahead, find out what it means to be .

DEFINITION WHAT IS PI?

USES

is commonly defined as the ratio of any circle’s circumference (c) to its diameter (d). c

r

The diameter of a circle is determined by multiplying the radus (r) by 2.

d

360˚OF

d

The circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times as long as its diameter.

It is determined by the equation 2 r, or times the diameter.

is often found in geometry and trigonometry formulas, especially for circles and spheres.

r

r

The area of a circle is r2

The volume of a sphere is 4/3 r2

A TIMELINE OF THE FIRST 360 DIGITS OF PI

For most calculations in which is required, using 3.14 suffices. Even so, many have tried to compute to thousands and millions of digits, and are lauded when any records are broken. Below are a few of these notable people and their discoveries within the first 360 digits.

10

14

AFTER 360?

Number of Decimal Digits

1012 1010 108 106 10

4

100 2000 1950

1900 1850

1

8

1

480 AD 7 DIGITS

Chinese Mathematician Tsu Ch’ung-chih

1400 10 DIGITS

1430 16 DIGITS

Indian Mathematician Madhava

Jumping to 500 digits in 1855, the Egyptian calculation of Scribe began an exponential Ahmes growth with the use of calculators and 1 25 9 0 3 6 0 14 1 5 9 2 6 5 35 8 9 7 9 3 2 modern computers. As 1 5 3 6 4 3 6 7 8 9 3 8 4 6 D I G 7 I T S O 1 F 2 6 9 of 2013, had been5 4 0 4 3 3 8 2 9 32 2 determined out to 8 79 2 6 5 9 0 12,100,000,000,050 0 2 2 8 9 8 0 places!

4 decimal 2 1 5 9 7

4

8

8

1

Persian Astronomer Al-Kashi

1596 20 DIGITS

German Math Professor Ludolph van Ceulen

1610 35 DIGITS 7

1

6

9

3

1630 39 DIGITS 9

Austrian Astronomer Christoph Grienberger

9 7

1 0 4 5 4 3 2 6 6 4 8 6 0 3 4 8 6 2 1 3 2 3 4 3 9 3 6 6 9 6 0 5 7 2 4 8 6 6 0 5 4 2 4 1 9 1 0 9 9 41 1 0 27 2 1 37 7 2 2 5 4 6 5 1 8 3 7 8 0 7 0 6 6 8 6 7 0 3 6 3 3 2 1 8 5 4

3

5

8

1500 2000 B.C. ONE OF THE EARLIEST REFERENCES

5

1 0

5 8

2 0

9 7

4

9 4

English Mathematician Abraham Sharp 4

8 2 5 3 4 2 1 1 7 0 6 7 2 8 0 3 4 9 8 2 1 9 8 6 4 8 0 0 8 9 8 6 6 2 5 28 1 3 0 6 2 8 6 4 2 3 81 0 6 07 64 23 70 59 9

1847 248 DIGITS

Danish Mathemetician Thomas Clausen

1706 PROPOSED

Welsh Mathematician William Jones Introduced the Greek letter ‘ ’

1706 100 DIGITS

3

English Mathematician John Machin

8

4 4 6

0

9 5 5

1844 200 DIGITS

0 5

8

2

5

3

5

9

4

0

8

1

2

8

4

0 5 5 5 9 6 4 4 6 2 2 9 4 8 9 5 2 1 1 5 4 9 9 3 8 3 0 3 7 0 1 8 1 0 2 9 6 4 1 4 4 2 8 2 8 5 0 8 1 7 4 0 97 11 56 8 1

6

5

9

3

3

4

4

6

1

2

8

4

7

5

SOURCES: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, DEPT. OF MATHEMATICS, RANDOMHISTORY.COM, SFU COLAB, INDIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY OF SCIENCE, PI: A SOURCE BOOK, PRINCETON DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

7

Some Egyptologists believe the ancient Egyptians used an approximation of to build the pyramids. Others disagree, arguing that the ancient Egyptians had no concept of and it would not have occured to them to use it.

1

THE -RAMIDS OF EGYPT?

3

German “Mental Calculator” Zacharias Dase

2

6

2

M_A_ESSAM/STOCK.XCHNG (PYRAMIDS)

1699 71 DIGITS

1841 152 DIGITS

English Mathemetician William Rutherford

1789 126 DIGITS Slovene Mathemetician Georg Vega

1794 136 DIGITS

The Great Pyramid at Giza closely approximates pi. Dividing the perimeter of its base by its vertical height yields the same result as if you were to divide the circumference of a circle by its radius.

Enter Sopot, Poland 03.08.2014

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Paolo Dal Molin (left) of Italy competes with Abdulaziz Al Mandeel of Kuwait during the mens 60m hurdles heats during day two of the IAAF World Indoor Championships.

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Salisbury, England 03.04.2014 The trainee choristers of Salisbury Cathedral Choir flip pancakes to mark Shrove Tuesday outside the 13th-century cathedral. Every year the choristers make pancakes at the Canon Precentor’s house to learn about the meaning of Shrove Tuesday, which is traditionally the day that all fats and flesh are eaten up to prepare for the 40-day fast of Lent.

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Pretoria, South Africa 03.04.2014 Supporters of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) rally and sing songs outside Pretoria High Court. The EFF are saying that the R600,000 deposit fee required when submitting candidates names for the upcoming national elections are unjust and are seeking an interdict in court against it.

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Panchimalco, El Salvador 03.09.2014 A man casts his vote during the presidential run-off election.

Voters in El Salvador get to decide whether to keep the ruling leftist party in power or return to conservative party rule.

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Heihe, China 03.05.2014 A soldier jumps over a ring of fire during a tactical training mission.

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London, England 03.08.2014 Lululemon hosts a 400-person yoga class at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to celebrate their first London store opening on March 28.

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Kashmir, India 03.08.2014 The recruits of India’s army from Kashmir stand in formation during their passing-out parade, after successfully completing 49 weeks of arduous training that involved weapons handling, map reading and counterinsurgency operations.

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Birmingham, England 03.06.2014 A dog owner holds her Dalmatian on the first day of the Crufts dog show. Said to be the largest show of its kind in the world, the annual four-day event features thousands of dogs, with competitors traveling from around the globe to take part.

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ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

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Loznica, Serbia 03.05.2014 A former employee of Viskoza factory visits the site of the devastated building, once a proud symbol of Serbian industry. Today, its deserted complex is a painful reminder of Serbia’s ailing economy.

The factory used to employ 11,000 people and was the economic mainstay of the region.

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Paris, France 03.04.2014 Models wear creations for the Alexander McQueen ready-towear fall/winter 2014-2015 fashion collection.

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Bakhchisarai, Ukraine 03.10.2014 A Crimean Tatar man prays at a mosque. The arrival of Russian troops in Crimea has opened old wounds among the Crimean Tatars, who once again fear they will be unwelcome in their homeland.

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Clay Center, Kan. 03.08.2014 Custodian Ray Keen inspects a 100-year-old clock atop the Clay County Courthouse before changing to Daylight Savings Time.

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Voices

CLAIRE FALLON

The Worst Pieces of Advice From Susan Patton’s Marry Smart SUSAN PATTON, also known as “The Princeton Mom,” first caught the public eye in March 2013, when she published a letter to the editor in The Daily Princetonian. The letter advised the young

female students at Patton’s alma mater to seek husbands while at Princeton rather than dating the lower-quality men they’d meet in their post-college lives, and to dedicate more of their time and energy to finding a good husband rather than focusing on their careers.

Less than one year after that initial

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Voices media circus, and several weeks after one wisely timed repeat performance in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month, Patton has returned with a full-length book version of her original advice, Marry Smart: Advice for Finding the One. The 11-month turnaround suggests a rush to capitalize on her brush with the limelight, and indeed the quality of the book does seem as slapdash as could be expected.

Of course, we could have hoped that Patton’s opus, when it emerged, would be less repetitive, more polished, and less replete with awkward logical fallacies. My boyfriend, a state school grad, writes text messages more finely crafted and coherent than her latest admonition to seek out husbands with Ivy League degrees.

But it’s not the clunky prose or the endless redundancies that doomed the book from the beginning, and even a fine-tuned version would have only succeeded in putting a prettier face on her flawed advice. The real problem was trying to turn one page of clichéd sexist tropes and ugly elitism disguised as advice into 200+ pages (238, if we’re counting) of constructive tips for young women today.

I’m right in the target audience

CLAIRE FALLON

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for Susan Patton’s advice. I’m 25, an alumna of her cherished Princeton, and still not married. During my single years in New York City, I spent considerably more time working and considering my career options than dating or angling to meet new men. Patton clearly tries to preemptively extinguish criticism about the sexist roots of her advice by repeatedly assuring us that her advice is only for

Women, do we really want to marry the kind of guys who will only commit to a woman so they can finally have sex with her?” women who want to have children and “something resembling a traditional marriage.” Well, I want both — surprise, I’ll admit that despite having been brainwashed by feminists! — so... did I find Marry Smart to be just the no-nonsense straight talk that I needed to achieve my true dreams of LeaveIt-to-Beaver-style domestic bliss?

Well, if you define “straight talk” as “hideous sexist stereotypes that were outdated 20 years ago,” then sure. But I can’t

Voices

CLAIRE FALLON

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say any of the advice actually seems useful or relevant to me, a 20-something in 2014.

Here are the 10 worst pieces of dating advice from Marry Smart — and trust me, there was plenty of bad advice from which to choose: “Potential buyers are unmotivated if offered free merchandise, i.e., it’s the lonely cow that gives away free milk.”

Women, do we really want to marry the kind of guys who will only commit to a woman so they can finally have sex with her? A man should be choosing to be with you because he appreciates your company, shares your values, and even, heck, actually loves you. Besides, a 2006 study revealed that 95 percent of Americans had engaged in premarital sex, and yet far more than 5 percent are married, so it sure seems like a lot of guys are indeed investing in cows of their very own despite access to free milk. This suggests that most men have motives other than finally obtaining sex from a recalcitrant girlfriend when they choose to take the plunge.

“If you’ve struggled with obesity through most of your teen years, then maybe surgical

intervention is a good idea for you [...] If you’re going to go the route of cosmetic surgery, do it early enough to feel comfortable in your new body before going away to school.”

Advising overweight, but not necessarily unhealthy, teenagers to get weight-loss surgery to slim down for the college dating market?

That’s terrible advice both psychologically and medically. Doctors typically recommend that weightloss surgery for teens should be

Marry Smart is out now on Gallery Books.

Voices considered only when serious obesity-related health complications have arisen, not for cosmetic reasons. And even if a teenager is a good candidate, the procedure is risky and requires the patient’s full commitment to maintaining a very restricted diet and appropriate lifestyle following the surgery.

Weight-loss surgery is not something to urge on an overweight teen just so that she can expand her potential dating options.

“Online dating can be the equivalent of going to a singles bar... for lazy people. [...]

Yes, I know that many people meet online and sometimes it works out well, but it is frequently inelegant, undignified, and hazardous.”

Wait, we’re supposed to get serious about meeting compatible men without even trying to connect with an appropriate guy through a forum where single people actively looking for relationships can go to find dates with similar interests and values? Also, if she thinks it’s lazy to dedicate an hour (or more) every evening to rating profiles, crafting witty but alluring messages to that cute barista/novelist who keeps popping up in your “Recom-

CLAIRE FALLON

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mended Matches,” sorting through messages that range from offensive and graphic to mildly appealing, corresponding with new prospects, and arranging first dates... well, clearly she’s never tried online dating. (Try it, Susan! I met some awesome guys on OKCupid.)

“In choosing a husband, how important are credentials?

Extremely important.”

Assuming these women are still working 40 hours a week to support themselves, she’s recommending 120 hours a week be devoted to the husband hunt.”

The elitism inherent in this tip is undeniable — and even The Princeton Mom should be aware that a man’s academic and professional credentials usually have at least as much to do with his parents’ wealth and connections as with his own merit. Don’t use shortcuts: Dedicate some time to figuring out whether your potential spouse is actually a competent, motivated, and generally self-sufficient person who will be a capable partner in

Voices life. Even if you really just love the idea of marrying a Harvard MBA with a sweet job at Goldman Sachs, remember those shiny credentials likely won’t make you happy with a partner who’s lacking in the qualities that actually make a good partner, such as compatibility, considerateness, and loyalty.

“If you are too drunk to speak, then you may be incapable of saying no or warding off unwanted advances. And then it’s all on you.”

I’m going to be heartfelt for a moment. If you have been sexually assaulted while too drunk to consent, it is not all on you. In fact, it’s not at all on you. Telling women that they are responsible for the crimes committed against them is not just terrible advice; it contributes to a culture in which rape victims are discouraged from reporting their assaults and even victimized further by judgmental friends, police, and college administrators. A new study suggests that rapists actually target drunk women, possibly in part because their victims won’t be taken seriously by law enforcement. Women aren’t to blame for this predatory behavior.

CLAIRE FALLON

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“[U]ntil you find a spouse, I would advise you invest your effort and energy at least 75 percent in searching for a partner and 25 percent in professional development.”

Um, is this even possible? Assuming these women are still working 40 hours a week to support themselves, she’s recommending 120

Weight-loss surgery is not something to urge on an overweight teen just so that she can expand her potential dating options.” hours a week be devoted to the husband hunt. Since online dating is off the table, you need to spend an average of 17 hours a day putting her tips for man-hunting into practice. That means, per Patton, you should be frequenting your local house of worship for like-minded worshippers, harassing friends to set you up with single acquaintances, and emailing old college classmates to see if they’re successful and marriage-worthy yet.

Don’t worry, this leaves you 8 hours of free time for the week. I recommend you spend them sleeping.

Voices “You can recover lost time on the job — but not in your children’s lives.”

Let’s not downplay how difficult many women find it to reenter the workforce after a prolonged maternity leave. Patton may think it’s worth it to lose years’ worth of promotions and watch one’s qualifications become obsolete in order to be home full-time for one’s children, but at least let’s give women the straight facts and let them decide whether they’d prefer to remain in the workforce or accept the massive professional setbacks and stay home. Many women find it’s close to impossible to gain a foothold in their old profession, especially in a position as senior as the one they left to have children.

If you value your career as well as your family, this is not as easy a choice as Patton paints it to be.

“Girl, lose the weight!

I know it’s hard… just do it.”

Oh, okay. Guess it’s as simple as “just doing it.” Super helpful, thanks!

“When she enters college, your daughter will never again be as young, as beautiful, as attractive to men, or as fertile.

Encourage her to make the best

CLAIRE FALLON

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use of this time.”

Parents, I beg of you: Do not tell your college-aged daughters to hook a husband before they grow too old and ugly. Trust me, she knows she’s enjoying the full bloom of youth, and the guys she’ll meet at college will let her know how attractive they find her. When and if she wants to get married, she’ll be able to make that choice for herself. In-

Parents, I beg of you: Do not tell your collegeaged daughters to hook a husband before they grow too old and ugly.” stead, tell her she’s smart, capable, and able to accomplish anything she sets her mind to. Tell her to find out who she is and how she wants to spend her life before she focuses on finding someone to share it with.

Tell her to learn how to be truly self-reliant and never feel dependent on a man for support or fulfillment. Girls today need to hear these things, from their parents as much as anyone.

Claire Fallon is a books editor at The Huffington Post.

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GETTY IMAGES/CULTURA RF

Voices

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

Getting in Shape Doesn’t Have to Be Such a Drag

W

HY HAVE WE MADE EXERCISING — at least the way we do it in the places that have come to be known as “health clubs” — such an awful experience? It’s a question I had time to mull recently on my 14-hour plane ride back from Seoul, where I was for the launch of HuffPost Korea. While I was there I was amazed at their practice of Kouksundo — a practice that combines meditation, breathing and martial arts and has been shown to boost productivity and reduce anxiety and stress — which was so different from how we approach fitness. ¶ It’s quite a contrast to the gyms that have become America’s temples

Voices of physical well-being, with their bright lights, loud thumping music, uncomfortable furniture and machines that seem to have been designed by sadists, and populated by people who often seem miserable, joylessly going through the strenuous motions so they can check off the exercise box on that day’s to-do list and get the heck out of there.

There’s a reason we call it “working out” as opposed to “playing out.”

And those are the ones motivated enough to actually drag themselves in. A large portion of health club members, even those paying hefty monthly fees, don’t go. As Daniel Duane pointed out in Men’s Journal, in order to make money, health clubs and gyms need to have around 10 times as many members as they’re designed to accommodate.

But does it have to be like this?

Does going to the gym have to be something to be endured?

After all, we know that physical activity is an incredibly powerful component of our overall well-being. Every day brings more evidence of the depth of the connection. For instance, one study out of Southern Methodist University found that the effects of physical activity on mild to moderate depression were

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

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so powerful that the study’s author, Jasper Smits, wrote a guidebook urging mental health professionals to actually prescribe exercise as a medical intervention. There are also studies showing how regular physical activity increases cognitive function and brain connectivity.

And, conversely, we also know how bad for us a lack of physical activity can be. According to an American Cancer Society study, people with

A person watching her own screen while walking on a treadmill next to another person watching another screen while walking on a treadmill is like a metaphor for our modern life.” a sitting job are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than those with standing jobs. This is not a new discovery. A 1950s study of people in similar lines of work showed that London bus drivers had a higher incidence of death from cardiovascular disease than bus conductors, and that government clerks had a higher incidence than postal workers.

The benefits of making our bod-

Voices ies fitter are deeply connected to the fitness of our inner selves, but gyms make it hard to feel that connection. They don’t allow for the kind of solitude and mindfulness that we can get communing with nature on an outdoor run. And, overly muscled pickups aside, they aren’t very conducive to making any real social connection. A person watching her own screen while walking on a treadmill next to another person watching another screen while walking on a treadmill is like a metaphor for our modern life. It’s what we do at work, at home and at the gym.

This is why Nicholas Miriello, a senior blog editor at HuffPost, prefers to use his daily run not just for his body but for his mind. “On the subway, on the street, in the car between traffic lights, or worse, while driving, while watching television, while at work, while lying in bed, etc., we are glued to our phones, to our email, to our Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest,” he writes. So for him, running is the one time he has to disconnect. And “soon after the moment of disconnect,” he writes, “I find myself actually connected. Connected with my surroundings, with my thoughts, with my body, with myself.”

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

It’s a hard experience to replicate at an indoor facility. But, fortunately, that’s beginning to change. The Guardian’s Nicole Mowbray writes about the growing trend of the “calm workout,” which she describes as “a new breed of holistic workout that promises to care for your head as well as your heart.” For instance, there’s Psycle, which offers spinning classes in rooms with low lights and calming music and features a “free time” break during the class. According to the company, its philosophy is inspired by the belief that “your state of mind is key to how often and how hard you exercise.”

There’s also CardioLates, which combines spin and Pilates; Third Space, which offers the services of “wellness doctors”; and Spynga, which is part spin, part yoga.

These workouts are part of a trend driven by the understanding that getting fit doesn’t have to be so unpleasant. And it’s pretty simple to see that if we make exercise a more inviting and more rewarding experience, we’ll do it more often. If we’re going to redefine success to include well-being, we also need to redefine getting in shape to include mental and soul fitness.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: RICHARD MCBLANE/GETTY IMAGES FOR SXSW; JAMIEVANBUSKIRKGETTY IMAGES; COMEDY CENTRAL; FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES

Voices

QUOTED

“ I’m a fucking Indian woman who has her own fucking network show.”

— Mindy Kaling

at a SXSW panel, when asked by a member of the crowd why there aren’t more women of color on The Mindy Project

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“ Just because it’s their right to do this doesn’t mean they’re right to do this.”

— HuffPost commenter KurtMichaelFriese on “University Changes Policies To Prevent Gay Couples From Getting Married On Campus Grounds”

“ If you’re poor, stop being poor.” “ It was extremely traumatic and awful and horrible.”

— Elisabeth Moss

on her short marriage with Fred Armisen, in a New York magazine profile

— Todd Wilemon,

FOX Business commentator and NYSE Euronext Managing Director, to the Daily Show’s Aasif Mandv

Voices

QUOTED

The United States always wants to gossip and remark about other countries’ situations, but ignores its own issues.

CLOCKWSIE FROM LEFT: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/MIDLAND POLICE DEPARTMENT; BRAD BARKET/INVISION /AP IMAGES

— HuffPost commenter BigRigger

on “China Slams U.S. Human Rights Record”

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“ Why waste time on real criminals when they can harass the homeless and helpless?”

— HuffPost commenter whoknew222

on “Texas Officers Make Contest Out Of Collecting Homeless People’s Signs”

“ We are going to crush them everywhere.”

— Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

on tea party-backed candidates challenging GOP incumbents in the midterm elections, to The New York Times

“ Meanwhile, there are young women like Malala Yousafzai who are doing extraordinary things with their lives...”

— HuffPost commenter Hulia_Dafazio

on “‘Breatharian’ Barbie Valeria Lukyanova Says She Wants To Live Off Light And Air Alone”

SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE

03.16-23.14

MORAL INJURY

INTRODUCTION PART I: THE GRUNTS PART II: THE RECRUITS PART III: HEALING

A WARRIOR’S MORAL DILEMMA

PREIOUS PAGE: VICTORIA WILL

BY DAVID WOOD I HAVE COVERED conflict and the military for 35 years, drawn to the adventure and adrenaline rush, and fascinated by the drama of Americans at war. I feel privileged to have been accepted by soldiers and Marines in their squads, platoons and battalions. Living with the grunts, I have come to respect their grit, their sense of honor and commitment, their bearing, their courage. I’ve been enriched by their unfailing humor and spontaneous generosity. Amid the horror and squalid waste of war, I have seen young Americans at their best. In a very personal way, I honor their service.

It took me a long time to recognize that something was wrong. I know too many accomplished warriors who return home proud but uneasy about their experiences. Some have sought therapy, but most have not. Some were diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Most were not.

But they are not okay.

This series came from a determination to understand why, and to explore how their way back from war can be smoothed. Moral injury is a relatively new concept that seems to describe what many feel: a sense that their fundamental understanding of right and wrong has been violated, and the grief, numbness or guilt that often ensues.

Here, you will meet combat veterans struggling with the moral and ethical ambiguities of war.

You will hear from some of the researchers and therapists working to help them cope, and you will come to understand some of the demons that veterans bring home from battle. However we individually feel about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, these enduring moral wounds, to young Americans who fought on our behalf, must be counted among the ultimate costs.

MOR A L IN J URY >> PART I

M O R A L INJURY >> PART I

GRUNTS THE

DA MNED IF TH EY K I L L , DA MN ED I F THE Y DON ’ T

THE GRUNTS

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PREVIOUS PAGE: BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

HOW DO WE BEGIN TO ACCEPT THAT NICK RUDOLPH, A THOUGHTFUL, SANDY-HAIRED CALIFORNIAN, WAS SENT TO WAR AS A 22-YEAROLD MARINE AND IN A DESPERATE GUN BATTLE OUTSIDE MARJAH, AFGHANISTAN, FOUND HIMSELF KILLING AN AFGHAN BOY? THAT WHEN NICK CAME HOME, STRANGERS THANKED HIM FOR HIS SERVICE AND POLITICIANS LAUDED HIM AS A HERO? Can we imagine ourselves back on that awful day in the summer of 2010, in the hot firefight that went on for nine hours? Men frenzied with exhaustion and reckless exuberance, eyes and throats burning from dust and smoke, in a battle that erupted after Taliban insurgents castrated a young boy in the village, knowing his family would summon nearby Marines for help and the Marines would come, walking right into a deadly ambush.

Here’s Nick, pausing in a lull.

He spots somebody darting around the corner of an adobe wall, firing assault rifle shots at him and his Marines. Nick raises his M-4 carbine. He sees the shooter is a child, maybe 13. With only a split second to decide, he squeezes the trigger and ends the boy’s life.

The body hits the ground. Now what?

“We just collected up that weapon and kept moving,” Nick explained. “Going from com-

Previous page: U.S. Marines carry a wounded comrade hit by an Improvised Explosive Device to a medical evacuation helicopter in November 2011.

THE GRUNTS pound to compound, trying to find them [the insurgents]. Eventually they hopped in a car and drove off into the desert.”

There is a long silence after Nick finishes the story. He’s lived with it for more than three years, and the telling still catches in his throat. Eventually, he sighs. “He was just a kid. But I’m sorry, I’m trying not to get shot and I don’t want any of my brothers getting hurt, so when you are put in that kind of situation ... it’s shitty that you have to, like ... shoot him.

“You know it’s wrong. But ... you have no choice.”

Almost two million men and women who served in Iraq or Afghanistan are flooding homeward, profoundly affected by war. Their experiences have been vivid. Dazzling in the ups, terrifying and depressing in the downs. The burning devotion of the small-unit brotherhood, the adrenaline rush of danger, the nagging fear and loneliness, the pride of service.

The thrill of raw power, the brutal ecstasy of life on the edge. “It was,” said Nick, “the worst, best experience of my life.”

But the boy’s death haunts him, mired in the swamp of moral confusion and contradiction so fa-

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miliar to returning veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is what experts are coming to identify as a moral injury: the pain that results from damage to a person’s moral foundation. In contrast to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which springs from fear, moral injury is a viola-

He sees the shooter is a child, maybe 13. With only a split second to decide, he squeezes the trigger and ends the boy’s life. tion of what each of us considers right or wrong. The diagnosis of PTSD has been defined and officially endorsed since 1980 by the mental health community, and those suffering from it have earned broad public sympathy and understanding. Moral injury is not officially recognized by the Defense Department. But it is moral injury, not PTSD, that is increasingly acknowledged as the signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the soul, akin to grief or sorrow, with lasting impact on the individuals and on their families.

Moral injury raises uncomfortable questions about what happens

COURTESY OF STEPHEN CANTY

THE GRUNTS

in war, the dark experiences that many veterans have always been reluctant to talk about. Are the young Americans who volunteer for military service prepared for the ethical ambiguity that lies ahead?

Can they be hardened against moral injury? Should they be?

With widespread public impatience to move beyond the long war years, it’s easy to overlook the pain that endures among service members and their families.

Experiences like those of Nick

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Rudolph and tens of thousands of others are theirs to bear. Many have found peace and acceptance: I did what I had to do, and I did it well and honorably. Others struggle to reconcile the people they have become with those innocent selves who jubilantly enlisted just a few years before. Either way, they manage mostly out of sight and on their own.

Yet a glimpse into their world also raises troubling questions for those of us outside the military — about wartime morality, about the accountability of those who encouraged or tolerated the

A photo taken during Stephen Canty’s time in Afghanistan.

THE GRUNTS decisions to go to war. What is the culpability of those who engineered the wars? Of those who approved the funding that enabled the fighting to go on, year after year? What of those who demanded the end of the draft in 1973 and its replacement with a professional fighting force? This “all-volunteer” military excused almost all Americans from service, while its relatively small numbers mean those who do serve must deploy again and again, and again.

As the broad moral injury of these wars is acknowledged, what is our part in the healing?

“Maybe people don’t want to talk about or know about what can happen to some of our sons and even some of our daughters when they go defend the country.

It’s not politically correct. It’s not attractive,” said Michael Castellana, a psychotherapist who provides moral injury therapy at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego. “But it’s the truth.”

‘BAD THINGS HAPPEN IN WAR’

Until now, the most common wound of war was thought to be PTSD, an involuntary reaction to a remembered life-threatening fear. In combat, the physi-

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cal response to fear and danger — hyper-alertness, the flush of adrenaline that energizes muscles — is necessary for survival. Back home, it can be triggered suddenly by crowds, noise, an argument — causing anxiety, anger, sleeplessness and depression. PTSD can be quickly diagnosed, and therapy at

It is moral injury, not PTSD, that is increasingly acknowledged as the signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the soul, akin to grief or sorrow, with lasting impact on the individuals and on their families. last is more widely available.

It is not fear but exposure that causes moral injury — an experience or set of experiences that can provoke mild or intense grief, shame and guilt. The symptoms are similar to PTSD: depression and anxiety, difficulty paying attention, an unwillingness to trust anyone except fellow combat veterans. But the morally injured feel sorrow and regret, too.

Theirs are impact wounds caused by the collision of the ethical beliefs they carried to war and the ugly realities of conflict.

COURTESY OF STEPHEN CANTY

THE GRUNTS

Most people enter military service “with the fundamental sense that they are good people and that they are doing this for good purposes, on the side of freedom and country and God,” said Dr. Wayne Jonas, a military physician for 24 years and president and CEO of the Samueli Institute, a nonprofit health research organization. “But things happen in war that are irreconcilable with the idea of goodness and benevolence, creating real cognitive dissonance

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— ‘I’m a good person and yet I’ve done bad things.’” Most veterans with moral injury, he said, “selftreat or don’t treat it at all.”

A moral injury, researchers and psychologists are finding, can be as simple and profound as losing a loved comrade. Returning combat medics sometimes bear the guilt of failing to save someone badly wounded; veterans tell of the sense of betrayal when a buddy is hurt because of a poor decision made by those in charge.

The scenarios are endless: surviving a roadside blast that strikes your squad, but losing lives

A medical evacuation helicopter is seen in the background, in this photo taken during Stephen Canty’s time in Afghanistan.

THE GRUNTS for which you felt responsible.

Watching as your dead friends are loaded onto helos in body bags.

Being wounded and medevaced yourself, then feeling burdened with guilt for leaving behind those you had sworn to protect. Seeing evil done and being unable, or unwilling, to intervene.

“An individual on a mission may at the end have questions about the morality of what went on, and most guys reconcile that fairly rapidly,” said Thomas S. Jones, a retired combat-decorated Marine major general. He is fiercely fond of young Marines and runs a retreat for the wounded, Semper Fi Odyssey, where he sees many cases of moral injury. He speaks with a parade-ground staccato, occasionally punctuating his thoughts with a concussive “Hell-fire!”

The majority of moral injury cases go much deeper, he said.

“They’re more about survivor’s guilt, death of children, death of civilians, that are just part and parcel of combat action. We continue to see guys four, five years on, still struggling.

“This is experience talking!

Hell-fire!”

Dr. James Bender, a former Army psychologist who spent

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a year in combat in Iraq with a cavalry brigade, saw many cases of moral injury among soldiers.

Some, he said, “felt they didn’t perform the way they should. Bullets start flying and they duck and hide rather than returning fire — that happens a lot more than anyone cares to admit.” Bender found himself treating anxiety and depression among soldiers “doubting the mission, doubting the fundamental nature of who they are — pretty deep stuff.”

‘WE DID IT ALL FOR NOTHING’

Moral injury is as old as war itself. Betrayal, grief, shame and rage are the themes that propel Greek epics like Homer’s Iliad, and all have afflicted warriors down through the centuries.

But during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it proved especially hard to maintain a sense of moral balance. These wars lacked the moral clarity of World War II, with its goal of unconditional surrender. Some troops chafed at being sent not to achieve military victory, but for nation-building (“As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down”). The enemy, meanwhile, fought to kill, mostly with the wars’ most feared and deadly weapon, the improvised explosive device. American troops trying to help Iraqis and Afghans were be-

THE GRUNTS ing killed and maimed, usually with nowhere to return fire. When the enemy did appear, it it was hard to sort out combatant from civilian, or child.

At home, as the rest of America gradually decided to oppose the wars as wrong and unjustified or futile, it became difficult for troops and their families to justify long and repeated deployments.

Navy Cmdr. Steve Dundas, a chaplain, went to Iraq in 2007 bursting with zeal to help fulfill the Bush administration’s goal of creating a modern, democratic U.S. ally.

“Seeing the devastation of Iraqi cities and towns, some of it caused by us, some by the insurgents and the civil war that we brought about, hit me to the core,” Dundas said. “I felt lied to by our senior leadership.

And I felt those lies cost too many thousands of American lives and far too much destruction.”

Dundas returned home broken, his faith in God and in his country shattered. In addition, he was diagnosed with chronic severe PTSD. Over time, with the help of therapists, friends and what he calls his “Christmas miracle,” his faith has returned.

As the wars dragged on it became clear that the campaigns to

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win hearts and minds were not working, and often not appreciated. For some who fought, the memories of their sacrifices have since become tempered by the recent deterioration of security in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We did it all for nothing,” said Darren Doss, 25, a former Marine who fought

“ People say, ‘Thanks for your service.’

Do you know what I did over there?

It just seems like you’re being patronized. Don’t do that to me.” in Marjah, Afghanistan, and lost friends in battle.

In both wars, context made it tricky to deal with moral challenges. What is moral in combat can at once be immoral in peacetime society. Shooting a child-warrior, for instance. In combat, eliminating an armed threat carries a high moral value of protecting your men. Back home, killing a child is grotesquely wrong.

Guys like Nick Rudolph ended up torn and confused, feeling unhappy and out of place, perhaps guilty and ashamed, or disturbed by their own numbness. Many newly returned veterans simply shrink from civilian society, un-

“You know it’s wrong. But ... you have no choice.”

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

— NICK RUDOLPH

PHOTOGRAPH BY VICTORIA WILL

THE GRUNTS able to craft an answer to a jaunty “Thanks for your service!” or “So how was Afghanistan?”

Or the worst: “Did you kill anyone?”

“I can’t go to a bar and start talking about combat experience with somebody — people look at you like you’re crazy,” said a Navy combat corpsman who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and asked not to be identified by name. He returned burdened with guilt over the lives he couldn’t save. “People say, ‘Thanks for your service.’ Do you know what I did over there? It just seems like you’re being patronized. Don’t do that to me.”

Afraid or unwilling to be judged by civilians, many new veterans isolate themselves, never speaking of their wartime experiences.

Unable to explain, even to a wife or girlfriend, the joy and horror of combat. That yes, I killed a child, or yes, soldiers I was responsible for got killed and it was my fault.

Or yes, I saw a person I loved get blown apart. From there it can be an easy slide into self-medication with drugs or alcohol, or overwork.

Thoughts of suicide can beckon.

“Definitely a majority” of returning veterans bear some kind

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of moral injury, said William P. Nash, a retired Navy psychiatrist and a pioneer in stress control and moral injury. He deployed as a battlefield therapist with Marines during the battle of Fallujah in 2004. “People avoid talking about or thinking about it and every

“Things happen in war that are irreconcilable with the idea of goodness and benevolence, creating real cognitive dissonance — ‘I’m a good person and yet I’ve done bad things.’” time they do, it’s a flashback or nightmare that just damages them even more. It’s going to take a long time to sort that out.”

That’s certainly true for Nick Rudolph. Back home at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in January 2012, after three deployments — a total of 16 months in combat — he was sinking in a downward spiral. Drinking so heavily that he picked up a DUI and got busted a rank, losing his prized position as a squad leader. Seeking help, he snuck off-post to see a civilian therapist. There, he was pre-

THE GRUNTS scribed sleeping pills and twice slept through morning formation, getting slapped with two unauthorized absences. All this added up to what the Marine Corps considers a “pattern of misconduct.”

At war, he’d been exposed to IED blasts six times and shot once, while he was manning a machine gun in a firefight. He’d risked his life, led men he loved in combat and seen some of them die. And now that he’d come home sick at heart, the Marine Corps, which he also loved, meant to kick him out.

Let’s pick him up now, a year or so later, in Philadelphia. Despite his earlier trouble, he’s been honorably discharged from the Marine Corps and is rooming with Paul Rivera, a Marine buddy from Afghanistan. Nick is working as a bodyguard for a security firm. His physical wounds have healed. Physically he is here. But the sounds and sensations and urgency of battle keep puncturing the peaceful civilian reality he’s trying to occupy.

“Coming back, I didn’t know what could help, like ... how do I get those feelings to stop?”

Nick said. He can be out in public and then comes something like a panic attack: He feels the

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adrenaline rush of combat, the crazy excitement, the hyperalertness ... and watches again as the boy comes around the wall.

“The feeling hits you and like ... I don’t want to be like that.

“I just want to be normal.”

‘YOUR TRUST HAS BEEN RUINED AND BROKEN’

At the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, close by the sprawling Marine base at Camp Pendleton, staff psychologist Amy Amidon sees a stream of Marines like Nick Rudolph struggling with their combat experiences. “They have seen the darkness within them and within the world, and it weighs heavily upon them,” she said.

Morally devastating experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have been common. A study conducted early in the Iraq war, for instance, found that two-thirds of deployed Marines had killed an enemy combatant, more than half had handled human remains, and 28 percent felt responsible for the death of an Iraqi civilian.

If the resulting moral injury is largely invisible to outsiders, its effects are more apparent. “I would bet anything,” said Nash, the retired Navy psychiatrist, “that if we had the wherewithal to do this kind of research we’d find that moral injury underlies

MANPREET ROMANA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

THE GRUNTS

veteran homelessness, criminal behavior, suicide.”

The moral injury of Sendio Martz involved neither killing a child nor disillusionment with the mission. It was the weight of command responsibility, and the guilt and shame he feels for having been unable to bring all his guys home safe.

Martz is a stocky man, softspoken with a gentle manner.

Haitian-born, adopted and homeschooled by religious American parents, he’s got a pretty firm grip on moral values and personal responsibility. That made him a

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good squad leader, responsible for the lives of a dozen or so Marines.

In April 2012, Martz was 26 and a Marine sergeant already on his third combat deployment, in the Kajaki District of southern Afghanistan. He’d lost a good friend in combat, 22-year-old Lance Cpl. William H. Crouse IV, of Woodruff, S.C. Martz’s unit, 1st Battalion 10th Marines, had taken other casualties. Now, Martz was leading his guys out on daily foot patrols through some of the same terrain and most heavily contested places in Afghanistan. IEDs everywhere, hidden in the dry, tall grass and rocky scrubland.

When they’d departed Camp Lejeune a few months earlier,

A U.S. Marine sergeant runs to safety as an IED explodes in the Garmsir district of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province on July 13, 2009.

THE GRUNTS wives and sweethearts and parents had crowded around to say their tearful goodbyes, imploring Martz, Make sure you bring my boy back, now. Looking him in the eye, hand on his shoulder.

Keep my boy safe.

“Well, that’s a high order,” Martz told me, “given that I am the one directing these guys where to go and I don’t know where anything is. I can’t say, ‘Oh don’t go there, there’s a bomb there, and there’s a guy over there, make sure you watch him and don’t get shot.’

You are praying that the decision you make is the right one, and if it is the wrong one — which a couple of decisions were the wrong ones — you are paying the price and you are living with it.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so stressed in my life.”

It was a young Afghan boy, Martz found out later, who detonated 40 pounds of explosives beneath Martz’s squad. He was one of the younger kids who hung around the Marines. Martz had given him books and candy and, even more precious, his fond attention. The boy would tip them off to IEDs and occasionally brought them fresh-baked bread. One day, as Martz’s platoon walked a rou-

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tine patrol, the boy yanked a trigger wire from a hidden position.

Whether he had been a secret enemy all along or whether some incident had turned him against the Americans are questions Martz wrestles with to this day.

But the effects of the blast were immediate. The detonation and

“ The feeling hits you and like ...

I don’t want to be like that.

I just want to be normal.” blizzard of jagged shrapnel felled Martz, knocking him unconscious, and ripped through his squad. Every Marine went down wounded.

Luckily, no one was killed, but several were severely injured.

Martz fought back to consciousness. He checked to see if his legs were there (they were), and got on the radio. “As a leader you can’t — I wasn’t allowed and couldn’t allow myself to crumble, or just give in to despair,” he said, his thoughts and words accelerating as he remembered.

We were talking in a quiet corner of the Wounded Warrior barracks at Camp Lejeune in November, shortly before Martz received his medical separation from the

TONY KARUMBA/AFP/GETTYIMAGES

THE GRUNTS

Marine Corps (his traumatic brain injury from the IED blast ended his dream of a lifelong career as a Marine). It took a while for that maelstrom of remembered sound and images to slow and fade — his men lying injured, a dazed Martz directing the evacuation of casualties and getting his surviving guys fighting back.

Martz told me that he looks on that incident as his own failure because he didn’t spot the IED before

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it went off. Because he didn’t warn his men away. “I’d say one of the things I struggle with the most is, all my guys got hurt and I let them down. It’s a constant movie, replaying that scenario over and over in my head. I constantly question every decision I made out there.”

Almost three years later, he’s “kind of stuck,” he said. He seems to be moving on with his life, taking college courses to become a mental health therapist. But inside, he’s not healed. “I have a hard time feeling comfortable around kids, because it was that kid that

U.S. military soldiers tend to a local Afghan man, who was shot after being suspected of planting an IED roadside bomb in Genrandai village in September 2012.

THE GRUNTS we got close to, and to have that same kid turn around and blow you up, it shatters your reality of what’s OK and what’s not OK. Your trust has been ruined and broken.

The only ones you trust are the guys you went with.”

The evidence suggests that such invisible wounds are widespread.

A study by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center found that for all the military personnel medically evacuated from Afghanistan between 2001 and 2012, the most frequent diagnosis was not physical battle wounds but “adjustment reaction.” This category includes grief, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and other forms of moral injury and mental disorders caused or inflamed by war. Between the start of the Afghan war in October 2001 and June 2012, the demand for military mental health services skyrocketed, according to Pentagon data. So did substance abuse within the ranks.

The statistics suggest a massive and widespread wartime trauma whose scope and depth we are only now beginning to grasp. And it worries people like Marsha Four, who was a combat nurse in Vietnam and knows war trauma inti-

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mately. She eventually found purpose and solace running a veterans center in Philadelphia, before she retired last year to work with the Vietnam Veterans of America.

Vietnam veterans like Four have their own struggles. But most of them served only one tour. The new veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, she believes, are especially wounded, because they serve multiple combat tours. “What have we done to this generation?” she wonders. Moral injury, acknowledgement and forgiveness aren’t so easy. “But we gotta give it a shot. Otherwise, we are going to pay the price for what we have done to them.”

“Civilians are lucky that we still have a sense of naiveté about what the world is like,” said Amy Amidon, the Navy psychologist.

“The average American means well, but what they need to know is that these [military] men and women are seeing incredible evil, and coming home with that weighing on them and not knowing how to fit back into society.”

I asked Maj. Gen. Jones, who is deeply concerned about moral injury and its effect on combat Marines, whether he thought war itself is immoral, whether moral injury is unavoidable in war. I wanted to know what he’d meant when he said actions that involve

THE GRUNTS moral transgressions are “part and parcel” of combat. He weighed his answer carefully before responding.

“A democracy is dependent on having guys that will come forward and put their right hand in the air and volunteer and do things that others decide to be done,” he said.

“You have to have a military that will do things, regardless.”

BLOOD UNDER HIS FINGERNAILS

Outside of Marjah, Afghanistan, January 2010. On a routine combat patrol, a platoon from 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, enters an adobe compound in a farm village.

Walking point, at the head of the column, is Lance Cpl. Zachary Smith, from Hornell, N.Y. He is 19.

An IED suddenly erupts beneath him, tearing off both his legs and scything down other Marines with shrapnel wounds. Cpl. Zachary Auclair rushes to save him, frantically pulling out tourniquets and bandages, and he is soon bathed in Smitty’s blood. That’s when the platoon’s sergeant, 28-year-old Daniel M. Angus, steps on a second IED and the blast blows him apart, killing him instantly. In the chaos, Staff Sgt. Warren Repsher, wounded in the face by shrapnel, is on the radio calling for a mede-

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vac bird, and Smitty is dying in Auclair’s arms.

Late that afternoon Darren Doss, a slim, black-haired 22-year-old, watched as his fellow Marines zipped up the two body bags, placed them tenderly on stretchers and ran out to the waiting helicopter. Away it went with the remains of Smitty and Angus, and Doss with heavy heart turned back into the tent.

“ It was that kid that we got close to, and to have that same kid turn around and blow you up, it shatters your reality of what’s OK and what’s not OK.” “And Auclair is sitting there with, like, guts hanging off his helmet and blood all over his stuff. He is crying and he has baby wipes out trying to clean under his fingernails, but the baby wipes are all dried up,” Doss recalled. “I wanted to talk to him, maybe try to cheer him up, but I didn’t know what to say, so I, like, gave him a pack of baby wipes I’d gotten in the mail, and I just went outside.”

Doss fell silent. He was sitting with his arms on his knees, head down, eyes wide and unseeing. Two of his former platoon-

COURTESY OF STEPHEN CANTY

THE GRUNTS mates, Nick Rudolph and Stephen Canty, sat watching him. They’d gotten together in Philadelphia for a reunion of sorts: Canty was video-taping interviews for a documentary about the struggles of returning combat veterans.

The camera was off and for hours they’d just been talking.

Doss picked up the narrative: The battalion held a memorial service for Smitty and Angus. The next day, Doss’s platoon went out on patrol and immediately there was a large explosion and Marines started taking fire. “We were in open desert and you could hear rounds bouncing off the rocks and no one took cover because we were like, just flat open,” Doss said.

Burning with revenge, the Marines responded with a hurricane of rifle and machine-gun fire, blowing apart adobe walls and ripping one insurgent to shreds.

“We fucked up this dude, and another guy was like dragging him, dragging him behind a wall,” said Doss. “And I saw him throwing up after he dragged that dude in and we, like, just leveled the place, shot the whole place up, went insane! But ... yeah.”

Then what? Doss paused, glancing around to where Rudolph

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and Canty were sitting, listening.

“We walked back in and I had an MRE,” a military ration, he said. The room erupted in laughter. Life at war goes on!

That gaiety hides a deeper, lasting pain at losing loved ones in combat. A 2004 study of Vietnam combat veterans, by Ilona PIvar, now a psychologist the Department of Veterans Affairs, found that grief over losing a combat buddy was even greater, more than

Stephen Canty during his time in Afghanistan.

THE GRUNTS 30 years later, than that of bereaved a spouse whose partner had died in the previous six months.

‘A WAR OF MORAL INJURY’

In Afghanistan, some ugly aspects of the local culture and the brutality of the Taliban rubbed American sensibilities raw, setting the stage for deeper moral injury among Marines like Nick Rudolph.

He remembered one time where Marines helped local Afghans build a school, near Combat Outpost San Diego, outside Marjah.

“And all the kids went to that school, and the Taliban came over and splashed acid in their faces and, like, horribly deformed them,” he said. “And it was because they went to a school that we built and they didn’t like it. They didn’t view it as we were trying to help them be educated. They just didn’t give two fucks at all.

“You see the Afghan tradition of having basically boys dance for grown men and they give them money and the guy who gives the most money gets to take the boy home. We are partnering with guys who are basically screwing the neighbors’ kids, 6- and 7-yearolds, and we are supposed to grin and bear it because our cultures

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don’t mesh?” Rudolph said, his voice rising. “When I really want to fuckin’ strangle those dudes?”

Stephen Canty, now 24, is living in Charlottesville, Va., and trying to make sense of his own wartime experience. He told of manning a vehicle checkpoint one day, when along came a middle-aged man on a Moped with two bruised little boys on the back. They had makeup on and their mascara was running because they were crying,

“ If we had the wherewithal to do this kind of research we’d find that moral injury underlies veteran homelessness, criminal behavior, suicide.” and the Marines knew they’d been raped. “So you check ‘em,” Canty said of the men and boys, “and they have no weapons, and by our mission here they’re good to go — they’re OK! And we’re supposed to keep going on missions with these guys.

“Your morals start to degrade.”

On his second combat deployment in Afghanistan, Canty shot and killed an Afghan who was dragged into the Marines’ combat outpost just before he died. “I just lit him up,” he recalled, brushing

THE GRUNTS his long hair out of his eyes. “One of the bullets bounced off his spinal cord and came out his eyeball, and he’s laying there in a wheelbarrow clinging to the last seconds of his life, and he’s looking up at me with one of his eyes and just pulp in the other. And I was like 20 years old at the time. I just stared down at him ... and walked away.

And I will ... never feel anything about that. I literally just don’t care whatsoever.”

But Canty wondered what kind of person didn’t have qualms about killing. “Are you some kind of sociopath that you can just look at a dude you shot three or four times and just kind of walk away? I think I even smiled, not in an evil way but just like, what a fucked-up world we live in — you’re a 40-year-old dude and you probably got kids at home and stuff, and you just got smoked by some dumb 20-year-old.

“You learn to kill, and you kill people, and it’s like, I don’t care.

I’ve seen people get shot, I’ve seen little kids get shot. You see a kid and his father sitting together and he gets shot and I give a zero fuck.

“And once you’re able to do that, what is morally right anymore?

How good is your value system if

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you train people to kill another human being, the one thing we are taught not to do? When you create an organization based around the one taboo that all societies have?”

Canty is bright and articulate.

For a guy who never feels anything about killing, he constantly monitors and analyzes his feelings about war, rubbing together his thoughts about duty and morality like worry beads, until they’re raw.

“My thought was, you did what you had to. But did I really? I saw him running and I lit him up. It’s the right thing to do in war, but in every other circumstance it’s the most wrong thing you could do,” he said. Faced with those kinds of moral challenges, “your values do change real quickly. It becomes a war of moral injury.”

Canty’s moral injury is his own struggle. But his intimate, dark knowledge of war is also a gift — of insight, which he badly wants others to share.

“We keep going regardless of knowing the cost, regardless of knowing what it’s gonna do,” he said. “The question we have to ask the civilian population is, is it worth it, knowing these mental issues we come home with?

Is it worth it?”

MORA L IN J URY >> PART I I

M O R A L INJURY >> PART I I

RECRUITS THE

WHEN R IG H T AN D W RO N G A R E H A R D TO T E L L A PA RT

THE RECRUITS

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PREVIOUS PAGE: COURTESY OF STEPHEN CANTY

THE RECRUITS CAME AT A TROT DOWN THE BOULEVARD DE FRANCE AT THE STORIED MARINE CORPS BOOT CAMP AT PARRIS ISLAND, S.C., SHOUTING CADENCE FROM THEIR PRECISE PARADE RANKS. PARENTS GATHERED ON THE SIDEWALKS PRESSED FORWARD, BRANDISHING CAMERAS AND FLAGS, YELLING THE NAMES OF THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS THEY HADN’T SEEN IN THREE MONTHS. “He said he lost 25 pounds!” cried a younger brother of Kenneth Karpenko of Corry, Pa. Now, Kenneth and hundreds of other recruits were about to graduate and folks had come from all over the country for Family Day, which opened with this recruit formation run. “There he is!” someone shrieked as a blur of olive drab streamed past. Kenneth’s mom, Pam Karpenko, dabbed tears from her cheeks and managed to say, “We are so proud!”

Is she comfortable with her son becoming a warfighter, with American troops still being killed in Afghanistan and trouble brewing elsewhere in the world? “Oh, we prayed about it and he prayed about it — he knew it was what God wanted,” she said. “We are good with that.”

It’s a proud and painful scene to watch, for it’s clear that there will be more wars, and that there will always be young Americans eager to sign up to fight. In

Previous page: Stephen Canty with his squad in Afghanistan.

THE RECRUITS three months, these recruits have earned the right to be called Marines. More training will come later. But there is no way, really, to prepare them for the emotional extremes of war: trauma for some, including moral injury, a violation of the sense of right and wrong that leaves a wound on the soul.

“You just can’t communicate the knowledge of war to somebody else. It’s something that you know or don’t know, and once you know it you can’t un-know it and you have to deal with that knowledge,” explained Stephen Canty, who went through boot camp here in 2007, before his two combat deployments to Afghanistan.

Army basic and Marine boot camp are rigorous preparation, of course. Recruits become lean and hard. They learn to work in teams, to obey orders without hesitation or question, to shout “AYE SIR!” in unison, to fire an assault rifle at human-silhouette targets. They march in close-order drill, navigate overland at night with a compass, demonstrate how to treat a sucking chest wound and fight each other with pugil sticks and boxing gloves.

They memorize the Marine core values or the seven Army values.

But can they be trained to make

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life-altering decisions in conditions of moral ambiguity, and to live comfortably with their actions? Can anyone really be inoculated against moral injury? Can it be prevented? The experiences of some recent combat veterans, at least, suggest not.

“We have come back, we have had brothers die in our arms, we’ve picked up parts of other people,” 28-year-old Marine Sgt.

“ You are completely angry at the situation you were put into ... not angry because you signed up but ... what happened you weren’t fully prepared for.”

Sendio Martz told me one day last fall at Camp Lejeune, N.C., shortly before his medical discharge from the Marine Corps. He spoke haltingly, searching for the words.

“And you are completely angry at the situation you were put into ... not angry because you signed up but ... what happened you weren’t fully prepared for.”

The physical and technical training at Parris Island is laced with lessons on morality and values.

Drill instructors hammer into recruits a rigid moral code of honor,

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

THE RECRUITS

courage and commitment with the goal, according to the Marine Corps, of producing young Marines “thoroughly indoctrinated in love of Corps and Country ... the epitome of personal character, selflessness, and military virtue.” The code is unyielding. “There is no room in the Marine Corps for either situational ethics or situational morality,” declares a standing order issued in 1996 by the then-commandant, Gen. Charles Krulak.

The Army’s moral codes are similar, demanding loyalty, respect (“Treat others with dignity and respect while expecting oth-

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ers to do the same”), honor and selfless service.

All this may sound like the moral ideals by which most Americans strive to live. But the military’s moral codes are different: They are issued to each recruit along with a weapon and the training, and eventually the authorization, to kill. Success on the battlefield may call for the suspension of basic notions of civilian morality in order to accomplish the mission. Thus the military codes add dimensions of loyalty, duty and personal courage, and back up those values with a requirement of rigid and unquestioning discipline and obedience to lawful orders. The Army’s Soldier’s Creed demands that troops “al-

U.S. Army Sgt. Jonathan Duralde (right) and Sgt. Luis Gamarra hold hands as they fight pain from injuries they suffered in an IED blast in June 2010, near Kandahar, Afghanistan.

THE RECRUITS ways place the mission first.”

The entire military is “a moral construct,” said retired VA psychiatrist and author Jonathan Shay. In his ground-breaking 1994 study of combat trauma among Vietnam veterans, Achilles in Vietnam, he writes: “The moral power of an army is so great that it can motivate men to get up out of a trench and step into enemy machine-gun fire.”

The military’s moral structure is intended to help guide troops through “morally ambiguous situations,” said Marine Col. Daniel J. Haas, who commands the recruit training regiment at Parris Island.

“We think about this all the time,” he said. In morally tricky situations where you have to make a split-second decision, “ultimately, the answer you come up with is the one you will have to live with. You’ll be more likely to live with your decision if you make it a considered, values-based decision.”

But in war, asking troops to meet the ideals and values they carry into battle — always be honorable, always be courageous, always treat civilians with respect, never harm a non-combatant — may itself cause moral injury when

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these ideals collide with the reality of combat. Accomplishing the mission may mean placing innocent civilians at risk. Duty, honor and discipline may mean obeying an order you know to be misguided — and later cause a feeling of having been betrayed by your leader.

The great moral power of an army, as Shay puts it, makes its participants more vulnerable to violation, and to a sense of guilt

“ We spent two deployments where you couldn’t trust a single person except the guys next to you.

We have trouble trusting people.” or betrayal when things go wrong.

It was Shay’s work with Vietnam combat vets, in fact, that led him to recognize that their trauma often came from a deep sense of betrayal.

He recognized that the official definition of PTSD failed to describe their mental anguish, leading him to coin the term “moral injury.”

The ideals taught at Parris Island “are the best of what human beings can do,” said William P. Nash, a retired Navy psychiatrist who deployed with Marines to Iraq as a combat therapist. “It’s these values that give you some chance

T H E R E C“You R U Ijust T S can’t communicate the knowledge of war to

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somebody else. It’s something that you know or don’t know, and once you know it you can’t un-know it.”

— STEPHEN CANTY

PHOTOGRAPH BY VICTORIA WILL

THE RECRUITS of doing something good in a war, and limiting collateral damage, however right or wrong” the war itself is. The problem, he said, is that “war will break these values.

“There is an inherent contradiction between the warrior code, how these guys define themselves, what they expect of themselves — to be heroes, the selfless servants who fight for the rest of us — and the impossibility in war of ever living up to those ideals. It cannot be done. Not by anybody there,” Nash said. “So how do they forgive themselves, forgive others, for failing to live up to the ideals without abandoning the ideals?”

Warriors come home “and something is damaged, broken. They feel betrayed; they don’t trust in these values and ideals any more.”

As Stephen Canty, the former Marine, put it, “We spent two deployments where you couldn’t trust a single person except the guys next to you.” Back in civilian society now, Canty said, “We have trouble trusting people.”

‘BAD THINGS STILL HAPPENED’

Even when armed with a set of rigid values and discipline, warriors in combat can be caught in situations where they have no op-

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portunity to choose between right and wrong. In the often chaotic fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, where there was no clear distinction between enemy insurgent and innocent civilian, young Americans could act in good conscience, and in accordance with a strict moral code, and still suffer moral injury.

During a gun battle outside Marjah, Afghanistan, in early spring of 2010, a Marine squad of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion 6th Marines (“Charlie One-Six”), was pinned down in a gully, taking intense fire from an adobe compound. Unable to move forward or to retreat, the squad leader OK’d an attack and Lance Cpl. Joseph Schiano, a 22-year-old on his second combat tour, lifted a rocket launcher to his shoulder, took aim and fired.

The blast blew apart much of the adobe building. As the dust settled, the Marines could hear shouting and wailing. Their interpreter said, “They want to bring out the wounded.” And as the torn and bleeding bodies were dragged out, it became clear that the Taliban had herded women and children into the building as human shields.

“And Schiano is leaning against wall, just sobbing,” recalled Canty, who was Schiano’s squadmate at the time. “The thing is, you couldn’t have known.”

But as Canty himself often

COURTESY OF DEBRA SCHIANO

THE RECRUITS says, once you know the truth of war, you can’t un-know it. After that tour in Afghanistan, Schiano left the Marine Corps and went home to Connecticut. The war still weighed heavily on him. He couldn’t fit back. Daytimes, he felt he didn’t belong. At night, he had screaming nightmares.

One Sunday afternoon several weeks after he returned, Schiano went off the road in his 2003 Volkswagen Jetta and rammed a utility pole. At his funeral in Riverside, Conn., Marines of One-Six carried the casket. He was 23 years old.

In other combat situations, where the kind of “considered, values-based decision” that Col. Haas advises is theoretically possible, young troops have two handicaps.

Their ability to make split-second moral assessments, a function of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, may not be fully developed, researchers say, a fact that may be familiar to any parent of teenagers.

But in war, when 20-year-olds are licensed to kill, the stakes are far higher. And they may not be getting enough sleep, another critical factor in making moral judgments, according to Shay, the VA psychologist. A 2008 Army study reported that combat troops were averaging

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less than six hours of sleep a night, month after month.

“The problem for a lot of these kids is that psychologically, morally and neurologically they are not fully developed by any stretch of the imagination,” Nash said.

That makes it impossible “for the people pulling the triggers, impossible for the medics and corpsmen and doctors who are treating people ... you want to try to live up to the ideal of protecting people, and you fail to protect them.”

Challenges to live up to a moral code are precisely what young Americans have been encountering in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his account of a 2003 combat deployment in Iraq, Soft Spots, Marine Sgt. Clint Van Winkle writes of such an incident: A car carrying two Iraqi men approached a Marine unit and a Marine opened fire, putting two bullet holes in the

Joseph Schiano is welcomed home from bootcamp.

THE RECRUITS windshield and leaving the driver mortally wounded and his a passenger torn open but alive, blooddrenched and writhing in pain.

The two Iraqis may have been innocent civilians. The Marines may have been obeying the strict rules of engagement, which govern when deadly force can be used (normally, in cases where the approaching car is a threat to American life and the driver refuses several warning signals to stop). But the damage was still done.

The only way to absorb such experiences, Van Winkle writes, was to “make it impersonal and tell yourself you didn’t give a shit one way or another, even though you really did. It would eventually catch up to you. Sooner or later you’d have to contend with those sights and sounds, the blood and flies, but that wasn’t the place for remorse.

There was too much war left. We still had a lot of killing to do.”

In a recent phone interview, Van Winkle said the decade since his combat tour has given him a slightly different perspective. “I tried to make myself and my Marines live up to those moral standards,” he said. “I mean, we weren’t pushing people around. We weren’t doing things we shouldn’t have been

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doing, although things happened by accident.

“I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, and bad things still happened.”

His moral injury is not unique.

“The bright line between murder and legitimate killing is something that our most junior enlisted person cares deeply about,” said Shay. “When they kill somebody who didn’t need to be killed, they

“ We are beginning to venture into what I think is the kernel of combat trauma: the transformative capacity of what happens when we send our children into a war zone and say, ‘Kill like a champion.’” are really wounded themselves.”

Not all those who deploy to a war zone experience killing or direct combat, and some troops never get to war at all. But moral injury can occur anywhere. Certainly the technicians working in mortuary affairs at Dover Air Force Base, Del., who handle the remains of Americans killed in combat, are exposed to moral trauma.

For many other U.S. troops, exposure to killing and other trau-

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

THE RECRUITS

mas is common. In 2004, even before multiple combat deployments became routine, a study of 3,671 returning combat Marines returning from Iraq found that 65 percent had killed an enemy combatant, and 28 percent said they were responsible for the death of a civilian. Eighty-three percent had seen ill or injured women or children whom they were unable to help. More than half — 57 percent — had handled or uncovered human remains.

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The intense kinship forged among small-unit combat troops can enable them to endure hardship, loneliness and peril. But such close relationships also put them at risk of excruciating grief at the sudden, violent death of a loved comrade, something that happens all too frequently. In a 2013 Wounded Warrior Project survey of its members, all severely wounded combat veterans, 80 percent said they had a friend seriously wounded or killed in action.

In a similar finding, an extensive 2008 field survey of combat and support troops in Iraq and Afghani-

A U.S. Marine yells for other Marines after an IED exploded while they were under enemy fire in Mian Poshteh, Afghanistan, in July 2009.

THE RECRUITS stan found that two-thirds knew someone seriously injured or killed.

Fifty-six percent had a member of their unit wounded or killed.

‘THE RIGHT THING TO DO COULD GET YOU KILLED’

In retrospect, signs of the resulting moral confusion are difficult to miss. The rate at which troops were hospitalized for mental illnesses has risen 87 percent since 2000, according to a July 2013 study by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center. The center also reported in June of last year that mental complaints, not physical injury, were the leading cause of medical evacuations from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2012.

Michael Castellana, a psychotherapist at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, sees the damage among dozens of his Marine patients: an erosion of moral certainty, or the confidence in their sense of right and wrong.

“We are beginning,” he told me, “to venture into what I think is the kernel of combat trauma: the transformative capacity of what happens when we send our children into a war zone and say, ‘Kill like a champion.’”

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Nash, the retired Navy psychiatrist, said veterans looking back on their time in Iraq or Afghanistan are prone to wonder, “In my little sphere of influence, how well did I or didn’t I live up to the ideals?” Often, he said, the answer “is what kills them.”

The inability to consistently achieve the highest levels of moral behavior in the shambles and

“ The problem we’re trying to understand is, can we detect people who may have more difficulties with moral and ethical quandaries that happen every day in combat.” chaos of war can produce varying degrees of “shame and guilt and anger — the primary emotional consequences of this moral injury,” Castellana said. “And if you read the suicide notes, the poems and writings of servicemembers and veterans, it’s the killing; it’s failing to protect those we’re supposed to protect, whether that’s peers or innocent civilians; it’s sending people to their death if you’re a leader; failing to save the lives of those injured if you’re a medical professional. ... Noth-

COURTESY OF DEBRA SCHIANO

THE RECRUITS ing to do with the rightness or wrongness of war.”

In recent years, the military has tried to build what it calls “resiliency” into its young warriors.

In one Army program, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, soldiers at every level get annual training in physical and psychological strengthening. The key to absorbing stress and moral challenges is to “own what you can control, and think before you take on negative thoughts and start blaming yourself,” said Sgt. 1st Class Eric Tobin, a master resilience trainer.

If women and children are inadvertently killed in battle, he said, “feeling bad about that is normal. Not to minimize the loss of life, but you can also focus on the positive outcomes of that battle, that you are still alive, that you protected yourself and your team, that you helped the military achieve its objective.”

The Army is also producing a series of videos to get troops to think about moral injury before they are sent into battle. In four of these 30-minute videos, to be completed later this spring, combat veterans talk about their experiences and how they dealt with the psychological damage, said Lt.

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Col. Stephen W. Austin, an Army chaplain with the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program. One of the videos focuses on killing.

“There are no answers — we just want to start the conversation, getting the troops comfortable talking about these things,” said Austin. “That’s the most important thing of all, that people feel they can talk about these issues with their buddies.”

The Marines have taken a slightly different approach, focused on identifying and helping Marines with all forms of combat stress right on the battlefield.

Nash developed a comprehensive approach to combat stress called OSCAR (Operational Stress Control and Readiness) concepts.

Under the program, the Marines have embedded mental health professionals like himself directly into combat battalions. And lead-

Schiano (left) with a close friend and fellow Marine in 2008.

THE RECRUITS ers, officers and noncommissioned officers alike, were trained to recognize Marines under severe stress, to calm them down and arrange peer support so they wouldn’t isolate themselves, and to get higher-level help if needed.

“This is relevant to moral injury big-time,” said Nash. It’s onthe-spot help from compassionate and wise mentors, the people who know Marines the best. A good platoon sergeant or squad leader is “better than I ever could be, listening to a Marine’s story, saying, ‘I’ve been there and done that and I made sense of it by saying this part was my responsibility but all that other stuff I couldn’t help.’”

The best military leaders do this instinctively. In Iraq, Nash once watched a battalion commander lean over a wounded Marine being carried off on a gurney; like most of the wounded, he was not only in extreme pain and fear, but tormented with shame for having been wounded, and guilt at having to leave his buddies. “You did your job,” the commander said, “and I am proud of you.”

The military’s efforts to build “resiliency” in its troops has drawn criticism from the Institute of Medicine, the independent,

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nongovernmental health arm of the National Academies. In a new report published in February, the IOM said there is an “urgent need” to prevent psychological health problems in the military, but that the Pentagon’s prevention programs are “not consistently based on evidence” and there is “no systematic use of national performance standards” to assess their effectiveness.

A more focused effort to help troops think through ethical and

“ None of us really knows what it’s like until we go over there, and we go two, three, four, five times before we ever pause to think about what we’re doing.” moral problems is a virtual reality (VR) prototype designed by Albert “Skip” Rizzo, a University of Southern California psychologist and specialist in virtual reality at the school’s Institute for Creative Technologies.

In one VR scenario, troops on a routine patrol halt their convoy, confronting a man drawn up in a fetal position on the road. As they watch, he moves slightly — he’s alive. Young soldiers are saying,

THE RECRUITS

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COURTESY OF STEPHEN CANTY

A photo of a medical evacuation helicopter taken during Stephen Canty’s time in Afghanistan.

THE RECRUITS “Hey! Let’s go help!” But they are silenced by the sergeant, who warns them that this may be an ambush.

“That guy may be innocent,” the sergeant says, “Or he may have a pound of C4 [explosive] on him. Maybe he’s just lyin’ there waitin’ for us to get near, and he or one of his buddies in that village hits the switch and boom!

You’re dead — or if you’re lucky, you’re laying in the ditch with no arms or legs ... I’ve seen it happen.

Sometimes, life sucks.”

The soldiers call for a robot to investigate, but while they wait, a friendly and wise mentor appears on the screen. “I’m Capt.

Branch. My job is to turn up at key moments to help you develop the resilience you will experience in and around combat,” he says in an avuncular tone. “Today you stood by and did nothing while a man bled to death on the roadway.

How’d that feel? Wrong? Frustrating? Overwhelming? It sucked, didn’t it? This kind of twisted crap happens all the time here. Your natural impulses are going to be challenged at every turn.”

The scenarios are intended not to provide specific answers, but to introduce troops to morally ambiguous situations and to get

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them thinking and talking about how to deal with them. But the bottom line is that morality, in war, is different.

“What you’ve learned from every good and decent person in your life is sometimes going to have to go on the back burner,” says the Capt. Branch character.

Their ability to make split-second moral assessments, a function of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, may not be fully developed, researchers say, a fact that may be familiar to any parent of teenagers.

“The right thing to do, in San Diego or Charlotte ... could get you killed here.”

Whether or not the VR scenarios help troops prepare for combat is unclear. But some answers may come from a pilot project Rizzo is running with a Colorado National Guard special operations team scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan later this year. The project is underwritten by the U.S. Army Research Lab, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Infinite Hero Foundation, which supports

THE RECRUITS troops and veterans with physical and mental health issues.

Rizzo and his team are using the virtual reality scenarios to study soldiers’ reactions to moral challenges, monitoring each participant’s heart rate, respiration and skin conductivity, and drawing blood to check for stress biomarkers.

“The problem we’re trying to understand is, can we detect people who may have more difficulties with moral and ethical quandaries that happen every day in combat,” Rizzo said. “And whether exposure to these scenarios has an impact” on how soldiers absorb combat trauma.

Such work may begin to provide critical insights into the nature of moral injury and help identify individuals who are more vulnerable to it. But for now, young troops will go to war not fully prepared for what they’ll find.

“None of us really knows what it’s like until we go over there, and we go two, three, four, five times before we ever pause to think about what we’re doing,” said Stephen Canty, a thoughtful 24-year-old who is now out of the Marine Corps.

“There’s always going to be

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people like me who are smiling the first time they get on the bus [to boot camp] — they don’t want to miss the war,” he said. “There will always be kids willing to fight, and they’re always going to pay this price, and there are always going to be guys like me who are saying, ‘Hey man, you don’t wanna do it, no, no, no, you don’t want to. It seems like fun, and I can’t tell you not to do it.’ But there’s no talking a kid out of it.”

Only after troops get back, he said, “do we start to look at the mental effects of killing other human beings.”

Canty’s little brother, Joe, joined the Marines in 2010 and recently deployed to Afghanistan. “I know what he’s getting into; he’s going back to Helmand Province less than 20 miles from where I was, and he’s got a grin ear to ear,” Stephen said. “And there’s nothing I can do to wipe that grin off his face because, that was me, you know?

Three years earlier. Nobody could have told me.”

Stephen’s grandfather tried.

He’d been a Marine in the Pacific in World War II. “Don’t do it,” he told Stephen before he enlisted at 17. “You’re too goddamn smart, boy.”

MOR AL IN J URY >> PART I I I

M O R A L INJURY >> PART I I I

HEALING CA N W E TR EAT MO R A L WO U N DS ?

HEALING

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PREVIOUS PAGE: WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES

FEW LIFE TRAUMAS CAN MATCH THE EXPERIENCES OF A MEDIC IN COMBAT, OR ETCH SO DEEPLY AND PAINFULLY INTO A SOUL. ¶ BILLIE GRIMES-WATSON WAS A MEDIC IN IRAQ IN 2003 AND 2004. AS THE INITIAL U.S. INVASION TURNED INTO BLOODY CHAOS, SHE WOULD SPRINT THROUGH THE SMOKE AND FIRE OF BLASTS FROM IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICES and gunfire to save lives, struggling with the maimed and broken bodies of soldiers she knew and loved. And try to recover in a few hours rest between missions.

She had just passed her 26th birthday.

Occasionally she would call home, but would burst into tears when she’d start to describe what she was doing. Then she stopped trying. A young officer in her platoon, Ben Colgan, was fatally wounded in a bomb blast. She was devastated. “I couldn’t help Lt. Colgan,” she told the military newspa-

per Stars and Stripes in 2004.

Nearly a decade later, GrimesWatson is haunted by the war and her part in it, bearing moral injuries literally so unspeakable that she seems beyond help. “I avoid talking about it, try to keep it down,” she told me in a recent phone conversation. “But inside I’m trying to do the happy face so no one knows how much I’m hurting.”

Therapists and researchers are recognizing more and more cases of servicemembers like GrimesWatson who are returning from war with moral injuries, wounds

Previous page: Flight medic Sgt. Cole Reece checks the vital signs of a wounded Afghan boy before transporting him to the hospital at Kandahar Air Field on Oct. 10, 2010.

JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

HEALING

caused by blows to their moral foundation, damaging their sense of right and wrong and often leaving them with traumatic grief.

Moral injuries aren’t always evident. But they can be painful and enduring.

“Everybody has demons, but there are some wild kind of demons when you come back from combat,” said a Navy corpsman (the Navy’s name for its medics) who served a tour each in Iraq and Afghanistan and asked not to be identified by name. He was once unable to save a Marine with terrible head wound, and afterwards felt other Marines blamed him.

“You come home and ask yourself,

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what the hell did I do all that for?

You gotta live with that shit and there’s no program that the military can send you to or any class that’s really gonna help.”

“Guilt is the root of it,” he said.

“Asking yourself, why are you such a bad person?” He wasn’t that way before his military service. “I have a hard time dealing with the fact that I’m not me anymore.”

Marine Staff Sgt. Felipe Tremillo also is struggling with guilt.

Two years after he came home from his second combat tour, in Afghanistan, Tremillo still is haunted by images of the women and children he saw suffer from the violence and destruction of war. “Terrible things happened to the people we are supposed to be helping,” he said. “We’d do raids,

A 10-year old wounded Afghan girl is carried by a U.S. army medic to a medical evacuation helicopter to be airlifted to Kandahar hospital on Aug. 21, 2011.

SOURCES; U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

HEALING going in peoples’ homes and people would get hurt.”

In Iraq, where Tremillo served his first combat tour, it was common for U.S. troops to search for weapons caches by banging on a door and ordering a family out of the house, holding them prone on the ground at gunpoint while rifling through their belongings. It was an oftrepeated scene, one that former four-star military commander Stanley McChrystal wrote in his memoir made him feel “sick.”

“As I watched I could feel in my own limbs and chest the shame and fury” of the helpless civilians, he wrote.

American soldiers had to act that way, Tremillo recognizes, “in order to stay safe.” But the moral compromise, the willful casting aside of his own values, broke something inside him, changing him into someone he hardly recognizes, or admires.

For many who experience such moral injury, the shock and pain fade over time. Supportive and understanding family and friends, a good job and often a spiritual connection can help.

For others, the wound gets worse. For Tremillo, “there is no

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WAR TRAUMA SYMPTOMS The definition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder doesn’t cover all the symptoms of moral injury, the lasting wounds to the soul caused by participation in morally ambiguous combat events. Here are the symptoms of each, and those that overlap.

“Startle” Reflex Memory L o ss

Fear Flashbacks

PTSD

S o r r ow

Anger Depression

Grief

Anxiety Insomnia

Re g re t

Nightmares

Shame

Self-medication with alcohol or drugs

Alienati

BOTH

on

MORAL INJURY

MULTIPLE DEPLOYMENTS FOR TROOPS IN RECENT WARS Frequent deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq have become routine for American soldiers – raising the risk of lasting mental trauma.

Individuals deployed Number of deployments AFGHANISTAN 823,136 2001-2013 1,489,394

IRAQ 2003-2013

1,115,872 2,337,197

fairytale ending,” he said.

“People try to make sense of what happened, but it often gets reduced to, ‘It was my fault,’ ‘the world is dangerous,’ or, in severe cases, ‘I’m a monster,’” explained Peter Yeomans, a staff psychologist at the VA Medical Center

COURTESY OF BRETT LITZ

HEALING in Philadelphia. Many of his patients suffer from both Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and moral injury, and he is searching for ways to ease their pain.

“People mostly try to push those experiences away and not look at them, and they inevitably end up with an oversimplified conclusion about what it all meant,” he said. “We’re trying to get them to unearth the beliefs that are causing their distress, and then help them analyze it, consider the evidence for and against the way they see it, and ultimately develop a more nuanced belief about what happened and what their responsibility actually is.”

For most veterans with moral injury, there is little help. In contrast to the extensive training and preparation the government provides troops for battle, the Defense Department and the VA have almost nothing specifically for the moral wounds that endure after they return.

Only one small program, based at the San Diego Naval Medical Center, routinely provides therapy designed for moral injury. Several clinicians launched the program early in 2013 after realizing

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“ I’m very respectful of how difficult it is for them to embrace. After all, service members have to follow orders, and if ordered to do something it is by definition legal and moral.” that many of their PTSD patients needed a different kind of help.

The therapies and drugs developed to treat PTSD don’t get at the root of moral injury, experts say, because they focus on extinguishing fear. PTSD therapy often takes the form of asking the patient to re-live the damaging ex-

Brett Litz, a clinical psychologist and professor at Boston University, has done pioneering work in defining and treating moral injury.

HEALING perience over and over, until the fear subsides. But for a medic, say, whose pain comes not from fear but from losing a patient, being forced to repeatedly recall that experience only drives the pain deeper, therapists have found.

“Medication doesn’t fix this stuff,” said Army psychologist John Rigg, who sees returning combat troops at Fort Gordon, Ga. Instead, therapists focus on helping morally injured patients accept that wrong was done, but that it need not define their lives.

On the battlefield, some have devised makeshift rituals of cleansing and forgiveness. At the end of a brutal 12-month combat tour in Iraq, one battalion chaplain gathered the troops and handed out slips of paper. He asked the soldiers to jot down everything they were sorry for, ashamed of, angry about or regretted. The papers went into a makeshift stone baptismal font, and as the soldiers stood silently in a circle, the papers burned to ash.

“It was sort of a ritual of forgiveness,” said the chaplain, Lt. Col. Doug Etter of the Pennsylvania National Guard. “The idea was to leave all the most troubling things behind in Iraq.”

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But by and large, those with moral injury are on their own.

‘A TOUCHY SUBJECT’

Brett Litz, a clinical psychologist and professor at Boston University who is affiliated with the VA in Boston, has done pioneering work in defining and treating moral injury. “We have no illusion of quick-fix cure for serious and sustained moral injury,” he said.

A few academic researchers and therapists scattered across the country are experimenting with new forms of therapy, some adapting ideas that have worked with patients suffering from PTSD and other forms of war trauma.

The Pentagon has quietly funded a $2 million clinical trial, led by Litz, to explore ways to adapt PTSD therapies for Marines suffering from moral injury.

The military services, not surprisingly, are reluctant to discuss moral injury, as it goes to the heart of military operations and the nature of war. The Army is producing new training videos aimed at preparing soldiers to absorb moral shocks long enough to keep them in the fight. But the Pentagon does not formally recognize moral injury, and the Navy refuses to use the term, referring instead to “inner conflict.”

“That’s a euphemism,” snorted

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

HEALING

retired Marine Maj. Gen. Thomas S. Jones, a decorated combat veteran who has had to raise his own money for research into combat stress and moral injury and treatment for wounded Marines. “It is true the folks are loath to use the word ‘moral,’” he said of military brass. Those outside the military “will think it means somebody did something immoral,” which may not be the case, he said.

The Pentagon declined to make policymaking officials available to discuss moral injury. Instead, Defense Department spokeswoman Joy Crabaugh issued a statement observing that moral

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injury is “not clinically defined” and that there is no “formal diagnosis” for it. The statement said the Defense Department “provides a wide range of medical and non-medical resources for service members seeking assistance in addressing moral injuries.”

Mental health care providers “often address moral injury when treating a psychiatric disorder,” the statement said, and chaplains are available as well. Crabaugh would not say why Pentagon policymakers refused to discuss moral injury.

Litz accepts the military’s reluctance to recognize moral injury.

“I’m very respectful of how difficult it is for them to embrace,” he said. “After all, service members have to follow orders, and if or-

U.S. Marines carry Cpl. Jorge Villarreal of San Antonio, Texas, to a medical evacuation helicopter on Oct. 17, 2010, in Kajaki, Afghanistan.

Villarreal was killed after stepping on an IED.

COURTESY OF AMY AMIDON

HEALING dered to do something it is by definition legal and moral.” Difficult problems might arise from official recognition of moral injury: how to measure the intensity of the pain, for instance, and whether the government should offer compensation, as it does for PTSD. “Moral injury is a touchy topic, and for a long time [mental health care] providers have been nervous about addressing it because they felt inexperienced or they felt it was a religious issue,” said Amy Amidon, a staff psychologist at the San Diego Naval Medical Center who oversees its moral injury/moral repair therapy group. “And service members have been very hesitant to talk about it, nervous about how it would affect their career.”

But things are changing. As recently as 2009, Litz was writing that despite evidence of a rising tide of moral injury among troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, clinicians and researchers were “failing to pay sufficient attention” to the problem, that “questions about moral injury [were] not being addressed,” and that clinicians who came across cases of moral injury were “at a loss” because existing therapies for PTSD were not designed to ad-

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“ We are not going to brush it aside.

It did happen and it wasn’t OK. The point is to help them feel OK sitting in the darkness with the evil they experienced.” dress moral injury directly.

In a recent phone conversation, however, Litz said moral injury has become a significant area of interest among clinical scientists.

“What’s new is that we are trying to study it in a more scientific way and finding ways of treating moral injury — and that’s unprec-

Amy Amidon, a staff psychologist at the San Diego Naval Medical Center who oversees its moral injury/ moral repair therapy group.

HEALING edented. It’s a slow process, and I am very proud of the fact that we have brought science to bear,” he said. Speaking of the results of new research on experimental therapies, he added: “You can’t argue with a clinical trial.”

‘I SEE INCREDIBLE GOODNESS’

At the San Diego Naval Medical Center, the eight-week moral injury/moral repair program begins with time devoted simply to allowing patients to feel comfortable and safe in a small group. Eventually, each is asked to relate his or her story, often a raw, emotional experience for those reluctant to acknowledge the source of their pain.

The idea is to drag it out into the open so that it can be dealt with.

The group is instructed to listen and respond with support but not judgment, neither condemning nor excusing what happened. Whatever caused the moral injury, Amidon said, “we are not going to brush it aside. It did happen and it wasn’t OK. The point is to help them feel OK sitting in the darkness with the evil they experienced.”

Often, patients feel guilty or ashamed, convinced they are unforgiven, worthless and impure.

In one recent session, a soldier

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rose hesitantly and told of a firefight in Iraq. Insurgents had suddenly rushed toward him using women and children as shields.

“He had about three-quarters of a second to decide, and of course he killed,” Michael Castellana, a staff psychotherapist and co-facilitator of the group, recounted.

“When he arrived home, coming off the plane, his wife handed him his new baby daughter. She put the baby in his arms and he immediately gave the baby back

“ I have all this guilt inside me and I want to let it out but I can’t. I want to tell my husband and family what’s going on, but I don’t. I just put on a happy face until I’m alone.” to her with an almost disgusted look — he almost dropped her,” he said. “The thing was, his new daughter was so beautiful and perfect and pure that he didn’t want his filth to contaminate her.

“As terrible as some of this stuff is — and sometimes what we hear makes your toes curl — what I see in these people is incredible goodness,” Castellana said. “Their efforts to punish themselves is just further evidence of their goodness.”

COURTESY OF MICHAEL CASTELLANA

HEALING Further into the sessions, group members are encouraged to do community service, and to practice acts of kindness. “One of the consequences of moral injury is selfisolation,” said Amidon. “The idea here is for them to begin to recognize the goodness in themselves, and to reinforce their sense of being accepted in the community.”

Toward the end of the eight weeks, group members are invited to write a letter to themselves from a benevolent figure in their lives — a spouse, or grandfather, or mentor — to explain how they feel and to imagine what this person would say in response.

“What is really healing,” Amidon said, “is to hear, whether it’s in this imagined conversation or with the others, someone sharing really shameful experiences and having people accept them — saying, ‘Yeah, that was fucked up, what you did, and remember all the good things you’ve done. This doesn’t have to define the rest of your life.’”

One participant, now 33, struggles with the guilt of having killed the wrong person. “My big thing was taking another man’s life and finding out later on that wasn’t who you were supposed to shoot,” he told me, asking not to be identified

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“ As terrible as some of this stuff is — and sometimes what we hear makes your toes curl — what I see in these people is incredible goodness. Their efforts to punish themselves is just further evidence of their goodness.” because of his continuing psychological treatment. “The [troops] out there, they don’t talk about it. They act like it never happened. Completely don’t ever bring it up.”

But in the San Diego moral injury program, he did summon the courage to stand up and talk about it. “Just saying it was helpful,” he said later. “There were about five

Michael Castellana, a staff psychotherapist and co-facilitator of the San Diego moral injury repair group.

TONY KARUMBA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Dust kicks off the ground during a dawn operation by U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan’s Naja-bien village in September 2012.

SOURCES: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF VETRANS AFFAIRS

HEALING people in the room, and they got it. I didn’t need to have anyone say it’s OK, because it’s not OK — that would have just pissed me off.”

What was the response of his peers? “It was silence,” he said.

“That unsaid, ‘I don’t care what you did, we are still good.’

“People give you space. And they got a therapy dog in there, and he comes over and wags his tail a little bit, tells you it’s OK, too, you know? Not saying it’s OK, but just to say you’re not some wicked person.”

Felipe Tremillo, the Marine staff sergeant, took part in the San Diego program last fall. One assignment was to write an imaginary letter of apology. His was intended for a young Afghan boy whom he had glimpsed during a raid in which Marines busted down doors and ejected people from their homes while they searched inside for weapons. The boy had stood trembling as Tremillo and the Marines rifled through the family possessions, his eyes, Tremillo felt, blazing shame and rage.

“I didn’t know his name,” Tremillo said. But in his letter, “I told him how sorry I was at how I affected his life, that he didn’t have a fair chance to have a happy life,

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TROOPS SEE THINGS THEY CAN’T FORGET A study of the 3,761 paratroopers and marines after returning from combat in Iraq in late 2003 found grim results about troops’ exposure to morally damaging events.

48%

Killed an enemy combatant Were responsible for the death of a non-combatant

14%

65%

28%

Handled or uncovered human remains

50% 57%

Saw ill or injured women or children whom you were unable to help

69%

83%

22% 26%

Had a buddy shot or hit who was nearby

Paratroopers Marines

21% 19%

Saved the life of a soldier or civilian

THE WOUNDS THAT DON’T SHOW Mental health wounds far outnumber physical injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Physically wounded Affected by PTSD

52,000

Between 275,000 and 500,000

based off of our actions as a unit.”

Writing the letter, he said, “wasn’t about me forgiving myself, more about accepting who I am now.”

Former Navy psychiatrist William P. Nash takes a slightly different approach in the experimental sessions he runs. His pioneering work with moral injury grew out of his experience as a combat therapist deployed with

COURTESY OF WILLIAM P. NASH

HEALING Marines in Iraq. Nash has developed a Moral Injury Events Scale, a self-evaluation for troops that asks them to respond to statements such as “I saw things that were morally wrong,” or “I am troubled by having acted in ways that violated my own morals or values,” or “I feel betrayed by leaders I once trusted.”

But from there, drawing out the painful, detailed explanations can be difficult.

“When they come in for treatment, the first thing out of their mouth is not, ‘I did something unforgivable and I want to tell you about it.’ Because they are working as hard as they can not to think about it,” Nash said.

“They don’t know that you are not going to judge them. They may be on their last little thread of self-acceptance and they don’t want you to cut the thread.”

To reach them, Litz, Nash and others who have tried this approach to moral injury use a technique they call adaptive disclosure. In this therapy, patients are asked to briefly discuss what caused their moral injury.

Among combat Marines, often the cause is the discovery that they love the thrill of combat

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“ They are working as hard as they can not to think about it. They don’t know that you are not going to judge them.” and killing, followed by guilt for feeling that way, Nash said.

As in the San Diego program, patients are asked to imagine they are revealing their secret to a compassionate, trusted moral authority — a coach or priest.

“The assumption here is if there is someone in your life who has your back, cares for you, is compassionate and you have felt their love for you, then you are safe in

Former Navy psychiatrist William P. Nash developed a self-evaluation for troops called the Moral Injury Events Scale.

LINDA DAVIDSON/ THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

HEALING

disclosing what you did or failed to do,” Litz explained. “If there is that compassionate love, that forgiving presence, it will kick-start thinking about, well, how do you fix this, how can you lead a good life now?” And that, he said, “is the beginning of self-compassion.”

The adaptive part of the therapy involves helping the patient accept his or her past actions.

Yeah, I did this, or I saw this, or this really happened — but it’s not all my fault and I can live with it.

Patients are asked to make a list of everyone, every person and institution, that bears some responsibility for their moral injury. They then assign each a percentage of

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blame, to add up to 100 percent.

If a Marine shot a child in combat, he might accept 30 percent of the blame. He might award the Taliban 50 percent, the child himself 5 percent and the Marine Corps 5 percent. God, perhaps, 10 percent.

A variant of adaptive disclosure was used in experimental treatment led by Litz and Maria Steenkamp, a clinical research psychologist at the Boston VA medical center, working with Marines from Camp Pendleton, Calif.

After having patients describe in painful detail what caused their moral injury, therapists asked them to choose someone they saw as a compassionate moral authority and hold an imaginary conversation with that person, describing what happened and the shame

A delirious wounded soldier reaches for a human touch while a flight medic and crew chief attend to other soldiers aboard a medical evacuation helicopter in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, on Oct. 10, 2010.

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

HEALING they feel. They were then asked to verbalize the response, using their imagination. Inevitably, patients imagined being told they were a good person at heart, that they were forgiven, and that they could go on to lead a good life. Of course, these conversations rely on imagination. But the technique allows the patient to articulate in his or her own words an alternative narrative about his injury.

All these approaches are designed as quick interventions, specifically intended for combat troops who may be deployed again soon.

The goal is to provide patients with insights and techniques to continue the work on their own — and eventually to move beyond their injury.

Left alone, Nash said, veterans with moral injury either conclude that “none of this is my fault,” or “it’s all my fault.” Neither can be totally true.

“In your heart of hearts, you know you were the one who pulled the trigger. You can’t unring the bell, can’t undo what was done And that’s a time bomb,” he said.

But when patients are helped to recognize their true share of the blame, “you can begin to make amends, until you get to a point where you can forgive, and that’s

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FOR HELP WITH MORAL INJURY OR OTHER MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES: The Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury’s 24/7 live chat outreach center (also at 866-966-1020 or email resources@dcoeoutreach.org).

The Pentagon website Military OneSource for short-term, non-medical counseling.

Veterans can call, text or chat with the Veterans Crisis Line.

Dial 800-273-8255.

the ultimate challenge.”

“To be clear, what we don’t do is to impose our moral appraisals or judgments [on] the situation, though we may occasionally have them,” Matt J. Gray, a University of Wyoming psychologist, said in an email. Gray led a 2012 study on therapy for moral injury and traumatic loss among 44 Marines. “We don’t try to dispute, minimize or explain away” a morally questionable action, he said.

“We try to help the person understand that this action or inac-

HEALING tion need not be destiny.”

Does this method actually work?

The results are promising but not conclusive, in part because the studies conducted so far were designed as intense, short-term interventions with troops preparing to go back to war. True healing of a moral injury seems to take time.

“I don’t think it ever happens in the therapy,” Nash said, “because I don’t think the therapy is ever long enough for that to happen.

All we can do is plant seeds.” But, he added, “as far as I know that’s the only route to salvation, and it ain’t easy and it ain’t quick.”

That was the conclusion of Gray’s clinical research trial in which adaptive disclosure therapy was used with 44 active-duty combat Marines with PTSD and moral injury. In six 90-minute sessions, Gray found that the Marines experienced “substantive” improvement in their symptoms.

So substantive, in fact, that the study has been expanded to a fiveyear randomized clinical trial.

But success requires a long-term commitment, Gray wrote in a paper about the project. The six sessions “represented the beginning of a process that the Marine would need to continue after the formal conclu-

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sion of the intervention.”

Billie Grimes-Watson’s experience in therapy, last spring in the San Diego moral injury/moral repair group, underscores how long it can take to heal moral injury. Like others, she found it difficult in those sessions to de-

The Pentagon does not formally recognize moral injury, and the Navy refuses to use the term, referring instead to “inner conflict.” scribe her deepest wounds.

“I have more than one moral injury and I used the easier one and not the bad ones that are really affecting me,” she said in December, eight months after she completed the program.

What she told the group was “my small one,” about the Iraqi kids who would flock around U.S. troops and vehicles on patrol, begging for candy and cigarettes. As 2003 wore on, many of the kids in Baghdad turned sour, throwing rocks at American troops. Some troops started throwing rocks back.

“You could actually see them get hit pretty hard,” she said.

“It’s something I normally wouldn’t do, bullying kids — I

HEALING have kids of my own, and I can’t even think of anyone hurting them like I did with those kids.”

In therapy, she said, “I explained how peer pressure kind of gets to you and you do things you shouldn’t have done and you try to forgive yourself for it. People gave me hugs, a lot of crying and discussion. But I still feel guilty and I haven’t forgiven myself for a lot of the things I did over there.”

Now she is back home at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, awaiting her discharge from the Army after 13 years. She’s been diagnosed with PTSD and physical ailments, but it’s the moral injuries that are truly disabling.

“I have all this guilt inside me and I want to let it out but I can’t,” she said. “I want to tell my husband and family what’s going on, but I don’t. I just put on a happy face until I’m alone.”

She’s been seeing a therapist since she returned from San Diego last spring, but she has not been able to even hint at her deeper injuries. Instead, she said, “I’ve started going backwards again. All the emotions and nightmares are coming back. I had stopped drinking and now I’m drinking again, trying to hide it. I can’t sleep at night.”

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Her PTSD makes her agitated around crowds; it makes her depressed and often angry. “But moral injury is the one that really gets you,” she said. “It’s hard to find yourself again, because you’re never going to be the same person. I am trying to figure out how to forgive myself for everything I did over there, and it’s hard to figure out.

“I’m messed up. I’m tired of just taking the pills.”

What is needed, she said, is many more programs like San Diego — and longer therapies that might enable her eventually to acknowledge what she called “the bad moral injuries that are really affecting me.”

“We are still having suicides by people who don’t tell anyone why they are hurting inside,” she said.

“We are still at war.”

Stephen Canty joins HuffPost Live to discuss some of the more difficult situations he found himself in while serving in the military.

Tap here to watch the full segment.

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Who Creates Drama At HBO? Very Few Women Or People Of Color.

AP PHOTO/HBO, JIM BRIDGES

BY MAUREEN RYAN

INCE ITS DEBUT in January, HBO’s True Detective has captured a great deal of attention, all of it richly deserved.

And though the praise for stars

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Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey has been almost unanimous, an intense debate has erupted around the show’s depiction of nearly everyone who is not one of the two white detectives at its center.

The women — the ones who aren’t dead — are clearly not

Woody Harrelson, left, and Matthew McConaughey in the popular HBO series True Detective.

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Exit the focus of the show. They’re usually seen when they’re arguing or sleeping with the men.

Even critics who admire the show’s strengths and aesthetic accomplishments recognize its limitations when it comes to its women, who represent a familiar array of cable-drama types: “crazy” mistresses, nameless strippers, randy hookups, disgruntled daughters, dismayed wives.

To a lesser extent, critics have also noted the spotty depiction of True Detective’s non-white characters. Two African-American detectives questioning Marty Hart and Rust Cohle have had a fraction of the screen time of Harrelson and McConaughey’s characters.

The debate around these issues has been necessary and illuminating, but it’s a conversation that has become distressingly familiar. Similar complaints have been lodged against other highprofile and often acclaimed dramas such as Breaking Bad, Ray Donovan, Mad Men, Rescue Me, The Newsroom, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos and on and on.

Maybe it’s time for a different conversation.

It might be useful to take a break from talking about what

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With one exception over the course of four decades, HBO has not aired an original one-hour drama series created by a woman.” individual dramas are doing and talk instead about what HBO — and other critically acclaimed TV outlets — are not doing.

With one exception over the course of four decades, HBO has not aired an original one-hour drama series created by a woman.

With one exception over the course of four decades, HBO has not aired an original one-hour drama or dramatic miniseries creatively led at its debut by a person of color. That exception is more than 21 years old (see below for more details).

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Exit Just under 8 percent of HBO’s original dramas and miniseries came from women, and 2.6 percent came from people of color.

Less than 5 percent of its onehour dramas — one of the most high-profile entertainment products in the world — were created by women. That’s over the course of nearly 40 years.

HBO is one of the most highly regarded entertainment brands in the world. During its Sopranos heyday, it represented the gold standard for TV dramas, and its shows still frequently dominate pop culture and critical discussions. Even though the TV universe is expanding in a multitude of directions, what HBO does — and doesn’t do — matters a great deal.

The shows included in our research are one-hour dramas and dramatic miniseries that HBO has aired between 1975, when the network went national, and April 15, 2014. If no “created by” credit exists, we identified the person who was considered the project’s lead writer, chief adaptor or lead developer. These were the people in charge of the storytelling at the time of the program’s debut; let’s call them the

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“narrative architects.”

Of 38 narrative architects of one-hour HBO dramas and dramatic miniseries between 1975 and 2014, Cynthia Mort of Tell Me You Love Me (2007), Abi Morgan of Tsunami: The Aftermath (2006) and M.M. Kaye, co-writer of The Far Pavilions (1984), are the only women, and Mort was the only woman to create a onehour drama series. According to HuffPost’s research, Michael

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The Killing showrunner Veena Sud is one of two people of color running a show at the five top networks: AMC, FX, Showtime, Netflix and HBO.

Exit Henry Brown, who co-wrote Laurel Avenue (1993), is the only person of color on that roster.

(HBO confirmed to HuffPost the names of creators and narrative architects, but did not identify any people of color on the list, aside from Brown.)

Even in HBO’s current, post-Sopranos era, as the network endeavors to craft a new identity for itself, the picture hasn’t improved. Actually, it’s gotten worse.

Guess how many women or people of color have been a creator or narrative architect on a one-hour HBO drama or miniseries since 2008 (the year after The Sopranos ended)?

None. Not one.

There are a number of reasons for the existence of problematic female characters, but this lack is one of them. It’s also self-evident that the people at the top networks and television studios have much more power than Nic Pizzolatto, the creator of True Detective, or any other single HBO creator or showrunner. Audiences can and should take individual writers to task for problems they perceive in a given show. But as long as this debate is limited to

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WHO RUNS THE SHOWS AT HBO? Between 1975 and April 15, 2014, 38 individuals created or designed the narrative for HBO one-hour dramas and miniseries.

White men accounted for 34 of those writers, white women had three slots and there was one, male person of color.

WHITE MEN NON-WHITE MEN WHITE WOMEN

individual dramas, and doesn’t consider the entities that commission and distribute them, the conversation is likely to go around in circles indefinitely.

“We can do better; we are doing better; we are striving to do better,” an HBO spokesperson told HuffPost via email. “We have just launched a new program called HBO Access that seeks emerging, diverse filmmakers ... and we are currently de-

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Exit veloping new programming with such talent as Oprah Winfrey, Steve McQueen, Jenji Kohan and many others.”

The spokesperson added, “When you look beyond drama series and miniseries at the many other programming genres that we present, such as comedies, documentaries, late night fare, sports and original movies, I think you will find a lot of diversity.” The network went on to cite programming such as The Chris Rock Show, the TV movie The Tuskegee Airman and John Leguizamo’s special Ghetto Klown.

To put the homogeneity of HBO’s decision-making in context, HuffPost looked to the other big players in the prestige TV game. Once again, the focus was on original series (not imports), specifically one-hour dramas and dramatic miniseries, i.e., the prime real estate of TV culture.

In TV’s most recent Golden Age, AMC, FX, Showtime, Netflix and HBO are among the leaders of the pack. Half-hour shows aren’t unimportant, but the dramatic fare from these five entities represents the major pillars of popular culture: Their programs not only capture the public imagi-

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nation, but often cement or increase the power of the people who make them.

From those five outlets come 97 narrative architects. Twelve are women. As far as I’m aware, only two of them (Brown and The Killing’s Veena Sud) are persons of color.

Of course these numbers are not exact, scientific or comprehensive. They are restricted to five networks or platforms, and one of them (Netflix) has only been in the game a few years. TV is also

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Tell Me You Love Me creator Cynthia Mort is the only woman to have created a one-hour drama series for HBO in the last four decades.

Exit a collaborative art form: The creators, developers and narrative architects compiled here weren’t solely responsible for a given program’s content. Women and people of color are or were employed — sometimes in important capacities — on many of these shows.

So it’s certainly possible to slice and dice names, titles and job responsibilities differently. But it’s unlikely that a list, for example, of every person who held the title of “executive producer” at the time of a drama or miniseries’ debut would look significantly different in its percentages.

Even as a snapshot of the industry, however, the numbers tell a clear story about who gets the keys to the fanciest car, culturally speaking. At the outlets responsible for many top programs, women and people of color are enormously underrepresented as creators. If one focuses only on the last dozen years at AMC, FX, Showtime, Netflix and HBO, around 12 percent of the creators and narrative architects in the dramatic realm were women.

According to the Women’s Media Center, “Shows with no women creators had casts that were 41 percent female. Shows with at

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PRESENT AT THE CREATION A breakdown of the 90 people who created or wrote one-hour dramas and miniseries for Netflix, HBO, AMC, Showtime and FX in the last 12 years, at the time of the programs’ debut.

JANUARY 2002 - APRIL 2014

WHITE MEN

WHITE WOMEN NON-WHITE WOMEN

As long as this debate is limited to individual dramas, and doesn’t consider the entities that commission and distribute them, the conversation is likely to go around in circles indefinitely.” least one female creator had casts that were 47 percent female.”

Given how few women and people of color are present at a show’s creation, is it any wonder we can’t escape this debate?

And so we find ourselves in one of those closed loops that True

URSULA COYOTE FOR NETFLIX

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Detective’s Rust Cohle described in one of his most memorable philosophical digressions. We go around and around, talking about individual characters and the missteps of particular shows. We wonder why women are too often depicted as nags, flunkies or side salads. We wonder why women often get less to do, have less to say and so often feel the impulse to take off their shirts. We won-

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der why people of color aren’t often depicted with compelling emotional lives or as complicated characters. We wonder why nonwhite men and women are hardly ever the protagonists. If the dictum of good writing is “write what you know,” what do women and people of color know? What dreams and nightmares do they have? What are their battles and fantasies? What stories aren’t we hearing from them?

I love True Detective and many, many shows that delve into simi-

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A scene from Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black, created by Jenji Kohan.

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Exit lar questions. I recognize that men are entirely capable of writing good female characters, and that white people can write quality roles for characters of color (but let’s not kid ourselves, it doesn’t happen often enough).

But when networks go to the same wells again and again, it starts to seem like the narrative concerns of programs created by men are the only narrative concerns that matter. They’re not.

Simply from a commercial perspective, the short history of Netflix’s original programming is instructive: Orange Is the New Black, which was created by a woman, has helped put Netflix on the map because its stories and characters were not what TV viewers usually see. If the companies that commission TV shows want to stand out in an increasingly competitive environment — or perhaps would like to cater to an American population that is half female and will soon have a non-white majority — don’t they need, or possibly want, as many fresh voices, ideas and perspectives as they can get?

It’s not as though nothing is changing. A number of current dramas feature complex, interest-

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We can do better; we are doing better; we are striving to do better.” ing women, and more platforms seem willing to tell offbeat or unusual stories about a more diverse array of characters. And it’s possible that the networks have some dramas in development that are being made by women and people of color. Some of those shows may actually make it on

Abi Morgan, writer of the 2006 HBO miniseries Tsunami: The Aftermath.

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THE NETWORKS The following breaks down one-hour dramas and dramatic miniseries that debuted on HBO, Showtime, AMC, FX and Netflix since 1975, when HBO began programming. The people included are the creators, writers or narrative architects of a show when it debuted. When a “created by” title was available, it was used. When it was not, the writer was used. When neither was available, the networks were asked to identify the person who served as narrative architect at the time of a program’s launch.

HBO

2.6%

NON-WHITE MEN

8%

SHOWTIME 26%

WHITE WOMEN

WHITE WOMEN

89.4%

74%

WHITE MEN

38 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTS

WHITE MEN

23 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTS

the air. If that happens, swell.

But what little change is happening has been glacial in most areas.

According to the most recent stats from the Writers Guild of America, about 30.5 percent of TV staff writers are women, and about 15.6 percent of TV writers are people of color; both numbers represent modest gains from the past.

San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, which uses a different calculation method, puts the percentage of female TV writers for the 2012-13 season at 34 percent.

Yet according to SDSU’s

FX

AMC 4.5 % WHITE

WOMEN

95.5% WHITE MEN

22 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTS

NETFLIX 9%

NONWHITE WOMEN

91%

WHITE MEN

11 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTS

most recent study, 27 percent of women bear the title executive producer, and 24 percent are a “creator” — numbers that have remained stagnant for a long time. In the 2010-11 season, “just 24 percent of the pilots in the pipeline for the season had at least one woman writer attached, while only 9 percent of the projects had at least one minority writer,” according to the WGA. A reminder: At the prestige networks, in the dramatic arena, those numbers are generally lower. A lot lower.

Years of writing about these issues and talking to writers and producers on and off the record have made a few things clear: Far too many in Hollywood are will-

33%

WHITE WOMEN

67%

WHITE MEN

3 NARRATIVE ARCHITECTS

Exit ing to tolerate tokenism in writers’ rooms. Far too few studio and network executives actively and consistently pursue a true diversity of ideas and personnel when choosing which storytellers to hire and which stories to tell.

The industry’s unwillingness to make serious and lasting changes to the way it does business makes sense from a certain perspective. Business as usual for the Hollywood decision-makers has no concrete, short-term downside. On the rare occasions when they’re asked about these matters, many executives pass the buck: It’s always somebody else in the Hollywood food chain who is responsible. Or they trot out a series of Hollywood chestnuts: It’s a meritocracy, the best work always rises to the top, everyone gets an equal shot, if only more women and people of color wanted to get in the game, our door is open to everyone, there is no problem, not really. Nothing to see here.

This is a narrative in which powerful media executives portray themselves as unwitting bystanders: They just can’t help the way things are. But aren’t they the ones who control the metanarrative (not to mention the

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enormous budgets)? From where they stand outside the universe of individual shows, do they not see this pattern, this flat circle?

To be clear, HBO isn’t the whole story. A few outlets aren’t the whole story. But these numbers mean something. When audiences want to check on the state of high-end drama — TV that examines, articulates and interrogates the human condition —

If the dictum of good writing is ‘write what you know,’ what do women and people of color know?

What dreams and nightmares do they have? What are their battles and fantasies?

What stories aren’t we hearing from them?” these places are among the first places they look. They’re among the outlets that tell us who we are and who we could be. The kind of places that are supposed move the ball forward when it comes to the evolution of the art form.

Many at the head of the pack, however, are behind the curve.

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Highly D Sensitive People, This One’s for You

BY AMANDA L. CHAN

O YOU FEEL like you reflect on things more than everyone else?

Do you find yourself worrying about how other people feel? Do you prefer quieter, less chaotic environments?

If the above sound true to you, you may be highly sensitive. The personality trait — which was first researched by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D., in the early 1990s

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Exit — is relatively common, with as many as one in five people possessing it. Aron, who has written multiple studies and books on high sensitivity, including The Highly Sensitive Person, also developed a self-test (which you can take here) to help you determine if you are highly sensitive.

While recent interest in introversion — driven largely by highprofile publications on the subject, including Susan Cain’s book Quiet — has brought more awareness to personality traits that value less stimulation and higher sensitivity, Aron notes that highly sensitive people still tend to be considered the “minority.”

But “minority” doesn’t mean bad — in fact, being highly sensitive carries a multitude of positive characteristics. Read on for some of the commonalities shared by highly sensitive people.

1. They feel more deeply. One of the hallmark characteristics of highly sensitive people is the ability to feel more deeply than their less-sensitive peers. “They like to process things on a deep level,” Ted Zeff, Ph.D., author of The Highly Sensitive Person’s Survival Guide and other books

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Zeff says that highly sensitive men he interviewed from other countries — such as Thailand and India — were rarely or never teased, while highly sensitive men he interviewed from North America were frequently or always teased.” on highly sensitive people, tells HuffPost. “They’re very intuitive, and go very deep inside to try to figure things out.”

2. They’re more emotionally reactive.

People who are highly sensitive will react more in a situation.

For instance, they will have more empathy and feel more concern for a friend’s problems, according to Aron. They may also have more concern about how another person may be reacting in the face of a negative event.

3. They’re probably used to hearing, “Don’t take things so personally” and “Why are you so sensitive?” Depending on the culture, sensitivity can be perceived as an asset or a negative trait, Zeff explains. In some of his own research, Zeff says that highly sensitive men he interviewed from other countries — such as Thailand and India — were rarely or never teased,

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while highly sensitive men he interviewed from North America were frequently or always teased. “So a lot of it is very cultural — the same person who is told, ‘Oh, you’re too sensitive,’ in certain cultures, it’s considered an asset,” he says.

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4. They prefer to exercise solo. Highly sensitive people may tend to avoid team sports, where there’s a sense that everyone is watching their every move, Zeff says. In his research, the majority of highly sensitive people he interviewed preferred individual sports, like bicycling, running and hiking, to group sports. However, this is not a blanket rule — there are some highly sensitive people who may have had parents who provided an understanding and supportive environment that would make it easier for them to participate in group sports, Zeff says.

5. It takes longer for them to make decisions. Highly sensitive people are more aware of subtleties and details that could make decisions harder to make, Aron says. Even if there is no “right” or “wrong” decision — for example, it’s impossible to choose a “wrong” flavor of ice

cream — highly sensitive people will still tend to take longer to choose because they are weighing every possible outcome. One exception: Once a highly sensitive person has come to the conclusion of what is the right decision to make and what is the wrong decision to make in a certain situation, he or she will be quick to make that “right” decision again in the future.

6. And on that note, they are more upset if they make a “bad” or “wrong” decision. You know that uncomfortable feeling you get after you realize you’ve made a bad decision? For highly sensitive people, “that emotion is amplified be-

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Exit cause the emotional reactivity is higher,” Aron explains.

7. They’re extremely detail-oriented.

Highly sensitive people are the first ones to notice the details in a room, the new shoes that you’re wearing, or a change in weather.

8. Not all highly sensitive people are introverts. In fact, about 30 percent of highly sensitive people are extroverts, according to Aron. She explains that many times, highly sensitive people who are also extroverts grew up in a close-knit community — whether it be a culde-sac, small town, or with a parent who worked as a minister or rabbi — and thus would interact with a lot of people.

9. They work well in team environments.

Because highly sensitive people are such deep thinkers, they make valuable workers and members of teams, Aron says. However, they may be well-suited for positions in teams where they don’t have to make the final decision. For instance, if a highly sensitive person was part of a medical team, he or she would be valuable in analyzing the pros and cons of a patient having surgery, while someone else

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Even if there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ decision... highly sensitive people will still tend to take longer to choose because they are weighing every possible outcome.” would ultimately make the decision about whether that patient would receive the surgery.

10. They’re more prone to anxiety or depression (but only if they’ve had a lot of past negative experiences). “If you’ve had a fair number of bad experiences, especially early in life, so you don’t feel safe in the world or you don’t feel secure at home or ... at school, your nervous system is set to ‘anxious,’” Aron says. But that’s not to say that all highly sensitive people will go on to have anxiety.

Having a supportive environment can go a long way to protecting against this. Parents of highly sensitive children, in particular, need to “realize these are really great kids, but they need to be handled in the right way,” Aron says. “You can’t over-protect them, but you can’t under-protect them, either.”

11. That annoying sound is probably significantly more annoying to a highly sensitive person. While it’s hard to say anyone is a fan of annoying noises, highly sensitive people are

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on a whole more, well, sensitive to chaos and noise. That’s because they tend to be more easily overwhelmed and overstimulated by too much activity, Aron says.

12. Violent movies are the worst. Because highly sensitive people are so high in empathy and more easily overstimulated, movies with violence or horror themes may not be their cup of tea, Aron says.

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13. They cry more easily. That’s why it’s important for highly sensitive people to put themselves in situations where they won’t be made to feel embarrassed or “wrong” for crying easily, Zeff says. If their friends and family realize that that’s just how they are — that they cry easily — and support that form of expression, then “crying easily” will not be seen as something shameful.

14. They have above-average manners. Highly sensitive people are highly conscientious people, Aron says. Because of this, they’re more likely to be considerate and exhibit good manners — and are also more likely to notice when someone else isn’t being conscientious.

For instance, highly sensitive people may be more aware of where

their cart is at the grocery store — not because they’re afraid someone will steal something out of it, but because they don’t want to be rude and have their cart blocking another person’s way.

15. The effects of criticism are especially amplified in highly sensitive people.

Highly sensitive people have reactions to criticism that are more intense than less sensitive people.

As a result, they may employ certain tactics to avoid said criticism, including people-pleasing (so that there is no longer anything to criticize), criticizing themselves first, and avoiding the source of the criticism altogether, according to Aron.

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MUSIC

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Dog Ears: Born in March In which we spotlight music from a diversity of genres and decades, lending an insider’s ear to what deserves to be heard.

BY THE EVERLASTING PHIL RAMONE AND DANIELLE EVIN

SONYA KITCHELL

FINLEY QUAYE

BÉLA BARTÓK

Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Sonya Kitchell was born at the close of the ’80s in Western Massachusetts. Raised in an artistic household, she started singing in early girlhood and soon after went on to songwriting. Sonya released her freshman set in 1996, just weeks after turning 17. Collaborations/shared stages include Angelique Kidjo, Ben Harper, Jackson Brown, Jamie Cullum, India.

Arie, Los Lonely Boys, Madeleine Peyroux, Garth Stevenson, Wayne Shorter, Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, and The Slip. Among her highlights: Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, The Late Show with David Letterman, feature film The Perfect Stranger, TV’s Private Practice and The Unit, along with a handful of releases to date. Download “Walk Away,” from Sonya Kitchell’s 2008 This Storm (Bonus Track Version).

Pop reggae hero Finley Quaye was born in Scotland in 1974. The youngest of seven from Ghanaian-Celtic roots, Finley grew up fast and hails from a rich musical bloodline: jazzist father Cab Quaye and guitarist brother Caleb Quaye. His accolades include MOBO’s 1997 award for Best Reggae Act and 1998’s Brit Award for Best British Male Artist. Collaborations feature William Orbit, Beth Orton and A Guy Called Gerald. Bandmates have been Chris Campbell (guitar), Hamlet Luton (bass), Matthew Phillip (drums), David Connally (keys) and Lord Eric and Winston Lewis (percussion). Revisit “Sunday Shining,” Quaye’s refresh of Bob Marley’s “Sun Is Shining,” from the 2008 release The Best of the Epic Years.

Composer and pianist Béla Bartók was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1881, one of two children in a devoutly Catholic home. Much of his childhood was cloistered due to health problems, and he spent his formative years listening to his mother play the piano. By the age of 9, he started showing signs of genius.

Bartók went on to attend the Academy of Music in Vienna and the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. He had a lifelong interest in Gypsy folk music, which greatly influenced his revolutionary works. Bartók, horrified by the growth of fascism in Hungary, fled to New York with his family in 1940. He passed away in 1945 and leaves behind a monumental body of work. Most beautiful is “Sonatina,” from Bartók at the Piano.

TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes GENRE: Singer/Songwriter ARTIST: Sonya Kitchell SONG: Walk Away ALBUM: This Storm (Bonus Track Version)

TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes GENRE: Pop ARTIST: Finley Quaye SONG: Sunday Shining ALBUM: The Best of the Epic Years

TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes GENRE: Classical ARTIST: Béla Bartók SONG: Sonatina ALBUM: Bartók at the Piano

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MUSIC

MC SOLAAR

LES BROWN

French hip-hop musician MC Solaar (né Claude M’Barali) was born at the close of the ’60s in Dakar of Chadian descent. Turbulence in Senegal pressed 6-month-old Claude and family into exile in France.

Throughout his boyhood (including a nine-month stay in Cairo), he was transfixed by music. As a teenage language scholar and graffiti artist, Claude took on his musical alter ego, MC Solaar. The early ’90s brought success with his platinum single “Bouge de Là” and international acclaim with opening spots for De La Soul. MC Solaar’s sounds of social conscience have given life to a basket of projects to date. Collaborations include Jimmy Jay, Missy Elliott, Urban Species, and Guru (Gang Starr).

Highlights include featured tracks on Sex and the City, MTV’s The Hills, and films Addicted to Love, Jimmy Hollywood and Illegal Love. Download “In God We Trust,” from MC Solaar’s 2010 collection Magnum 567.

Iconic man of the horn, composer, and bandleader Les Brown was born in 1912 in Pennsylvania. Given the gift of music by his father, a baker and musician, the 14-year-old Les embarked on his professional beginnings. As a Duke University student in the mid-’30s, Les made his early mark with his Blue Devils and then his Band of Renown. A seven-decade soundtrack to the 20th century followed, sparking radio and television with Bob Hope, performances with Doris Day and Tony Bennett, stands on the Steve Allen, Dean Martin, and Rowan & Martin variety shows, along with a trove of TV specials. The maestro’s highlights included Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat “King” Cole. Among his credits: films Seven Days’ Leave, Rock-A-Billy Baby, and the original Nutty Professor starring Jerry Lewis. Brown went on to become president of the L.A. Chapter of NARAS, spearheading the first televised Grammy Awards. His legacy includes a score of classics including “Leap Frog” and “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.”

In 1996, the Guinness Book of World Records honored Brown for leading the “longest-lasting musical organization in the history of pop music.” The genius passed away in 2001, and his son Les Brown Jr. carries the torch. Remember the titan with “Bizet Has His Day (Live),” from Les Brown & His Band of Renown.

BUY: iTunes GENRE: Hip-Hop/Rap ARTIST: MC Solaar SONG: In God We Trust ALBUM: Magnum 567

TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes GENRE: Jazz ARTIST: Les Brown SONG: Bizet Has His Day ALBUM: Les Brown & His Band of Renown

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HARRY JAMES (AND HIS ORCHESTRA) Swing king Harry James was born in Georgia in 1916, the son of circus performers. As a youth, Harry played trumpet in dance bands throughout the South. In 1935, he joined Ben Pollack’s orchestra, and by 1939 — after two years with Benny Goodman — he founded his own orchestra, with Frank Sinatra at the mic.

James became an iconic hit-maker during WWII and even married the era’s glamour girl, Betty Grable, in 1943. After the war, film and television beckoned, and ultimately the band leader made his way to Vegas, where he performed for the rest of his life. James passed away in 1983.

Remember him with “The Lamp Is Low,” from The Complete Recordings 1939—Harry James and His Orchestra Featuring Frank Sinatra.

TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes GENRE: Pop ARTIST: Harry James (and His Orchestra) SONG: The Lamp Is Low ALBUM: The Complete Recordings 1939–Harry James and His Orchestra featuring Frank Sinatra

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A Putin Butt Plug Now Exists

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Lawmaker Who Wants MorningAfter Pill Restricted Blames Raped Pregnant Women for Not Taking It

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A BIRD STARTED A FIRE WITH A CIGARETTE

4

A Narrowing Global Food Supply Will Make Us All Fat, Sick and Less Safe

05 Tourist Lost in the Australian Outback Survives by Eating Flies

HTOMAS/GETTY IMAGES (TOILET); NICOLA TREE/GETTY IMAGES (TATTOO); GETTY IMAGES/FLICKR OPEN (UPSKIRT PHOTOS); SLOBO/GETTY IMAGES (FLAGS)

Exit

06

HUFFINGTON 03.16-23.14

TFU

Meet Airpnp, Where You Can Now Rent a Stranger’s Toilet

7

The Real Secret to Higher SAT Scores?

Richer Parents.

8

TATTOO ARTIST INKS HIS OWN DOG

9

Upskirt Photos Are Now Illegal in Massachusetts...

Which Means at One Point They Weren’t

10

The Plan to Split California Into 6 States Would Screw Over Poor People

Editor-in-Chief:

Arianna Huffington Editor: John Montorio Managing Editor: Gazelle Emami Senior Editor: Adam J. Rose Editor-at-Large: Katy Hall Senior Politics Editor: Sasha Belenky Senior Food Editor: Kristen Aiken Senior Voices Editor: Stuart Whatley Pointers Editor: Robyn Baitcher Viral Editor: Dean Praetorius Creative Director: Josh Klenert Design Director: Andrea Nasca Photography Director: Anna Dickson Associate Photo Editor: Wendy George Senior Designer: Martin Gee Infographics Art Director: Troy Dunham Production Director: Peter Niceberg AOL MagCore Product Manager: Gabriel Giordani Architect: Scott Tury Developers: Mike Levine, Sudheer Agrawal QA: Joyce Wang, Amy Golliver AOL, Inc. Chairman & CEO:

Tim Armstrong

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK