If it’s true that only just war warriors will fight just wars—at least intentionally, consistently, and when things get especially desperate—it’s important to remember, as the late Jean Elshtain reminded us, that just War Tradition presupposes the possibility of a martial character grounded in a particular kind of self: “one strong enough to resist the lure of seductive, violent enthusiasms; [and] one bounded by and laced through with a sense of responsibility and accountability.”
To get an idea of just what kind of martial character Elshtain was pointing to, we can turn to CS Lewis, especially his essay The Necessity of Chivalry. Written in August 1940, smack in a moment marked by particularly intense fighting in the Battle of Britain, such thoughts were strikingly relevant in Lewis’ day. They are strikingly relevant now.
For Lewis, the proper image of this complex martial character is best communicated by the chivalric idea, and ideal, of “the knight.” This chivalric ideal, in turn, is best understood through those words addressed to the dead Launcelot, the greatest of all the knights, in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur: ‘Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe.’ Lewis expounds:
The important thing about this ideal is…the double-demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.
It is probably time here for a definitional refresher. The term “meek” is rather out-of-favor nowadays. ‘Meek’ sounds ‘weak’, hardly a quality worth cultivating—certainly not for those at the pointy end of the spear. But, modern misunderstanding notwithstanding, there is nothing ‘weak’ or ‘spineless’ about the meek. Indeed, the sense from which the chivalric ideal—and, it’s worth mentioning, the inscripturated ideal as well—draws its meaning is the Greek term praus, a word used in ancient sources such as Xenophon and Aristotle to describe instances of power under submission—such as a warhorse trained for battle. The emphasis is on power disciplined, or ferocity under restraint. This connection puts the lie to the “meek-is-weak” misnomer. There was nothing weak about a war horse. Magnificent steeds, they could propel their 2,000 pounds up to 35 miles-per-hour, smashing through and scattering enemy formations; they could instantly respond, in the din of battle, to the sudden commands of the one who held their reins; and they could bite and kick and strike and boff and become, themselves, deadly weapons.
Writing at the beginning of the Second World War, Lewis found this power-under-restraint chivalric ideal to be terribly relevant: “It may or may not be practicable—the Middle Ages notoriously failed to obey it—but it is certainly practical; practical as the fact that men in a desert must find water or die.” The key was in remembering the knight “is a work not of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.” Chivalry attempted to bring together two things that since the fall of humanity have no natural tendency to gravitate toward one another: it teaches “humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed the lesson” and it demands “valor of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.”
The danger, as Lewis saw it, was that if we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections: those who can deal in blood and iron but…know nothing about mercy and kill men as they cry for quarter, and “those who are ‘meek in hall’ but useless in battle.” That’s the hopeless choice.
These same, tawdry alternatives of either “brutality or softness” that were present in Lewis’ day are present in ours as well. They were insufficient then. They are insufficient now. As Lewis warned: “The ideal embodied in Launcelot is…the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.” In a world such as our own, Lewis’ closing comments in his reflection on the necessity of chivalry is ominous: “There was, to be sure, a rumour in the last century,’ that wolves would gradually become extinct by some natural selection; but,” Lewis laments, “this seems to have been exaggerated.” Present circumstances would seem to bear this out.
What’s all this got to do with moral injury? I’ll touch on a few things more.
First, It occurs to me that this idea of power under restraint places burdens on those who support just warriors. If we insist that just war tradition presupposes a particular kind of warrior—an ethical one—then it should be clear that we owe those particular kinds of warriors particular kinds of things. This obligation finds expression in the purpose of our service academies, ROTC programs, and the professional military education system more broadly. At present, given the political climate in the United States, this is a contested question. It shouldn’t be. The primary reason our service academies exist is to turn our boys and girls into the kinds of men and women able to lead others in fighting and winning America’s wars. Military education exists to form our warfighters physically, intellectually, and morally so they can become peacemakers through the deployment of necessary, proportionate, and discriminate violence.
But they are also there to learn how to do so with honor and moral probity. Power under restraint. What are these restraints—the reins under which our nation’s warhorses submit? Things like ethics, standards, the martial virtues, character, moral law, laws of war, rules of engagement, and moral judgment, among others. The multi-disciplinary curriculum at our service academies helps to build these things in our young—not by simply building a compliance mentality but in building professionalism and wisdom and, ideally, a genuine love for the good, true, and beautiful.
Another aside, this one via an anecdote: at a conference at the US Naval Academy few years back, the then-superintendent, Vice Admiral Ted Carter, told about a Cold War encounter he had as the backseater in a F4 Phantom, fresh out of Top Gun training, with a pair of Soviet MiGs. As Carter tells it, the Soviet pilots had done several things that, by the Rules of Engagement, cleared Carter’s pilot to shoot, fire, and take those MiGs down. After about a 35-second engagement, Carter’s plane had easily maneuvered behind a Soviet one. Carter’s pilot said, “These guys are the junior varsity.” So now there was a question. Do they take the shot? It was a short conversation—Carter’s pilot said, “there’s no one gonna die here today.” Instead, they waved at the pilots and flew back to their ship. What I want to highlight here is the permission that a high level of training gave the American crew. They knew they could spare the lives of the Soviet aviators, let them go, and, if the Soviets were foolish enough to reengage, quickly get the upper hand again and kill them. They could not have had this confidence if they were not well-trained or not in equipment that allowed them to perform to their abilities. The aside is this: If we are asking our warfighters to fight ethically, we have a moral obligation as a nation to train them up and equip them sufficiently so that they are the most lethal they can possibly be. Only in this way, it seems to me, can we meet the double obligation of doing what we can to bring our troops home both physically and morally whole.
Second, this chivalric ideal does not judge the martial nature—the belligerent dimension of human being—something to be simply overcome tout court, recognizing instead that given the conditions of this world, martial power, including coercive justice, is a basic, even salutary, property of political life. This isn’t to say it’s merely instrumental. Let’s return to meekness for a moment. Aristotle places meekness as the mean between irascibility—wild quick-temperedness—and a spineless lack of spirit, or apathy. This is to say that the ability to be angry at the right things, in the right way, in the right degree, for the right reasons is a necessary element of moral excellence. Combine this virtue of anger with other of the virtues—such as prudence, courage, magnanimity—and we have a sufficiently robust morally excellent cocktail to lay the foundation for a virtuous martiality that recognizes the necessity of standing effectively against such evils. Virtue is perfectly consistent with the idea that “A deserves B for doing C.” And so, in most cases, you give them “B.”
This recognition is exemplified, of course, in just war tradition, which asserts that wars may be justly fought only when a sovereign authority—in their exercise of responsibility and stewardship over their political community—determines, in the last resort and with the aim of peace, that discriminate and proportionate force is necessary to retribute a sufficiently grave evil, to take back what has wrongly been taken, or to protect the innocent. In such cases, and only such, war may be required to restore at least a minimally sufficient degree of order, justice, and peace.
These kinds of sentiments—of peacemaking-force deployed under carefully prescribed constraints—power under restraint—are grounded, at least in the Western context, in our culture’s Greco-Roman and Hebraic patrimony, an inheritance increasingly renounced. As we abandon ourselves, the just war unity of power under restraint is increasingly divorced by those who dismiss the insertion of love into power politics “as a weak sentimentality” or, more commonly, by those who regard “the combative side of man’s nature as a pure, atavistic evil.”
I’ll close with a brief reflection on this last point. here is a commonplace belief—certainly in America but probably the West more generally—that is often tacitly held if not consciously asserted—among academics, the general public, and even—if surprisingly—military professionals, that killing, including in a justified war, is always morally wrong—even when legally sanctioned and when necessary to avert a greater moral wrong.
You can see this belief exemplified in a series of op-eds in the New York Times written by a formerly commissioned Marine officer. He said:
When I joined the Marine Corps, I knew I would kill people. I was trained to do it in a number of ways, from pulling a trigger to…beating someone to death with a rock. As I got closer to deploying to war…my lethal abilities were refined, but my ethical understanding of killing was not. I held two seemingly contradictory beliefs: Killing is always wrong, but in war, it is necessary
This belief carried costs for him. “I didn’t return from Afghanistan as the same person,” he writes. “My personality is the same… but I’m no longer the “good” person I once thought I was.”
We see this Marines’ sentiments reflected in the moral injury literature. The two operative words used to describe the two commonly referred to kinds of moral injury are “betrayal” and “transgression.” The “transgression” injury—doing something that goes against a deeply held moral belief—is really, of course, just another kind of betrayal. The only difference, here, is that you’ve let yourself down by betraying your beliefs such that you’ve discovered yourself to be the lousy sonofabitch you really hoped you weren’t.
Moreover, we see this “killing is wrong, but in war it is necessary” belief reflected in the clinical finding that having killed in combat is a chief predictor of moral injury. The literature does not suggest that the kind of kill—whether lawful, accidental, or an atrocity—much matters. This is a catastrophe. Both common sense and common law—to say nothing of natural law—recognizes that killing comes in different kinds. One kind—murder—is morally evil, don’t do it. Accidental killing is more or less morally neutral—there may be varying degrees of culpability (you should have been more careful), but it’s not morally evil. Another kind of killing—that kind permitted within just war framework—is morally permissible, perhaps even morally obligatory in certain situations.
Sometime ago I participated in an Operational Religious Support Leaders Training conference for U.S. Army Europe. One of the plenary talks was given by a senior chaplain who delivered an excellent presentation in which he defined moral injury in essentially the same terms described here—as a spiritual wound that results when warfighters violate their core moral beliefs and thereby feel they no longer live in a reliable, meaningful world and can no longer be regarded as decent human beings. In discussing what the morally injured require for post-facto care, he pointed to atonement; forgiveness; healing; reconciliation; new meaning and purpose—such as might occur by finding avenues through moral trauma and into post-traumatic growth. This isn’t wrong. But what about the warfighter who makes a morally permissible kill but, believing that killing is wrong but in war it is necessary, is morally injured by his action? Unless we believe the norms are merely subjective, then what that warfighter really needs is not on that chaplain’s list. He needs vindication.
This is different than forgiveness. One forgives someone who has done something wrong and repented. Vindication is what is given to one who is proved to have done nothing wrong in the first place. Forgiveness is offered to the guilty. Vindication is owed to the wrongly accused—even the wrongly self-accused. There’s more to be said on this, I’ll say it in a moment.
I have been at pains to suggest that the view of the martial character on display in just war tradition ought to be equipped with the moral confidence that there is nothing necessarily in tension—or, maybe better, certainly nothing in contradiction between warfighting and moral excellence. This is partly because the business of warfighting, including killing and causing harm, is not, at least in the view of the classical and Hebraic traditions—inherently morally injurious. A part of that duty, then, to do what we can to bring our warfighters home morally whole requires that we provide them moral philosophical and theological ideas that help them to understand this.
I don’t mean for any of this to be glib or dismissive of the tragedy of war as a human experience and the very real moral burdens that warfighters take upon themselves. It is insufficient to simply wave a hand and say “you’ve have done nothing wrong” to those who have fought with nobility and morality and yet still feel morally injured. This is why I’ve found it wise to introduce a distinction between moral injury and what we can call moral bruising. Moral bruising can be taken to follow the same idea as physical bruising. That is, the bruise is a result of an impact trauma but it falls short of a long-term, debilitating or disfiguring injury—even if the depth of its pain can hinder our flourishing for a time. I want to reserve moral injury for that justified trauma that comes from the guilt of having done something morally wrong. Moral bruising, however, we can posit as coming not from guilt but from grief, even the grief attending action that is morally right—as is lawful killing in a justified war—or morally neutral—as is accidental killing. This is not semantics. To embrace the truth that not all grief is guilt can be extraordinarily palliative. I have seen it help warfighters navigate the morally bruising battlefield without becoming morally injured.
