A call for Mennonites to be a listening, nonjudgmental presence to veterans

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. —John 1:8-9

Violence in human society is a mystery. It destroys relationships, undermines society and runs counter to our basic instincts for empathy, cooperation and collaboration, according to The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal (Crown, 2009).

These instincts have informed our morality and have not only insured our survival as a species but have made us the most successful and dominant species in all creation. Forget all the vivid language of “nature, red in tooth and claw” (“In Memoriam A.H.H.” by Lord Tennyson Alfred); violence is an anomaly among animal species, including our own.

Violence is also antithetical to the fundamental tenets of Christianity and certainly to any Anabaptist understanding of God’s purposes. It is difficult, therefore, for Mennonites to understand why people harm or kill each other and why whole nations choose for war. Our denomination is founded on the refusal to participate in such actions. So we might come to regard ourselves as different from those who willingly join the military and enact the brutalities so common in war.

But numerous psychological studies have revealed that most people are fully capable of doing terrible things to one another. Recall Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment at Yale.

Milgram, a social psychologist, conducted an experiment in 1962 in which volunteers were recruited to play the role of teachers. These teachers were told that another volunteer, a student, was to memorize a list of words. Whenever the student made an error, the teacher was told to press a lever to shock the student. For each ensuing mistake, levels of shock would be increased up to a dose of 450 volts, which the teachers were told could be lethal. At the teachers’ side, a researcher in a long white coat commanded the teacher to administer and increase the shocks and did so with calm, confident and imperious authority.

The setup was a ruse. In reality, both the student and the researcher were paid actors, and nobody was getting shocked. But what of the teachers, the true subjects of the experiment? All of the volunteer teachers shocked the student repeatedly, and 65 percent went all the way to the lethal shock level, despite the screams and pleas from the student actor to stop.

This experiment horrified the average American because it seemed to demonstrate that the average American was not so different from those German citizens who participated in atrocities under the influence and command of the Nazis. It became clear that otherwise good and responsible people could be induced to act against their conscience and injure or potentially kill others. Not only has this experiment been replicated but other, similar experiments, such as the Stanford Prison experiment, have demonstrated similar disturbing susceptibilities.

Left to our own devices, we cannot assume that our moral compass will always point north, even for the best of us, and even for us Mennonites.

So too, in the maelstrom of war, people are capable of doing terrible things to other human beings. Soldiers sometimes perform actions that they later find hard to explain and understand in retrospect. Many are consumed with guilt and regret.

A Vietnam Veteran writes about his transformation in war: “I was 18 years old, and I was like your typical young American Boy. … I had strong religious beliefs. I wanted to be a priest when I was growing up. You know, I didn’t just go to church on Sundays, it was every day of the week. … And I was into athletics, sports. I was nothing unique. I wasn’t no angel. I mean, I had my little fistfights and stuff. You’re only human. But evil didn’t enter it until Vietnam. Why I became like that? It was all evil. Where before, I wasn’t. I look back today, and I’m horrified at what I turned into. … War changes you, strips you or all your beliefs, your religion, takes your dignity away; you become an animal. You know, it’s unbelievable what humans can do to each other. I never in a million years thought that I would be capable of doing that. Never, never, never” (Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character by Jonathan Shay, Atheneum, 1994).

There is something particularly horrible that overtakes people in war.

But why do good people change during war?

From a philosophical and psychological point of view, disorderliness in our world can lead to disorderliness in our inner being, according to Tamar Gendler in “The Disordered Soul: Thémis and PTSD,” 2014, in Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature, Yale Online Course. Externally we all have a strong need for structure and orderliness in our world.

Internally, the orderliness that governs our soul shapes our perception of the world and our actions. The unconventional nature of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are examples of a highly disordered world. No one can be trusted, the enemy is almost impossible to identify, and the rationale and purpose of the mission are elusive. Friends are killed at random. The chaos that rules unconventional warfare drastically alters soldiers’ perceptions of the world. Their inner lives can become chaotic or disordered, and their actions change accordingly.

Subject a person in such a vulnerable state to a situation where blind obedience to a commanding authority is expected and rewarded, and soldiers will do things that they never thought themselves capable.

The term moral injury has been coined to describe the psychological pain and distress that arises from adverse moral choices soldiers make in war. Moral injury is the damage done to one’s moral integrity when one crosses that line between right and wrong.

Moral injury can result from killing or injuring others or from witnessing such an event without intervening. It can be caused when a soldier participates in heavyhanded searches of civilians or actions motivated by revenge or actions, even those conducted from a distance, that lead to death and destruction. Veterans have reported “anguish about having interrogated detainees, not by torture but the proper way, by slowly and deliberately building intimacy only in order to exploit it,” writes Nancy Sherman in “A Crack in the Stoic’s Armor” (New York Times, May 30, 2010).

The pain of having gone against one’s conscience is even more acute when one returns home, where the rules of civilian life are reinstated, and the justifications that seemed so compelling in the theater of war are no longer so cogent.

James Stockdale, a prisoner of war for five years during the Vietnam War, suffered terrible physical and mental abuse while in captivity. He wrote of his experience of torture: “These were the sessions where we were taken down to submission and made to blurt out distasteful confessions of guilt and American complicity into antique tape recorders, and then to be put in what I call ‘cold soak,’ a month or so of total isolation to ‘contemplate our crimes.’ What we actually contemplated was what even the most laid-back American saw as a betrayal of himself and everything he stood for. It was there that I learned what stoic harm meant. A shoulder broken, a bone in my back broken, a leg broken twice were peanuts by comparison. Look not for any greater harm than this: destroying the trustworthy, self-respecting well-behaved man within you” (Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior by J.B. Stockdale, Stanford University Press, 1993).

Moral injury is not a psychiatric condition but a human struggle for personal integrity and self-respect. The journey back from war and toward healing and self-forgiveness is difficult and painful.

So what are we—as citizens and as Mennonites—to do?

1. We should seek to be a listening and nonjudgmental presence to veterans. Veterans are not the enemies of our beliefs but victims—in some cases the most compelling living witnesses to the fundamental truth that human beings are not made for violence and war. Their experiences reveal something profoundly true about human beings and their need for peace.

Veterans have much to teach us about the deep and awful injury that violence and war inflict on our understanding of ourselves as moral agents. Their experience is in many ways proof to our conviction that nonviolence is fundamental to moral and spiritual integrity.

2. We are called by Christ to healing and understanding. Listening to veterans can strengthen us in our convictions and provide comfort and healing for them. But to do so, we must learn what challenges these returning veterans face. In our congregation, our minister helped co-facilitate a group for veterans. While the turnout was modest, the group found the exploration of spiritual and moral questions helpful. Being a listening presence can be powerful for both parties.

3. We should also ask veterans and other military organizations about ways we might assist returning veterans in their reintegration to society. Ken Landis and his church have undertaken an “exploratory effort to see how we as Menno­nites living next to a huge military base (Fort Drum) may have a more open presence and care for our neighbors that are being drastically impacted by war.”

The self-acceptance, forgiveness and reintegration process for veterans can be facilitated by welcoming support and acceptance from others. While we may not understand experiences veterans have endured or the journey toward healing that they must make in the years ahead, we can assist in their healing. Jesus calls us to walk in the light with our veteran brothers and sisters on their difficult journey home.

4. Finally, we should try to strengthen our own moral resolve. Remembering Milgram, we should realize that we are not immune to societal and political pressures to participate in acts of violence and brutality. Let us look to the examples of our church fathers and mothers. The Martyrs’ Mirror may seem remote and blandly historical, but it tells the stories of real people facing grotesque atrocities with moral courage and grace.

We should be so strong. We should try to incorporate their examples deep into our souls to whatever extent we can and hold them in our minds as models. We will likely never be called on to lift our persecutors out of any frozen lake, but we can help lift those persecuted by war, by their own conscience, out of the frozen lakes of their despair.

Eileen Ahearn and Mark Kliewer belong to Madison (Wis.) Mennonite Church. Eileen is a psychiatrist at a VA hospital, and Mark is a radiologist at the University of Wisconsin. Their views do not represent those of the Veterans Administration.