AYR Plenary 1

Exploring the Moral Landscape: Military, Theological, and Academic Intersections

“Exploring the Moral Landscape: Military, Theological, and Academic Intersections” was the first plenary session of 2011 After the Yellow Ribbon conference at Duke University. The panel discussion was moderated by Andrew Bell and featured Elyse Gustafson, Herman Keizer, and Warren Kinghorn.

ELYSE GUSTAFSON’s Comments

I. A little about me

Whether by happenstance or by intention, I’ve found myself inhabiting the small and at times uncomfortable space where the military, the academy, and the church overlap.

Eight years ago, I started out as an Army ROTC cadet. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know how to wear my uniform or how to address my superiors. I didn’t understand what rank meant or how to do a proper push-up. But the learning curve is pretty dramatic in the military; you learn fast or you’ll learn it isn’t for you.

I was a fast learner. I soaked it all in like my life depended on it. That could have been because the ROTC cadre told us our lives did depend on it. But I think I was just grateful that I got to do something that felt serious. By the end of my first year, I had almost gotten used to ignoring late-night dorm parties in order to wake up at 5:30am each morning. I was faster and stronger than I had ever been. I could take apart an M16 and put it back together again in 44 seconds, and I had memorized the infantry field manual like the back of my hand.

My transformation was well on its way. I wore the military’s clothes; I spoke the language; I imbibed the values. And I was deeply committed to a group of people who did the same.

But there was always a part of me that wanted to better understand why I was working so hard. The military was teaching me how to act in war, but I wanted to know how to think about war, violence, and a soldier’s moral responsibility.

This wasn’t easy. My professors generally disapproved when I showed up to class in uniform. I knew it wasn’t a slight against me; I knew they knew that I was a good student. But something about their training and formation made it hard for them to suppress their gag reflex at the sight of camouflage.

I could also sense in my ROTC cadre a certain knee-jerk resentment toward the academic faculty. They could be friendly and polite, but that was about it. The faculty frequently and publicly questioned the presence of ROTC on campus. No matter how well intentioned the faculty might have been, they were perceived as a threat to the existence of ROTC. They were to be tolerated but not taken too seriously.

Maybe if I had been a little older, I would have called both parties out. Maybe I would have told my cadre and my professors that I needed their help, that I couldn’t figure this out on my own. But I didn’t quite know I could do that yet. I went with what I thought was allowed.

After four years of ROTC, I was commissioned as an officer and was given orders to the 10th Mountain Division at Ft. Drum. This was what I had been preparing for. It was what my entire group of friends had been preparing for.

But somewhere along the way, I began to notice a change in myself. I had met people in those four years of training—soldiers who had already been through too many combat deployments.

Sometimes they’d want to talk; sometimes they’d avoid it at all costs. Sometimes they’d dance around the edges; sometimes they’d explode in a moment of extreme frustration. No two people were exactly the same, but all of them were hurting and all of them felt alone.

II. Dan

When Dan and I met, he had just gotten back from his second tour in Iraq and was assigned, against his will, to be a training NCO for my college’s ROTC battalion. He fought the assignment tooth and nail—he wanted to get back into the fight—but someone somewhere thought Dan needed a break from combat. From what I could tell, Dan never slept; he rarely ate, and he lived off of Mountain Dew.

My senior year I was stuck as the cadet S-4 for my battalion. It was a job that no one wanted because it was full of logistical and supply headaches, but it meant that Dan and I worked together a lot. On occasion, we’d have to drive a huge Army truck out to some National Guard post in the middle of nowhere to pick up M-16s for the rifle range.

Dan usually preferred working to talking, but when we were driving somewhere, he could do both. From our conversations it soon became clear that no matter how excellent Dan was at his job, other aspects of his life were falling apart. He absolutely hated being in Wheaton, IL. He knew no one, and no one knew him. He was separated from his wife and son and missed them terribly. He also couldn’t stand to be away from his former unit, which was getting ready for its third deployment. His unit needed him, and he was stuck in the suburbs with a bunch of college kids.

It didn’t help that his deployments hadn’t been easy. He’d seen more dead bodies—more dead children—then anyone should.

“Have you thought about therapy?” I asked one day.

“I’m in therapy,” he said. “The DoD pays for it.”

“Has it helped at all?” I asked.

“Not really,” he sighed. “I usually spend the whole hour explaining what life in the military is like. I have to explain everything. We don’t get anywhere.”

“Maybe you will eventually.” I offered.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said hesitantly. “Plus the money is running out.”

I mulled over his response to my question for a while and came up with a new idea: “What about the Church? I asked. “Have you thought about going?”

“Elyse,” he said numbly. “I’ve tried going to church. But I’m treated either as a hero or a monster, neither of which is a person.”

There was no anger in his voice, no frustration or pride or contempt. What he said was the truth, no matter how hard it was to swallow.

I didn’t say much after that. Instead, Dan began telling me stories. He certainly had no obligation; I had done nothing to prove that I could handle them. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he just wanted to keep the conversation going. Or maybe he knew that he had to tell someone if he was ever going to stop feeling this way.

The stories were hard to hear. They were stories of the failure of the Rules of Engagement, stories of violence and bloodshed, of betrayal and abandonment.

Once again, there wasn’t much to say. And there wasn’t much time to grieve either. The drive was over, and we had work to do.

It was a few days before I had a chance to talk with Dan again, but I wanted him to know that I was grateful to him for trusting me. So I spent the week writing him a prayer. I’m sure, looking back, that the short little prayer on which I’d worked so hard was riddled with theological mistakes. But it was the best I could offer, and I wanted to offer something.

I went to his office and read it to him, which was a little embarrassing for both of us. But by the time I’d finished reading, he was crying. “No one’s ever done anything like that for me before,” he said.

It doesn’t sound like much, but being with him in that room without trying to label or fix him is the closest I have ever felt to God.

It was one of the most spiritually intense and emotionally exhausting weeks of my life. Every ounce of me was straining to focus on seeing him and not some projection of what I wanted to see. It would have been so easy to see him as a hero for keeping our country safe. Or to see him as proof of America’s immorality and the perfect scapegoat for our national sins.

But when Dan was sitting right there in front of me, he didn’t seem like either of those things. He seemed like a person struggling hard to figure out this mess.

III. Learning More

In the weeks that followed, I stumbled upon a book about the moral treatment of returning warriors by Bernard Verkamp. I’d been reading a lot about the morality of war and about debates between just war and pacifism. But this book seemed to fall into an entirely different category, one that breathed life into an intellectually stunted dialogue.

Verkamp helped me see my conversations with Dan and with others through a liturgical lens. I was reminded that there is a sacrament of the Church called the “Reconciliation of a Penitent,” or what is more commonly called confession. I was reminded that confession is necessary for the formation and preservation of community, and that reintegration into community heals many wounds.

The book also taught me that there are at least four stages of confession: the examination of conscience, the act of confessing, the act of absolution, and penance.

For a soldier, that first stage, the examination of conscience, is quite possibly the hardest. Every single service member is different. Some are dealing with physical wounds—burns, amputation, traumatic brain injury. Some are dealing with psychological wounds—post traumatic stress disorder, depression, the loss of a comrade in arms. Some are dealing with social wounds—strained marriage and divorce, racism, social isolation. Some are dealing with sexual wounds—military sexual trauma, the effects of DADT or the even worse policies that came earlier.

Multiply all that by the strong cultural differences between generations and between services, and you’ve got an overwhelming array of complexity.

Any examination of conscience in this context can feel like an impossible task. Thankfully, we have something called the just war tradition. The just war tradition is commonly thought of as a moral checklist that determines whether or not we can go to war. But really the tradition originated not with generals or policy makers or even therapists but in the confessional as a tool to guide priests when talking with penitents. It’s not a list of requirements for war; it’s a retrospective penitential tool.

So the tradition helped me to know, in a way that I didn’t before, that if a soldier in a Humvee drives over boy who was in the way, then something is wrong. If a soldier goes out alone on a revenge patrol, or if a soldier uses a .50 cal on a man with rocks in his hand, or if a soldier shoots a woman driving too fast toward a checkpoint… if any of these things happen, there is a moral problem. It doesn’t matter how just the larger cause or how patriotic the motivation, and it doesn’t matter if the Pentagon says it’s all okay. A separation now exists between the soldier and the rest of humanity, and it’s the job of the soldier, the community, and the priest to figure out how to get the soldier back.

IV. When you can’t know everything

When I came to Duke four years ago, I dove head first into my studies, into the ordination process, into figuring out how to fine-tune my ears so that I could become a person who knows how to listen to confession. Since I’ve graduated and begun working at a church, my appreciation for the complexity of the situation has only increased.

The examination of conscience after war is an incredibly difficult task. There are so many layers to sort through, layers that are hard to identify because society has taught most of us to obscure the truth with jokes or pride or self-deprecation.

But the hard work of conscience examination can lead to the freeing hope of confession.

And by confession, I don’t mean some rattling off of a list of sins. I don’t mean that I need you to dump every problem, big or small, onto anyone willing to listen. A confession is never something that is meant to get you sympathy, attention, status, or fame. It is never something that isolates you from others. Instead, confession is that whisper of truth that drops the act of self-importance and ushers us into the gift of community.

By confession, I mean the words that come out when you describe the aching lesson you’ve spent your whole life learning. Maybe it’s that thing that never quite came natural, that thing you screwed up a few too many times and were forced to figure out. Or maybe it’s the thing that did come natural, that thing you took too far and had to learn how to control. It’s the words you say with absolute conviction and determination, with a rigid body and through gritted teeth. It could be incredibly simple… the vague sense that something is wrong, that life doesn’t have to be this way. A confession is that part of yourself that’s been through the blazing fire and that produces words as pure as refined gold.

As I prepare for my ordination in the Episcopal Church and the authority to hear sacramental confession, I keep these three things in mind: it’s a true confession if it brings people into community. It’s true absolution if the penitent isn’t facing his or her fears alone. And it’s true penance if the end result is healing and reconciliation with God and with each other.

This is what the Church has to offer soldiers. May God give us ears to hear.