Nothing ever prepares you for . . . seeing the destruction of an entire nation. Nothing ever prepares you for . . . the unmeasured killing of civilians, nothing ever prepares you for what that does to you as a human being. . . . Nothing is going to really prepare you for the level of destruction that you bring upon a nation and you bring upon yourself for being a part of it. And yet I have a conscience . . . which goes way beyond any law, it goes beyond any order that I can receive.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n<\/blockquote>\n Camilo Ernesto Mej\u00eda was sent to Iraq for the first time in 2003. As a Staff Sergeant in the Florida National Guard, he was responsible for leading a small platoon of soldiers during the occupation of Ar Ramadi, a city in central Iraq, 60 miles west of Baghdad. What Mej\u00eda witnessed and participated in as a soldier on the frontlines of combat left him with a deep sense of personal moral betrayal and violation–something he describes as the crossing of an interior “Rubicon.”<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> War’s profound moral wounding is only now getting the attention it needs and this attention comes against a devastating backdrop: Today, some 20 soldiers will take their lives and in the last six years nearly 45,000 veterans and active-duty service-members have completed suicide–far exceeding the number of military personnel who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n A growing body of literature, emerging out of veterans’ own experiences, explores the wounds Mej\u00eda describes through the lens of “moral injury,” a term capturing the “dissolution” of a soldier’s moral identity, the destruction of a soldier’s “trust” in the world’s capacity for meaning, and the corresponding feelings of guilt, meaninglessness, shame, despair, and inner anguish following war-time deployment.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Implicit in these descriptions is the idea that military personnel are first and foremost moral<\/em> agents who have their own, interior sense of what is good or right or meaningful and how those things ought to be pursued. Moral injury is so profound because it violates soldiers’ deeply held beliefs and challenges the very notion that a soldier is in fact a moral person and someone whose sense of what is right or good corresponds to their reality. Imagine losing this sense. Imagine the profound destabilizing effects of living in a world that feels untrustworthy, feels in some way wholly indifferent, arbitrary, and fundamentally amoral.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n If we are to understand moral injury, and understand Mej\u00eda’s experience on the ground in Iraq, then we have to first understand the power of war itself and contend with the fact that “war is a force that gives us meaning” and a force constraining moral decision-making and moral agency.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n It may seem odd to talk about war as a moral constraint with regards to military service members, much like claiming that the practice of medicine is a moral constraint on the agency of nurses and doctors, or the classroom a moral constraint on the agency of educators. After all, like medicine and education, soldiering is a profession in that it involves systems of education, indoctrination, training, and credentialing. One of the explicit \u201cprofessional\u201d aims of military service is<\/em> warfighting.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Given that war is part of the profession, how can one complain that they are constrained by the very thing they have signed up to do? The problem with such an argument is that it is too simplistic a view of war\u2019s realities and too simplistic an understanding of who becomes a soldier and fights America\u2019s wars.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n As moral questions surface in war contexts, continuing to practice war risks becoming more and more unconscionable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n As will be seen in Mej\u00eda’s story, war is terribly fraught with moral ambiguity and this ambiguity is especially poignant when a soldier\u2019s belief in the principles underlying a war\u2019s justification begins to crumble. As moral questions surface in war contexts, continuing to practice war risks becoming more and more unconscionable. And as regards the notion that warfighting is in some respects a choice or a hazard that military professionals accept, the data concerning the backgrounds of America\u2019s soldiers\u2014especially those deployed to overseas combat\u2014belie easy assumptions about the \u201cvoluntariness\u201d of military service<\/span>.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n As of this writing, war has been raging for the better part of a decade and a half, which is perhaps unsurprising given that the United States is a country born of war and remade in war\u2019s image through centuries<\/em> of conflict domestic and abroad. So crucial has war been to our sense of national identity and cohesion that it is perhaps not unrealistic to deem war one of the grand unifiers undergirding the plural society that we esteem. Too, in the way that war gathers us, trades in the language of sacrifice, and creates its own martyrs, war is often our country\u2019s \u201ccentral liturgical act.\u201d<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> War in the American context wields a kind of narrative power that establishes sacred myths about our nation’s history and purpose and these myths \u201cposs[ess] our imaginations\u201d and \u201ceveryday habits.\u201d<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The consequence of all of this being that war functions as a moral constraint delimiting the kinds of speech acts that are and are not acceptable, setting the parameters for \u201cadequate\u201d patriotic expression, and obscuring the actual trauma and injury facing soldiers and veterans tasked with carrying out war\u2019s demands.<\/span><\/p>\n Mej\u00eda’s story helps us see all of this with perfect clarity.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe [the U.S. military] hurt people, and not just physically…We destroyed them emotionally.”<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n<\/blockquote>\n As mentioned, Mej\u00eda participated in the first wave of America’s invasion of Iraq and experienced firsthand the shock and awe of war’s potency and devastation. Shortly after his arrival, though, he was victim to war’s constraining power in a different form as a participant in torture. The scene is rather straightforward. Mej\u00eda, stationed at Al-Asad airbase, \u201cwitnessed prisoners being blindfolded with black hoods, their hands tied behind them while their genitalia were \u2018inspected\u2019 for no reason\u201d and at other times he saw prisoners subjected to \u201cmock executions\u201d with \u201csoldier[s] simulat[ing] the sound[s] of bombings with a gun or sledgehammer.\u201d<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Mej\u00eda was directed by a commanding officer to lead the torture of a military detainee–an order he attempted to refuse, though not entirely. Rather than physically lead the torture, Mej\u00eda instead used his rank to “watch<\/em>, rather than conduct<\/em>, the abuse.\u201d <\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In further reflecting on his complicity in torture, even if on the sidelines, Mej\u00eda relates that he felt \u201cafraid to speak out\u201d against the abuse, knowing, as he did, that the orders came \u201cfrom way up the chain of command,\u201d and in the end he experienced a \u201cdeep sense of betrayal.\u201d<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Though implicated in the torture of military prisoners, Mej\u00eda’s attempts at a kind of moral agency–his intentional decision to in some small way carve out a space interiorly for moral conscience and moral objection to take hold–reveals the extent to which the demands and norms of war can constrain what actions are possible and the soldier’s moral decision-making. In the scene of torture Mej\u00eda describes at least two constraints that are operative: <\/span><\/p>\n 1) The seeming necessity of violence in the context of war <\/span>and <\/span><\/p>\n 2) the hierarchical command structure of the military, which operates with particular force in a combat theater.<\/span><\/p>\n War, fundamentally, is about violence deployed en masse<\/em> to achieve an end determined by state actors. People\u2014soldiers, specifically\u2014become the instruments of violence sacrificed for the war cause.<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> When the justification for war is imbued with something as potent as combating global terror and when war is executed against the backdrop of a devastating attack on a country\u2019s soil\u2014e.g., 9\/11\u2014one can imagine just how necessary and righteous war might feel. But in this very sense of righteousness lies one of war\u2019s most significant dangers: The righteousness of the cause justifying all manner of brutality in the cause\u2019s service. <\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Enter torture.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Torture in any context, but perhaps especially in war-time, thrives on necessity, namely the necessity of getting this<\/em> information, in this<\/em> moment, for this<\/em> given purpose. Arguably, torture\u2019s exigencies take on near-mythic quality as they are backed by the war cause–with respect to the occupation of Iraq, nothing less than the eradication of global terror–and the sense that the lives and the needs of the nation stand in the balance. But Mej\u00eda details something different and more sinister than torture as traditionally understood. What Mej\u00eda describes comes close to torture as sport. Stripping inmates nude for needless inspections and staging mock executions are abuses of power for power\u2019s sake and for the sheer enjoyment of violently controlling and dominating human bodies. War so warps human consciousness that the unconscionable (torture) becomes normal, routine, recreational. Torture goes hand in hand with the \u201cseductiveness of [war\u2019s] violence\u201d and offers \u201cgod-like empowerment over other human lives,\u201d too powerful, it seems, to refuse. <\/span>17<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The seduction of domination and the power war enacts on human bodies forms war’s inner logic which rationalizes and justifies violence in pursuit of war\u2019s end(s). Alternatively, torture also reveals the psychic, even spiritual, constraints of war which can override human reason and desensitize soldiers and interrogators through their contact with death and the \u201cgrotesque\u201d\u2014a desensitization so complete that the line between humanity and inhumanity risks complete erasure.<\/span>18<\/sup><\/a><\/span> To invert the psalmist: here, violence and necessity have met, war and torture have kissed each other.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Torture goes hand in hand with the \u201cseductiveness of [war\u2019s] violence\u201d and offers \u201cgod-like empowerment over other human lives\u201d too powerful, it seems, to refuse.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n While it is true that war, as manifest in the scene of torture Mej\u00eda describes, sanctions the brutalization of human beings, that sanctioning does not just occur spontaneously\u2014it happens through the very specific mechanism of military command. This is the second constraint.<\/span><\/p>\n As a professional agent of war\u2014a soldier\u2014Mej\u00eda is subject not just to the demands of the war cause or the constraints of war\u2019s corrosive psychological effects, but to the hierarchical authority of the United States Army. In other words, Mej\u00eda has not accidentally stumbled into torture, he has been commanded <\/em>into it. The impact of military command authority should not be overlooked because this command is backed by the power to detain, prosecute, and imprison.<\/span>19<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Imagine then Mej\u00eda\u2019s double-bind: on one hand the narcotic of war and the power that comes with controlling others\u2019 lives, and on the other hand, the juridical power of the military to enforce Mej\u00eda\u2019s compliance with military orders (compliance, that is, with the very violence and abuse that war has normalized and encouraged). Mej\u00eda chooses one small measure of non-compliance but it cannot keep him from being wounded, deeply, morally<\/em>, by his environment. Mej\u00eda is betrayed by his failure to uphold his moral code in overseeing torture and he is betrayed by the military leadership ordering his complicity in moral violation. The frustration of Mej\u00eda\u2019s moral agency as a soldier commanded to torture becomes the seedbed for moral injury.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n This internal conflict over war’s demands and the Army’s command authority put Mej\u00eda on a collision course with the U.S. military, one that eventually resulted in his arrest, trial, imprisonment, and demotion.<\/span><\/p>\n While stateside dealing with various issues related to his green card, Mej\u00eda was ordered back to Iraq to finish combat duty, confronting him with one of the most consequential decisions of his life: refuse a military order and desert his combat unit, rendering him absent-without-leave (AWOL) and subject to military court martial or return to war, which for him meant \u201cbrutaliz[ing] the people, rap[ing] the land, and possibly [dying]\u201d in Iraq against the dictates of his conscience.<\/span>20<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Conscience won out and Mej\u00eda embarked on a different sort of war, an internal one, one in which he fought to “reclaim [his] humanity” and “spiritual freedom.” <\/span>21<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n I have not deserted the military. I have not been disloyal to the men and women of the military. I have not been disloyal to [the] country. I have only been loyal to my principles. And I think that gives me the right to decide not to be a part of something that I consider criminal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Before turning himself in to military police and facing court martial for desertion, Mej\u00eda gave an interview to\u00a060 Minutes<\/em><\/a> and in it he voices how he understood himself as a moral agent facing war’s constraints. “I have not deserted the military,” Mej\u00eda says, “I have not been disloyal to the men and women of the military. I have not been disloyal to [the] country. I have only been loyal to my principles. And I think that gives me the right to decide not to be a part of something that I consider criminal.”<\/span>22<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Mej\u00eda’s comments come on the heels of the charges leveled by his commanding officer that Mej\u00eda’s desertion was cowardly and traitorous.<\/span><\/p>\n This language of disloyalty, cowardice, and betrayal is charged with meaning–the notion of disloyalty is an especially potent constraint within the logic of war. As already mentioned, war needs a cause and servants of that cause\u2014loyal<\/em> servants willing to take up arms and carry out war\u2019s violent demands. In refusing further participation in the war effort Mej\u00eda opens himself to being branded disloyal to the “war on terror,” which is to say disloyal to the nation itself.<\/span>23<\/sup><\/a><\/span> As with the episode of torture, it’s not just the narrative or psychological power of war that Mej\u00eda is up against but the military itself. And in desertion, Mej\u00eda is subject to the full coercive and juridical power of military command and the military justice system.<\/span><\/p>\n A great irony stands at the heart of all of this. <\/span><\/p>\n Because war has set the terms for who or what is moral (namely those who support and carry out war), opposition to war, within war\u2019s logic and psychological constraints, becomes immoral<\/em> for it is nothing less than the betrayal of war\u2019s demands and the nation\u2019s purported needs. Mej\u00eda\u2019s choice is constrained, then, to betraying country by betraying the war cause or betraying self in the service of war. By choosing to preserve his own moral identity and the salvaging of his moral conscience, Mej\u00eda is deemed an immoral agent who has prized his own needs and conscience above the needs and conscience of the country.<\/span>24<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n The impossible choice here between two kinds of betrayals ought to be recognized as a form of moral constraint rooted in war\u2019s logic and war\u2019s reality. What’s more, though, is that Mej\u00eda\u2019s choice was especially constrained given the threat of the military\u2019s juridical power. Not only would Mej\u00eda be socially branded a \u201ccoward,\u201d \u201ctraitor,\u201d or \u201cdeserter\u201d but legally <\/em>so. War\u2019s stigmas, backed by a jury\u2019s conviction in a military court martial, would in some sense become legal determinations of Mej\u00eda\u2019s character and identity should he refuse further military service. But refuse is precisely what Mej\u00eda did and in so doing he discovered a kind of liberation that a guilty conviction, loss of rank, and imprisonment could not stifle.<\/span><\/p>\n I was called a coward, I was called a traitor, I was accused of desertion. I was tried, I was convicted, I was sentenced, I was put in jail. And let me tell you, I’ve never felt freer in my life, you know. There\u2019s no higher assertion of your freedom than to follow your conscience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Reflecting on his imprisonment, Mej\u00eda offered this to directors Gary Weimberg and Catherine Ryan in their film, Soldiers of Conscience<\/em><\/a>: \u201cI was called a coward, I was called a traitor, I was accused of desertion. I was tried, I was convicted, I was sentenced, I was put in jail. And let me tell you, I\u2019ve never felt freer in my life, you know. There\u2019s no higher assertion of your freedom than to follow your conscience.\u201d<\/span>25<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Mej\u00eda\u2019s words reveal that there is something powerful about exercising moral agency in the face of constraint and, yet his story also suggests equally, that there is something deeply injurious when moral agency is frustrated. His anguish over his complicity in war’s violence and destruction is palpable, so too is his relief as his conscience is unburdened of war’s demands, even as that unburdening comes at the cost of his freedom and military standing.<\/span><\/p>\n Returning, now, once more to torture and to the broader issues of war’s constraining power, Mej\u00eda\u2019s attempt at non-compliance is an imperfect one and he cannot completely wash his hands of his complicity. As a leader in the chain-of-command and a bystander he is complicit even if the violence and humiliation were carried out by lower-ranking service members. And yet, Mej\u00eda\u2019s choice was made in the midst of immense constraints: a military command order, the powerful psychic draw and narrative of war, and, perhaps, the justification of moral necessity. Failing to fully exercise his agency in the face of these constraints, agency that in his ideal world might have looked like immediate desertion, left him wounded by a sense of profound self-betrayal\u2014that is, left him morally injured.<\/span><\/p>\n Mej\u00eda\u2019s moral wound perhaps explains the clarity with which he made the decision to abandon his post and face the consequences of a military tribunal. For him, it seems, the pain of further frustrated agency\u2014through acquiescing to the demand that he re-enter combat duty\u2014would be so immense that he would rather risk public disgrace and military imprisonment. Indeed, Mej\u00eda was<\/em> imprisoned but far from prison being yet another constraint on his exercise of moral agency in wartime, it was the consummation<\/em> of his agency<\/em>. It is worth quoting Mej\u00eda again as he describes this period of life: \u201cI was tried, I was convicted, I was sentenced, I was put in jail. And let me tell you, I\u2019ve never felt freer in my life.<\/em>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Mej\u00eda\u2019s journey is but one example of the moral lives of America\u2019s soldiers and the true costs of the pursuit of war\u2014not in dollars and cents\u2014but at the level of the human spirit. What Mej\u00eda describes is the constant threat of losing his humanness and of experiencing self-annihilation. Mej\u00eda is not alone, and not just because other soldiers have similar stories\u2014they do and these need to be told. No, Mej\u00eda is not alone because war is not a force that only exists in some far-off battlefield; war\u2019s corrosive and alluring power are not confined to the frontlines of combat. War normalizes and sanctions violence wherever it exists and wherever it is celebrated, at home or abroad. Mej\u00eda’s story offers a lesson: rejecting war is costly in the highest, and yet still possible. Mej\u00eda’s choice awaits any and all who would risk the work of naming and resisting war’s power and war’s reality.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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