“IF PTSD RESULTS from being the prey—re-experiencing the feeling that something is hunting you, hurting you, trying to kill you—then moral injury results from being the predator—where you have done things to hurt people.
I hear moral injury when a veteran tells me, ‘If people knew what I had done ...’ or ‘I can’t walk into church.’ Sometimes it takes a form of humor, where people joke about not wanting to be around ‘holy stuff.’ In a story of St. Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier who is baptized and converts to Christianity, after he leaves the army to enter the monastery, he refuses to come to the altar, and he cowers in the corner. He feels this distance from the holy. I see this pattern over and over again in veterans’ experience throughout church history and in the brothers and sisters I went to war with; their sense of who they are is altered.
If you’ve had this experience of war, you become a prophet. You have to tell people what war is like and what it does to people—the rest of the world needs that witness. Otherwise, we’re going to just go right back into it if we don’t hear it.
Joining the military is kind of easy; it’s leaving that’s really hard. The young men and women being deployed today, they don’t know about all that yet. And I pray for them, that they’ll have compassionate leaders that can see their symptoms if they’re having struggles. And I pray for peace. I pray that they have a boring deployment—and come back.”
Rev. David Peters spoke with Sojourners associate editor Betsy Shirley about his experience as an army chaplain in Iraq and his current ministry to veterans.
Rev. David Peters is vicar of a Pflugerville church plant in the Diocese of Texas and founder of the Episcopal Veterans Fellowship.
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