Killing from the Inside Out

Robert Emmet Meagher is Professor of Humanities, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA. His publications include numerous books, translations, and original plays, most recently Herakles Gone Mad: Rethinking Heroism in an Age of Endless War and Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War. Across many years he has served in a range of veteran-focused programs aimed at understanding and healing war's inner wounds, and since 2010 has led a VA literature seminar.Douglas A. Pryer retired as a lieutenant colonel from the US Army military intelligence corps in August 2017, last serving on the Joint Staff as a Middle East political-military advisor. His military experience includes five years supporting combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, and his essays and book, The Fight for the High Ground, explore warfare's moral and psychological dimensions. He is pursuing a PhD in International Politics at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales.Other Contributors:Anthony Camerino, Anthony J. Jack, Bill R. Edmonds, Bob Darlington, Braden Allenby, Brian Turner, Charles Pacello, Chester Nez, D. William Alexander, David Peters, Doug Anderson, Edward Tick, Eric Newhouse, Erik D. Masick, Euripides, Hamilton Gregory, HC Palmer, Jonathan Shay, Joshua Phillips, Kristen Leslie, Michael Lapsley, Michael Putzel, Monisha Rios, Peter D. Fromm, Peter G. Kilner, Peter Marin, Sean Levine, Shannon French, Siegfried Sassoon, Stefan J. Malecek, Steve Mason, Timothy Kudo, Tom Robert Frame, Tyler Boudreau, Wilfred Owen, William Allen Miller, William P. Mahedy, and William Shakespeare

Armies know all about killing. It is what they do, and ours does it more effectively than most. We are painfully coming to realize, however, that we are also especially good at killing our own ""from the inside out,"" silently, invisibly. In every major war since Korea, more of our veterans have taken their lives than have lost them in combat. The latest research, rooted in veteran testimony, reveals that the most severe and intractable PTSD--fraught with shame, despair, and suicide--stems from ""moral injury.""But how can there be rampant moral injury in what our military, our government, our churches, and most everyone else call just wars? At the root of our incomprehension lies just war theory--developed, expanded, and updated across the centuries to accommodate the evolution of warfare, its weaponry, its scale, and its victims.Any serious critique of war, as well any true attempt to understand the profound, invisible wounds it inflicts, will be undermined from the outset by the unthinking and all-but-universal acceptance of just war doctrine. Killing from the Inside Out radically questions that theory, examines its legacy, and challenges us to look beyond it, beyond just war.