Hooper's War and Moral Injury, With Guest Peter Van Buren
Wars do terrible things to people who fight them. Physical injury and psychological injury are well known. Veterans commit suicide at an alarming rate. But perhaps less understood is the moral injury that goes along with war, especially unjust wars. Former State Department official Peter Van Buren joins the Liberty Report to discuss his important new book, Hooper's War, which uses fiction to explore and address a very non-fictional problem.
Wars do terrible things to people who fight them. Physical injury and psychological injury are well known. Veterans commit suicide at an alarming rate. But perhaps less understood is the moral injury that goes along with war, especially unjust wars. Former State Department official Peter Van Buren joins the Liberty Report to discuss his important new book, Hooper's War, which uses fiction to explore and address a very non-fictional problem.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Co-host today, Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Good.
We have a special guest today.
He's been a friend, and matter of fact, he puts a lot of things on the website, the Ron Paul Liberty Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
And he has written a lot about foreign policy, and he has visited with us in D.C. and he has a book coming out, and his name is Peter Van Buren.
Peter, welcome to our program today.
Dr. Paul, thank you.
It's always a pleasure to be here with you and to get a chance to say thank you for all you've done for me in the past.
Well, wonderful.
You know, you had a couple of the book, the first book that I became aware of is We Met Well, and we had a discussion with that way back, and then you had another one out before that, a ghost of Tom Jode.
But you have a new one coming out called Hooper's War.
Hooper's War.
Oh, boy, I'm sure this is going to be a good one.
So I imagine this will be something that our viewers will be very interested in.
Why don't you give us a little idea, maybe even the sequence of these several books that you have written and how they might be different each time.
And what are you going to approach on this particular book?
Well, Hooper's War is a novel about moral injury, what happens to people's souls, their consciences, their hearts, their being in war, both combatants and non-combatants.
When I came back from Iraq, and I spent a year there with the Department of State embedded with our military working on the failed reconstruction efforts, when I came back, there was this lagging sense in me of the failure to do good, the failure to have accomplished anything.
And I kind of thought it was unique to me and my own particular failures in that the reconstruction of Iraq was supposed to have done away with the problems we now see sweeping across Iraq and the Middle East with ISIS and things like that.
And I thought it was a personal issue until I started talking more with soldiers who had been there with me and some who had been in other wars.
And many of them expressed this same feeling of moral injury, this sense that we had done things wrong, either by our overt actions, things we did, or by not doing things, by not reporting waste and fraud and mismanagement and war crimes and atrocities and things like this.
And that it had damaged us in a way that was different than PTSD, not a physical manifestation, but something closer to our inner self.
And I came through the offices of a guy named Matthew Ho, who was a former Marine, one of four people at the U.S. Department of State to actually resign in protest over the Iraq war and the Afghan war.
Matt introduced me to this concept of moral injury.
And it's very simple.
If we are, in fact, moral beings, people who have a sense of right and wrong, then it extends from that that that sense of right and wrong can be broken, can be damaged, can be challenged in a way that doesn't snap back by the things we do and we don't do.
And once you open that door, it all comes flooding out.
Unfortunately, there are explanations for the 20 veteran suicides that we see every day in the United States.
There are explanations for the way that people come back and their loved ones say, you know, they're not quite the same.
There are explanations for the way that many people who have been exposed to war find some form of comfort in alcohol, in drugs, in various self-destructive behaviors that at least put things off a little bit.
And as I started talking to more people who had been exposed to war on the civilian side, particularly Japanese people from World War II, I realized that this extended beyond combatants.
I lived in Japan for a number of years.
I speak Japanese, and I got to know some elderly folks there who had survived the war as children, who walked away from the experience as damaged as any soldier that I spoke to.
When I began reading deeper into diaries and journals from World War II, from the Korean War, Vietnam, as well as post-9-11 wars, I realized there was this commonality of pain, that the soul simply isn't that big of a place.
And this led me to write a book about all this, and I call it Hooper's War.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Maybe if you can give us a quick synopsis.
It's interesting because the first book was very powerful, and we'll talk about it later.
I hope it got you into some trouble.
We've talked about it before.
But after that book, which I, you know, I devoured, I thought it was one of the best things written about the Iraq War.
You started writing these two novels.
And I thought, this is a departure.
I wanted more nonfiction from you, to be honest.
So I'm curious, you know, your use of fiction as a way of conveying the message.
Maybe if you can talk a little bit about the plot of the book as much as you'd like to and how you use the medium of fiction to address a very real issue.
Well, I wanted a setting that was both familiar to readers, but yet removed from some of our modern politics.
And given that I had done some of this research in Japan, the end of World War II seemed a natural place to set the book.
It's far enough in the past that we can pass by some of the more immediately held political beliefs that people had about Iraq, Afghanistan, or what have you.
Certainly Vietnam is still a very sensitive political issue for people.
But it's not so unfamiliar that I have to kind of explain who the good guys are and the bad guys are.
I don't have to take the reader by the hand through that.
The story is very simple.
A young man named Nate Hooper goes off to war to fight the Japanese through a series of kind of contrivances.
He finds himself in Japan at the end of World War II.
And he and a Japanese soldier and a Japanese woman face a series of events, including some very significant moral challenges, that have modern resonance.
There is an attack on a Japanese village by accident that I think a modern reader would recognize as the equivalent of our drone wars, where innocent people are killed.
There are situations where both Hooper and the Japanese soldier face a question of whether or not to commit acts of torture.
They are placed in the classic ticking time bomb scenario, where, yes, if you conduct torture, you may in fact save more of your comrades' lives than you will inflict in terms of doing this atrocity.
Is that the right thing to do?
And in each of these instances, they make decisions in the matter of seconds that live with them throughout their lives.
And I tell the book in reverse order.
We begin with Hooper as a 90-year-old man, looking back at his life and realizing that the choices and decisions and actions he took at 18 were things that he had to live with for his whole life.
And I think it is that sense of reflection that touches closely on moral injury.
Because when we look at the statistics of those 20 veterans a day who take their lives, it turns out that more than half of them are over age 50, which means that they are reacting to things removed from our modern wars that suggest that the things that happen to them stay with them.
They're like a drop of water on the end of a faucet that's growing and growing until finally the drop falls.
When we're talking about doing this to individuals, it's a crime.
When we realize that we're doing it across generations to our own society, it is the strongest possible argument against war, against intervention, against the pursuit of American foreign policy as it's been practiced in the last 70 years.
And so I'm dealing with themes that are as big as they get here.
And to do that in nonfiction is very difficult.
You have to make sure that the reader sticks with you and that each example, whether it's from the Punic Wars or from last week in Afghanistan holds up.
But fiction allows you to pull these elements out of history, out of reality, to create composites and to talk to people emotionally about a subject that is emotional.
It lives inside of us.
It literally all is in our heads.
And so an intellectual approach, which is what nonfiction is, can only go so far.
I need to talk to the reader at an emotional level.
I need to be in his or her head.
And fiction turns out to be the vehicle for that.
And I'll encourage everyone to take a look at Hooper's War and see if you're ready to fight that war alongside me and my characters.
Peter, I haven't heard, I imagine you do use the word, but I want to talk about one single word, and that is the use of the word guilt.
I don't think I heard that, but do you see this as guilt that you're dealing with?
And is that part of the problem?
You know, the one thing that I've come across, if you suggest this in the political life, what they do is they turn on you and say, oh, if they're guilty and they did this, they're just following orders.
You're unpatriotic.
You're not supporting the war.
You're a bad person, and therefore you have to do this.
So guilt has to be squelched.
Now, how do you handle that question?
Well, guilt and shame are some of the ways that moral injury manifests itself.
But the question of, as you mentioned in the political life about the way people react to these things, I mean, it's the same old story.
We've trotted that same old argument out from time immortal.
There was a period in our American history when we talked about shell shock and called people yellow or cowards for that.
There was a period of time when we dismissed mental illness in general as simply a weakness of character.
Man up, toughen up.
There was a period of time not too long ago when PTSD was not acknowledged as an actual medical and psychological condition.
And now, of course, we know it can be measured in MRIs and can be treated the same way other illnesses that affect our men and women coming back are treated.
And I suspect we're going to find our way back to that with moral injury.
The Veterans Administration acknowledges moral injury as something that they will acknowledge and treat.
Most psychologists who are familiar with the people who are coming back from war are familiar with these terms, though they haven't quite made it into the mainstream.
I suspect if you talk to some soldiers, if you talk to people who deal with mental health issues with soldiers, these terms are very familiar and a very, very real kind of thing.
And I also know that when I have the opportunity to speak publicly about things like moral injury, it is inevitable that I will be contacted by veterans or people who care for veterans or people who have lost loved ones who say, you know, I didn't have a word for this.
I didn't have a way to describe what you have described.
And then you take a deeper look and realize that what we're talking about today as a so-called contemporary issue has been a part of art and literature since the Greeks.
If you go back even as far as the Iliad and the Odyssey, you see elements of moral injury.
You look at films like The Best Years of Our Lives that was released right after World War II, William Myerle in 1946, with deals with men coming home from war, Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried, Oliver Stone's film, Platoon.
These issues, that there are more to us as human beings than our physical bag of blood and skin, that there is a moral side to us, and that moral side can be broken.
Those things have been with us forever.
They've been part of war forever.
They've been part of people forever.
And those who simply try to dismiss them as a way of pretending that we are not destroying the souls of the people we send off to war and perhaps the soul of the nation at the same time, well, they're just trying to keep that flag waving long enough to get some more people to sign up and to justify another intervention without ever coming to terms with the cost of endless war.
Indeed.
You're right of this Japanese sergeant who sees his neighbor killed, and you point out that at that point he transforms from being a young boy to an innocent boy to a full-fledged soldier out seeking revenge.
And I was thinking this could be pulled from the headlines, except that the mainstream media doesn't cover these, so you won't see it in the headlines.
But it's actually something that we've all talked about.
Today we use the word radicalization.
And if I were going back to this idea of fictionalizing this and setting it in a historical setting, Dan and Dr. Paul, you know, as soon as I would use the word radicalization in a book or an article, there would be three different people telling me I was wrong from four different perspectives.
But in fact, what happens to this young Japanese boy in the story is radicalization.
He is a child who was sent off to the countryside for his own protection, and an errant American airstrike kills an old man in his town.
Everyone is innocent, including in its own bizarre way, the pilot who drops the bomb.
The pilot doesn't know he's dropping it on a house with a revered old man in it.
And the little boy doesn't know why the pilot dropped it.
He's innocent.
The man is innocent.
Everyone's innocent, but yet an old man dies.
And this young child realizes at that point that whether anyone is guilty or innocent, they are all responsible and that he shares a responsibility for protecting the people in his village.
And he becomes radicalized.
Whistleblowing's Moral Scales00:09:51
He wants to join the army.
He wants to fight Americans.
He signs up.
He was able to hide out from the recruiters in Japan by virtue of being in the countryside.
And this, I'm sad to say, is based on a true story that was told to me by a Japanese gentleman that I got to know in Tokyo.
And he went to the army and said, you don't know who I am.
I've been hiding, but now I want to fight.
I want a weapon.
I want to go do this.
And I want to be taught to kill.
And the recruiter told him, you know, we don't have to teach you much.
We'll show you how to aim the weapon.
We'll show you how to, we'll teach you how to kill, but you've already learned the hard part.
You've learned how to hate.
We're going to use you.
You know, I was drafted into the military, and I had a reaction that I remember very clearly about my experience there.
But I remember my early years of war was World War II.
I was born in 35, so from the age of six to 10, that's all we heard and knew about, so it had a big impression.
But as I got older and decided to pick a career, I literally picked a career which would guarantee that I wouldn't have to shoot people.
So I sort of became radicalized in a different direction and said, yeah, I'll go.
I'll do my best to live within the law and this sort of thing, but I'm going to be a doctor.
I am not going to do that.
But I want to ask a question about the type of war goes in.
How much difference will this moral injury occur?
Because some people arm themselves against being morally injured, and they even do more than I did.
They become pacifists.
I don't want any part of it.
I won't fight it.
I'm going to keep my moral standard.
And then there are other kinds of wars that we have been experiencing and we've talked about and you've talked about, and that is carelessly getting involved in constant wars and not following the law, not having declaration, and senseless killing and spending and all this.
It seems to me like the moral injury is going to be much more specific.
Of course, the pacifist is not going to have it, most likely, but if there's a declared war and an enemy that is more clearly seen than what we have seen in the last 15 years, wouldn't moral injury be completely different under the different circumstances?
Absolutely, and it scales up and down.
No one is going to sit here and argue that we should not have defeated the Nazis in World War II or that we should not have responded to various things that have happened.
There are certainly times and places where nations go to war and that is in the national interest.
There are times and places where it doesn't.
And so the concept, though, of moral injury scales up and down.
In a war against the Nazis, there still may be examples of moral injury that occur on an individual basis.
That may scale up dramatically when we're talking about war in Libya, for example, where the moral injury occurs perhaps as much on the local level, an individual soldier's level, as it does on a societal level.
Because these lapses in morality are not limited to individual actions.
Jonathan Shea, the physician and psychologist, a psychiatrist who coined the term moral injury, he worked for the Veterans Administration back in the 1980s and was also a classicist.
He read Greek, and he was the one who pulled this concept of moral actor out of the ancient Greek texts and brought it forward into modern days.
He talks about the idea that the moral failings can occur at the very highest levels among our leaders.
That could be the leader of your platoon or it could be the leader of your country.
And that level of moral failing can reflect downward, can scale back down to people who, through their actions, either supported those leaders in their moral failings or in their inaction by failing to stand up to those moral actions, failed themselves.
The idea that we are moral beings doesn't limit ourselves to individual actions, whether I squash a bug or not today.
I am a moral person because I live in a society of people and my morality doesn't begin and end at myself.
And there's a line in the book where the soldiers are talking about simply, hey, we're just trying to follow orders here.
You know, we're not making moral decisions, sir.
And Lieutenant Hooper responds to them and says, you know, just because it isn't your fault doesn't mean it doesn't become your responsibility.
And I think that is the concept here of when do you assume responsibility for an action, either by your own hand or by your country.
And I want to just add an example, two examples to that, one from the book and one from real life.
In the book, there is a character who is kind of a bit of a pacifist.
He's kind of a passive pacifist in that he is the radio man for the unit, and he doesn't use his weapon, his weapon that fires bullets.
But of course, he has the realization that as he's calling in airstrikes, as he's calling in artillery strikes, that he's killing far more people than the guys next to him who are firing off individual rounds and comes to understand that.
And that concept enlarges to some very real people that I've had the opportunity to meet with.
Lisa Ling is one of them.
She was a member of the drone program in the United States.
She fought her war in Montana.
She never physically left the United States.
She herself never pulled a trigger.
She worked doing IT work, networking, the backbone of the drone program that allowed others to do the specific pull of the trigger, if you will.
And she has suffered greatly from moral injury, realizing that she played a part in the chain of events that resulted in the loss of innocent life 6,000 miles away, and that it's simply a matter of scaling the technology.
Sure, she did not hold a rifle in her hand, look down the barrel and pull the trigger and see a head explode 200 meters downrange.
But the technology just grew up around her to the point where she could contribute to the killing as certain as if she had her hand wrapped around the grip on that rifle.
And so this is another form of moral injury that scales with our technology, that brings more people into it.
Lisa, I'm very pleased to say, has become a whistleblower and is featured in a documentary called National Bird.
It's on Netflix in the United States right now, and it's appearing other places.
And Lisa, among others, has blown the whistle on some of the ways that the kill decisions were made, some of the ways that innocent people were swept up in the drone killing program, and has helped share with Americans what's being done in their name, and has been very open about her own moral injury and her own crisis of soul for the role she played.
Right.
I think Daniel has another question, and we'll be winding down.
Yeah, well, you mentioned whistleblower, and Peter, you yourself were a whistleblower at the time you wrote the book.
You put yourself up to some criticism and then some writing the book.
It sounds to me with this book that you still are sort of blowing the whistle.
This seems to be, now that you've described it better, an extension of the whistleblowing.
Do you want to comment a little bit about this, sort of in your own experience as a whistleblower?
Absolutely.
I think there's an intimate tie between moral injury and whistleblowing because the psychologists have told us that there's not really a cure, if you will, for moral injury.
There is possibility of redemption through a rebalancing of the scales, trying to contribute something morally good to yourself to balance the morally bad things that you did.
And whistleblowing can, in fact, help balance those scales to do something good, to let something good come out of your experience.
And if anything good came out of my blowing the whistle on the waste and fraud in Iraq, then perhaps that's helped my soul find its center.
I think at the end of the day, when she tells her story, we'll hear that Chelsea Manning witnessed events in Iraq that required a rebalancing, and that may have been part of her motivation.
Edward Snowden has absolutely spoken of rights and wrongs that he witnessed and the need for someone to do something to balance the wrongs that were committed at the senior levels inside the NSA.
But it's all a matter of trying to reckon with the things that you did, the decisions that you made.
Part of my therapy is to have written a book about it.
Part of my whistleblowing, and I guess I'll change the verb here.
I won't call what I've done with Hooper's War whistleblowing.
I'll call it getting up on the roof and screaming.
Trying to get a concept, a word, a thought, an idea out to as many people as possible who haven't heard it in hopes that I can help some people who are out there fighting their own versions of Hooper's War.
Reckoning and Screaming00:00:34
Well, Peter, keep up the screaming.
That's what we need.
We need a lot of it.
And this has been a great interview.
I know our viewers will be delighted with this.
And I also want to re-emphasize, you know, Hooper's War, this book, and recommend it to all our viewers.
And, Peter, I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
It's good to see you again.
And I think you're doing great work.
Keep it up.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
Dan, thank you.
Good.
And I want to thank our viewers today for tuning in for this special interview with Peter Van Buren.