Why am I passionate about this?
Moral injury, post-traumatic stress, and the dark night of the soul are human conditions I understand well. See, over the course of a lengthy military career, I deployed overseas many times, including to Afghanistan. In my last two deployments, I served as the legal advisor to a joint special operations task force. In this role, I advised on more than 500 “strikes”: air attacks intended to kill humans. When I returned from Afghanistan in 2018, I noticed a change in me, and I’ve been living with moral injury and post-traumatic stress since. This list helped me, particularly with the lesser-known “moral injury,” and I sincerely hope it helps you too.
E.M.'s book list on moral injury and the dark night of the soul
Why did E.M. love this book?
Few today know of moral injury, and I found this book to be a great introduction to the condition. The heart of it concerns betrayal—by those above and even ourselves.
Often seen as the father of “moral injury,” Jonathan Shay reveals that the condition itself actually stretches deep into the bowels of history, at least as far as Shakespeare, if not the Homeric epics written 2,400 years earlier: a reminder that everything old is new again.
Rather than acting as ventriloquist, Shay quotes his patients, allowing the veterans to speak for themselves; to express their traumas and the consequences thereof. And he emphasizes, as few do, the responsibility of society to aid in healing those traumas.
An accessible, practical read for understanding moral injury, trauma, and our communal responsibilities.
1 author picked Odysseus in America as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In this ambitious follow-up to Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, to illuminate the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road back to civilian life.
Seamlessly combining important psychological work and brilliant literary interpretation with an impassioned plea to renovate American military institutions, Shay deepens our understanding of both the combat veteran's experience and one of the world's greatest classics.
In Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay used the story of the Iliad as a prism through which to examine how ancient and modern wars have battered the psychology of…