Ghosts of Ortona, page 40
For Bill, it was absolutely not a point in their favour that the First Parachutists were volunteers; on the contrary, it was a strike against them. And yet, at the same time, Bill recalled that when he’d been their prisoner, those volunteers had treated him well; he recalled how the surrendering German officer had been shot in the heart by a Canadian; he recalled how the “little German” had pushed the muzzle of his Schmeisser against Bill’s chest—but then, for some reason, hadn’t pulled the trigger. That experience probably had a lot to do with why Bill called it a stupid war. The same moral confusion was apparent in his answer to my question, near the end of the interview, about the war’s worth.
“I guess the Germans had to be defeated I suppose. Yeah. I don’t know who was wrong and who was right in that war but, all wars are the same aren’t they? Uh, I don’t think they need to happen at all, you know. Wars, you know. I don’t think so.”
Most Canadians would condemn any suggestion that both sides in World War II were equally right or wrong. But I don’t think Bill’s comment was meant as a literal moral comparison. He wasn’t indifferent to Nazi ideology or to the argument that it had to be defeated. I think, like Farley Mowat, he simply couldn’t accept that goodness should be the war’s last word.
TED’S WAY OF COPING with his trauma was to organize the Christmas Reconciliation. I had misgivings about the politics of his project—misgivings that were, unfortunately, confirmed by later meetings with two of the German participants. But it’s important to recognize that Ted was trying to solve a painful problem that had been darkening his life for decades—and he was alone in doing so. His society wasn’t exactly coming to him with solutions. In fact, his society barely acknowledged that there was a problem to be solved.
At the time of my research, many of the veterans in this book probably would have been diagnosed with PTSD if they’d seen a psychologist. Some of their symptoms were self-reported (e.g., Ted’s haunting; Mel’s stomach ailment and “constant flip-book” of pictures in his mind) and other symptoms could be observed (e.g., Bill’s moments of narrative incoherence.)
However, these men might well have been misunderstood and found themselves frustrated by the dominant clinical approach. Until recently, therapeutic treatments have assumed that soldiers’ traumas are caused by fear. Consider the following definitions of psychic trauma: it’s caused by “terror and helplessness,” a violation of “our taken-for-granted senses of security, predictability, trust, and optimism,” a “fundamental rift or breakdown of psychological functioning (memory, behaviour, emotion) which occurs as a result of an unbearably intense experience that is life threatening to the self or others.” All of this posits a breakdown in mental function resulting from an experience of extreme fear and threat to one’s life.
The veterans whom I interviewed might also have suffered from fear-based trauma. But what I saw them struggling with was not a reaction to fear—it was a reaction to causing death and suffering to others.
Since the time of my fieldwork, a new clinical approach is now in use to address this oversight. The concept of “moral injury” was introduced by psychologists working with American veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to address the moral dimensions of soldiers’ traumas. Writing in 2009, Brett Litz and his colleagues at Boston’s Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD defined a “morally injurious experience” as “[p]erpetrating, failing to prevent, [or] bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” The symptoms might be the same as those of conventional PTSD, but in the case of moral injury the symptoms arise from emotions of guilt and shame.
Therapists are advised to accept and take those emotions seriously; it’s important not to “undermine the patient’s need to feel remorseful.” The steps for treatment begin with “psychological- and emotional-processing of the memory of the moral transgression” followed by “forgiveness-promoting experiences.” Regarding the latter, the authors add, “In simple terms, this is couched as making amends.” Finally, social connection or “being accepted by a group” is important to healing as it “helps construct meaning and purpose that transcends the self.”
Dutch anthropologist Tine Molendijk has critically expanded the way we think about moral injury. Molendijk teaches at the Netherlands Defence Academy and has studied trauma among Dutch veterans of the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and the NATO mission in Afghanistan. As an alternative to the clinical notion of injury, she suggests that we also think in existential terms. When individuals experience profound moral distress and disorientation, this can result in feeling that they have lost their coherent sense of self and their place in the world.
A moral injury may entail questions and insights about the self and the world that go beyond and deeper than the event. A veteran’s experience may have shattered his trust in people’s ability to do right; moreover, it may have shattered his very moral frame of reference with which he used to make judgments about questions of wrong and right. He may struggle not only with moral questions such as ‘Am I/are others good or bad?’ but also with such ethical questions as ‘What is good and bad?’
This “shattered moral frame” can lead to feeling alienated from yourself and your society. In part, this alienation stems from the inability to construct a coherent story about what happened. Such narrative difficulties are typical of all traumas. In her interviews with Dutch veterans, however, Molendijk found that much of the “profound confusion and disorientation” in their narratives was rooted in a persistent internal conflict, as they grappled with incompatible moral interpretations of their actions.
The stories of Bob and other veterans conveyed all sorts of ethical questions. How to do right when forced to choose between two evils? What do right and wrong mean in the battle for survival? What is goodness when it only confirms the evilness of a situation? Was I a good soldier, and is being a good soldier really good? Do my guilt and other worries make me a good or a bad soldier, and a good or a bad human being? What do good and bad even mean?
The unsettled, self-contradictory nature of these narratives may actually be very appropriate representations of the situations that the soldiers were involved in—situations of genuine “irresolvable moral conflict” in which “it makes sense to feel guilty and not guilty at the same time.” Sometimes, as a result, the soldiers came to “feel that their belief in right and wrong failed them.”
In Molendijk’s descriptions of veterans’ narratives, I see Sam’s obsessive work on mapping his battle; the ambivalent stories told by Mel, Gus, and Rollie about “real killers” and Norman Letendre; Bill’s confusion about who was right and wrong; Ted’s arguments with himself that he was not guilty but still needed to atone; and Maurice’s feeling that he had left some unknown thing behind. All of them were struggling with deep moral disorientation. In a way, that disorientation was their wound.
As for what helps veterans to recover from moral injury, Molendijk offers an anthropological perspective that goes beyond the usual focus on individuals and medical institutions. She observes:
[M]any societies used to have rituals for returning soldiers which acknowledged the moral complexity of military intervention and involved both the returned soldier and society…[T]he Christian community of the first millennium generally assumed that warriors returning from battle would or should feel guilty and ashamed for all the wartime killing they had done…It was believed that although the evil in which warriors had participated might have been necessary, it was still evil. So, rather than dismissing guilt and shame as ‘insignificant or irrelevant’, returning warriors were encouraged to seek resolution…through rituals of purification, expiation, and reconciliation.
She further notes that similar traditions have existed in other cultures, including those of Indigenous North America. These traditions share in common “an understanding of military action as something that may be morally polluting” and a process of “purification and reintegration” of the returning soldier that involves “active engagement by the wider community.”
Importantly, what is absent from these traditions is the celebration of the returning soldier as a hero. In Molendijk’s view, there is wisdom in that absence. Most of the Dutch veterans whom she interviewed “did not see much value in being applauded as heroes” and in some cases “it made them feel extremely uncomfortable and aggravated their guilt.” Nor was it helpful to glorify their suffering. The latter is a tendency when veterans are viewed too much through the frame of PTSD. While the intention behind that is sympathetic, it “portrays veterans as victims of war, and as with heroization, victimization leaves veterans with no space to feel remorse.” Instead, Molendijk recommends a social response that respects the moral complexity of what veterans have experienced.
Finally, Molendijk found that “in the absence of existing meaningful rituals,” the veterans she met had “invented their own symbolic acts.” Many of them had returned more than once to Srebrenica, the place of their disastrously failed UN peacekeeping mission.11 Sometimes bringing family members and friends, the veterans participated in marches for peace and other activities through which they expressed remorse and created new, positive relationships with the local community. Other veterans had attempted to share their stories with the public at home, seeking not only understanding for themselves but also a new sense of purpose in educating the public about war.
Here, I think of Ted’s public ritual of reconciliation; Maurice’s private act of returning to where he shot the German; and Maurice’s decision to keep going on pilgrimages in order to talk to Canadian youth.
And I think of why the veterans talked to me.
He’s the guy who wants to know about Ortona.
I worry sometimes that, in being that guy, I opened wounds that I didn’t know how to console. I knew very little about therapy at the time. But I hope that my basic instinct to listen without judgement offered some help to the men who spoke to me.
What some of them seemed to want most of all was not help for themselves, but reassurance that their story might help others. One of the first things Mel told me was, “I don’t think any veteran wants the schoolkids today to glamorise war or anything. It’s a terrible thing. Nobody should have to go through it.” And when Norman was telling me about the much-celebrated Seaforths Christmas dinner in Ortona, he concluded: “I hope those things never happen again.” He looked frightened when he said it. While the memory still haunted him, he surely knew it was unlikely to happen again to him. What troubled him was the thought that it would happen again to anyone.
When I read about treatments for moral injury, my feelings are mixed. Of course it’s a good thing. If we need to have soldiers, then we should absolutely be ready to help them cope with the consequences of what we ask them to do. Ideally, we wouldn’t only find ways to cure the psychological costs. In the first place, we would try to prevent those costs from being incurred.
One way of prevention is to avoid the use of violence. Another is to immunize ourselves from the harmful consequences of its use. We can pursue both approaches without contradiction. But if we become too effective at the second approach, will we stop feeling the need for the first?
This might already be what’s happening. We seem easily convinced of our own goodness and the depravity of our enemies. By prioritizing the use of long-distance bombing, and promising “no boots on the ground,” we protect our soldiers not only from physical but also from psychological harm. And our technological ability to distance ourselves from killing continues to advance. In the not-too-distant future, much of our violence may be carried out by devices and drones—intelligent weapons that do not feel.
Will that be the end of moral injury?
That depends, I suppose, on the moral.
SINCE THE LAST TIME I saw it, the Price of Peace monument has had inscriptions added to its base. There’s a plaque to commemorate the 48th Highlanders of Canada who fought the Germans in the countryside west of Ortona. There’s a plaque to commemorate members of the First Nations of Canada who served and died in the Italian Campaign. There’s a plaque to commemorate two Ortona women, Maria and Francesca La Sorda, who tended the statue until their deaths, ensuring it was always adorned with fresh flowers. There’s a plaque created by the government of Canada to identify the Battle of Ortona as a National Historic Event. That might not be the end of it. By the time you’re reading this, there could be more.
The square in which the statue stands has been renamed. What was previously Piazza Plebiscito is now Piazza degli Eroi Canadesi, or Canadian Heroes Square.
The municipality has also greatly enhanced the space.12 They removed the car parking to create a large pedestrian area with benches on a mix of cobblestone and grass. The stone is laid out in the shape of a giant maple leaf. Near the leaf’s base, at the centre of the plaza, there’s a floor fountain with six jets of water that rise to just under an average person’s height. In evenings, the jets engage in a play of colour, alternating between red and white for Canada, blue for Ortona, and red, white, and green for Italy. On a grey stone stela, there are words in Italian, English, and French:
CANADA AND ITALY
War brought us together and peace made us friends
They’ve made the square much brighter and more uplifting. The solemnity of The Price of Peace is respected, but now the statue anchors one corner of an architecturally interesting and positive space. There are symbols of life, two cultures, and the ocean. It’s good to see some beauty added to Ortona after it lost so much to the war.
If you find yourself in Ortona, standing in this place, and thinking about The Price of Peace, consider also having a thought for the ghosts. There is no trace of them in Canadian Heroes Square—and maybe it’s better that way. But if they hadn’t mattered to some Canadian soldiers, there would be no statue here.
And when you’re ready to move on from the square, please don’t forget the civilian monument. It’s on via del Cimitero less than five hundred metres away.
“IDON’T KNOW WHETHER I’ve been much help.”
Immediately, I wanted to reassure him. “But it’s the thoughts that you have that are interesting,” I replied.
Not my best answer. I would have liked to leave Norman with better words than that.
“I find it difficult to uh, to really put my thoughts out,” he said. “Put them into words.”
His box was on the sofa beside him. The lid was closed. He was staring at it. I waited, sensing that he had more to say.
He looked from the box to me.
“Like another world.”
MY BOX IS STILL open on my living room floor. I’ve grown accustomed to it here. Soon, though, I’ll put the lid back on and take it back down to storage. I’ll return it to its usual place on the shelf, but with a difference now. I won’t feel like I’m hiding from it anymore.
For years, at the back of my mind, I had the idea that this box should be a book. It was a nagging idea, not a welcome one; a perfectly fine idea, but not for me. In principle, I wasn’t against it. I just didn’t want to be the author.
And so I lived with the feeling that I was shirking some kind of duty. I used to think of ways to argue back. This idea that there should be a book—where did it even come from? No one had asked for one. No promise had been made and broken. On the contrary, I’d kept my promise: I’d finished the dissertation. That was a book-length public document, available online to anyone who cared to read it. True, I hadn’t told anyone about it—not even the veterans I’d interviewed. But by the time I’d finished, most of them were dead, and in all the years following our interviews, not one had reached out. They knew how to find me if they wanted to. The reasonable conclusion was they had got on with their lives and weren’t thinking much about me one way or another. If I continued to dwell on my supposed debt to them, that would be a symptom of my needs, not theirs.
As for the Ortonesi, I had a more valid reason to feel I’d let them down. None of their stories had made it into my dissertation. But that hadn’t been intentional. A dissertation can’t be a mixed bag of stories; as an academic work, it needs a thesis; things that don’t support the thesis, don’t belong. I would have preferred to include their stories, but when the thesis took shape—when I’d finally unlocked the way forward—there simply hadn’t been a place in it for them.
Anyway, how much was fair to expect of me? At least I’d done something rather than nothing, and that something hadn’t been easy. With the same time and effort (or god knows, maybe less) I could have gone to medical school and become a “real” doctor instead.
Those were the arguments that I repeatedly made to myself. And it was all beside the point. The point was, none of that would have stopped me from writing a book from the box, if only the topic in the box hadn’t been killing. I did want to write a book; I just didn’t want to write one about that. I was sick of the topic and didn’t want it in my life. My aversion stemmed from more than just the time I’d have to spend living with it while writing; what really made me recoil was the thought of how the finished book would tie me to it forever, binding it to my name. Maybe I would only get to publish one book in my life. And that book would be this? Why do that to myself?
Meanwhile, from time to time, I had to go down to the storage locker. And every time, there would be the box. I just wanted to get these balcony chairs out for the summer, or store these pots for my plants, but the damned box wouldn’t let me do it in peace. It always summoned the same gnawing feeling inside me; not exactly guilt, more like an existential dread. Naturally, I started to hate it for that. Sometimes I imagined taking it outside and tossing it into the dumpster. There you go. Problem solved. Then I’d feel bad for the thought—which of course only added to my resentment.
