Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War

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.


''Such Christian thinkers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas crafted Just War Theory (JWT) in order to limit war. In Killing from the Inside Out, Professor Robert Meagher, a poetic writer and brilliant classical scholar, leverages history to provocatively argue that the opposite has actually occurred and JWT has served only to legitimize and inspire war. JWT, he convincingly contends, has also made it tragically easy to deny the existence of moral injury, a condition that commonly afflicts combat veterans and profoundly and negatively affects psyches. How can combat veterans feel guilt or shame, many wonder, if the war they fight is just? Thus the help these afflicted warriors desperately need is withheld from them. Another fundamental truth this bold, beautifully written, and erudite work powerfully conveys is the following: war kills not only those it buries in the ground; it just as surely kills those souls who march home, heads held high while the music plays and their loved ones cheer, yet feeling inside they are forever lost.''
--Lieutenant Colonel Douglas A. Pryer is an active-duty counterintelligence officer who has deployed to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of the book, The Fight for the High Ground: The U. S. Army and Interrogation During Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003 - April 2004.

''Killing From the Inside Out examines suicide--the form (of) self-inflicted death resulting within as we acquiesce to war. Robert Emmet Meagher argues persuasively 'just war' is a modern myth, and to kill another is to kill a part of self. This is a thoughtful, timely, and needed book. We need to look war in the eye as our nation, Meagher points out, is on a perpetual warpath. We call it, 'the war against terrorism.' Meagher cites historical thinkers, modern sages, and veterans back from battle. He makes us think and think again as we consider war and its pernicious effect, not only 'out' there, but 'inside' here, inside our singular and collective souls. Read this book. Then ponder it. Then act on it. It just might save a soul--your soul.''
--As one of the few American correspondents who spoke Vietnamese, Thomas C. Fox covered the war for TIME, The New York Times and the National Catholic Reporter. He now serves as NCR publisher. His books include: Pentecost in Asia: A New Way of Being Church, Sexuality and Catholicism, and Iraq: Military Victory, Moral Defeat.