Servicemen and women risk even more than life and limb going to war. The brutality of combat and the loss of beloved comrades can inflict psychic and spiritual wounds just as devastating as those caused by bullets or roadside bombs.

Last month, the Coming Home Project’s founder and president, Dr. Joseph Bobrow, led a panel discussion on how to address such moral and spiritual injuries at the annual conference of the Coalition for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans in Washington, D.C.

The subject was important enough to attract the top chaplain of Veterans Affairs, Keith Ethridge, and the wing chaplain at Travis Air Force Base, Steve Torgerson, whose presentations reflected the sea-change in thinking about this issue the military has undergone since the Vietnam War.

Both chaplains, like Joe, view wartime injury in a context large enough to include the catastrophic loss of faith some veterans experience as a result of seeing and doing things that violate their sense of what is right.

“Those who volunteer for service want to do good,” Joe said. When veterans feel let down by their leadership or find cause to question their mission, it can be an unexpected and destabilizing blow. “You can’t stand by what you’re doing, and you can be thrown into a crisis of meaning.”

Some veterans, irrevocably changed by their hellish wartime experiences, feel bewildered by their return to civilian life. Family bonds fray. Work seems frivolous compared to the life-and-death intensity of war. And they enter a downward spiral of hopelessness and despair.

Lt. Col. Torgerson, who was the second-ranking chaplain in Iraq in a year-long tour from 2006 to 2007, said that after the devastating experience of Vietnam, when traumatized soldiers had no outlet for their grief and rage, today’s military is trying to find ways to contain and process the psychic wounds of war.

The concept of what’s needed to be healthy has been expanded beyond the merely physical to encompass social, emotional and spiritual well-being. And the stoic archetype of warriors who deny their wounds is beginning to give way to a more realistic frame that acknowledges everyone needs help sometimes.

    
                    Andrew Jenkins takes a photo with his girlfriend

In this context, there is room to acknowledge the overwhelming psychic dilemmas that are best defined as spiritual injuries:  guilt, anger and sadness that block peace of mind; the feeling that life no longer has meaning; and the bitter sense that God or life has let you down.

Chaplain Torgerson said the emerging new ethos is, “You can be broken and it will be OK, and we’ll look after you as a community.” This message is becoming ever more urgent as the military faces an alarming rise in suicides. But, Chaplain Torgerson said, young service men and women usually only begin to respond after direct experience with war. “Having been in a war zone wakes you up to a lot of things you can’t think of until you go.”

The Coming Home Project’s retreats are designed to help restore the communal ties broken by traumatic wartime experience. Veterans and their family members can share their most harrowing experiences and grieve their most painful losses without fear of being judged. The incorporation of meditation and mindful movement into the retreat offers the opportunity to learn skills that help regulate emotion and enhance well-being.

“The community that we form at the retreat, it’s not a religious congregation; it’s not therapy,” Joe said. But, at its best, the retreat confers its own blessing.