UC Santa Cruz

Beginning from theories of psychological trauma as ‘moral injury’, this dissertation argues against established models that explain posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among war veterans as the inevitable result of exposure to violence. Instead, I argue the condition we recognize as trauma is the behavioral adaptation, following a crisis of belief, to life in anomic circumstances. Trauma’s cause is the inability of pre-existing moral beliefs to provide for the contextualization or justification of personal actions or the actions of others, resulting in the unsuccessful accommodation of morally challenging experiences. The resulting incoherence demands an interpretation of the situation as having been traumatic. Analyzing trauma requires an institutional approach that accounts for the history of the traumatic event within the broader context that gives the event meaning.

My analysis begins with veterans’ accounts of wartime experience published as war novels. Close readings illustrate the genre’s critique of the institutions of war, including the persistent suggestion that trauma results when the moral authority of these institutions proves illusory. The dissertation then considers the US Army’s institutional values to locate potential points of moral failure that may be the source of trauma among recent veterans. This analysis of the ideal soldier’s moral expectations accounts for: processes by which the Army regulates individual behavior; institutionally sanctioned limits on moral decisionmaking; the influence of historical legacies on present practices; and the relative power and motives of various political interests in pursuing institutional change or continuity. I argue American soldiers sent to war in Iraq could not rely on their available moral beliefs for two primary reasons. First, there is a fundamental conflict between the moral demands of warfighting and the cultural values of democratic society. Second, the Army creates the conditions under which its soldiers are unable to reconcile the actions it demands of them and the ethos it provides. The idealist expectations of too many American soldiers sent to war in Iraq simply collapsed in the cognitive dissonance of confronting a war they were neither ideologically nor institutionally prepared to fight.