"To know that someone is there, that someone that comes from home to take care of you makes a tremendous difference for our warriors," says Judith Markelz, director of the Warrior and Family Support Center in San Antonio.

After 10 years of war, says Georgetown University professor Nancy Sherman, US troops are coming home from Iraq, “and now they see that whole project of stability and democratization unraveling. They come home carrying heavy, invisible wounds, of a sense of betrayal and PTSD. Was it worth it?”

Some chaplains have seen and ministered to so many dying or badly wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan they themselves have become casualties.

“The people who are paying the costs, military families, veterans, civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—those people deserve to have their story told,” says Professor Catherine Lutz of Brown University.

No one should think intervention in Libya will be easy or simple, writes religious studies professor Charles Mathewes. "Obama’s message to the nation was a reminder that he surely doesn't."

"Whether you act or whether you don't act, the stakes are really quite high, and that's what makes it so daunting from a moral perspective."

"Whether we're actually preserving veterans' capacity to have a flourishing life after war, a good life for a human being after war, I don't know. I just don't know," says clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay.

"To do the war on the cheap and not hold us all accountable for the decisions that are made is a travesty," says this New York National Guard state chaplain.

"It's our job as civilians to tend to the returning warriors by bringing them into the center of the community," says this psychotherapist and author of "War and the Soul."

The Catholic peace movement Pax Christi USA met outside the White House for prayers of repentance for war.