BOB ABERNETHY, host: In Pakistan, the U.S. government’s use of armed drones to target militants continues to strain relations between the countries. In the past, the administration has avoided talking about its drone program, but on Monday (April 30), a top White House official strongly defended use of the controversial technology. At the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, called weaponized drones both legal and ethical and said their use is consistent with the country’s right to defend itself:

John Brennan: “There is nothing in international law that bans the use of remotely piloted aircraft for this purpose or that prohibits us from using lethal force against our enemies outside of an active battlefield.”

ABERNETHY: For more on this, Kim Lawton is here. She is managing editor of this program. We are joined by Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School and author of The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama. He joins us from New Haven. Professor Carter, welcome to you.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN CARTER (Yale Law School): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: John Brennan said that the use of drones is legal, perfectly legal. You agree with that?

CARTER: I think the administration is right. We’re a nation at war, and in time of war a belligerent certainly has the right to target the leaders of the other side who are in the chain of command, and that’s what we are doing.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: But if the battlefield in essence here has become the entire globe, how does that change the moral calculus of when and how the U.S. uses force justly?

CARTER: Well, I think you’re right that the more important questions are the ethical ones, and one of the ethical questions is how big the battlefield is, because the administration claims the right to target leaders wherever they may show up in the world. A second moral problem that arises is the problem of civilian casualties. Even if we have the right to go after leaders of Al Qaeda, we have to do it, both as a matter of law and as a matter of ethics, in a way that minimizes civilian casualties. The administration doesn’t actually count civilian casualties, so we don’t know how many there have really been. Mr. Brennan says that there have been times that they haven’t actually taken the shot because civilians have been in the line of fire, and if so, I’m glad to hear that, but I still think that we’d be better off if we could have a conversation in which we could talk more about the civilians who are killed. And there’s another ethical problem that we don’t spend enough time thinking about, and that’s the way that the drone war goes away from the front pages. It’s not on the evening news. In Iraq, we’re on the evening news. In Afghanistan, it’s on the evening news. With the drone war, it’s done in secret, it’s clandestine, it’s hard to keep track, and we really should know what’s being done in our name.

LAWTON: What kind of moral oversight would you like to see taking place surrounding this?

CARTER: At minimum, we members of the public ought to demand as much disclosure as possible from both our government, and also that the media cover the drone wars as closely as we cover other wars. There’s no greater and more difficult moral decision a nation makes than killing other people, and it’s quite important, if we are going to do that, that it remain in the forefront of our consciousness, that we not be distracted by other issues.

ABERNETHY: How do we know how many civilian casualties there are? Isn’t that a big danger, that this—that the use of drones will spill over and there will be a lot of civilian casualties?

CARTER: Because the administration doesn’t tell us when there are civilian casualties, or how many, it’s very difficult to keep track. We tend to rely on sources on the ground, some of whom have their own agendas and want to exaggerate it for one reason or another. But if we don’t know how many civilians are dying, we really can’t give a good assessment of the ethical principles that are underlying these attacks.

ABERNETHY: Professor, just very quickly, why now? Why did the administration come out with this now?

CARTER: There have been a lot of voices, including my own, that have been urging an open discussion of this. Because the administration has not acknowledged in the past that this drone program even exists, it’s hard to have public conversation about it. Now we can have an ethical conversation about it, and it’s high time that we do so.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and to Stephen Carter of Yale University Law School.

KIM LAWTON, host: Religious groups were among those expressing sorrow and condemnation after a US soldier was accused of a shooting spree in Afghanistan that killed 16 villagers, nine of them children. US officials said it was an isolated attack and promised to seek justice.  The massacre triggered a new round of anti-US protests. Relations were already tense after American troops burned Qurans at a US military base.

For more on the situation in Afghanistan, joining me is William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Bill, welcome.

WILLIAM GALSTON (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): Good to be back.

LAWTON: How does what happened in Afghanistan this week affect the moral calculus of how the US proceeds there?

GALSTON: In my judgment, this is a really tough one. On the one hand, as the defense secretary said, in the fog of war terrible things happen. To engage in a war is to commit yourself to a process that you can’t entirely control, and events like this unfortunately are almost inevitable. On the other hand, we are pursuing a kind of forward strategy, having our troops not just in the large bases but also interspersed with civilians in the countryside, and that makes it more likely that events of this sort will happen, but unfortunately the United States and its allies have reached the conclusion that this is the only way to prosecute the war with any chance of success. So now we have to choose between our strategy and the inevitable morally troubling consequences of that strategy.

LAWTON: When we first went into Afghanistan it was after 9/11, and there was fairly widespread consensus that we were morally justified to go in, that we had right intentions for going in there. Do things like this erode our moral credibility for that decision?

GALSTON: Well, I think the credibility of the decision, both moral and not, has weakened over time. It’s weakened in part because the war has just ground on for so long, more than a decade now. And it’s weakened in part because our objectives have changed. Some would say broadened. Some would say that they’re no longer achievable, that it was one thing to try to deny a safe haven to Al Qaeda and its sympathizers, and a very a different thing to try to reconstruct the Afghan nation and its central political institutions. People across the political spectrum, right to left, are beginning to wonder whether we’ve bitten off more than we can chew and if we are committed to a mission whose success is dubious now at best because of the way we’ve defined it. Then that makes it even more troubling that we are engaged in strategy and tactics that make events of this sort more likely.

LAWTON: And what moral factors should we take into consideration as we consider an ethical exit from there?

GALSTON: Boy, that’s another tough one, because we have a bunch of people who have worked with us, who have committed themselves to the joint cause. They are now very, very vulnerable, and we have responsibilities to them. We have responsibilities to civilians in areas that are contested between the allied forces and the Taliban, and we have an obligation, it seems to me, to do everything in our power to ensure that the people who have cooperated with us are treated appropriately. Regrettably, we have not discharged that responsibility very well with the Iraqi civilians who worked with us, and many of them are now in fear for their lives.

LAWTON: Alright, difficult questions still ahead. Bill Galston, thank you very much.

GALSTON: My pleasure.

CHAPLAIN STEVEN RINDAHL: The month of May, we sustained our largest volume of casualties. We were conducting memorial ceremonies every few days, and by the time that month was over, I was pretty well worn out.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Chaplain Steven Rindahl served 15 months in Iraq. Now he’s the chaplain at the Fort Jackson hospital in South Carolina, which is also the headquarters of the Army’s Chaplain school. There are 2900 full and part-time chaplains, and many have served at least one tour of duty in a combat zone, and, like Chaplain Rindahl, been haunted by the experience.

CHAPLAIN RINDAHL: We have 17 of our soldiers killed and one of our contracted interpreters, and I did not keep count of how many traumatic amputations and other wounds that caused our people to be evacuated from theater.

SEVERSON: It was his fellow chaplains who took him aside and told him that he was suffering from what has become known as “compassion fatigue.”

CHAPLAIN RINDAHL: I realized that what they were saying was true because I would hear footsteps outside in the gravel, the crunching noise, and I would just be terrified that somebody was coming to tell me about another casualty.

CHAPLAIN MIKE DUGAL: Across the board we have recognized that we do have chaplains that have experienced combat trauma.

SEVERSON: Colonel Mike Dugal is the Chaplain Director for the Center for Spiritual Leadership at Ft. Jackson. The center opened in 2008 partly in response to the realization that, like soldiers, chaplains also suffer the trauma of combat stress.

CHAPLAIN DUGAL: We do have chaplains that are going through the same psychological and traumatic events that our soldiers are going through. It is hard to be empathetic and to show compassion to our soldiers and to see the brokenness, to see the carnage and that not to affect you.

SEVERSON: According to the army, since the beginning of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s chaplains have served a total of more than 20,000 months in combat zones, some have gone on as many as eight tours of duty. One survey revealed that 20 percent of these chaplains had suffered compassion fatigue or some sort of PTSD.

Like the soldiers, these chaplains are often in the heat of battle where death is very real and the casualties are friends. Lieutenant Colonel Graeme Bicknell is not a chaplain, but he is an army expert on compassion fatigue.

LT. COL GRAEME BICKNELL: It can be nightmares. It can be lack of desire to eat, sort of feeling sad, sadness, avoiding certain behaviors because it reminds you of what happened.

SEVERSON: He says it’s understandable that chaplains would experience compassion fatigue.

LT. COL BICKNELL: The more empathic a person is, the more they’re able to relate to somebody or be in their shoes. The more vulnerable they are to compassion fatigue. And I think that with chaplains, that empathic relationship is incredibly important to be able to benefit the soldier.

CHAPLAIN JOHN READ: I guess I first learned in a profound way how trauma can damage the soul when I was clinically trained at Brook Army Medical Center.

SEVERSON: Chaplain John Read is the army’s Director of the Soldier and Family Ministries.

CHAPLAIN READ: You see the gun shot wounds, the stabbings, the burn patients, all the volatility of the kinds of things you see in a war zone. I mean I recognized there, as a clinically trained chaplain working in a hospital setting how that would affect me in terms of questions of life, death, grief, loss. The things that profoundly become kind of moral, ethical, spiritual aspects of our lives.

SEVERSON: He tells of seeing the body parts of 38 little Iraqi kids blown up by a terrorist bomb right after learning he had just become a grandfather. And of the soldier who died in his arms.

CHAPLAIN READ: He had just become a naturalized citizen two months before his death, killed in a rocket attack. I held him in my arms as he died and gave him, recited a prayer from his specific faith that he was from, and the peaceful look on his face as he thanked me and died, I will just never forget. But there isn’t a day that I don’t wish that he could somehow be with his wife and kids.

SEVERSON: One thing that often comes through is the deep, abiding respect and fatherly love these chaplains have for their soldiers.

CHAPLAIN DUGAL: It is natural for chaplains to weep with those who weep because a lot of these kids, most of these kids are the age of my youngest son and I’m a father to them. There are times that when I reflect about the cost that our military has paid since 911, I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to be with them. Because it is an honor.

SEVERSON: And it is not only the soldiers chaplains weep for — it’s the soldier’s families.

CHAPLAIN READ: The chaplains that go out and do many notifications, supporting the casualty notification process and the death notifications. It’s a heavy load to bear. And so at some point in time, invariably they have to re-engage themselves in a meaningful way to move in and through and beyond that.

SEVERSON: That’s where the chaplain’s school and the Center for Spiritual Leadership come into play. They get training here, discussion groups, reading lists, counseling.

There’s a chaplain museum tracing back to the Revolutionary war. It was George Washington who first dictated that each regiment should have it’s own chaplain.

CHAPLAIN DUGAL: When pain and suffering is very real, soldiers know that they can turn to the chaplain.

SEVERSON: Chaplain Greg Cheney served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He says there was a time when what he experienced in combat challenged his faith.

CHAPLAIN GREG CHENEY: Definitely, I mean when you go through that kind of extreme circumstances, there were times when I would, you know, question God and ask God what’s going on. Yeah, it’s one of those experiences where everything doesn’t make sense when it’s happening.

SEVERSON: Ultimately, he says, his faith actually grew from his combat experience.

CHAPLAIN CHENEY: Even when I was going through that, I felt an amazing sense of calm in those situations as I ministered to those soldiers, and I know that that could not have been anything from myself, it was only God, you know, Jesus Christ working through me to touch these soldier’s lives.

CHAPLAIN DUGAL: I would definitely say that my faith has developed and not to the point of questioning the existence of God, but having to deal with the reality of pain and suffering and realize that there are no just simple answers.

CHAPLAIN RINDAHL: If you think about what Christ did for humanity. He left a place of ultimate privilege in order to take on a hardship and ultimately sacrifice himself for people who didn’t know him. And soldiers take upon themselves the obligation to leave the most privileged county in the world and be willing to sacrifice personal comfort and, although not intending to sacrifice their own life, at least be willing to.

SEVERSON: There’s a phrase that’s become quite common among veterans, and among chaplains, of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It’s called “the new normal.” It means that their lives are never going to be quite the same as before.

CHAPLAIN READ: Sunday school teachers I had had as a kid growing up who kind of always celebrated my journey, said you’re not the same. And I would say, reflectively, how am I different? Well, you’ve seen things that none of us will ever see. We can see that in your eyes.

SEVERSON: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Crystal City, Virginia.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, the military’s largest and most advanced medical facility. It’s where doctors send some of the most seriously burned and wounded soldiers to recover, sometimes with artificial limbs. Since the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, thousands of soldiers, like Private Carlos Gomez, have suffered injuries like his. He was on a scouting mission and was seriously wounded when his vehicle ran over a roadside bomb in Afghanistan earlier this year.

PVT CARLOS GOMEZ: Well, the blast, it shot us straight up in the air so the impact actually broke my left leg. It shattered my heel and my bones down my right, left leg, I mean, and my right leg got crushed. They couldn’t save it anymore so they had to amputate it here at Brooke Army Medical Center.

SEVERSON: Two other soldiers were wounded in the blast. One was killed. At first Gomez wasn’t sure he wanted to live.

PVT GOMEZ: I woke up, you know, not really knowing what happened still. I didn’t know that my leg was amputated, and when I was fully, you know, aware of what’s going on, I saw my leg, yeah, I broke down in tears, you know, and I hated my life, and I didn’t want nothing to do with it.

SEVERSON: The first battle many seriously wounded soldiers face is whether they want to go on with their lives and then endure the long, painful process of healing, often alone. Doctors have learned that wounded soldiers heal faster and more completely when they have family around them. That’s what happens here at the Warrior and Family Support Center in San Antonio. It is the only one of its kind. It was the dream of Judith Markelz, and now she’s the director.

JUDITH MARKELZ (Warrior Family Support Center Program Manager): We attempt to form a home away from home for wounded warriors and their families, to help them feel some kind of connection to each other, things for them to do every day to take them outside of their own world and help them transition back to active duty or to the civilian community where they’re going to have to adjust and make a lot of changes.

SEVERSON: Although it’s located on an army post, the Warrior and Family Support Center is funded entirely from private donations and staffed by about 150 volunteers. Families live in apartments close by, so they can help soldiers accept what is called “the new normal,” which means their life will never be quite the same again. Sometimes family is as important as the medical care.

MARKELZ: To know that someone is there, that someone that comes from home to take care of you makes a tremendous difference for our warriors. If you believe in the triad of the healing of the mind, body, and spirit, then we probably fall in the category of the healing of the spirit.

SEVERSON: Bryant Casteel is a Baptist chaplain at the center. He says the most important part of his job is simply to be there.

CHAPLAIN (CAPT) BRYANT CASTEEL: You know, sometimes you want to find the right words. I found many times when dealing with soldiers there’s not a right word. There’s no right way to tell someone you’re going to be okay. And some say, hey, can you pray for me chaplain? You know, can you let me know things are going to be all right? I can’t promise you, but I can promise you I’ll be here to support you.

SEVERSON: One of the favorite nights around here is bingo night. For a while they forget that the war for them is not yet over. For those who think this must be a very sad place, Judith Markelz says the opposite is true. She says it’s a place of hope, which is the name of the sculpture hanging in the center which was created by a staff sergeant who had 29 surgeries while he was at Brooke. She says the wounded may cry in their beds at night, but never in public.

MARKELZ: These young men and women do not want your sympathy. They want your support and in the help of their healing, because they’re going to be okay. They did what they were commanded to do, and they did it with great integrity and honor.

SEVERSON: And many paid a huge price, like Master Sergeant Doug Reed with the Ohio National Guard, critically wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan in 2010. He’s the father of seven kids, here with his wife, Jana.

MSG DOUG REED: The angel of death had me in his arms, and Jesus said, “No, I’m not done with you.” So they fought over me, and my jaw came off.

JANA REED: He was very close to death, in the fact that I mean with every surgery they didn’t know if he would ever wake up or ever become independent. And so that’s when I just had to say, “Okay, God, I am not in control. The doctors are not in control. But you are in control, and you are going to have to fix this, if this is what you want.”

SEVERSON: And when he finally did wake up, for two months he didn’t know his wife. He didn’t even know who he was.

JANA REED: But when our kids walked in the door he gave them a hug, and he called them all by their pet names, and so the kids began to cry, not because of what they saw, but because it’s dad, he does know me, when the doctors were saying we don’t think he’ll know you.

MSG REED: I didn’t know what I looked like. It couldn’t have been good, and they don’t see that. They don’t care if I have teeth or not or my jaw is out of shape now or anything else. What they cared about is I was still alive. I was still with them.

SEVERSON: Judith Markelz says the families themselves need support.

MARKELZ: This is not a singular effort. It involved families, children, wives, mothers. An injury or a death is like dropping a rock in the water, and the ripples go forever, and they affect everyone with whom they ever came in contact.

SEVERSON: Private Gomez has two children, and he says he knows things will get better when he gets his prosthesis, but in the meantime his seven-year-old son is having a hard time.

PVT GOMEZ: It’s affecting him. I know definitely it’s affecting him. You know, he has to help out his dad a lot with stuff that I can’t do, like picking stuff up for me, you know, putting on my shoes, stuff like that.

SEVERSON: Gomez says he’s always been religious, but one of the few times he didn’t have time to pray was when he rushed out on a mission in the middle of the night, the mission that cost him his leg. He says the war has not cost him his faith.

PVT GOMEZ: I don’t question God, not one day, you know, why this happened to me. I thank him actually, because it could have been the opposite, you know. I could have paid the ultimate sacrifice and passed away. It was because of him I’m still sitting here talking to you right now.

SEVERSON: Jana Reed says her faith and her husband’s are actually stronger.

JANA REED: Because every day we have a miracle that has been answered, and some people might say, oh, it’s a coincidence, but we’ve just had too many coincidences in the pasts 16 months that I do not accept it. It is not a coincidence.

SEVERSON: Chaplain Casteel says he has seen how the Warrior and Family Support Center has helped soldiers get better quicker. But he worries about what happens when the soldiers go home.

CH CASTEEL: When you walk around here, you don’t feel like you’re different. You don’t feel like, wow, someone’s staring at me or looking at me like I’m strange, and so I think here for a soldier it can be safe. Now when they leave this environment, going back to their home of record, then it could be a little more challenging, and I think that anxiety rises again for the soldier: Hey, will I be accepted?

SEVERSON: There was a time when wounded soldiers returning from the Vietnam War received more hostility than community support. But times have changed.

MARKELZ: Whether you agree with what these young men and women did is of, frankly, no concern to me. If you don’t like the war, it is not an issue for me. The issue is that we continue to support these young men and women for the rest of our days and theirs, because this doesn’t end tomorrow.

SEVERSON: She says that there are now other warrior and family support centers being built around the country modeled after the one here.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Lucky Severson in San Antonio, Texas.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Going into the Iraq war, U.S. military officials described the overwhelming force they intended to employ as “shock and awe.” Now it seems that same phrase could be used to describe the overall cost of that war and the one in Afghanistan and the U.S. engagement in neighboring Pakistan. It’s much greater than predicted by the government, according to a report compiled by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. It’s called the Eisenhower Research Project, codirected by Professors Catherine Lutz and Neta Crawford.

PROFESSOR NETA CRAWFORD (Political Science, Boston University): I’ve been looking at the history of war and its conduct for a long time, and what struck me about these three wars most startlingly was how much we don’t know about the costs.

PROFESSOR CATHERINE LUTZ (Anthropology and International Studies, Brown University): The reasonable estimate is approximately $4 trillion for the war, up to today and including some of the future costs that we’re obligated to pay for veterans care.

SEVERSON: That estimate includes the cost of the fighting that hasn’t ended yet, but it does not include as much as a trillion dollars just for the interest payments on the war debt through 2020. That’s a unique aspect of these wars.

CRAWFORD: Every other war the US has fought historically has been paid for by revenue, either by raising taxes or selling war bonds. In this war, the United States has almost entirely financed it, paid for it by borrowing.

LUTZ: What surprised me most was this idea that wars have such a long tail into the future of negative effects that we pay environmentally, we pay in human suffering, we pay in financially decades into the future.

President George W. Bush in 2003: “My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

SEVERSON: Originally, the Bush Administration projected the Iraq war would be short and cost approximately $60 billion, clearly off the mark, but historically not unusual.

LUTZ: Governments often try to sell wars to the public and they use, at best, a very, very conservative estimate that will seem the most attractive and reasonable to the public. There tends to be an assumption that force will work, and therefore the job will be done in a couple of weeks or a month.

CRAWFORD: That doesn’t usually happen. In fact, it hardly ever happens. You have to really destroy a country to get people to roll over, and in every instance, the duration of war is almost always underestimated.

SEVERSON: To date, more than 6,000 U.S. troops have come home in coffins, although until recently images of the solemn event at Dover Air Force Base have been forbidden. Less well known is the fact that more than 26,000 allied military and security forces, most of them Iraqi or Afghan, have also been killed.

LUTZ: A lot of the information about the war is not available to the American public. For a variety of reasons, the idea that you want to have a sanitized version of the war available for purposes of morale, for the public at large, for the troops.

SEVERSON: Hundreds of aid workers have been killed, others kidnapped. Twenty-three hundred U.S. contractors have died. But what we rarely hear about are the numbers of civilian deaths, and they are considerably greater than military casualties.

CRAWFORD: In Iraq, it’s been about 125,000 people killed, civilians killed. In Afghanistan, the conflict has killed directly about 12,000 to 14,000 civilians.

SEVERSON: The hostilities In Pakistan have actually taken more lives than the war in Afghanistan—about 35,000, including civilians and militants. There, the U.S. military relies increasingly on drone attacks. The cost of this operation is classified.

CRAWFORD: These strikes have killed about 2,000 people. We don’t know exactly how many, and we don’t know exactly how many of those people were insurgent targets. Now this is a secret war, but it’s an open secret.

SEVERSON: Another war statistic is the number of wounded. Among U.S. servicemen alone that number is nearly 100,000, and the wounds are often severe.

LUTZ: This war differs from previous wars in a number of ways, and so there are certain kind of injuries and severity of injury that we did not see in previous wars. Survival rates are higher because of battlefield medicine and other factors.

SEVERSON: The insurgents’ use of IEDs or improvised explosive devices has been a major cause of injuries.

LUTZ: So we have a lot more injuries that are, again, whole body impact rather than just a single bullet kind of injuries, and these kinds of traumatic brain injuries that have such long-term negative effects and often interact with some of the other problems, the PTSD and other injuries that have this major effect on the person.

SEVERSON: It’s the hidden costs or unquantifiable costs of war that keep popping up in the Watson Institute report, which was compiled by 20 academics from around the country—the cost, for instance, to our civil liberties. The report says there has been unprecedented surveillance of American behavior and phone conversations that have been allowed through the Patriot Act, which was enacted to fight terrorism at home.

LUTZ: It is common to wars in general that they have often expanded the power of the government beyond what they were, what those powers were in peacetime, and that those powers are often maintained past the end of the conflict, and so in line with the idea that wars are never over when we think they’re over, that’s one way in which that statement’s true.

SEVERSON: Then there’s the image of the U.S., which has suffered globally, first after the torture pictures from Abu Ghraib, then the reports of the secret prisons and the detention of hundreds of terror suspects at Guantanamo, many of whom were released after several years.

CRAWFORD: It’s tarnished the image of the United States as a country of the rule of law.

LUTZ: For the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, this has been a nightmare decade.

SEVERSON: The report says the psychological effects for the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have been “massive”—depression, post traumatic stress disorder, broken families, targeted victims and collateral damage of a counterinsurgency war.

LUTZ: The number of refugees from these wars have been estimated by the UN at 7.8 million persons in those three countries—Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And that’s equivalent to the population of Connecticut and Kentucky being forced from their homes.

SEVERSON: The environmental harm is difficult to calculate but significant: damage from spilt fuel, spent munitions, toxic dust, increased rates of respiratory and cardiovascular disease, which is also showing up in returning troops.

SEVERSON: The report also takes into account what the wars have accomplished—the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the diminished ability of the Taliban, greater rights for women in Afghanistan, the spread of democracy, although Iraq and Afghanistan are listed as two of the world’s most corrupt countries. But like the costs, it will be impossible to measure the benefits until well into the future, and it’s the future that concerns the authors of this report.

LUTZ: The data is out there, but it’s very difficult to access. In some cases it’s not there at all. We need to know what those data are for past conflicts in order to try and project forward to other conflicts. That’s how a democratic society should operate is with full information about what public policy decisions are being made and who’s being asked to pay what. These have been costs that have also been born very unevenly, so the people who are paying the costs, military families, veterans, civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan—those people deserve to have their story told.

SEVERSON: Benjamin Franklin is quoted as having said, “Wars are not paid for in wartime. The bill comes later.” The Watson Institute report says the bills for these wars will keep coming in for as long as 40 years later.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Lucky Severson in Washington.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Analysis and discussion of some of the week’s news now with Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, and Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service. Welcome to you both. Kevin, an obscure publicity-seeking pastor in Florida oversees the burning of a Quran, and there are deadly riots in Afghanistan.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): Right. It’s a real challenge for this country because the more attention that people pay to him the more he’s sort of egged on to keep doing this kind of thing. But if we don’t pay attention to what he’s doing, the Muslim world thinks that we don’t care whether or not Qurans are being burned in the United States or that they think that maybe all Christians or all Americans are burning Qurans when that’s clearly not the case. But it’s a real pickle as to how much legitimacy you give this guy, because the more he gets, the more he’s going keep going.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And what actually happened was he had a mock trial where he put the Quran on trial, and he actually had an imam speak in defense of the Quran, but in the end the Quran was found guilty, and that’s when the burning occurred. That was put on the Facebook page, on his Facebook page. It was put on Youtube. But it happened on March 20. The riots happened quite awhile after that, in part because local leaders, Muslim leaders in Afghanistan, manipulated it. You know, people in the country there didn’t necessarily know about it. Most Americans didn’t know about it, except for the fact that people went through with loudspeakers in some of these towns, and there was also an allegation that hundreds of Qurans were burned here. So there was a lot of manipulation about what really happened as well, for a lot of different political purposes.

ABERNETHY: Another frustration: the ideological stand-off in Washington over the budget.

LAWTON: Well, Republicans this week unveiled—while Congress was talking about how are we going to fund the rest of this year, the Republicans also unveiled their blueprint for 2012 and beyond, and they proposed a very radical restructuring of Medicare/Medicaid, some of those other programs. The congressman who introduced it said it was a moral obligation to do something about Medicare/Medicaid, because it just is simply unsustainable in its current effect, and that has a lot of religious groups talking and debating.

ECKSTROM: Right, and right now we are talking about, you know, a hundred million for this, two hundred million for that. It’s relatively small potatoes. What’s important about this Republican plan is that it’s a big-picture, long-term ideological blueprint for how we should fund the government and fund the services, and the bottom line is that it proposes taking in less revenue through lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy, at the same time cutting services to folks who really can’t afford to have those services cut. So a lot of religious groups say that it’s immoral budgeting to be able to try to balance the budget on the backs of the folks who can’t afford to.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, there was a Supreme Court decision this week that worried a lot of people interested in the separation of church and state.

LAWTON: Well, the justices in a very close decision rejected a challenge to a program in Arizona that gave tax credits that eventually got funneled to private schools, mostly religious schools in that particular case. Some taxpayers had challenged that, saying that’s an establishment of religion, and the court said those people didn’t have the standing or the legal right to bring forward that case, so it’s going to make these challenges to church-state cases more difficult in the future.

ECKSTROM: Right. Since 1968 Americans have had a right to challenge these sorts of cases when they think that the government is improperly funding religion. The Supreme Court has said that. And what’s happened in this case and then in a 2007 case, a challenge against the White House faith-based office, is the court is really tightening the screws on this, on making it harder for people to challenge these programs that they think are unconstitutional.

ABERNETHY: So looking around we have humanitarian crises all over the place, we have natural disasters, we have budget stand-offs.

LAWTON: Wars.

ABERNETHY: Wars.

LAWTON: And rumors of wars.

ABERNETHY: Maybe next week will be better.

ECKSTROM: Hopefully.

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LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Happy days in Roswell, New Mexico, as soldiers in a National Guard engineer company deployed in Afghanistan come marching home. For some, unless they get called back the war is over. For others, it’s only begun.

MICHAEL ABBATELLO: I was a rifleman.

SEVERSON: In an infantry unit?

ABBATELLO: In an infantry line unit.

SEVERSON: In the Marines?

ABBATELLO: Correct, Marine Corps infantry.

SEVERSON: Michael Abbatello joined the Marines September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attack on the Twin Trade Towers. Like tens of thousands of American soldiers coming home, he has struggled with the warning signs of post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, symptoms like nightmares, insomnia, hyper-vigilance and guilt, and for him something even deeper—a wounding of the soul.

ABBATELLO: Something is changed. You know, you feel down to your spirit. You know that you’re different now. You know, we don’t really have a consciousness of our own spirit until it’s wounded, and then it needs help.

SEVERSON: With the increase in crime and suicide among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the notion that war can actually damage or warp the soul has been gaining traction among experts in the field. Nancy Sherman, a professor at Georgetown University, has studied and written extensively about the hearts, minds, and souls of soldiers.

PROFESSOR NANCY SHERMAN (Georgetown University): I like to talk about the moral emotions of war, and they include wounds, but they’re the hard, bad feelings that may erode at your character. That’s the really deep ones.

SEVERSON: The kind of emotional wounds Lieutenant Colonel Eric Olsen witnessed as a chaplain in Iraq.

LT. COL. ERIC OLSEN: It’s a hard place where you are asked to do some very difficult things, and once you’ve crossed those lines it’s hard to navigate back. It is a soul wound. It’s definitely a soul wound.

SEVERSON: Michael Abbatello is still suffering from the guilt that his unit wasn’t there to protect an Afghan father who had provided intelligence on the enemy to the Marines.

ABBATELLO: He had trusted us to some degree that we would be there to support him and his family if he was going to be taking chances to help us, and we betrayed his trust. I mean to a certain degree we weren’t there for him. So yeah, I have guilt.

SEVERSON: What happened to him?

ABBATELLO: Him and his family were gunned down in front of their house. His beard was cut off. He was stripped and laid on top of his family.

SEVERSON: You knew the kids, too? The kids, the whole family?

ABBATELLO: Yeah, yeah.

SEVERSON: A recent survey by the Rand Corporation found that over 300,000 veterans are suffering from some form of PTSD, which has put enormous pressure on veterans’ hospitals like this one in Los Angeles, which also houses New Directions, a residential treatment program for veterans. Clinical director Monica Martocci says no one knows the number of PTSD victims for certain because many veterans refuse to acknowledge it.

MONICA MARTOCCI (Clinical Director, New Directions): It doesn’t bode well for their career if they’re in any way seen as mentally unstable.

SEVERSON: Those who have studied the issue say moral wounding is especially prevalent among recent vets because so many have served more than one tour of duty. Ed Tick operates a sanctuary called Soldier’s Heart for stricken veterans and says they aren’t the only ones suffering.

DR. EDWARD TICK: Twenty percent of active duty troops and as much as 40 percent of Guards and National Guardsmen and reservists are coming back with PTSD. These are astronomical numbers, and we could go through substance abuse and divorce and child abuse and homicide and imprisoned populations, so they are really hurting.

SEVERSON: The Justice Department estimates that nearly a quarter-million veterans of wars dating back to Vietnam are serving time behind bars. The New York Times found 121 cases in which Iraq and Afghan veterans committed murder after their return from war. Only a few had been screened for mental health problems, and unlike many civilian criminals, the overwhelming majority had no prior criminal record.

Dr. Jonathan Shay, a neuroscientist who works with the Veterans Administration, ridicules the age-old theory that good breeding and good character will keep you morally strong even in the face of war.

DR. JONATHAN SHAY: Well, that idea has a great pedigree, and I’m afraid it’s complete crap. It is simply wrong. Moral injury causes good character to become deformed.

SEVERSON: It alters it? It changes who you are?

SHAY: It alters it. It makes you bitter. It makes you cynical. It makes you filled with hatred.

SEVERSON: Michael Abbatello had never been in trouble before, but he served time in prison after his wife convinced him to sell all his unregistered civilian guns to someone who turned out to be a government informer.

ABBATELLO: You get so used to having a rifle. You know, I used to get these fears like I had forgotten my rifle somewhere, and to even imagine life without a rifle is scary.

SEVERSON: Monica Martocci says Michael Abbatello’s attachment to guns is not uncommon.

MARTOCCI: That’s what they were trained to do and what they learned, especially in combat, is that the world is not a safe place, and they are taught to protect themselves and others so, I mean, they think everyone else is crazy for not having a weapon with them at all times.

SEVERSON: The rate of suicide among vets of the current wars has also been on the rise. A federal study in 2005 found that veterans were twice as likely to commit suicide as those who hadn’t served in the military, and PTSD is considered a significant reason why almost 25 percent of America’s homeless are veterans of all wars, even though they make up only eight percent of the population. The largest number of homeless vets reside in downtown Los Angeles, and many have found help at the venerable Union Rescue Mission.

SEVERSON: Anthony Ortega now works at Union Mission. He was injured by shrapnel while his National Guard unit was in Afghanistan, found this place after living on the streets. When he got home, badly injured, Anthony fell into drugs and onto the street.

ANTHONY ORTEGA: And then doing some of the things we have to do, as far as serving our country, goes against what’s in the Bible. Coming back, having to deal with that was very difficult.

SEVERSON: Billy Zinnerman was a sergeant major in the Marines. He says the first Gulf War, where he served on reconnaissance patrols, changed him spiritually.

BILLY ZINNERMAN: Without a doubt, because you see no spirituality in war. Combat does not, for lack of a better word, expose you to the opportunity to serve the Lord.

SEVERSON: After he lost his faith, he lost his wife and his home, and now he’s trying to help other veterans at the Los Angeles mission.

ZINNERMAN: I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a position to say to yourself, if you have believed in God you think God has abandoned you. That’s what you feel in combat, because you feel there can be no God with this type of carnage going on.

SEVERSON: Everyone we spoke with agrees that an important factor in the turbulent return of some vets is that much of the country has not shared the pain of the two wars they have been fighting.

SHERMAN: There’s lip service to the service and to saluting the service, but does the public really understand in a deep way, empathetically, what the moral burdens of war are? I don’t think so.

SEVERSON: The good news is the Department of Defense has instituted a reintegration plan for returning vets called the Yellow Ribbon Program.  Chaplain Eric Olsen officiated at this one.

OLSEN: We try to see them as soon as they come home and in 30 days and 60 days, and we bring them together and sort of tell them what they’re going to go through.

SEVERSON: And more churches are joining in, like the Unitarian church here in Albany, New York, which recently sponsored it’s first healing circle ceremony for veterans like Michael Abbatello.

ABBATELLO: I’ve lost more friends to suicides then I did in combat.

SEVERSON: For too many veterans, coming home doesn’t end with kisses and hugs. Now there is an increasing awareness and some say an urgent need for America and Americans to step up and share the pain of our returning veterans and help them reclaim their lives.

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In 1998, I drove by a billboard for the recently released movie “The Thin Red Line,” one of those rare films that are both intensely graphic and introspective. To convey the movie’s central theme, the billboard included the longer subtitle from the James Jones novel: “Every man fights his own war.” “Ah,” I said to myself, having only just seen the film. “Now I get it.”

SPC Gary Cretors, photographed for the Soldier Portraits Project by Ellen Susan.

I thought of that moment recently as I was reading Nancy Sherman’s new book, The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of our Soldiers. Sherman, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, provides a window into the complicated inner moral struggles of the individual soldier and sheds light on the tapestry of individual wartime experience. As she explains, every person’s experience is unique. Therefore philosophy, with its thousands of years of nuanced discussion, is better suited to address moral conflicts than psychology. Indeed, Sherman argues, it is philosophy’s very complexity that can be so healing.

This is an important distinction. For its part, the Department of Defense has made considerable progress acknowledging the psychological burden on its returning warriors. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its less severe manifestation, combat stress, have been discussed extensively in public forums, and service members are now encouraged to receive counseling without jeopardizing their own careers. This is an important and very positive step.

But the approach to wartime psychology is still a pathological one: “You are mentally broken, and we care about you, so we want to fix you.” It has a one-size-fits-all feel. The problem is more complicated than that. From my own observations of combat, the individual soldier often feels not that he or she is broken, but that the world itself is broken, and there is no easy fix for a broken world. Philosophy, at the least, offers a framework in which to understand it.

I have experienced this disorientation myself. Not long after returning from my second deployment to Afghanistan in as many years, I found myself in the checkout aisle of a Home Depot. The cashier noticed my military ID when I opened my wallet to pay, and he awkwardly informed me that I warranted a 10 percent discount. After ringing up the sale and handing me my receipt he added, “And, um, thank you for your service.”

I was confused by that exchange. It’s not that I don’t like the 10 percent discount (because I do), nor that I didn’t appreciate his intentions. It’s just that after enduring significant time apart from my family and fighting in a messy war with no clear protagonists, I expect a little more civic burden-sharing. While my squadron and I had been busy battling the Taliban and Al Qaeda, after all, Wall Street apparently had been on a drunken bender of sub-prime loans and mortgage derivatives that nearly catapulted the nation into a second Great Depression. Meanwhile, the bills for the war—not insignificant by any measure—were simply being charged to our children. Where was the shared sacrifice? Was the nation’s role in the war only to give me a 10 percent discount at Home Depot—and an obligatory pat on the head?

This relationship between the military and the nation, and especially the confusion and misunderstanding on both sides, is an important issue that Sherman discusses extensively. For my part, I have long felt that the inflated words used to describe servicemembers—from “hero” to “great American”—almost always miss their target. Hyperbole sacrifices credibility. But there is still ample common ground on which to begin a more productive conversation. For instance, I always understood my role fighting the nation’s enemies, but it was very difficult for me to reconcile that with the role of being a father to my two sons, if only because the former meant I was always gone. To whom was my true loyalty? I remember in particular a long-distance conversation from Afghanistan with my then three-year-old who had been lured reluctantly to the phone. I tried to draw him out of his shell with light-hearted banter, but he cut me short with the only words he knew to express his longing for an absent father. “You’re taking too long, Daddy,” he whispered. “I know, buddy,” I whispered back, my voice unsteady now. “I know.”

Perhaps here lies the kernel of mutual understanding. A father’s absence from his children is just one example of a deeper, sometimes all-pervasive sense of guilt about the inability to live up to competing standards. The military, of course, is all about standards, and sometimes they are irreconcilable. This guilt—and its mirror image, resentment—are common themes in Sherman’s book, but they are also emotions that are familiar to virtually all working parents who find themselves falling short in some capacity. It is part of the shared humanity of adulthood. In combat, I was surprised to learn from trained psychologists that the psychological effects of frequent long deployments are similar to those of a single traumatic incident, and I have often looked at exhausted civilian counterparts, trying unsuccessfully to adequately balance work, children, and relationships, through the same lens that I viewed my own sailors. We are all, it would seem, fighting our own internal wars.

This is not to say that going to war is just like having a bad hair day. But the core moral struggles on both sides are still recognizable. We service members and civilians are more alike than we may seem. The mismatch between ideals and reality, whether as a result of our inability to live up to expectations or the world’s inability to live up to our own, is devastating stuff. By shining the light of philosophy on a generation of soldiers, Sherman has initiated a dialogue that will help the military—and the nation—better understand their common struggle and, hopefully, better share the burden. It is a dialogue that is long overdue.

US Navy Commander Greg Parker completed multiple tours on four different aircraft carriers and commanded a squadron deployed to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. In 2010, he was a Federal Executive Fellow with the 21st Century Defense Initiative, a research project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.