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.

“When we’re using missiles that kill but place no risk,” suggests Yale law professor Stephen Carter, “that means it’s easier to fight, which means it’s more likely we’ll fight.”

Christians, Jews, and Muslims have a sacred connection to the city of Jerusalem, says author James Carroll, and “that sacred connection, even though at the present moment it’s a source of contention, is actually a profound source of union.”

Violence in Jerusalem is no surprise, according to writer James Carroll, “because that’s the human story. The great thing about Jerusalem is it’s a place where the human story gets transcended.”

Watch excerpts from our conversation with the director of policy studies at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies on ethical and moral issues at stake in the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

In a new book called "The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama," Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter ponders the vocabulary of just and unjust war and the significance of using the American military for humanitarian intervention.

"Does the public really understand in a deep way what the moral burdens of war are? I don't think so," says philosopher, ethicist, and psychoanalyst Nancy Sherman.

"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," writes US Navy Commander Greg Parker.