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.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Drones are increasingly becoming some of the most valuable weapons in America’s arsenal.

Drone operator speaking on video: This is going to save someone’s life today.

LAWTON: Unmanned aircraft such as the Predator and the Reaper can hover over remote areas and do surveillance for hours, even days. Their operators are often in places as far away as Nevada or Virginia, and the drones can release missiles or bombs with no risk to those operators. Experts say within 20 years the vast majority of America’s fighting aircraft will likely be pilotless. The use of drones may be strategic, but is it moral?

PROFESSOR EDWARD BARRETT (US Naval Academy Center for Ethical Leadership): If you believe that a society has a duty to reduce unnecessary risk to its combatants, then these systems do that, so that would be actually one moral obligation, and then also the state has an obligation to effectively and efficiently defend its citizens, and these systems are effective and efficient.

PROFESSOR MARY ELLEN O’CONNELL (University of Notre Dame Law School): To accept killing far from the situation of battlefields where there is an understanding of necessity is really ethically troubling for many of us.

LAWTON: America’s use of remotely piloted aircraft or drones has increased dramatically since President Obama took office. Both the military and the CIA use them in combat operations and counterterrorism missions. Drones have been engaged in lethal operations in at least six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya. Retired Lieutenant General David Deptula oversaw the US Air Force’s drone program from 2006 until last year. He says remotely piloted aircraft achieve a moral good.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL DAVID DEPTULA: The precision, the persistence, and the accuracy that remotely piloted aircraft bring to the equation actually enhance our ability to accomplish our objectives while minimizing loss of life.

LAWTON: Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter, author of the book “The Violence of Peace,” agrees that minimizing risk to US troops is a worthy goal. But he says it also has moral implications that should not be ignored.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN CARTER (Yale Law School): When America has troops on the ground and people are dying as well as killing, it’s on the news every day. When we’re using standoff bombing, when we’re using missiles that kill but place no risk, it fades from the nation’s consciousness. That means it’s easier to fight, which means it’s more likely that we’ll fight.

LAWTON: Notre Dame Professor of International Law Mary Ellen O’Connell worries that the growing availability of unmanned aerial systems lowers political and psychological barriers to killing.

O’CONNELL: These sleek, attractive, small glider-like planes fly out of their hanger and slip in to a village somewhere and drop a bomb. That seems so easy to do, and on the screen it doesn’t look any different than the video game that the soldier plays later at her home.

DEPTULA: Are these people arguing that, you know, we should only fight if you are exposed to threats and putting your life at risk? That’s silly, and I think it’s ill-founded.

LAWTON: Edward Barrett is director of strategy and research at the US Naval Academy’s Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership. He says, in fact, high-tech sensors on the drones give operators a very detailed picture of what they are doing.

BARRETT: So they’re operating from afar, but their senses are very close to the situation. They see very clearly the battle damage that they are doing, and therefore they know they’re not playing a video game.

LAWTON: He says the distance allows operators to make moral decisions about the use of force.

BARRETT: A soldier in the situation is scared and possible hasty in deciding what to do and acting and possibly even angry, whereas an operator who’s not threatened can use tighter rules of engagement and is not going to be fearful and therefore is going have a much cooler head.

LAWTON: Deptula says much ethical oversight surrounds the US military’s use of drones.

DEPTULA: You have many, many more sets of eyes that are watching what’s going on and many, many more people in the decision loop in terms of employing lethal ordnance if, in fact, that is going to be applied.

LAWTON: O’Connell says she supports the use of drones in combat situations like Afghanistan. But she argues that their use in non-combat settings, such as Pakistan, is morally and legally wrong.

O’CONNELL: International law says that on a battlefield in which armed groups are engaged in organized armed fighting we have a presumption of necessity that persons may be killed without warning in that situation. You can ask any member of the United States armed forces where are we engaged in combat today, and they will all tell you Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They will not tell you Pakistan.

LAWTON: The CIA oversees drone strikes as part of counterterrorism operations, but US officials refuse to discuss the program publicly. According to a tally by the nonpartisan New America Foundation, since 2004 there have been more than 260 US drone strikes in Pakistan, which the foundation estimates killed between 1,600 and 2,500 people. The strikes have generated strong protests from Pakistanis who claim that many civilians as well as militants have been killed. The US takes the position that those strikes are permissible as part of the war against terror.

DEPTULA: Our principal adversary since bin Laden has declared war on the US in the mid-nineties has been al Qaeda. It is fully in cognizance with the laws of international armed conflict to pursue those individuals wherever they reside.

O’CONNELL: They’ve actually been lulled into a sense that killing with drones is not extraordinary, that these are bad people as determined by our CIA, and therefore we can just kill them. This is killing large numbers of persons who we would never allow to be killed if they were in another geographic zone—if they were in the United States, for example.

CARTER: You need really good intelligence on where those missiles are going, because otherwise you’re going to blow up a lot of wedding processions and make a lot of enemies instead of hitting the al-Qaeda leader who you thought was in the car but really wasn’t.

LAWTON: The New America Foundation estimates that while the civilian mortality rate from drone strikes in Pakistan had been about 20 percent, last year it fell to about five percent. As drone technology advances, even more difficult questions may lie ahead.

BARRETT: Perhaps more ethically challenging is the issue of autonomous lethal systems. The idea is that you can use software that recognizes the targets and then makes a decision that’s ethical to destroy targets, with no human intervention.

LAWTON: Wherever the technology goes, ethicists say the moral dimensions must be a significant part of the discussion.

O’CONNELL: We have to be aware of what these technologies are capable of and what they’re doing and demand of our leaders that our ethical, moral, and legal principles that we hold dear, that are the basis of this country, remain uppermost in all of our minds.

LAWTON: Carter believes the principles of the just war doctrine, which have informed military policy for centuries, are still relevant for determining when to use drones.

CARTER: Is there a just cause? Is this the last resort? Can the use of force actually do the thing that we claim we are setting out to do? And is our use of force proportional to the problem we are trying to solve? When we ask questions like that we’re asking moral questions. I think those are the right questions to ask.

LAWTON: The Department of Defense currently has about 8,300 remotely piloted aircraft, not including the CIA’s, and plans to spend about $6 billion in 2012 adding to that inventory.

BOB ABERNETHY: The last of the U.S. troops in Iraq came home last month, and we want to explore today how they are being received. Are they getting the help they need? How do they feel about the violence in the country they left behind? Meanwhile, what can be said about the incident in Afghanistan when four Marines defiled the bodies of Taliban fighters, and the picture of that went online around the world? Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, joins me to talk with Nancy Sherman, a University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington. Her specialty is the ethics of war, including what she has called “moral wounding.” Her most recent book is The Untold War. Nancy, thank you for being with us.

NANCY SHERMAN (University Professor, Georgetown University): My pleasure.

ABERNETHY: When people see the pictures of the Marine incident, everybody says that’s terrible, reprehensible, no excuse for it. But, you know, here are guys who may have been on several tours, they’re tired, they see their friends, their buddies, blown up, killed, maimed. It would seem to me a fairly natural reaction to demonize the enemy, hate the enemy and want to do something despicable to express your feelings about this enemy.

SHERMAN: You’re right. The angry responses increased as the weapons have gotten dirtier and the enemies more invisible, and the rules of engagement have clamped down, and so there is a lot of frustration and, as you say, lots of deaths and maimings, and if you can’t exercise your frustration at the living you may do it toward the dead. That said, officers are furious that there was this kind of misconduct, this lack of professionalism, and a sense of not really having compassion for the respect due for the dead.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): Nancy, we’ve seen in the news this past week, but over successive weeks, ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites, tensions in the government. How does all of this contribute to this notion you talk about, the moral wounding of those troops who served there?

SHERMAN: Well, I think troops have been on a roller coaster these ten years, especially in Iraq. They were exhilarated with the fall of Baghdad, frustrated with not finding WMDs, ambivalent about a mission, and reluctantly took on the role of being city builders, city planners, school builders, and the like. And now they see that whole project of stability and democratization unraveling, and they feel, I think, frustration. You know, some come home, their marriages have exploded, they’ve lost custody of the children. They come home carrying heavy, invisible wounds, of a sense of betrayal and PTSD. That’s hard. Was it worth it?

LAWTON: Was it worth it?

ABERNETHY: A sense of their having carried the whole burden and the whole rest of the country not having done so?

SHERMAN: That’s right. They are a volunteer force, but they’re still only, you know, one percent or fewer than the country, and that makes them a kind of isolated group.

ABERNETHY: But they are getting the medical care they need.

SHERMAN: Well, yes, they are getting medical care. It’s better than ever, but it’s massive, and we’re in the process of DOD budgetary constraints. We have to make sure that at primary care they get psychological screening, and that it carries through to the end of their days.

LAWTON: Is there an ethical obligation, a moral obligation we as a society have toward these troops?

SHERMAN: Absolutely, absolutely. They may come home with a sense of resentment because they carried so much. We have to reach out through community organizations, creation of jobs, and simply talking to the vet who comes home.

ABERNETHY: Is that hard to do?

SHERMAN: Yeah, but first thing to do, no judging and a lot of empathy, because it could have been your son or daughter, and it probably is your neighbor.

LAWTON: And is that happening? Do the troops feel that that is happening enough?

SHERMAN: More and more, but don’t be surprised if when you say, “Thank you for your service,” you get a mixed response.

ABERNETHY: Really?

SHERMAN: They want you to know it was harder than just your utterance of that remark.

ABERNETHY: Nancy Sherman of Georgetown University, many thanks.

SHERMAN: Thank you so much.

ABERNETHY: And Kim Lawton of this program. Thank you.

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: 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.

Read an excerpt from JERUSALEM, JERUSALEM by James Carroll

JAMES CARROLL (Author, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World”): Jerusalem in the ancient world was the cockpit of violence. It was the place where all the warring armies of the empires intersected.

Beginning with that first experience of exile in Babylon, Jews came into a new awareness of who they were and who their God was by looking back at Jerusalem, and they claim their identity by refusing to forget it.

Augustine was arguing for the survival of Jews as Jews in Christendom who would witness to the truth of Christian claims by their degradation, and that’s been the source of tremendous anti-Jewish and ultimately anti-Semitic behavior, contempt, and one of the most powerful forms of the degradation was the Jews are to be permanently in exile from Jerusalem, from the Jewish home.

It’s so important to emphasize that the Islamic arrival in Jerusalem was nonviolent and respectful of the Jewish tradition, so that when the caliph beheld the Temple Mount, which to him was to be revered because that was the place where God had stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son, he’s astounded to discover that the Christians have been treating it as a garbage dump, and the caliph, Umar, ordered the Temple Mount cleaned up, reverenced; he invited Jews back into the city who had been exiled by the Christians. Those first generations of Muslims were honoring the Jewish holy place without any sense of conflict with it, and we know that that was lost.

In the year 1096 when the pope calls for the crusade to take Jerusalem back from the infidel who have been occupying it since the seventh century, it sears the European Christian imagination with violence, holy war, God wills violence, and it centers the Christian imagination on—guess what?—Jerusalem.

The return of the Jewish people to Jerusalem, to Israel, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries especially, culminating in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, is a reversal of this ancient fate that was generated by the Romans and then theologized by the Christians. And I would just add that we Christians have been reckoning with this, and that’s the meaning for us Catholics of the tremendously important visit to Jerusalem by Pope John Paul II in the year 2000. He prayed at the Western Wall as a Jew would pray, without invoking Jesus, and he offered his act of repentance there—a tremendously important reversal of theology, the example of the kind of reckoning with the past that has to keep happening, actually.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims all have a sacred connection to it, each in a very different way. That sacred connection to this place, even though at the present moment it’s a source of contention, is actually a profound source of union.

I don’t see any hope for peace between Israelis and Palestinians until two things happen. One, Palestinians have to somehow reckon with the authentic return of the Jewish people to the Jewish homeland is a fulfillment of Jewish history. On the other side, I don’t see much hope for peace until Israelis reckon with their part in the dispossession of the Palestinian people, and in particular I’m troubled by the settlements and the ongoing occupation.

The holy one we all have in common is the one God, which makes us brothers and sisters, so the place itself is a source of peace, and so I love Jerusalem, including the mess of it—the Christian mess, certainly, but all of the messes of it.

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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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