Lu Lobello's Moral Injury

Dear Mr. President,

Jonathan Shay defines moral injury this way: “It occurs when you’ve done something in the moment… that you were told by your superiors that you had to do…but which nonetheless violated your own ethical commitment.” Politicians do not suffer moral injury but those they send to war do. On April 8, 2003, on Baladiyat Street in Baghdad, U.S. Marines from Fox Company came under intense fire and in the chaos and confusion of the moment, they did not know who the enemy was and fired into vehicles filled with fleeing civilians. “Atonement” by Dexter Filkins in this week’s New Yorker describes the carnage and its consequences. Marines took a terrible toll on civilians that day—and on themselves as well. The marines’ wounds were both physical and mental: PTSD, alcohol, drugs, violence, prison, moral injury. Lance corporal Toone: “they gave us this power to shoot anyone we wanted and face no consequences. Well, you have to live with yourself. It destroyed me.” The Bush gang of necon terrorists never faced consequences for the tens of thousands of deaths they caused either; you eliminated that possibility when you said you wanted to “look forward, not backward” and as a result, our moral injury as a nation is still an open wound. Here’s 1^st sergeant Lopez: “She’s shot up so bad, the whole side of her body peeled away, still alive….You are not the same person when you come back.” Lance corporal Lu Lobello, a machine gunner, is haunted by an image of a “blood-soaked Iraqi infant, his mother holding him aloft by one foot, ‘Why did you shoot us?’ the woman demanded over and over.” Politicians disguise the slaughter of innocents with the innocuous-sounding “collateral damage.” Filkins’ article centers on Lobello’s 10 year search for the survivors of the Kachadoorian family who were on Baladiyat Street that day, rushing home to safety; Lobello sought forgiveness for the harm he caused them. You, Mr. President, are not responsible for his moral injury or for Bush’s wars but you are responsible for others. There is no justification for war, it is ugly, it is evil, it is immoral. No politician will ever investigate the true causes for 9/11 or Iraq or Afghanistan, for the truth is what politicians fear most. The lies, deceptions and futility of war without end has resulted in more than 6,000 U.S. dead, more than 100,000 Iraqi deaths and who knows how many Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemenis and Somalis. The U.S. toll on 9/11 was less than 3,000. When is enough enough?