Kevin Powers' Moral Injury

Dear Mr. President,

Kevin Powers, like Lu Lobello, was a machine gunner in Iraq in 2003, and like Lobello, Powers suffered moral injury. His novel, The Yellow Birds, is both a beautifully written and horrifying story of war and what it does to people, not just the physical violence but the emotional and psychological violence as well, the way it destroys the soul and the psyche of those who go to war. Here’s a few lines from the book that captures the effects of war on a soldier who comes home after fighting in Iraq: “…should I have said that I wanted to… be asleep forever because there isn’t any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing…” Powers’ protagonist comes home to false sentiment and meaningless patriotism; he now sees everything is and always has been lies and illusion. He has lost his identity, his soul and his ability to believe in anything. Mr. President, you are the commander of armies that dominate and terrorize the world but you are neither brave nor respected. You are a fraud, a soulless technocrat who hides behind the mask of thoughtful leader and dispenser of justice but your justice is arbitrary and no justice at all. You summarily condemn others to die and call it justice. You bureaucratize murder and call it justice. You institutionalize perpetual war in the illusion of national security and call it justice. You fooled the world into believing you were a man of peace. You had a mandate to end wars, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the war on drugs, the war on the environment, the war on the middle class, the war on women, and all the other wars on…, and you didn’t. The American people expected no less when they elected you. You could have been the man of peace we thought you were, a hero of humanity, but you were not and never have been. You were a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Trojan horse for the establishment and you have continued the violence begun by your predecessors. You have continued and made worse the moral injury we suffer as a nation and you will be judged by history and by your god for your betrayals and the violence you do.