A Soldier’s Prayer
Screams went off like a bomb in the bedroom. I sprung from my kitchen seat up the stairs to the top of the landing and tossed the door open. Entangled in sheets, his arms and legs flailing, my dad was on his back fending off attackers like an injured ant. But he was asleep, I quickly realized, and safe. Standing in the doorway, silent, motionless, I monitored his contortions and listened.
Suddenly, after a sequence of moans, yells, and shrieks, he shouted, “Yessir!” as he raised his hand to his forehead and saluted an officer in his dream. Then, as if taking his orders to the troops he commanded, he muttered that it’s time to “kill some fucking dinks.” Dad left the jungles of Vietnam in 1969, but that night, 43 years later, he relived his combat from a pillow-top mattress in suburban Salt Lake City.
Nine out of ten United States military veterans are men. A third of them served, like my father, in the Vietnam era or earlier, and since September 11th the US has added more than five million to the ranks. A majority of these post-9/11 veterans deployed overseas and half of them were in combat. Of those with combat experience, half say they suffer from post-traumatic stress—a normal reaction to horrific events, not a pathology.
Many of our estimated 18 million veterans say the American public has little awareness of the challenges they and their families face. They bring the horrors of war home because our culture has lost the religious rites that unburden our returning warriors.
Ancient Healing
Before he became a god of medicine and the healing arts in ancient Greece, Asclepius was a mortal man, according to Homer’s The Iliad, a physician treating soldiers wounded on the battlefield at Troy during the Trojan War. From the fifth century BC onwards pilgrims flocked to healing temples in his name where they slept overnight in a sacred area for the purpose of having a divinely inspired dream, a process known as incubation. The next day a priest interpreted the dream and prescribed the appropriate therapy.
As the Roman Empire expanded, soldiers carried the cult of Asclepius with them, establishing shrines and temples near military outposts across what is now Europe and North Africa, and the Vestal Virgins cleansed some of these soldiers before they returned home to their families.
With the rise of Christianity, pagan worship went away but the link between religion and healing remained. In 369 AD, Basil of Caesarea established a new type of monastery in which monks lived alongside those suffering from illness and in need of care. Recognized by many as the world’s first hospital, Basiliad was a large-scale, 300-bed complex with freely offered inpatient facilities where professional physicians and nurses treated the sick and studied disease.
In 1585, the Brothers Hospitallers, a Catholic religious order founded by John of God, a Portuguese soldier turned healthcare worker, built a hospital on Tiber Island on the site of the Temple of Asclepius in the center of Rome. For millennia, soldiers in the West healed with the help of religion, though that would change with the Enlightenment in Europe.
Indigenous tribes never severed this connection. Among Native Americans, the Plains Indians purify themselves in sweat lodges, and the Navajo use the Enemyway and its prayers, songs, and other rites to protect warriors from the ghosts of slain enemies. These ceremonies clear individual combatants and their communities of the harmful effects of war.
Until modern times, returning warriors across cultures were met by people who understood the spiritual roots of their wounds. Although our society recognizes the need service members have for dedicated healthcare, today’s approach is disconnected from the wisdom of the past.
Modern Medicine
Over the last century and a half, the federal government has evolved a system for administering benefits to veterans. In 1865, days before his death, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill to form the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, a network of long-term care homes for the honorably discharged. During World War I these facilities shifted their emphasis from lifelong residential care to short-term treatment focused on rehab and a return to society. After World War II, the U.S. government modernized its military medical system by recruiting top personnel, funding cutting-edge research, and affiliating with medical schools like Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), which pairs with the Portland Veteran Affairs Medical Center near where I live.
But modern institutionalized medicine is best for treating acute physical ailments and fails to address the cause of chronic suffering, as evidenced by this statistic: There have been over six thousand veteran suicides a year for 22 consecutive years, totaling 140,000 deaths—more than double the number of American military deaths since the start of Vietnam. Veterans comprise 6% of the adult population yet 20% of all suicides. Not only is the actual number of suicides higher (due to underreporting), it excludes additional related deaths from self-injury, such as overdoses.
Throughout history, myths and gods and monks have been central to caring for a country’s service members. The absence of the sacred in our current approach points to a profound misunderstanding of the universal and moral nature of the wounds of combat veterans.
Combat Trauma
Combat trauma is not new. Soldier’s heart, shellshock, and combat fatigue were the “PTSD” of the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Even Roman general Gaius Marius, who died in 86 BC, suffered from night terrors and flashbacks and had to numb himself to sleep with alcohol near the end of his life. This condition has been around for as long as war itself.
Post-traumatic stress affects the brain’s limbic system and results in hyperarousal, a persistent fear of and need to be on guard for physical danger nearby. But there’s another dimension of combat trauma that is often present with post-traumatic stress. It’s called moral injury.
Moral injury occurs when one sees or does something that violates his personal principles. It’s processed in the prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain, where reasoning takes place, and it colors a soldier’s beliefs, values, and identity with a residue of guilt and shame, such that he must reckon with his troubling experiences. “Moral injury,” Reverend Rita Nakashima Brock says, “is an inner anguish that can lead to you feeling like you’re not a good person and if anybody ever figures that out, they’re never going to love you again.”
Moral injury amplifies fear and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress and presents even when what one did or witnessed was warranted and unavoidable, when the call of duty entails harming others on the battlefield.
War is a minefield of moral wounding, and some situations set it off more than others: when a commanding officer gives an order that affects the survival of others, or a medic is unable to care for all who were harmed, or an enlisted soldier fails to report an unethical event. In each case an individual may second guess his decisions regardless of the moral bind he was in.
In Ken Burns’ documentary series The Vietnam War, John Musgrave, who served in the 1st Battalion 9th Marines, explained his experience with the moral complexities of combat. “I only killed one human being in Vietnam,” he said, talking about the first man he killed in the war. Beset with guilt, he thought he’d go insane if he had to keep it up for a year. When he saw a fellow Marine step on a land mine, he made a deal: “I will waste as many gooks… wax as many dinks… smoke as many zips as I can find,” he said. “But I ain’t gonna kill anybody.”
That objectifying mindset, which he says is necessary for sanity in war, needs deprogramming before a soldier can truly come home, not only to his friends and loved ones, but to himself.
Emotional Distance
Unlike my father and grandfather, I’ve never worn a uniform. As a teenager I read in the Book of Mormon that “the preaching of the word had a… more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword…” (Alma 31:5) and thought to myself, this is how Dad and I are different. Although I had a sense even then that I was more poet than warrior, and that my influence in the world would involve my love of language, it would be at least another decade or so before I set off on an adventure to uncover the values and worldview that are my own.
The night I watched my father flail in bed he woke me up several times screaming. After the fourth time I gave up on sleep, grabbed my tablet, and typed the keywords “ptsd vietnam retirement” into Google, finding evidence of a trend in earlier era veterans seeking help for the first time for symptoms of post-traumatic stress. My dad had just retired from his career as an executive in the defense industry, and he, like many others, had fenced off his past with busyness and workaholism. But now a slower pace of life and fewer demands were leaving his psychological perimeter vulnerable to ambush.
The next morning I called my mom to tell her what had happened. “Oh, this started a few months ago,” she said. A day later she called to say they had spent the night in the ER. While thrashing in bed during another night terror, Dad had split his lip on the corner of a nightstand.
My dad and I started to drift apart. A month earlier I’d left my promising media career in New York City and the church in which I was raised. I was questioning my inherited model of masculinity: Why do we equate success with wealth? When is it no longer admirable to fend off feelings in order to press on? And what does it even mean to be a good man?
Amid this upheaval I joined the executive team of a fast-growing, venture-backed software company in Utah. I’d grown up wanting to be a commander—not on the battlefield but in business—and despite a pivot I was still on track. But my paradigm was evolving. My heart wasn’t in it, not for long at least, and the growing dissonance I felt eventually became unbearable to my soul. I attempted to explain my decision to leave, but it was hard for my father to understand. Yet this change in direction ended up initiating me as a storyteller and healer.
Closer Than Close
Two months ago my dad went to the Salt Lake City VA hospital for congestive heart failure. When I arrived at his room in the telemetry ward, he was grimacing and unable to stand up from a chair or get into bed on his own. “Did I tell you about PTSD,” he said under the fluorescent lights, “I signed the paperwork to start the process.” A week before his scheduled stay, he had admitted—like an outlaw turning himself in after years of evading arrest—to suffering from post-traumatic stress. The next step would be an evaluation to qualify for increased benefits.
After a week, without consistent progress and high on painkillers, he was pensive and wondered aloud whether he’s a good man. That’s when I did something I did not anticipate: I asked him if we could pray together. “I’d love that,” he said. We clasped hands and for the first time since I left the church 13 years ago, I prayed to our Heavenly Father. In that instant the separation between me and God and Dad disappeared, for the distress we call moral injury is, in fact, the evidence of a conscience, of the sacred humanity that no amount of atrocity can tarnish.
In our secular age, a restoration of religious rites for returning warriors may seem outlandish or reserved for those committed to their parishes and synagogues and mosques. But the task, as I see it, transcends faith tradition and asks us wherever we live to respond soulfully to the needs of individual veterans, to enable them to gather amongst themselves, to give them a transition space, between service and homecoming, to heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and to reconnect them to community with genuine gratitude for their sacrifice, regardless of our stance on war, the policies of an administration, or partisan differences. What might this look like?
An Integrated Approach
We need the best of modern science and ancient wisdom to forge an integrated approach to combat trauma, post-traumatic stress, and moral injury, one couched within a life path for those who continue to identify as a warrior long after being discharged from military service.
The healing has to be holistic, spreading through body, mind, and spirit, through the full spectrum of our human-divinity. Here are the layers in a comprehensive protocol:
Nervous system regulation. Nature, coherence breathing, cold exposure, laughter, dancing, appropriate touch, and other activities tone the vagus nerve and elevate mood.
Brain rewiring. Gratitude journaling, positive visualizations, and techniques from cognitive-behavioral therapy reaffirm more helpful pathways in the brain.
Mindfulness. Gently noticing sensations as they come and go without interpreting their meaning sends a message to the brain that experiencing them is not dangerous.
Experiential therapy. A capacity to stay with the intense discomfort that arises when recalling traumatic memories modifies those memories and the emotional learning.
Resting as Awareness. Gradually a fragmented sense of self gives way to the realization that the one experiencing these parts is already whole—is Wholeness itself.
Unique expression. This undivided Self expresses through the integrated body-mind in ways that are unique, spontaneous, and appropriate to the moment.
This protocol is inspired by patterns in programs and practices such as Primal Trust, Integral Polarity Practice, Aletheia’s coaching methodology, and Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking Dharma. Though each layer strengthens a foundation for lasting healing and transformation, the application is not necessarily linear, as any part of the stack may be relevant at any time.
But implementing this protocol within a scientific-materialist worldview stunts the results. Belonging to a community of practice with an overt spiritual framework—even a shared theology—is itself potent medicine. If we, as a country, are serious about caring for our veterans and their families, we must restore the link between religion and healing by offering sacred rituals within the context of faith groups that do not disband once the program is over.