Moral Injury and Soldiers in Conflict

Moral Injury and Soldiers in Conflict

Author: Tine Molendijk

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-16

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1000365077

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book advances an interdisciplinary understanding of moral injury by analyzing the stories of military veterans of combat and peace missions. In the past decade, the concept of moral injury has emerged to address the potential moral impact of deployment. This book contributes to an interdisciplinary conceptualization of moral injury while, at the same time, critically evaluating the concept’s premises and implications. It paints an urgent and compassionate picture of the moral impact of soldiers’ deployment experience and the role of political practices and public perceptions in moral injury. It does so by drawing on the experiences of close to a hundred Dutch veterans deployed to Bosnia (Srebrenica) and Afghanistan, and analyzing their stories from the perspectives of psychology, philosophy, theology and social sciences. Ultimately, this book advances the understanding of moral, political and societal dimensions of moral injury and contributes to practical efforts aimed at its prevention. This book will be of much interest to students of ethics and war, cultural anthropology, conflict studies and international relations.


Conflict

Conflict

Author: Neil D. Shortland

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-02

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0190623454

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Conflict: How Soldiers Make Impossible Decisions is about making hard choices--where all outcomes are potentially negative. The authors draw on interviews conducted with soldiers about the situations they faced and the decisions they made at war. These are vivid and sometimes distressing stories. They form the data from which the authors explore the cognitive processes associated with choice, commitment to action and (sometimes) error, as well as goal directed thinking, innovation and courage. By referring to real cases, Conflict invites readers to consider their own responses under extreme circumstances and ask themselves how they would choose between difficult options. In doing so this book will go some way to helping readers understand what it feels like when choosing between least-worst decisions.


War Surgery

War Surgery

Author: Christos Giannou

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Accompanying CD-ROM contains graphic footage of various war wound surgeries.


What Every Person Should Know About War

What Every Person Should Know About War

Author: Chris Hedges

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1416583149

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Acclaimed New York Times journalist and author Chris Hedges offers a critical -- and fascinating -- lesson in the dangerous realities of our age: a stark look at the effects of war on combatants. Utterly lacking in rhetoric or dogma, this manual relies instead on bare fact, frank description, and a spare question-and-answer format. Hedges allows U.S. military documentation of the brutalizing physical and psychological consequences of combat to speak for itself. Hedges poses dozens of questions that young soldiers might ask about combat, and then answers them by quoting from medical and psychological studies. • What are my chances of being wounded or killed if we go to war? • What does it feel like to get shot? • What do artillery shells do to you? • What is the most painful way to get wounded? • Will I be afraid? • What could happen to me in a nuclear attack? • What does it feel like to kill someone? • Can I withstand torture? • What are the long-term consequences of combat stress? • What will happen to my body after I die? This profound and devastating portrayal of the horrors to which we subject our armed forces stands as a ringing indictment of the glorification of war and the concealment of its barbarity.


War: How Conflict Shaped Us

War: How Conflict Shaped Us

Author: Margaret MacMillan

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1984856146

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Is peace an aberration? The New York Times bestselling author of Paris 1919 offers a provocative view of war as an essential component of humanity. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Margaret MacMillan has produced another seminal work. . . . She is right that we must, more than ever, think about war. And she has shown us how in this brilliant, elegantly written book.”—H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity. Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control? Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves.


Why Soldiers Miss War

Why Soldiers Miss War

Author: Nolan Peterson

Publisher: Casemate

Published: 2019-09-19

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781612007731

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ask most combat veterans to name the worst experience of their lives, and they'll probably tell you it was war. But ask them to choose the best experience of their life, and they'll usually say it was war, too. For someone who has not been to war, this is nearly impossible to understand. The spectrum of emotions experienced by a combat veteran is far wider than that experienced in civilian life and for that reason it can be hard for a veteran to re-assimilate to civilian life. Ask a combat veteran about this, it's a common feeling.What is it about war that soldiers miss? This is a question that every civilian should try to understand. Weaving together a wide range of stories from the flight deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier off Syria to climbing a forbidden Himalayan pass into Tibet, this moving and insightful book explains one of the most everlasting human pursuits - war. But its focus isn't solely war; it is also about coming home and confronting another kind of struggle, which we all share--the search for happiness.In this collection, Peterson writes of war from the perspective of both a combatant and a witness taking the reader from combat missions over Afghanistan as an Air Force special operations pilot to the frontlines against ISIS in Iraq, and the trench and tank battles of the war in Ukraine. Interweaving his frontline reports with a narrative about his own transformation from a combat pilot to a war journalist, Peterson explores a timeless paradox - why does coming home from war feel like such a disappointment?


The War for the Common Soldier

The War for the Common Soldier

Author: Peter S. Carmichael

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-11-02

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 1469643103

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war. Digging deeply into his soldiers' writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was "a common soldier" but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers' experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.


The Deaths of Others

The Deaths of Others

Author: John Tirman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-07-01

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0199831491

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Americans are greatly concerned about the number of our troops killed in battle--33,000 in the Korean War; 58,000 in Vietnam; 4,500 in Iraq--and rightly so. But why are we so indifferent, often oblivious, to the far greater number of casualties suffered by those we fight and those we fight for? This is the compelling, largely unasked question John Tirman answers in The Deaths of Others. Between six and seven million people died in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians. And yet Americans devote little attention to these deaths. Other countries, however, do pay attention, and Tirman argues that if we want to understand why there is so much anti-Americanism around the world, the first place to look is how we conduct war. We understandably strive to protect our own troops, but our rules of engagement with the enemy are another matter. From atomic weapons and carpet bombing in World War II to napalm and daisy cutters in Vietnam and beyond, our weapons have killed large numbers of civilians and enemy soldiers. Americans, however, are mostly ignorant of these methods, believing that American wars are essentially just, necessary, and "good." Trenchant and passionate, The Deaths of Others forces readers to consider the tragic consequences of American military action not just for Americans, but especially for those we fight against.


From Soldiers to Citizens

From Soldiers to Citizens

Author: Dr Chris Alden

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-03-28

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1409498549

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Demilitarization of conflict and society is crucial to building sustainable peace in countries emerging from the scourge of civil war. As longstanding conflicts come to an end, processes which facilitate the potentially volatile transition from formal peace to social peace are critically important. At the heart of the exercise is the necessity of transforming the culture and the instruments of war - demilitarization - including disarming, demobilizing and reintegrating (DDR) former combatants into society. This volume represents the first in-depth and comprehensive discussion of reintegration of former combatants in war to peace transitions. In addition to a systematic reflection and review of existing literature on DDR, the authors devised and applied a field research methodology to studying the reintegration of former combatants in Angola with potentially significant implications on the design and implementation of DDR programmes. The volume is written for academics, students and practitioners focusing on war to peace transitions and post-conflict issues.