“To be in war is to be morally injured”

David Wood. Photo: davidwood-journalist.com

Few journalists have witnessed the worst of human conflict with the clarity – and moral unease – of David Wood. A Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, he has spent more than three decades embedded with soldiers on front lines from remote battlefields to bomb-shattered capitals, documenting not only the physical toll of battle but its corrosive effect on the human spirit. Raised a pacifist, Wood did not set out to cover wars, yet found himself in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, confronting scenes of such brutality that they left scars of their own. His reporting has helped bring the concept of “moral injury” – the deep psychic wound caused when one’s own moral code is violated – into the public conversation.

VAZHA TAVBERIDZE: “In jungle clearings, they would bring prisoners, and the commander said on this one occasion… they said: oh sir, what should we do with the prisoners? And he said: oh, kill them. And I thought: I didn’t hear that. I didn’t want to hear this. And there is no way you can change that scenario – you can’t stop people being murdered in front of you. I can conjure up the most appalling thoughts. Doesn’t have to be at night, I can have those thoughts sitting in a taxi, or in a train, going to the English countryside…” — This is from Don McCullin, the legendary war photographer. Is that a prime example of moral injury that you have written so much about?

DAVID WOOD: Here’s the thing about moral injury, and it took me a long time — 20 years or more in war — to recognize what this is. To be in war is to be morally injured. So we all walk around with a sense of what’s right in life. It’s our own moral compass, our collection of beliefs, and we learn it as kids. These are various things that we learn from our parents, from church, synagogue, mosque, from elders. As we go through life, we collect a sense of what’s right. And in war, that sense of what’s right — your own moral beliefs — are violated every day, every minute, all the time. That’s what war is. And so, to be in war, as Mr. McCullin has pointed out, is to be morally injured. And then the question, of course, becomes what do you do with that? How do you respond? How do you endure? And I think that’s especially germane to the war in Ukraine. I can’t imagine the degree of moral injury among not just Ukrainian fighters, but the civilian population.

How relatable is suffering from a moral injury, moral scars, to you personally? You yourself were raised as a pacifist, yet you chose to dedicate a large part of your life to documenting and reporting on wars. What contributed to that decision and how much bigger the shock was the reality of war to you?

Very relatable. When I was growing up, we believed that war wasn’t effective, and that – we studied Gandhi and the power of nonviolence – and I was quite taken with that idea of nonviolent resistance. I didn’t choose to become a war correspondent. I was working at Time magazine in Boston and Chicago, and then they sent me to Nairobi to cover Africa. And I didn’t know it at the time, but what the job ended up being was to cover all the wars that were going on. So I just went. It wasn’t a conscious choice of mine.

I found two things right off the bat. One was that fear is physical – I was in a little village that was hit with an air strike. And there were bombs and strafing and rockets, and a lot of people were killed, and I had trouble standing up. My knees just turned to jelly. And I didn’t understand that about fear before – how physical it is.

The other thing I learned pretty quickly was that, well, let me tell you what happened. I stumbled upon a massacre where there had been a lot of women and children not just killed, but brutally killed, and the shock was enormous. Because I had grown up in a very peaceful place, in a loving family, and I always thought or assumed that the world was a good place. And then I got to that place – it was an African village, not just a war camp. In Africa, when you joined the rebel army, you brought your wives and your children with you. And so the enemy came and shot and killed a lot of people, and then they set the fields on fire so that the bodies burned.

I found a letter years later, written to my parents about that trip that I took, and I said, “Really, nothing much happened.” Back then, I couldn’t find the words to describe what I felt. I had nightmares about that, and I couldn’t speak about it for a long time. I had no way to process that. But, you know, one reaction I had was that I wanted a battalion of marines to come wreak vengeance on the people who did this. I wanted revenge.

The other thing that I found about those early experiences in war was that it was exciting. And this is a dirty little secret of people who cover war. It’s exciting, it’s thrilling, it’s dramatic, it’s great journalism. And that was sort of a wake-up call for me – I’m still a pacifist, but you know, I saw why people do this. I saw the other side as well, very much so.

There was a small but very telling sentence in your own bio where you write that “David Wood here has been scared much of his professional life.” Short, but telling.

Well, it is true. I don’t think you can be in war and not be scared. What I found out as a journalist is that my worry always was: “How can I convey what’s going on here?” I have spent my career writing about not grand strategy, or the wars overall, but instead writing about individual soldiers. Who are they? Why do they do what they do? What is it like for them?

And so that’s hard work in the middle of a war, to sort of assemble your cast, to capture some of the dialogue, to capture the flavour of what’s going on. What does it smell like? What does it feel like? And so in that sense, yes, I’ve been scared. But I’ve also been very busy.

How big is that hill of the overall senselessness of war that I suppose you have to climb while at the same time doing your professional work?

That’s a very, very good question. I learned from combat soldiers that they, by and large, are less interested in the course of the war than they are with what’s right in front of them – their own little piece of it, as far as they could see or yell, that’s sort of their world. You know, when I was deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, my editors back in Washington were always saying, “What do soldiers think about the war? Do they think it’s going well or not?” I said they can’t answer that question. That’s not what their daily life is. Their daily life is: “How do I avoid getting killed, and how soon can I go home?” That’s the whole thing.

So I leave it to others – politicians and generals and strategists – to figure out what the course of the war is. But I think for the individual soldier, it’s very self-centred and local.

Is it moral injuries that make people break? Or snap? That make one desert, for example?

From my experience, bad things happen to people when they’re not part of a unit, a community, a group – when they somehow feel like they’re not connected to this close-knit band of soldiers. Then there’s no sanction against doing bad things. Without the sense of devotion to each other, which dictates that you should not desert, that you should not shirk… if you’re outside of that group, if you’re outside of that bond, then what’s to hold you in that role as a combatant? Nothing.

I also think that if you’re not part of that tight group, things happen in war that are so horrifying that it can drive people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do. I have seen soldiers so revolted by what they have seen – and maybe done – that they’ve just said: I’m not fighting anymore. I’m done. Whatever you want to do to me is not as bad as continuing to do what I’m doing. And you know, the sanctions against that are pretty severe. People get shot for desertion.

You’ve spent much of your career documenting the human cost of war – not just the physical, but the moral and psychological toll. Although most of this has been in American wars. When you observe Russia’s war in Ukraine, what strikes you most in this regard?

What struck me about the war in Ukraine, what makes it different, I think, is the stark reality of Russia’s unprovoked invasion, but also Russia’s focusing violence on civilians – on apartment buildings, on hospitals and schools. The scale of brutality is beyond anything that I have witnessed myself in over a 35-year-long career, and I think kind of unique in the annals of modern warfare.

And my reaction, as I watch this unfold, is this creeping, ever-growing fear for what happens to the Ukrainian people. Because the suffering that I’ve seen, the moral injury that I’ve seen over those long years, I think pales in comparison to what people in Ukraine are experiencing, year after year after year.

Look, I know there isn’t any other way around it. Bad things happen in war, and you know, you can’t escape it. Children are killed, people are killed, maimed. Society is damaged. And yet, the collective injury of those events in Ukraine really beggars belief. It would be hard to imagine if one asked you to, and yet we need not imagine, as we are watching it with our own eyes every day. It’s almost broadcast live.

Eventually, the war will end as all wars do. However it ends – whether it’s a peace agreement, or a ceasefire, or the Russians just leave – it will end. The problem is that peace, real peace, depends on overcoming those moral injuries and accepting the humanity of people on the other side. Unless that happens, there won’t be real peace. And I worry about how people will deal with that.

How tall an order is that to ask of Ukrainians?

Huge. It’s huge. For reconciliation, for real reconciliation, like I said, you have to accept the humanity of people on the other side. There has to be an element of forgiveness. How could I ask anyone in Ukraine to forgive the Russians for what they’ve done? You know, it’s beyond reckoning.

One thing that I have seen that can help is a truth commission. It’s a concept which gives a platform or an opportunity for people to relate their experiences. And maybe this is my take as a journalist, but I think people telling their stories can be so powerful. For people’s voices to be heard can be really powerful. It can be mending. So maybe that lies in Ukraine’s future. But I do worry what the future holds – even after the fighting stops.

A question on the moral injury of the aggressor: what of those Russian soldiers who do believe in the war, who buy into the propaganda, who embrace Russia’s imperial vision as a righteous cause?

Well, I think it’s unavoidable that they too have moral injuries. But what they do with that is something different.

To bring an example of what happened in Africa. If you find yourself in combat and you kill a child who has picked up a gun and is a threat, in whatever circumstances – that’s a moral injury. And I have to think that any human being who finds himself doing that experiences some kind of moral injury.

And I think, you know, for those Russian soldiers who have bought into the propaganda, who believe that they are on this historic mission of extending the Russian empire, and that this is a glorious thing to be doing – I guess you can see how they would justify some of the horrible things that they’ve done.

But I wonder, you know, what happens when they go home and they’re remembering: Oh man… I killed two elderly women in the street for no reason. Was that a heroic act in defence of Russia’s imperial glory? Did I make Russia greater by shooting Ukrainian kids?

A lot of moral injury happens after soldiers return home. Once they’re out of the combat zone. They’re out of that moral universe where you can kill a child and that’s somehow okay. Now they’re back in civilian society – and killing a child is an unspeakable horror.

On the other side of the trenches, there are also thousands of Russian soldiers – many of them young conscripts or forcibly mobilized men – that were sent to fight a war they may not understand or believe in. They are just corralled into it, like cattle, and then sent into a meat grinder. How deep will the psychic damage run among those ranks – and how different is it from what we’ve seen in western conflicts?

The West does not do that. At least doesn’t do that anymore.

First of all, people who are sent into war unwillingly don’t make very good soldiers. They make terrible soldiers. They are the first to break, they are the first to run. What that does to them inside, I can’t imagine. I mean, you would hate your government for doing that to you. You’d hate your fellow soldier. You’d hate everybody. It’s a war crime and a moral crime, to drag somebody into combat like that.

Back to the Ukrainians – you know why I alluded earlier to the fact that your book about moral injury covered only American wars, fought by Americans? None of those were in self-defence. Ukraine’s is. How big a difference does that make? What do the moral scars gained in a war where you fight for your own land, for your own family, look like? How different do they look? Are they easier to heal or more difficult?

Very, very good questions. If a nation feels like they prevailed in a war of self-defence, against an aggressor, that’s a very powerful and all-encompassing kind of thing. And I think it would strengthen society against the kinds of moral injuries that we’ve been talking about – it’s a soothing balm of sorts.

But what if they don’t win? What if there is a stalemate that turns into a frozen conflict that is going to last for years? Then I don’t think we know.

You can look at the war in Korea, which ended in a stalemate, and 60 to 70 years on – in the south at least – people went their own way, and the trauma of losing contact with family members who are in the north has slowly passed as the generations have passed.

But in the case of Ukraine, if the war ends in a frozen stalemate, with the threat of renewed fighting constantly hanging over people’s shoulders, I don’t know how you withstand that. I don’t know how society responds to that kind of trauma. But I worry about it.

I think it’s even more important than the physical rebuilding, to do what we can to help assuage those feelings of moral injury, moral scars, which have got to be gigantic.

What about the Ukrainian POWs who are returning home with harrowing stories about how the Russians treated them? We had one of them interviewed recently. He couldn’t even fathom forgiveness, in however a distant future. I don’t want to forget, he said, let alone forgive. I want revenge and nobody can deny me that.

I don’t think there can be a lasting peace in Ukraine, between Ukraine and Russia, unless there is some kind of atonement on the part of Russia for what it’s done. And yet, I can’t imagine that anything that the Russians could do would satisfy the gentleman you interviewed.

I got to know an American bomber pilot from World War Two who was captured – shot down over Japan – and was tortured in Japanese prison. Unlike the Ukrainian soldier, who I presume was defending his homeland… I don’t know how I feel about that, because he was dropping bombs on Japanese civilians, which, it’s not okay. The torture was not okay either. But he held on to that anger for decades, until probably 1990 or 95, so 40 years. He hated the Japanese.

Then he met – in a structured way – one of the Japanese prison guards. And they embraced and forgave each other and hugged and cried. And he let all of his anger go. It was wonderful to see. Very emotional. But to hold on to that – having spent your entire life holding on to that anger – can’t have been good for you. It’s a moral injury in itself, carrying that huge burden of anger on your shoulders all your life. I don’t think you can live a normal life carrying around that kind of anger.

But obviously it is not for me to say, well, why don’t you just forgive the Russians for what they did? Who am I to say that? Absolutely no. I can’t. Nobody can say that, as he said. Words fail. What the people in Ukraine have been going through is just unspeakable. And I think we need to think hard about how do we help people through that? What can we do? And we need to start now. I think it’s time – even while the fighting is going on – to think about the post-war, and what that’s going to look like. There’s not just the physical reconstruction that needs to happen. Glossing over the moral injuries will not do the people of Ukraine a service.

David Wood is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has covered war and conflict around the world for more than 35 years. He has been a journalist since 1970, spending time as a staff correspondent successively for Time, the Los Angeles Times, Newhouse News Service, The Baltimore Sun and AOL’s Politics Daily. You can read more about him here.

Vazha Tavberidze is a Georgian journalist based in Tbilisi who regularly contributes to New Eastern Europe.

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conflict, journalism, mental health, Russian invasion of Ukraine, War