Unjust War Rev. Catie Scudera First Parish in Needham, 11/10/19 Just

Unjust War Rev. Catie Scudera First Parish in Needham, 11/10/19 Just last week, just in time for Veterans Day, New York Times editor and journalist Carol Giacomo published a report that “Suicide Has Been Deadlier Than Combat for the [U.S.] Military.” She wrote, “More than 45,000 veterans and active-duty service members have [died by suicide] in the past six years. That is more than 20 deaths a day — in other words, more suicides each year than the total American military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. The latest Pentagon figures show the suicide rate for active-duty troops across all service branches rose by over a third in five years… In 2016, veterans were one and a half times more likely to [die by suicide] than people who hadn’t served in the military… [and] the risk nearly doubles in the first year after a veteran leaves active duty.” When I think about honoring our veterans, my heart is often pulled toward tragic numbers like these. Many of our service members return home with severe physical injuries, including of the brain; mental health disorders, including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; and, horrific memories of being shot at, seeing colleagues and friends hurt or killed, or missions gone wrong against unintended targets, like civilians and children. And, after veterans return home, they may be greeted with a “Thank you for your service” — but many also notice the news reports and conversation among family and friends that draws into question whether our current incursions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere have done anything positive to secure freedom and safety “over there” or right here in America. It is the ongoing work of political scientists, philosophers, and theologians to determine when, if ever, there is a “just war.” From a religious perspective, the Roman Catholic Church has a well-defined and popularly-cited understanding of whether a war is “just.” First, a nation must have just reasons for entering war, and then, a nation must conduct war against another nation in a just manner: as examples, Catholic jus ad bellum includes having right intention, competent governmental authority, a high probability of success, and that war was a last result; jus in bello includes having proportional responses, no excessively violent or destructive weaponry, distinguishing between combatants and civilians, and exercising fair treatment of prisoners of war. The horrors of war, especially an unjustified war, can result in what some psychologists and chaplains call a “moral injury.” The term “moral injury” was Unjust War Rev. Catie Scudera First Parish in Needham, 11/10/19 popularized over twenty years ago by Dr. Jonathan Shay, a Boston-based clinical psychiatrist who worked with veterans diagnosed with PTSD. He first described “moral injury” as he treated Vietnam War veterans, specifically. Dr. Shay felt there was something different about some of his patients that couldn’t be fully explained by a PTSD diagnosis. Philosophy professor Dr. Aaron Pratt Shepherd writes that “while some symptoms of moral injury — reexperiencing the traumatic event, sleep disturbances, self-harming activities like substance abuse and recklessness, and suicidal thoughts — overlap with those of PTSD and traumatic brain injuries, there are differences. What distinguishes moral injury is a persistent sense of guilt and shame, and an ethical ‘drift,’ whereby veterans no longer have a clear sense of right and wrong, or of what makes their lives meaningful.” Syracuse University’s Moral Injury Project describes the scenarios in which soldiers may experience a moral injury; it’s essentially a list of opposites from jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Service members may experience moral injury if they: 1. Used deadly force and causing the harm or death of civilians or fellow service members; 2. Gave orders that result in the injury or death of a service member; 3. Failed to provide medical aid to an injured civilian or service member; 4. Learned of the executions of cooperating local nationals; 5. Failed to report sexual assault committed against oneself, another service member, or civilians; 6. Followed orders that were illegal or immoral; or, 7. Experienced a change in belief about the necessity or justification for war. Japanese-American theologian Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock says, “In war, it’s often your job to do those things that violate everything you were ever taught is wrong. Moral injury afflicts ordinary moral people, when no good choice is possible… Moral injury is the feeling that [it] is no longer possible to be good anymore. It is the loss of the capacity for trust and empathy, of a sense of meaning, and even of faith...” These spiritual, emotional, and physical wounds are not unfamiliar to us who have lived through the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan years, and certainly not to those who lived through the Vietnam era. There are “just war” questions for all these military actions, like, Did we send troops for valid reasons? Were our 2 Unjust War Rev. Catie Scudera First Parish in Needham, 11/10/19 actions a proportional response to harm done to our nation? Did we treat civilians and prisoners fairly? And, I do want to take a small Unitarian Universalist historic detour as we think about moral injury and the Vietnam War. In 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara gathered a team of thirty-six analysts to draft “a full history of U.S. decision-making on Vietnam” beginning in the 1940’s. The seven-thousand-page report would become known as “the Pentagon Papers.” The Papers detailed, though unknown to the American public, that the United States had been secretly involved in Vietnam’s affairs since the 1950s; that the CIA had helped depose Vietnam’s former president; that the government was using the war in Vietnam to “contain China” and Soviet communism, not liberate South Vietnam, and later, that the government continued with the war simply not to embarrass ourselves with a military loss; that the United States had expanded its bombing campaigns into neighboring Cambodia and Laos; and, that a succession of presidential administrations had lied to the public about these facts, all while we deployed nearly three-and-a- half-million American service members to Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, who worked at the think-tank RAND Corporation, began smuggling the Pentagon Papers out of his company in October 1969, 50 years ago last month. In 1971, Ellsberg began leaking the documents to friends and contacts at various national newspapers, most famously at The New York Times and The Washington Post, as we recently saw in a star-studded movie. But, the Nixon administration went after the newspapers, and none could publish the Pentagon Papers in its entirety. So, Ellsberg began looking for the right congressperson to leak the Papers to. Around the same time, Senator Mike Gravel, a Unitarian Universalist from Alaska, attempted to filibuster renewal of the draft; Ellsberg felt like he’d found his right congressperson. Another Unitarian Universalist, Ben Bagdikian, was the journalist at The Washington Post who’d known Ellsberg when they both worked at the RAND Corporation; Bagdikian was asked to help Ellsberg deliver the Pentagon Papers over to Senator Gravel. Gravel then placed the Pentagon Papers into the public record through his chairmanship of the Senate’s Building and Grounds subcommittee. However, a fellow senator blocked funding for a Senate stenographer to type up the Pentagon Papers, and Ellsberg’s plan for the Papers to become publicly available were thwarted again. 3 Unjust War Rev. Catie Scudera First Parish in Needham, 11/10/19 Gravel approached three dozen publishers with the Pentagon Papers, and was turned down by every one. Then, one of Gravel’s aides reminded him of his own denomination’s publishing house up in Boston. The Unitarian Universalist Association’s Beacon Press had already published books that condemned the United States’ involvement in Vietnam by folks like socialist historian Howard Zinn. So, Gravel called Beacon Press to ask if they were interested. As we heard from our own Ed Lane in his lecture about the Pentagon Papers, Beacon Press and the UUA decided to take up the challenge. Beacon Press director Gobin Stair recalled, “Other publishers had turned down the manuscript both for commercial reasons and out of fear, and as a free press we felt we had a responsibility to publish needed information when others would not.” Senator Gravel told our denominational magazine, the UU World, “Nobody would touch [the Papers], nobody but the Unitarians. So that really locked me in: I’m Unitarian, and I’m damn proud of it. They’ve got courage. I’m very loyal to the Unitarian Church for what they did.” In 1971, publishing the Pentagon Papers was a huge financial risk for us, because our denomination was in very bad financial shape; the UUA president at the time, Reverend Bob West, was narrowly avoiding bankruptcy by cutting funding and programming. Some of you may have attended our September Lane Lyceum on the so-called “Black Empowerment Controversy,” which included in 1970 the UUA reneging on promised funding to black Unitarian Universalist activists and organizers. This was all part of our far-reaching financial problems. The Veatch Funding Program out of the Shelter Rock Unitarian Universalist congregation on Long Island loaned one-hundred- thousand dollars to Beacon Press as “working capital” as they published the Pentagon Papers. Beacon Press also received smaller donations of support from rival publishing houses. Beacon Press is the only publisher who ever published the complete Pentagon Papers, and the four-volume set of the Papers was released in mid-October 1971. The federal government was displeased with us.

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