When I returned from Vietnam, I was consumed by guilt, a deep sense of having participated in something terribly wrong. It wasn’t until I read “Achilles in Vietnam” by Jonathan Shay that I could name what I was feeling. Shay, a VA psychiatrist, couldn’t make sense of a particular narrative he heard from returning Vietnam veterans. Their symptoms were different from PTSD, which primarily deals with the traumatic aspects of combat.
Shay found a striking parallel between his patients’ war experiences and those of the warriors portrayed in The Iliad, Homer’s epic poem about the Trojan War in the eighth century BC. Their condition was neither a disorder nor an illness but rather moral guilt about what they had done or an injury resulting from failed leadership. He coined the term “moral injury” to describe this condition.
Since then, moral injury has been widely recognized as a risk to veterans of all wars, especially our newer ones, from Vietnam to the present. In this essay, I would like to broaden the scope of this conversation to include not only how betrayal and failed leadership affect individuals but also how they now affect America at large.
After Vietnam, I suffered agonizing moral guilt over what we had inflicted on Vietnam, some of which I witnessed firsthand. In the name of imperialism, we killed, depending on the estimate, between 1 million and 2 million people, mostly civilians, burning down hooches and napalming civilians.
Under Trump, my moral guilt has escalated, an unwanted ghost returning from the past. It began with relatively minor Trump transgressions, such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, paving over the Rose Garden, and tearing down the East Wing.
I couldn’t name what was happening to me until Elon Musk, with his billions, eviscerated our government while raping USAID. That action alone will cause an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 additional deaths each year, according to the Center for Global Development.
That’s when it hit me. I was suffering from more than depression or hopelessness: once again, moral guilt had come to call. Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit has aptly described this malady as a “deep sense of wrongness” that can infiltrate our lives when we realize we are complicit in something seriously bad.
It gnaws at my soul that Trump is building a gigantic, gold-crusted ballroom to replace the East Wing. It’s something one would expect to see in a Las Vegas casino or a gentleman’s club straight out of the Victorian Age, built for the new owners of our country, the ultra-rich.
We can’t let them do it in our name. Even conservative icon David Brooks says it is time to hit the streets. As I write this, a mother, a neighbor, an American was shot dead by ICE while attempting to leave a protest. The next day, two migrants were shot in Portland — also while driving away from ICE.
What we have on our hands is a mad king who has surrounded himself with white nationalists and racists like Steven Miller. Things are dire: we can’t wait for impeachment. Congress must come to its senses and enforce the 25th Amendment, declaring Trump mentally unfit for office. It’s time to lock him in his romper room at Mar-a-Lago with scale-model toys of his favorite buildings, all renamed after himself.
The consequences are grave: It’s either him or us. In “Achilles in Vietnam,” Homer scholar Johannes Haubold passes on to us an ancient Greek axiom about what happens when citizens are betrayed by their leaders:
“When the commanders — ‘the shepherd of the people’ — fail to act honorably and ethically, it is said that the leaders have ‘destroyed the people.'”
Let’s not let that happen to us!
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.