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Ian Fritz's memoir, What the Taliban Told Me, chronicles the author's difficulties processing his role in events that resulted in death and injury to others. Not officially diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Fritz discusses a category of non-physical harm that military experts denote as "moral injury," which he says is closer to what he suffered during his deployment in Afghanistan. But what precisely is moral injury, and in what ways does it differ from the more well-known PTSD designation?
According to Syracuse University's Moral Injury Project (cited in Fritz's book), moral injury constitutes "the damage done to one's conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one's own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct." As an airborne cryptologic linguist, Fritz identified potential ground threats to U.S. soldiers through close monitoring of Taliban ...
