Essay
by Jack Saul
The subterranean strata of U.S. wrongdoing run deep—the genocide of Native Americans, the long history of slavery and racism, the effects of xenophobia, the illegal wars of aggression around the world. Today we are faced with the question: As a society, how will we remember and respond to these many past wrongs?
Approaches that take into consideration participants’ histories—along with their experiences of physical and mental trauma, and moral injury—seem to pay off.
For the past 25 years, I have worked as a researcher and practitioner in the field of large-scale psychosocial trauma. My current project, the Moral Injuries of War, seeks to probe the moral anguish experienced by military veterans and war correspondents deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is an immersive audio installation, in which we overlay edited audio interviews and ...