'Untold War' author sees guilt as a key component of military humanity

SALT LAKE CITY — Suck it up. Truck on. And live in deprivation.

Today's form of the stoicism known to ancient philosophers thrives in contemporary military culture, says Georgetown philosophy professor Nancy Sherman.

She was surrounded by this mindset while developing an ethics program at the U.S. Naval Academy. She wrote about the connections she saw in a book published in 2005 titled "Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind."

But she found the warriors' stoic armor is not particularly adaptive to civilian life. And with the United States embroiled in protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she decided to look behind the curtain of the stoic military culture and mindset.

"I wanted to think more about what it was to go to war, to deploy and to come home," she said. "I wanted to follow the arc of the emotions in some way."

The more time she spent interviewing veterans, the more obvious it became there was an elephant in the room that often went either unmentioned or unlabeled: guilt.

There's lucky guilt felt by escaping the calamities or hardships comrades have had to face; accident guilt for bad things that happened for which there was no obvious fault; survivor guilt for being alive when comrades perished; and collateral damage guilt, the complex result of war where civilians are frequently hurt because they and the combatants are mixed, and where there are no clear battle lines that separate neighborhood markets from battlefield mayhem.

There is even a civilians' guilt for people who see men and women in uniform, perhaps at the airport, who are a reminder of a secure life while others are at risk. "They don't know what's going on in their minds and say 'poor guys' or 'poor women.' They don't know how to express their own guilt at being safe when others are so exposed."

Interviews with veterans to give voice to their experiences resulted in Sherman's most recent book, "The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of our Soldiers." She talked about the experience researching the book during an interview at Westminster College on Thursday, where she was scheduled to lecture about the book in the evening as part of the Kim T. Adamson Lecture Series on International Studies.

Not all warriors return from battle beaten up and damaged. "Many come home very healthy," she said.