ABSTRACT
To better understand when and why military moral injury arises, one should first ask: how come so many soldiers do not develop moral injury? This chapter explores how Dutch veterans made sense of their deployment and moral challenges related to their profession. The veterans’ stories indicate that soldiers generally do not experience as much moral tension as one might expect considering their circumstances, and when they do, they are often able to manage the tensions by means of justifying simplifications. They tell themselves that ‘some things just happen in war’ or employ formulas such as ‘I just have to follow orders’, ‘it was him or me’ or ‘I treat them like they treat me’. Also, they are generally able to resolve possible tensions arising from being both a soldier and a civilian by compartmentalizing their military and civilian selves, prioritizing the former in military contexts while allowing the latter to supersede in others. Foreshadowing the subsequent chapters, this chapter concludes that such a belief may work in many cases as a self-fulfilling prophecy but also may exacerbate confusion and distress when conflicts turn out to be truly irresolvable, thus creating the risk of moral injury.
