Soldiers Shooting Soldiers? Never Happens:
For the past several years, David Foy, a psychology professor at Pepperdine University, has been engaged in a study on the "spiritual consequence" of participating in war. Until now, surprisingly, very few researchers have examined how war affects a soldier's sense of morality or tried to quantify it. What Foy and his colleagues have found is that specific kinds of wartime experiences — notably the unintentional killing of civilians and the failure to save others from being killed — can cause "moral injury" to a soldier, as well as psychological trauma. The complex manifestations of PTSD — jumpiness, rage, sadness — are compounded by what Foy calls "changes in one's ability to perceive themselves as capable of acting in a morally appropriate way." Men who return from combat, he says, often see themselves as "damaged goods."
