Violence of this magnitude is both infectious and given to mimicry and repetition--its contagion knows no boundaries and it expands exponentially. Absolutely compelling, it is ambivalent, being both agony and ecstasy. The violence of soul that war creates is self-transcendent and religious in nature. Snatched from the commonplace of life, the combat soldier is "born again" into a different plane of existence from which there is no return. The remembrance of war is a liturgy, a painful yet almost sacramental re-enactment of the mighty acts of violence through which the soldier entered this new life. This re-enactment takes place through memories which constantly and painfully recur. The jealous god of war
intrudes upon its adherents through a lifetime of dreams and waking thoughts, stirring up embers of the total rage that once consumed their souls.

Infectious, compelling, transcendent and transforming, violence continues to demand obeisance at the deepest levels of the soul. The veteran, having undergone a "conversion experience" into the realm of violence, cannot and will not depart from that domain. In a paraphrase of J.R. Oppenheimer's famous comment when he witnessed the first nuclear explosion, it can be said: "The veteran has known violence and that knowledge cannot be taken away." The tree of that knowledge, like the tree in the Garden of Eden, entices and intrigues for it provides access to the godlike power of life and death--but its fruit is poisonous beyond all others.

The knowledge of violence is a revelation, an initiation into the unspeakable--the unthinkable--mystery of good and evil. Like all revelation, it is only partial, for it promises further disclosure, deeper understanding, and more power. The veteran continues to search for that which remains hidden beneath the veil of this transcendent experience, while hoping somehow that further revelation might include a restoration to innocence, a return to the garden. As life unfolds for former soldiers, it becomes clear that no return is possible--but the quest for peace of soul continues.

No one knows better than the soldier that war has irrevocable and enduring consequences. People are dead and maimed, homes and villages destroyed. Personal responsibility for such actions cannot and should not be denied. The great moral discovery in a combat zone is of one's own limitless capacity for malice, and, by extrapolation, the unsuspected depths and pervasive nature of human depravity. A veteran must live with this knowledge for a lifetime.

The attributes of violence are authentic and enticing, but the effects of violence, both upon society and upon the soul, are clearly evil--evil beyond anything else in human experience. And yet there is a stubborn refusal to accept evil of this magnitude as the final reality. The human spirit both demands and understands that there be some reality beyond violence. This realization is the beginning of spiritual healing.

Propensities of nature and grace assert themselves so that conscience, wisdom, weariness, religious impulses, and a desire for healing: all conspire in a struggle to dethrone violence from its primacy. In this pursuit of peace the subtle contour of another revelation emerges: a disclosure that violence may be only penultimate, that another reality might instead be definitive. At this point the issue becomes truly religious, amounting to a clash between two contenders for ultimacy. There takes place within the soul a practical testing of these two alternative and contradictory religious hypotheses.

Psychotherapy provides a formidable critique of violence. It allows the veteran to revisit the brutality of the original event in a benign and supportive context. It discloses the futility and destructiveness of clinging to combat survival mechanisms.

Psychiatry offers remedies for the biochemical residue of violence. Therapy is an essential step in healing the wounds of war for a great many veterans. Therapy loosens the grip of violence upon the soul but is unable finally to dislodge it. The final displacement of war's violence requires a transforming experience that exceeds in magnitude and significance the original transformation into that realm.

This new transformation must be more infectious, compelling, transcendent and transforming than is violence. It must be expressed in a liturgy. It must be a community experience. The second transformation requires a peace that transforms violence itself, a peace that passes understanding.

John Fergueson, Marine combat veterans of Vietnam, also an Episcopal priest, is convinced that some combat events create a transcendent experience of evil. The experience is one of true ecstasis—ecstasy in the classic sense. In ecstasy, one seems to transcend oneself. The other self is created in what is often a dissociative state.

A person then must live in both selves, but sometimes there is insufficient energy. The person goes back and lives in the evil self, by continually reliving the experience, by going back over it again and again. For Fergueson, PTSD is the liturgy and worship that victims go through of their encounter with evil. It is what they do in order to be empowered to deal with their fragmentation.

In any case it is true that the residue of war remains entrenched and often intractable because it was etched upon the soul through an event that took a person outside of himself in a moment of massive violence. Another self was created in a moment of ecstasis which bore the semblance of a religious transformation. It was a conversion experience, an introduction into a new realm wherein goodness was subverted. The only effective remedy is a counter-transformation, a second and more powerful ecstasis than the first. This is a lifelong journey. There must be an experience of transcendent good which is more powerful than the evil experience.

Combat creates a dark night of the soul. And this is a classic religious term. Veterans came very close to experiencing a state of soul which is described throughout the literature of Christian mysticism. The spirit enters a period of bleakness, a night of the soul. God is grasped only as if in a cloud--a cloud of unknowing. Religious good feelings, joy and enthusiasm all disappear. This experience of the mystics is the biblical experience lived to its fullest extent. This is quite biblical. Christians, in following Christ, also must cry out with him on the Cross: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" Veterans can get that spiritual place very rapidly and at a very young age.

For the mystics, God is found in the depths of one's soul only after a period of apparent absence (dark night, or cloud of unknowing are terms commonly employed to describe this state). The dark night experience shatters shallow religious images and practices. Religious enthusiasm disappears. God no longer seems to be present either in one's own life or in the world. Often one is almost overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy and even of sin and guilt. Eventually, through a very painful process, one becomes aware again of God's presence. Now, however, the presence arises from the midst of a deep and abiding "cloud." The emptiness and desolation of life, the sense of personal inadequacy and sin can become points of contact with God. But this takes a good bit of understanding, lots of guidance and some very hard work.

This new awareness gradually becomes one of God's pervasive and gracious presence. A far more profound faith has replaced the one which was lost. Through the grace of God, one comes to perceive the Easter experience of the risen Christ emerging from the darkest corners of the soul. The fog of war embedded in the soul can be transformed into the cloud of unknowing in which God is perceived in the deepest parts of the cloud.

Vets understand these concepts through personal experience. Understanding the relationship between the veterans' journey and that of the Christian mystics has been helpful to many. Vets have undergone a journey of the spirit not unlike that described by the mystics. They have had consciousness altering experiences. Our modern world offers a number of these: War, holocaust, genocide, massive starvation, nuclear awareness.

To make this journey a fruitful one, we must first unmask a religious underpinning that is most detrimental to veterans’ spiritual health. This is the myth of American innocence; it is the belief in American exceptionalism. It is a form of civil religion that goes back to 17th century England and was transported to the American colonies. It was best expressed in a veterans group by a Vietnam helicopter door gunner. "Before I went to Vietnam," he said, "I believed in Jesus Christ and John Wayne, but in Vietnam both went down the tubes."

The John Wayne and Jesus Christ connection amounts to a national myth. According to this myth, our nation is incapable of fighting an immoral war. The myth goes even further. We believe that the wars we fight must not merely be just, but they must be waged in behalf of a holy cause. For us war must be a crusade. In a holy war,we tell ourselves, the nasty business of killing is really God's work. Get on with it and God smiles on you. In Vietnam and again in the present war, that myth is unmasked.

The Jesus Christ and John Wayne myth is pervasive. It lies at the heart of American self-definition as an article of religious faith. Our pilgrim forebears felt that they had been called to a religious destiny unique in human history. John Winthrop (1588-1649), who was to become the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, set a tone and direction to American life that remains almost unaltered to this day. Before disembarking in Salem Harbor in 1630, Winthrop reminded the settlers: "[We] must consider that we shall be as a City set upon a Hill, the [eyes] of all people are [upon] us." In that moment the myth was born: America was to be a chosen people among the nations of the earth. It was to be a moral example to the rest of the world. The corollary was also implied by Winthrop: the rest of the world must keep its eyes upon us and follow our lead, for "the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory.…"

Scholars call the mythology of a nation its "civil religion." Every tribe, people, and nation has some sort of civil religion. What distinguishes the American version from others is its dependence on the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures for its language and concepts. Though the United States owes its cultural origins as much to the philosophy, laws, and ideas of ancient Greece and Rome as it does to biblical religion, we have never acknowledged this fact. We prefer to express our self-understanding in terms of the traditional biblical faith. Civil religion in America seems to resemble biblical religion, but in fact it is very different. Our civil religion convinces us that our national goals are transcendent and beyond question. It diminishes other nations and inverts religion, constructing its own model of God.

While sometimes war is the lesser of two evils, and combat sometimes a necessity, we don't usually discuss war in these terms--the terms of the classic just war tradition. We usually revert to our civil religion. There has never been a greater need for a public conversation about religion and war than there is now.

Returning veterans are aware of the disjuncture between battlefield realities and this religious belief system. The journey out of the night becomes possible, when civil religion is laid to rest.
Liturgies, retreats, sacramental ministry, conferences, various approaches to prayer, Scripture study, spiritual reading, and use of the various religious and spiritual traditions are more fruitful without the impediment of civil religion.

Twelve Step Spiritual Recovery Program, or The Spiritual Bootcamp. Steps 11 & 12, living out GOYA, ACVOW

Step 11. We committed ourselves to completing the final mission of a combat soldier: becoming bearers of peace, prayerfulness, happiness and rejoicing, resolving to go behind the "enemy lines" of fear, mistrust, selfishness, greed, hatreds which surround us in our culture, confident that, as warriors of peace, we will overcome these barriers using the weapons of peace, mercy and kindness which we have been given.

Step 12. Where before we were infected with the contagion of violence, we will now spread to others the contagion of peace which we have received, planning our mission carefully, including all those within the ambit of our lives.

While only God can bring about the ultimate transformation of humanity and the final peace which is the final destiny of the world--the divine plan revealed in Scripture, we must continue to be agents and instruments of that divine plan.

We exist in the "not yet complete" stage of God’s plan. Only in the risen Christ has God's plan for the entire cosmos been fulfilled.

As Paul tells us "We know that the whole creation groans and suffers together until now." (Rom 8:22) We are part of that creation. We must actively wait for and allow ourselves to be open to the work of grace on an international, global scale and we must be agents of grace.

The just war tradition is only for now, but the ideal that must inform us is always before us. Peace, the final work of God, remains our goal and our vision. Paul has the last word: "And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus… And the God of peace will be with you." (Phil 4:7 & 9)