Moral injury themes in combat veterans’ narrative responses from the National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study.

Abstract

Spiritual changes, or “soul wounds,” have long been described as expectable consequences of combat, useful in understanding the profound changes in many surviving warriors. However, moral injury as a research construct has only recently been introduced into the combat trauma literature (Drescher et al., 2011), and it is in the early stages of construct validation. To extend validation efforts, the current study examined National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study (NVVRS) veterans’ narrative responses to questions about the lingering effects of their combat participation for themes consistent with moral injury as reported by combat trauma experts in the Drescher et al., (2011) study. Findings confirmed key experiences involving civilian deaths and betrayal as themes among NVVRS participants’ responses about their troublesome combat experiences.