The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a physical and psychological toll on a group in the United States military that has received very little attention in the media: chaplains. Navy chaplains serving with Marine, Coast Guard, and Naval units have responsibilities for ethical education in those units and are tasked as moral advisers to command, as well as provide religious services and counseling. I begin this book with a memoir of my experiences for more than two years (2004–2006) as an instructor in intensive weeklong sessions held at bases and camps around the world teaching Navy chaplains about ethics and the virtues so that they can better fulfill their assignments in theater and during other deployments. Although I have been a university philosophy professor for more than forty years, I had never taken on such an assignment, though I did teach at Homestead Air Force Base for the Air Force during the Vietnam War. I have tried to describe what it was like for those of us on the teaching team to design and teach a suitable ethics curriculum for chaplains who are suffering through identity-challenging personal conflicts while trying to perform their multiple roles in the combat zones. The religious beliefs the chaplains espouse often clash with the realities they confront in a war that many worry cannot be morally justified, and for some chaplains, the curriculum we designed added intellectual ammunition to their concerns about the moral legitimacy of the enterprise in which they had staked their professional careers.

My experiences with the chaplains, most having just recently returned from Iraq or Afghanistan, sometimes bordered on the surrealistic and often jumped that border. Many of the chaplains were tormented by psychological demons that had inhabited them during their combat-zone deployments. Some chaplains had vivid flashback experiences during the teaching sessions. Too many of them seemed to be untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sufferers. All wrestled with the moral schizophrenia that they wear on their uniforms: they are officers in the war machine and they are ordained representatives of religious faiths that typically preach beliefs antithetical to the “virtues” of the military. Many of the chaplains confided some of their horrific stories to me of personally witnessed human destruction and, in their clerical roles, of listening to confessions and confused cries for psychological and theological help from Marines who had committed or had witnessed patently immoral acts during their tours of duty.