Camillo "Mac" Bica
in Moral injury
American philosopher and Vietnam veteran. Former U.S. Marine Corps captain who served in Vietnam in 1968–69; on returning home became a peace activist and academic, earned a PhD in philosophy (CUNY Graduate Center), and taught for many years at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Founder of the Veterans Self-Healing Initiative, a peer-support programme for Vietnam- and post-9/11-era veterans.
Stake§
Bica writes as a veteran who self-identifies as morally injured and as a philosopher who treats his own experience as the case material for the analysis. The stake is personal, political, and philosophical at once: the work argues that moral injury is the appropriate frame for what war does to its participants, that the locus of repair is necessarily philosophical and communal rather than pharmaceutical, and that civilian society bears a debt to its veterans that the PTSD frame has obscured.
Bica's 1999 International Journal of Applied Philosophy article "A Therapeutic Application of Philosophy: The Moral Casualties of War: Understanding the Experience" is one of the earliest articulations of moral injury as a category — the term appears in Wikipedia and in some secondary literature as having originated with Bica, although the parallel and roughly contemporaneous use by Jonathan Shay in Achilles in Vietnam (1994) is the more widely-cited claim of priority. The construct was being articulated in roughly the same form by several figures in the mid-1990s, with Shay's clinical version in psychiatry and Bica's philosophical version in applied philosophy converging on the same problem from different disciplines.
His later book Beyond PTSD: The Moral Casualties of War (2016) is a longer treatment of the same argument. Bica appears in person as one of the four veterans whose testimony structures Brock and Lettini's Soul Repair (2012), which is the place most readers first meet him.