David Wood
in Moral injury
American journalist, longtime senior military correspondent for Time, the Los Angeles Times, Newhouse News Service, and the Huffington Post. Won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for "Beyond the Battlefield," a ten-part HuffPost series on severely wounded post-9/11 veterans. Has been embedded with U.S. forces in every American war from Vietnam onwards.
Stake§
Wood writes from inside the embedded-correspondent tradition — sympathetic to the troops, sceptical of senior-leadership narratives, and increasingly critical over the long arc of his career of the strategic decisions that produced the post-9/11 wars. The stake on moral injury is reportorial: the book is an argument that the construct names something American civilian readers have not yet been forced to look at, and that the cost of the long wars is not finally counted in PTSD diagnoses or amputations but in this less-visible category.
Wood's 2016 book What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars (Little, Brown) is the most widely-read trade journalism on moral injury. The book builds out from a 2014 HuffPost three-part series of the same title and won the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for non-fiction. Methodologically it is reported narrative — extensive interviews with combat veterans paired with profiles of the leading clinical and academic figures (Litz, Shay, Brock, Sherman) — written for a general readership rather than a clinical or theological one.
The book is the standard non-academic entry point into the moral-injury literature and is the place most non-specialists first meet the construct.