Home from the War — Vietnam Veterans, Neither Victims Nor Executioners

Robert Jay Lifton is the most important predecessor figure in the moral-injury field and the one most consistently under-cited. Home from the War — published by Simon & Schuster in 1973, reissued by Other Press in 2005 with a new preface — was Lifton's working-through of his 1969–73 Vietnam veterans' "rap groups," the unstructured peer-counselling sessions he and other psychiatrists had been running in New York for returning veterans, often in cooperation with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It is the Achilles in Vietnam before Achilles in Vietnam — the prior articulation of substantively the same clinical and conceptual material, which Shay picked up and re-articulated two decades later under different vocabulary.

Lifton was already a major figure when the book appeared. Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima had won the National Book Award in 1969; Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961) had established him as a public-intellectual psychiatrist and the leading American clinician on extreme-situation psychology. Home from the War was published as the antiwar movement was at its peak and as the U.S. military was withdrawing from Vietnam; the framing is openly political and Lifton later said it was the angriest of my books. The Other Press reissue acknowledges the political register and the original subtitle (Neither Victims Nor Executioners) is itself a polemical claim against the framing the veterans' movement had been resisting.

Two analytic moves are doing the work that survives into the contemporary moral-injury literature. The first is the atrocity-producing situation — the institutional and operational structure that makes ordinary soldiers commit acts that violate their own moral standards. The locus of analysis is structural rather than individual: Lifton is not asking what is wrong with the soldier who committed the atrocity but what was wrong with the situation that produced it. The second is the account of survivor mission and animating guilt — the way the moral wound, once incurred, can become the engine of political and ethical work, the case in evidence being the VVAW veterans themselves who were Lifton's patients and interlocutors. Both moves prefigure substantial parts of the Shay / Litz / Sherman literature, but Lifton got there first.

The reason the book has been under-cited is partly disciplinary: Lifton was working in an explicitly psychoanalytic and politically engaged register that fell out of favour in clinical psychiatry through the 1980s and 1990s, and the Litz-style cognitive-behavioural framework that came to dominate the field had different intellectual ancestors. Shay does cite Lifton, but Litz et al. (2009) does not. The 2018 Williamson, Stevelink, Greenberg systematic review gives Lifton one citation. The 2014 Wood book discusses him at length and is the place where the post-9/11 readers who came to moral injury via journalism rather than via clinical training are most likely to encounter him.

The stake is psychiatric-political. Lifton is doing both clinical work with veterans and political analysis of the war that produced the patient population, and the two are not separable in the book. The argument is that learning from the veterans — taking their moral testimony seriously as moral testimony — is owed by civilian readers, and that the analysis of the war's atrocity-producing structure is part of what that learning requires. The position is the one Klay would later articulate in essay form (After War, A Failure of the Imagination) and the one Boudreau would articulate in his Massachusetts Review piece — but Lifton is the prior articulation of all of them.

For the moral-injury corpus Home from the War should be read first, before Achilles in Vietnam. The chronological order matters: the construct of moral injury did not appear de novo in 1994 with Shay or in 2009 with Litz. It was articulated in substance in 1973, by a clinician who was already nationally significant, working with the veteran population that would later be the founding case material for the field. The 2005 reissue is the more available edition and is the one to buy.