Casualties

"Casualties" is Jonathan Shay's contribution to the Summer 2011 Casualties of War issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (published through MIT Press). At nine printed pages it is short, deliberately so — a compressed, late-career restatement of the moral-injury argument seventeen years after Achilles in Vietnam and nearly a decade after Odysseus in America. The framing is medical-surgical: Shay borrows the surgical concepts of primary wounds, wound complications, and wound contamination, and applies them to the psychological and moral injuries of war.

The essay's principal historical importance is that it is the place where Shay distinguishes his own definition of moral injury — the three-element formula reproduced in the excerpt above — from the broader Litz et al. (2009) reformulation, which had by then become the working definition for the field's clinical-research wing. The Litz framework counts perpetration and witnessing as moral-injury-producing alongside betrayal; Shay's narrower frame counts only the betrayal-by-authority case. Shay treats the difference as substantive and not merely terminological, and the essay is the citation point for anyone who needs to make that distinction in print.

Daedalus is a peer-reviewed academic journal of the kind that publishes by invitation around themed issues; the editorial filter is exacting and the authors are typically established figures in their fields. The 2011 Casualties of War issue is a useful issue in itself — Paul Wise's piece in the same number challenges Just War doctrine on civilian-casualty grounds, and the issue as a whole is worth reading as a snapshot of how the American Academy was processing the post-9/11 wars. For the moral-injury corpus specifically, "Casualties" is the late Shay in compressed form, and the most efficient way to anchor his definition against Litz's in a single citation.

The piece is open access through the MIT Press Daedalus site. It should be read after Achilles in Vietnam but is shorter and more pointed; for someone surveying the field for the first time, the order book-then-essay produces the better understanding than essay-then-book.