What Have We Done — The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars

David Wood is a long-serving American military correspondent — Time, Los Angeles Times, Newhouse News Service, Huffington Post — who has been embedded with U.S. forces in every American war since Vietnam. He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for "Beyond the Battlefield," a ten-part HuffPost series on severely wounded post-9/11 veterans. What Have We Done grew out of a 2014 three-part HuffPost series of the same title; it was published by Little, Brown (Hachette) in 2016 and won the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for non-fiction. The book is the most widely-read trade journalism on moral injury and the place most general readers first meet the construct.

Methodologically the book is reported narrative. Wood structures it around extended profiles of post-9/11 combat veterans — the central case studies are several Marines from a single 2010–11 Afghanistan deployment — interleaved with profiles of the leading clinical and academic figures ( Litz, Shay, Brock, Sherman all appear by name) and with Wood's own observations from embedded reporting. The book is written for a general American readership and the prose is accordingly readable; the construct is introduced gradually rather than defined upfront, which works as a writing choice but means the book is not the place to read first if you want the conceptual definitions.

Little, Brown is a major U.S. trade publisher (the Hachette imprint that has published Stephen King, Donna Tartt, James Patterson) and the editorial filter is trade-press rather than academic. The reception was strong: the Dayton Peace Prize is the major U.S. prize for non-fiction promoting peace and human rights, and the book has been a syllabus presence in undergraduate veterans-studies courses since publication. Critical responses inside the academic moral-injury literature have been mixed-positive — appreciation for Wood's reporting access and for the way the book brought the construct to a much wider audience, alongside caution that the journalistic synthesis necessarily smooths over the substantive disagreements between the Shay and Litz frameworks that the specialist literature treats as load-bearing.

The stake is reportorial and political. Wood writes from inside the embedded-correspondent tradition — sympathetic to the troops, sceptical of senior-leadership narratives — and over the long arc of his career he has grown more openly critical of the strategic decisions that produced the post-9/11 wars. The book is finally an argument that the construct of moral injury names something the American civilian public has not yet been forced to look at, and that the cost of the long wars is partly carried in this less-visible category. The implicit claim is that the public has a debt to its veterans that acknowledging the construct is part of paying.

For the moral-injury corpus What Have We Done is the standard non-academic introduction. Read it first if the technical literature is forbidding, or read it after Shay and Litz for the connecting tissue between the academic literature and the post-9/11 cases the academic literature is mostly about. It does the work no other single book in the field does of being readable without losing the substantive content.