The weight of books about war is enough to break shelves, backs and hearts, but what that weight hasn’t broken is humanity’s determination to shoulder weapons and shoot. We’re often faced with questions that challenge our moral core and psyche’s moorings and often we turn away. But not everyone has that choice, as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Russell Edmonds, author of God Is Not Here: A Soldier’s Struggle with Torture, Trauma, and the Moral Injuries of War (Pegasus Books), illustrates in his memoir. Edmonds is upfront with his readers—the book is one man’s journey to hell and back, not to paradise, but to Dante’s purgatory: “Here indeed be torment, but not death.” It is this unwavering focus on moral trauma’s impact which makes this veteran’s narrative somewhat unique in the growing volumes of work by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
Based on two journals Edmonds kept, the book’s threads alternate between two states of mind. The first thread recounts Edmonds’ Iraq war year (365 days, 365 chapters); the second chronicles Edmonds’ time in Germany where his mental collapse begins. Moving back and forth between the realities of Iraq and the often-hallucinatory quality of Edmonds’ subsequent breakdown, time blurs. The present is as uncertain as the future, which Edmonds captures poetically.
I am midway lost, alone
And stunned.
My feet don’t stir.
It’s the panic inside.
It stretches in this fearful place
Where the past is present,
And alive…
Edmonds’ moral crisis is precipitated by events during his 2005 service in Iraq. It’s two years after Saddam’s overthrow. An insurgency is destabilizing Iraqi society, eroding the US occupation’s imposed order. US military and civilian leadership see the need for counterinsurgency. Edmonds, then a Captain, driven by the events of 9/11, seeks out the Iraq duty where his Special Forces training can be applied: “ I hunger for the field that will test my mettle.” To develop counterinsurgency capability, he joins Special Forces teams embedded as advisors with Iraqi Security Forces.
In Iraq, Edmonds’ duties include training Afghan troops and police, going on patrols in Mosul, and serving as an advisor/observer to Saedi, an Iraqi interrogator of suspected terrorist prisoners housed in what’s called The Guest House, a former Saddam Hussein military site. Edmonds, immersed in the study of Arabic language and culture, develops a relationship with Saedi. The Iraqi becomes his tutor in the psychology of interrogation using what Edmonds calls “The Approach.” Edmonds describes Saedi’s technique as, “They are nice. Then mean, then angry then happy, then hit and slap and hurt and scare; they laugh and then show regret and sadness and then share stories and then go quiet.”
Under Iraqi legal code, suspects can be found guilty only if they confess to their alleged crimes. Otherwise they’re released. Edmonds is there to make sure the interrogators don’t use torture or techniques that are against US military code of conduct. This amuses Saedi—he and other Iraqis mock Edmonds’ restrictions. They declare terrorists want to be held by Americans, not their fellow Iraqis, because the Americans are “soft” and the suspects always go free to kill again. Edmonds listens but insists they abide by the rules. At the same time, Edmonds acknowledges his own anger ⎯ “ I only feel hate toward these terrorists.”
Edmonds sees The Approach method work. Wearing a black full-face mask, he joins Saedi’s interrogations as an observer, and later, as he practices the techniques under Saedi’s tutelege, becomes an active participant in some suspect’s interrogations.
He wants to kill them to prevent more deaths, even as he resists Saedi’s pressure to allow more physical abuse ⎯ methods beyond the psychological manipulations and physical discomfort the Iraqi deploys to extract confessions that would be torture under American military code.
The focus sharpens when Edmonds compares his military experience with his parents’ Peace Corps work, noting that his career choice seems opposite to theirs. “But is it really?” he asks. “I guess the metric comes down to intent which determines the right of wrong of every human being.”
Edmonds’ questioning of interrogation techniques to determine guilt or innocence deepens over time. Early on in his deployment, Edmonds’ view of the US mission and his own intent is captured in the Special Forces motto, De Oppresso Libre ⎯ liberate the oppressed. But oppressor and oppressed blur in this fluid situation. As the months roll on, relationships deteriorate. Edmonds’ range of emotions shrinks. He watches “chick flicks” to feel something besides anger and fear. While on leave, he breaks up with his girlfriend. Back in Iraq, Edmonds isolates himself from his Army mates and the Iraqis. He fantasizes about being killed on one of his team’s patrols in Mosul. It’s a wish for relief.
Simultaneously, he begins to doubt if the war is “winnable”, eventually questioning the very nature of war. Edmonds’ moral framework, based on good guys winning and bad guys losing —and identifying who’s wearing what hat —collapses. When confronted with evidence of tortured prisoners from another sector under American supervision, Edmonds must make a choice that will affect his future in more ways than one.
The memoir is rife with references to faith, the presence or absence of it ⎯ of “God” ⎯ in the author’s life. Faith in this case is mutable. It flows or disappears in the author’s personal relationships; to a girlfriend; to Saedi, described as his “partner”; and to the military leadership which ultimately fails Edmonds when he seeks help for his deteriorating emotional state. Finally, motivated by love and faith in his wife and family, and spurred by a near-death experience in South Sudan, Edmonds does solo battle with his demons. As noted near the book’s end, Edmonds credits writing with helping restore him to purgatory. “Writing became my own very personal form of immersion therapy. “
Following the memoir’s conclusion is an essay by Edmonds’ mother. It’s an eloquent plea for better treatment of war veterans. There’s also a Reading Group Guide authored by George Lorber, identified as a professor at the US Naval Post-graduate School, who serves as an ethics and morality coach, guide and mentor to US Special Forces officers.
Lorber’s Guide presents provocative questions challenging readers to respond to underlying moral issues like the ones Edmonds confronted. For example, is torture ever justified? The Guide reinforces the book’s focus on individual moral choice with questions such as “How would you personally define torture?” and “Is it ever permissible to do the wrong thing for the right reason?” Perhaps the question which most directly ties to Edmonds’ own view of what constitutes morality in war is this one:” How far should intentions factor in assessing the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of an act?” The Guide, like Edmonds memoir, restricts itself to moral dilemmas that seem to be created by the Iraqi legal system and how its society defines terrorism after the American invasion and occupation. The Guide therefore reinforces the moral choices of war as individual, divorced from the question of the choice by leaders to go to war.
In this, the Guide seems similar to a request to Edmonds from Bill Nash, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry and a retired Navy captain, recipient of a Bronze Star for his Iraq service. In Nash’s introduction to the book, he asks Edmonds to “…not let anyone (sic) lure you into a discussion of the political or religious implications of your memoir, if any can be found, as if those are all your book is about. Your book is far too important for that.”
It’s a puzzling plea. If anything, the political and religious implications of God is Not Here are central to Edmonds narrative. But, like the Readers Guide, Nash’s request connects to another larger question.
In a recent Harper’s essay, “First-Person Shooters”, Sam Sacks discusses a half-dozen literary award-winning books of fiction by Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans. He refers to a number of literary critics and commentators, citing George Packer and Michiko Kakutani; the latter for investing today’s war literature with the timelessness and eternal truth of war’s experience, and Packer for noting how these works demonstrate the healing power of literature. But, while acknowledging those perspectives, Sacks then asks what’s missing from the current literary conversation:
All pain may be the same, but all wars are not, and in the search for reconciliation that distinction has gone missing. Why did we fight these wars, and what were we trying to achieve? Did we succeed or did we fail? What consequences have we wrought on the countries we attacked? What, if anything, have we learned?
Which raises a question about what’s missing in this memoir; there’s little or no reflection on the moral choice by American political leaders to invade Iraq. That choice gave birth to the morally challenging situation faced by Edmonds and the Iraqis he comes to admire (or at least respect). In an otherwise challenging, honest account, this absence is a missed opportunity when discussing the moral question of war. War’s trauma and suffering it causes can certainly be a personal experience for its warriors as Edmonds’ powerful story documents. But the consequences of the decision to go to war transcend the personal and connect to our shared humanity and responsibilities as citizens, civilian or military.
