Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 135

REVIEW ESSAY - KILLING

MR REVIEW ESSAY

KILLING FROM THE
INSIDE OUT
Moral Injury and Just War

Robert Emmet Meagher; Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon, 2014, 190 pages

Lt. Col. Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army

I

n a 2006 book, Robert Meagher, a brilliant classical scholar, delivered the definitive translation of
Euripides’ play Herakles Gone Mad and argued that
Hercules’ killing his beloved wife and children during a
bout of post-combat madness sheds light on the timeless
psychological horrors of war. Killing from the Inside Out
examines the psychological effects of combat from another angle, as it pertains to just war theory (JWT) and
the theory’s impact on “moral injury.”
The title comes from the poignant story of Noah
Pierce. A young infantry soldier during the U.S. invasion
of Iraq, Pierce became distressed by several incidents,
such as his accidentally crushing an Iraqi child under his
Bradley fighting vehicle. After Pierce committed suicide
in 2007, his mother said, “he couldn’t forgive himself for
some of the things he did” and that the kind of wound he
had “kills you from the inside out.” As Meagher correctly
describes in Killing, Pierce’s story is just one of many attesting to the power of moral injury, a condition causing
self-destructive behaviors such as drug abuse, domestic
violence, and suicide.
Meagher begins his analysis with the roots of JWT in
early western civilization. The concept of sin, he shows,
was prefigured in the Greek concept of “miasma” (moral
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