INDEX — Building a mini-dam on a scenic stretch of the Skykomish River would not cause flooding or reduce water flow, according to preliminary studies by the Snohomish County Public Utility District.
These findings are among the results of studies done recently by the PUD in determining whether to pursue the project.
The utility is looking at building an inflatable mini-dam, or weir, on the river just above Sunset Falls near Index. The PUD believes the project could generate enough power for nearly 10,000 homes. Its cost is estimated at between $110 million and $170 million.
The utility has scheduled open houses for Wednesday in Everett and Thursday in Sultan to discuss its findings with the public.
The meetings will be informal. Visitors may circulate, look at photos and graphics and discuss the idea with officials.
“We heard a lot of concerns from the local residents,” said Kim Moore, an assistant general manager for the PUD. “We’ve been trying to address those concerns.”
Some neighbors and environmental groups oppose any consideration of a dam on the stretch of river.
Jeff Smith, who lives about 50 yards from where the mini-dam would be installed, said the new information makes no difference to him.
“This is not an issue about engineering details,” he said. “This is an issue about a protected natural resource. It’s like negotiating the terms of surrender before the battle starts.”
The south fork of the Skykomish is part of the state’s Scenic Rivers System. Under this designation, development is discouraged but not prohibited.
This designation also does not prevent development, but the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is required to consider the tag in deciding whether to issue a permit for a dam.
Last year, American Rivers, a national environmental group, listed the stretch of river as the seventh most endangered river in the nation. The designation was prompted by the possible PUD project, said Brett Swift, regional director for the group’s northwest office in Portland.
In the project, water would be diverted from the pooled water behind the weir, above Sunset Falls, through a pipeline downstream to a powerhouse below the falls.
The dam would be inflated only during winter months when the flow is highest, PUD officials have said.
The PUD has a federal permit to study the project but has yet to apply for a license to build. If that occurs, it likely won’t be for three or four more years, Moore said.
Concerns about the project include flooding above the dam and reduced water flow below it; glare from lights; noise and traffic during construction, and the effect on the scenery.
In addition to the findings on flooding and water flow, the PUD also has artist’s conceptions showing the weir would have a minimal effect on the appearance of the river.
Officials have drawn up routes to minimize noise and traffic during construction, Moore said. An electrical switchyard for the power could be hidden behind the powerhouse to keep it invisible from across the river, PUD spokesman Neil Neroutsos said.
Other issues, such as the project’s potential effect on fish, will have to be studied in greater detail, Moore said.
All the information so far is preliminary and will have to be fleshed out further if the utility decides to go ahead with the project, Moore said.
“We have not found, as of yet, a fatal flaw with respect to this project.”
The PUD buys about 90 percent of its power in the form of hydroelectric energy from the Bonneville Power Administration and is looking to diversify.
In 2011, the PUD opened a $29 million mini-dam on Youngs Creek near Sultan. In 2008, the PUD bought a tiny, 6-foot-tall dam and powerhouse on Woods Creek near Monroe from a private utility company for $1.1 million.
The PUD also owns and operates the Jackson Hydroelectric Project on the Sultan River, which includes Culmback Dam on Spada Lake.
Lower Elwha Klallam elder Adeline Smith talks about growing up on the Elwha, where the salmon were once so numerous she had to push them out of the way with her hands as she swam in the river’s cold waters as a child. Photo: STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
For the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the Elwha River’s restoration also is a cultural renewal
By Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times staff reporter
Swimming in pools of the Elwha River as a child, Adeline Smith pushed salmon out of the way, so thick were the fish in the lower river. “It was nothing to see them everywhere when us kids were in the water, especially in the deep holes. We would scare them away.”
Elwha Dam was finished just four years before she was born in 1918. It quickly began killing fish.
Smith, one of the oldest living members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, whose homeland included villages up and down the river, remembers as a kid running from pool to pool with her niece, the late Bea Charles, scooping up the silvery baby salmon stranded in puddles by operation of the dam. “They were just dying. We felt sorry for them,” she said of the gasping fish. The dam walled adult fish off from 93 percent of their habitat upriver. With so little spawning ground left, the fish declined. Today the river’s chinook, steelhead and bulltrout are listed for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The tribe intervened in 1986 in licensing proceedings to demand the dams be taken out, and worked with environmental organizations to force the settlement that became the 1992 Elwha restoration act.
With 989 members today, the tribe lost the most with the destruction of the fish runs — and was the slowest to reap the benefits of economic development from the dams. Power poles carried electricity to only parts of the tribal community as late as the 1930s, and the reservation didn’t even have indoor plumbing until 1968.
Smith, now 93, has outlived three children and two husbands. Over the course of her life she welded submarines, worked as a riveter at Boeing, eviscerated chickens at a meatpacking plant, sewed jackets at a Seattle garment factory, and picked salal in the woods for 17 cents a bunch. She’s seen and done a lot in her life. But the dams coming out?
“I never thought I would see the day,” Smith said. “It’s a great thing, even if a percentage of the fish come back.”
Some things, though, may be gone forever.
As a child, she remembers her father telling her about Thunderbird’s Cave — the place where a rainbow jumped back and forth in the river’s mist as it crashed through a tight canyon.
There, Thunderbird, who could make the salmon come upriver just by flashing his eyes, dwelled in the upper reaches of the watershed, where only the biggest fish could go.
She fears the cave, and the tribe’s creation site near where Elwha Dam is today, may be gone because of the dynamiting of the river channel when the dams were built.
But restoration of the river will continue a cultural revival for the tribe, which in 2007 published a book on the Elwha River and its people for use in its tribal community and in public schools. And the tribe is playing a lead role in the recovery of the Elwha ecosystem, from restoring habitat in the river to replanting native plants in the mud flats that will be exposed when the dams come out.
“It’s a lot of change,” Smith said. “And we are going to have the fish back.”
The new Elwha Tribal fish hatchery on the Elwha reservation is to be used to supplement populations of fish that naturally recolonize the river as habitat becomes available. Photo: Steve Ringman / The Seattle Times, 2011
A federal judge has dismissed a suit against the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe’s hatchery plan as moot, and the tribe has terminated its plan to stock the Elwha with nonnative steelhead.
By Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times staff reporter
A federal judge has thrown out a suit against the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe’s hatchery plan, and the tribe has backed away from stocking the Elwha River with nonnative steelhead.
The Elwha is at the center of the region’s long-running debate on hatcheries and their role in salmon recovery. A $325 million federal recovery project for the river is now under way, with one dam out of the river and another soon gone in the largest dam-removal project in history. With so much at stake, hatchery plans for the fish-recovery effort drew fire early.
Litigation was flying before the first chunks of concrete even came out. Advocates for wild fish filed notice of intent to sue in September 2011 over the new $16 million hatchery built as part of the recovery project. But portions of the lawsuit, filed in March against the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, were thrown out last week by Benjamin Settle, U.S. District Court judge for the Western District in Tacoma.
Settle found that the suit was moot because, since the suit was filed, the tribe had obtained permits from federal fisheries officials to carry out programs at its hatchery, leaving no question to settle.
“It speaks for itself,” said the tribe’s lawyer, Steven Suagee. “The initial complaint had been that the tribe didn’t have the approvals for these hatchery programs, and now we do.“
The new hatchery is to be used to supplement populations of fish that naturally recolonize the river as habitat becomes available. Ultimately, taking two dams out of the river will reopen 70 miles of habitat in the Elwha to salmon and steelhead spawning. But dam removal also is letting loose huge amounts of sediment, trapped behind the dams for a century. As the water gets muddy, the hatchery also is intended to provide a safe-harbor gene bank for four populations of fish listed for protection in the river, including steelhead.
The tribe backed away from one of the programs it sought to run at its hatchery: stocking Chambers Creek steelhead, which, while not native to the Elwha, have provided a fishing opportunity for tribal fishermen for years as native stocks in the Elwha declined because of the dams.
With the dams coming out, however, wild-fish advocates no longer wanted the nonnative fish stocked in the river. The tribe, while not conceding that the fish cause harm to wild stocks, announced in December to federal officials that it has ended its Chambers Creek program and will not be reviving it.
Instead, tribal members will mop up the fish returning from its last release from the hatchery in 2011 until no more of the nonnative fish come back. That will serve the needs both to avoid crossbreeding of the nonnative fish with fragile, rebuilding native runs and to provide a small fishing opportunity for the tribe.
A moratorium is in effect on fishing in the river for five years while populations rebuild. The tribe is negotiating with federal fisheries officials to be able to fish native Elwha steelhead after the moratorium even if those fish are still listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act, if doing so does not set back recovery.
Suagee said that those talks are still ongoing and that nothing is final.
Kurt Beardslee, of the Wild Fish Conservancy, said the nonprofit, which took the lead in the suit, intends to appeal.
Meanwhile, dam removal is on hold until repairs are made to a water-treatment plant built as part of the recovery project that clogged with leaves, sticks and mud during the first fall rains. The plant has not been providing the level of water quality expected nor functioning as planned.
Repairs are expected to put off resumption of work until at least April.
Washington state would see federal funding cut for everything for teacher’s aides for disabled kids to immunizations if Congress can’t reach a budget agreement.
By Lynda V. Mapes and Sanjay Bhatt, Seattle Times staff reporters
From fewer immunizations to classrooms without teachers aides for children with disabilities, Washington state could feel the reduction of millions of dollars of federal aid if Congress can’t reach a budget compromise, a White House report released Sunday says.
Unless Congress acts by Friday, a series of automatic budget cuts, called sequestration in D.C. budget-speak, will take effect, adding up to $85 billion nationally over the course of the remaining fiscal year, through September.
The Senate is to consider bills this week that would avoid the cuts. Meanwhile, the White House on Sunday released the list of potential budget reductions, state by state, as part of its stepped-up campaign to prod Congress to act.
Some state agencies that rely heavily on federal funding would be particularly hard hit.
“My budget is 53 percent federal, and the amount of state and local dollars has also declined,” Mary Selecky, secretary of the state Department of Health, said Sunday.
The cuts would mean a more than 8 percent reduction in her agency’s funding, or $22 million in a department that has already seen a 38 percent cut in state money over the past six years, Selecky said.
Under an analysis prepared by her agency, about half of the new round of federal cuts would come out of food and nutrition programs for infants and pregnant women.
Cuts in federal immunization funding could also mean that 4,451 fewer kids receive vaccinations. Other core services, from breast- and cervical-cancer screening to inspections of health-care facilities and drinking-water protection, would be reduced.
Selecky said public-health budgets are already so tight that further reductions would put people’s health at risk. “Bugs don’t know boundaries, and they don’t know political parties, or that our budget is tight,” she said.
Other reductions in Washington state outlined by the White House include:
• $11.6 million for primary and secondary education, putting 160 teacher and aide jobs at risk. An $11.3 million reduction would jeopardize the jobs of 140 teachers, aides and staff working with children with disabilities.
In addition, around 440 fewer low-income students would receive aid to help them finance the costs of college, and about 1,000 children would be cut from Head Start and Early Head Start services.
• $3.3 million to help ensure clean water and air, and to prevent pollution from pesticides and hazardous waste. In addition, Washington could lose $924,000 in grants for fish and wildlife protection.
• Furloughs for 29,000 civilian Department of Defense workers that would reduce gross pay by
$173.4 million. Army base operation funding would be cut $124 million.
• About $271,000 in grants that support law enforcement, courts, crime prevention and education, corrections and community corrections, drug treatment and enforcement, and crime victim and witness initiatives.
• $661,000 for job-search assistance, referral and placement. Up to 800 disadvantaged and poor children could lose access to child care, and $1 million could be lost for meals to seniors.
Not mentioned by the White House was money to clean up the Hanford nuclear reservation, where last week six tanks holding radioactive material were found to be leaking. The budget cuts could lead to up to 1,000 cleanup workers facing furloughs of up to six weeks, the state says.
“Our concern is anything that slows down cleanup,” said Dieter Bohrmann, spokesman for the nuclear-waste program at the state Department of Ecology. “We need to keep progressing and avoid further delays, especially with the news of additional leaking tanks.”
The list from the White House includes other possible cuts nationally, including reductions for health research through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as cuts in aviation safety, air traffic control and security. The White House did not say how those cuts would affect the state.
The looming cuts are the result of failed attempts by Congress and President Obama to tame the federal budget deficit, beginning back in 2011. The automatic cuts now facing the country are just the start of more than $1 trillion in across-the-board reductions that would be imposed on domestic and military spending over the next 10 years.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on ABC’s “This Week” that the worst of the cuts could be alleviated with some flexibility. “We can get all through this,” he said. “The best way to do it is just allow flexibility.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney has insisted for weeks that the agencies have no flexibility. Administration officials did not respond to questions Sunday about whether they would support a change in law to gain flexibility.
Some analysts outside government said they are optimistic a compromise budget solution would be reached before long, mitigating or at least redirecting the cuts.
“My suspicion is this is a game of poker. People in Congress will step up to the plate,” Anthony Chan, chief economist for JPMorgan Chase’s wealth-management service, said in an interview Friday.
He’s not worried if Congress can’t reach a deal right away. “It’s not the end of the world if it takes a couple weeks, a couple months,” he said.
The combination of sequestration, higher payroll taxes and the “fiscal-cliff” deal reached by Congress late last year will shave
1.5 percentage point off the U.S. economy’s growth in 2013, Chan said, but that’s not reason for panic.
The important thing, he said, is for Congress to reach a deal that will eliminate the pall of uncertainty looming over American businesses and holding back their decisions to invest and hire.
Even if the spending cuts produce short-term job losses, the Seattle metro area is outperforming the national average in job growth, Chan said. The area saw 2.9 percent annual job growth in 2012, compared with
1.6 percent nationally.
Construction, manufacturing and the leisure-and-hospitality industries were responsible for a huge part of the area’s job growth. Chan said those numbers, along with a rebound in housing values here and nationally, indicate the nation’s economy is coming back.
On February 23, the Stealth plays host to the Calgary Roughnecks at Comcast Arena. 6:45pm
www.comcastarenaeverett.com
COMCAST ARENA DOORS OPEN AT 5:15pm. Come early to take part in pre-game activities, featuring Coors Light drink specials, face-painting, poster-making station and much more!
Hang around after the game for an autograph session with Stealth players.
Walker Ames Room, Kane Hall, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195
SAVE THE DATE! The University of Washington’s American Indian Studies Department invites you to a two-day symposium to be held May 1-2, 2013 in Seattle, Washington.
“The Living Breath of Wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ: Indigenous Ways of Knowing Cultural Food Practices and Ecological Knowledge,” will bring together primarily Northwest Coast and regional Native leaders, elders, and scholars who will share their knowledge and expertise on topics such as tribal food sovereignty initiatives, food justice and security, traditional foods and health, global climate change’s impact on coastal indigenous food systems, treaties and reserved water rights, and treaty fishing rights and habitat protection.
Indigenous peoples in the Northwest have maintained a sustainable way of life through a cultural, spiritual, and reciprocal relationship with their environment. Presently we face serious disruptions to this relationship from policies, environmental threats, and global climate change. Thus, our traditional ecological knowledge is of paramount importance as we strive to sustain our cultural food practices and preserve this healthy relationship to the land, water, and all living things.
This symposium will be the inaugural event to honor UW’s future longhouse-style community building, Wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ (a Lushootseed word meaning Intellectual House), that will open its doors in 2014. This event symbolizes the spirit of Wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ and embodies the essence of the work we envision doing in this cultural and intellectual space.
Registration details are forthcoming.
Coordinators:
Dr. Charlotte Coté, Clarita Lefthand-Begay, Dr. Dian Million, and Elissa Washuta.
Charlotte Coté (Nuu-chah-nulth) Ph.D., Associate Professor, UW’s Department of American Indian Studies; Affiliated Faculty, Canadian Studies Center, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies; Chair, UW’s Wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ (Intellectual House) Planning and Advisory Committee.
Clarita Lefthand-Begay (Diné) MS, Ph.D. candidate, UW’s School of Public Health, Graduate Student Representative, Wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ (Intellectual House) Working Committee Member, 2012 First Stewards Witness.
Dian Million (Athabaskan) Ph.D., Assistant Professor, UW’s Department of American Indian Studies.
Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz) MFA, Academic Counselor and Lecturer, UW’s Department of American Indian Studies.
Please join Haida artist Sondra Simone as she shares her new Native art instruction books at South Shore School, 4800 S. Henderson St. room 292 Seattle, WA 98118, on Thursday, February 28th from 4:30-5:30 PM. All are welcome!
Acclaimed author, environmentalist and activist Winona LaDuke, White Earth Ojibway, Minnesota, shares her experiences, insights, and philosophies about how to build sustainable communities using traditional indigenous ecological knowledge and caring for the land. Learn what we can do individually and collectively to make the changes necessary to live in balanced ways for ourselves, our families and communities, and honoring the web of life.
With special guests Red Eagle Soaring Native Youth Theater Arts.
President Barack Obama is promising a “big push” for his proposal to provide pre-K for all 4-year-olds.
Source: Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is promising a “big push” for his proposal to provide pre-K for all 4-year-olds.
Obama says having the world’s best education system will help create jobs and boost the middle class, but it starts with early childhood education.
He said studies show that pre-kindergarten kids do better in school, are less likely to become teen parents and are more likely to attend college, have a job and form stable families.
Obama announced the proposal in his State of the Union address last week. Republicans have questioned the cost, which the White House has yet to reveal.
In an interview broadcast Friday with radio host Yolanda Adams, Obama says, quote, “we’re going to make a big push on that.”
Former Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo walks among civilians carrying a burden of guilt most Americans don’t want to share. A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kudo thinks of himself as a killer. “I can’t forgive myself … and the people who can forgive me are dead,” he says. Photo: JOHN MINCHILLO / AP
A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, former Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo thinks of himself as a killer – and he carries the guilt every day.
By Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, former Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo thinks of himself as a killer – and he carries the guilt every day.
“I can’t forgive myself,” he says. “And the people who can forgive me are dead.”
With American troops at war for more than a decade, there’s been an unprecedented number of studies into war zone psychology and an evolving understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. Clinicians suspect some troops are suffering from what they call “moral injuries” – wounds from having done something, or failed to stop something, that violates their moral code.
Though there may be some overlap in symptoms, moral injuries aren’t what most people think of as PTSD, the nightmares and flashbacks of terrifying, life-threatening combat events. A moral injury tortures the conscience; symptoms include deep shame, guilt and rage. It’s not a medical problem, and it’s unclear how to treat it, says retired Col. Elspeth Ritchie, former psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general.
“The concept … is more an existentialist one,” she says.
The Marines, who prefer to call moral injuries “inner conflict,” started a few years ago teaching unit leaders to identify the problem. And the Defense Department has approved funding for a study among Marines at California’s Camp Pendleton to test a therapy that doctors hope will ease guilt.
But a solution could be a long time off.
“PTSD is a complex issue,” says Navy Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
Killing in war is the issue for some troops who believe they have a moral injury, but Ritchie says it also can come from a range of experiences, such as guarding prisoners or watching Iraqis kill Iraqis as they did during the sectarian violence in 2006-07.
“You may not have actually done something wrong by the law of war, but by your own humanity you feel that it’s wrong,” says Ritchie, now chief clinical officer at the District of Columbia’s Department of Mental Health.
Kudo’s remorse stems in part from the 2010 accidental killing of two Afghan teenagers on a motorcycle. His unit was fighting insurgents when the pair approached from a distance and appeared to be shooting as well.
Kudo says what Marines mistook for guns were actually “sticks and bindles, like you’d seen in old cartoons with hobos.” What Marines thought were muzzle flashes were likely glints of light bouncing off the motorcycle’s chrome.
“There’s no day – whether it’s in the shower or whether it’s walking down the street … that I don’t think about things that happened over there,” says Kudo, now a graduate student at New York University.
“Human beings aren’t just turn-on, turn-off switches,” Veterans of Foreign Wars spokesman Joe Davis says, noting that moral injury is just a different name for a familiar military problem. “You’re raised `Thou shalt not kill,’ but you do it for self-preservation or for your buddies.”
Kudo never personally shot anyone. But he feels responsible for the deaths of the teens on the motorcycle. Like other officers who’ve spoken about moral injuries, he also feels responsible for deaths that resulted from orders he gave in other missions.
The hardest part, Kudo says, is that “nobody talks about it.”
As executive officer of a Marine company, Kudo also felt inadequate when he had to comfort a subordinate grieving over the death of another Marine.
Dr. Brett Litz, a clinical psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Boston, sees moral injury, the loss of comrades and the terror associated with PTSD as a “three-legged stool” of troop suffering. Though there’s little data on moral injury, he says a study asked soldiers seeking counseling for PTSD in Texas what their main problem was; it broke down to “roughly a third, a third and a third” among those with fear, those with loss issues and those with moral injury.
The raw number of people who have moral injuries also isn’t known. It’s not an official diagnosis for purposes of getting veteran benefits, though it’s believed by some doctors that many vets with moral injuries are getting care on a diagnosis of PTSD – care that wouldn’t specifically fit their problem.
Like PTSD, which could affect an estimated 20 percent of troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, moral injury is not experienced by all troops.
“It’s in the eye of the beholder,” says retired Navy Capt. William Nash, a psychiatrist who headed Marine Corps combat stress programs and has partnered with Litz on research. The vast majority of ground combat fighters may be able to pull the trigger without feeling they did something wrong, he says.
As the military has focused on fear-based PTSD, it hasn’t paid enough attention to loss and moral injury, Litz and others believe. And that has hampered the development of strategies to help troops with those other problems and train them to avoid the problems in the first place, he says.
Lumping people into the PTSD category “renders soldiers automatically into mental patients instead of wounded souls,” writes Iraq vet Tyler Boudreau, a former Marine captain and assistant operations officer to an infantry battalion.
Boudreau resigned his commission after having questions of conscience. He wrote in the Massachusetts Review, a literary magazine, that being diagnosed with PTSD doesn’t account for nontraumatic events that are morally troubling: “It’s far too easy for people at home, particularly those not directly affected by war … to shed a disingenuous tear for the veterans, donate a few bucks and whisk them off to the closest shrink … out of sight and out of mind” and leaving “no incentive in the community or in the household to engage them.”
So what should be done?
“I don’t think we know,” Ritchie says.
Troops who express ethical or spiritual problems have long been told to see the chaplain. Chaplains see troops struggling with moral injury “at the micro level, down in the trenches,” says Lt. Col. Jeffrey L. Voyles, licensed counselor and supervisor at the Army chaplain training program in Fort Benning, Ga. A soldier wrestling with the right or wrong of a particular war zone event might ask: “Do I need to confess this?” Or, Voyles says, a soldier will say he’s “gone past the point of being redeemed, (the point where) God could forgive him” – and he uses language like this:
“I’m a monster.”
“I let somebody down.”
“I didn’t do as much as I could do.”
Some chaplains and civilian church organizations have been organizing community events where troops tell their stories, hoping that will help them re-integrate into society.
Some soldiers report being helped by Army programs like yoga or art therapy. The Army also has a program to promote resilience and another called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness to promote mental as well as physical wellness; some clinicians say the latter program may help reduce risk of moral injury but doesn’t help troops recognize when they or a buddy have the problem.
Nash says the Marines are using “psychological first aid techniques” to help service members deal with moral injury, loss and other traumatic events. But it’s a young program, not uniformly implemented and just now undergoing outside evaluation for its effectiveness, he says.
At Camp Pendleton, the therapy trial will be tailored to each Marine’s war experiences; troops with fear-based problems might use a standard PTSD approach; those with moral injury may have an imaginary conversation with the lost person.
Forgiveness, more than anything, is key to helping troops who feel they have transgressed, Nash says.
But the issue is so much more complicated that wholesale solutions across the military, if there are any, will likely be some time coming.
Many in the armed forces view PTSD as weakness. Similarly, they feel the term “moral injury” is insulting, implying an ethical failing in a force whose motto stresses honor, duty and country.
At the same time, lawyers don’t like the idea of someone asking troops to incriminate themselves in war crimes – real or imagined.
That leaves a question for troops, doctors, chaplains, lawyers and the military brass: How do you help someone if they don’t feel they can say what’s bothering them?
