Moral Wounds and Racial Phantoms: Psychoanalytic Reflections on American War Trauma
- Eric Anders
- Mar 6
- 64 min read
Updated: Mar 7
Introduction
America’s wars have left deep psychic scars—“moral injuries”—on those who fought them and on the peoples caught in their crossfire. From the “Good War” of World War II to the quagmire of Vietnam, U.S. military violence has often been entangled with racism: enemy peoples were cast as racial or cultural Others to justify unimaginable brutality. This exploration will delve into the psychoanalytic dimensions of these entwined phenomena, examining how moral injury and racism have shaped American wars and their aftermath. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory—especially insights from Sheldon George and Derek Hook’s Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory—we will probe the unconscious forces at play in wartime racism and moral transgression. We’ll critically assess the moral injuries suffered by American soldiers and the trauma inflicted on racialized populations targeted by U.S. warfare. Along the way, we’ll interrogate cultural representations like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, among others, treating them with skepticism to expose their ideological blind spots when called for. Finally, we connect these historical and psychological threads to our contemporary moment, where unresolved war traumas and persistent racist fantasies feed into rising authoritarianism in the United States. (Spoiler: we won’t shy away from naming names and pointing fingers at today’s would-be strongmen.)
This journey traverses battlefields and minds, past and present, in search of insight. But fear not—while the concepts are intricate, the discussion will remain accessible. We’ll break down psychoanalytic theories in plain language and ground them in vivid historical examples. The goal is a compelling, clear-eyed inquiry that illuminates how the “Othering” and moral corrosion of war haunt the American psyche, and what that means for the society we live in today.
Moral Injury and the “Other” in War
War throws ordinary men and women into situations that shatter the moral codes of peacetime. Moral injury refers to the inner anguish that arises when someone perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that violate their core ethical values (Moral Injury - PTSD: National Center for PTSD) (New Nonfiction by Adrian Bonenberger: "An Alternate View of Moral Injury" - Wrath-Bearing Tree). Unlike PTSD, which is often rooted in fear and survival instinct, moral injury centers on guilt, shame, and a sense of betrayal of one’s own moral compass (New Nonfiction by Adrian Bonenberger: "An Alternate View of Moral Injury" - Wrath-Bearing Tree) (Moral Injury - PTSD: National Center for PTSD). Imagine a soldier ordered to fire on civilians, or a medic forced to triage who will live and who will die—such events can leave scars on the soul that no medal or parade can salve.
Crucially, moral injury doesn’t afflict only soldiers. Societies too can experience a kind of collective moral injury when they recognize (or refuse to recognize) unjust harm done in their name. And for those on the receiving end of wartime atrocities—often populations already racialized as enemies or “inferior” peoples—the trauma is double-edged. They suffer the direct terror of violence and the moral shock of being treated as less than human. In war, racism has frequently been the handmaiden of moral transgression: by defining the Other as inhuman, soldiers find it “easier to kill that way,” as one analysis of U.S. military language starkly put it ('Because it's easier to kill that way': Dehumanizing epithets ...). Dehumanizing epithets and stereotypes strip the enemy of individuality and empathy, lowering the psychological barriers to murder and massacre.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this process of Othering and dehumanization taps into deep unconscious mechanisms. Lacanian theory posits that identity is formed through contrast with an Other, and that the unconscious itself is structured by the discourse of the Other (Sheldon George and Derek Hook (eds), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory | Psychoanalysis and History). In the chaos of war, soldiers are often subjected to a new discourse: propaganda and training that paints the enemy in demonic or subhuman terms. Racism becomes not just a political tool, but a “psychic reality”—a part of the soldier’s inner world that “mediates [their] social relations and access to a sense of being through and against bodily flesh” (as George and Hook put it) (Sheldon George and Derek Hook (eds), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory | Psychoanalysis and History). In plainer terms: racial ideology seeps into the unconscious, telling the soldier, “They are not like us; their lives mean less.” This unconscious bias can be perversely thrilling to the aggressor’s psyche: the normal moral rules are suspended, offering a grim freedom to indulge violent impulses. Lacanian thinkers describe racism as operating as a mode of enjoyment (jouissance) (Sheldon George and Derek Hook (eds), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory | Psychoanalysis and History)—the racist stereotype carries a kernel of illicit pleasure (in feeling superior, in blaming the Other, even in hurting them) that can be very psychologically potent.
The flip side of this “enjoyment” by the perpetrator is the profound suffering of both victim and perpetrator once the frenzy passes. The American soldier who was taught to revile a “Jap” or “gook” and then pulled the trigger may later find his triumphs curdling into nightmares and remorse. The Vietnamese villager or Japanese civilian, meanwhile, is left to grapple with why the Americans’ vaunted ideals of liberty and human rights did not apply to them. In both, a kind of moral confusion and injury takes root. As psychiatrist Frantz Fanon observed in the context of colonial wars, the violence and racism of such conflicts inflict psychological damage on both the colonized and the colonizer (Oppression and Mental Health Theme in The Wretched of the Earth | LitCharts). The colonized live in a constant “state of rage” under assault, while the colonizer is haunted by the suppressive brutality he enacts (Oppression and Mental Health Theme in The Wretched of the Earth | LitCharts). War’s racism thus creates a toxic relational loop: a feedback cycle of hatred, fear, and guilt that can endure long after the guns fall silent.
Let’s ground these abstractions by turning to two of America’s most significant 20th-century conflicts—World War II and the Vietnam War. Each reveals in different ways how racial ideology and moral injury became intertwined, and how they rippled through culture and politics.
World War II: Race War Beneath the “Good War”
World War II is often remembered in the U.S. as a morally clear-cut conflict: a fight against fascist tyranny and genocide, “the Good War” that saved democracy. But this comforting narrative obscures a darker reality—particularly in the war against Japan. In the Pacific Theater, WWII was, in historian John Dower’s words, essentially “a race war”, fueled on both sides by brutal racial hatreds (War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War | The Inglorius Padre Steve's World) (War Without Mercy - Wikipedia). American propaganda and popular culture overflowed with dehumanizing caricatures of the Japanese. Cartoons and posters depicted Japanese people with fanged teeth, as apes or vermin, or sneaking, subhuman creatures deserving extermination. Soldiers marched to slogans like “Remember Pearl Harbor—Keep ’Em Dying!” and viewed the enemy not as individual human beings but as an undifferentiated horde of “Japs.” As Dower documents, everything from “songs, slogans, [and] propaganda reports” to Hollywood films and even military intelligence reports were permeated with grotesque racist stereotypes (War Without Mercy - Wikipedia). This was officially sanctioned bigotry—one training film shown to GIs proclaimed that the Japanese soldier “has all the cunning of the Oriental mind ... This little rat is a dangerous enemy” (an example among many). Small wonder that many American troops came to see the killing of Japanese not as a grim necessity but as a form of righteous pest control.
Importantly, this racism was not just wartime hysteria against a foreign enemy—it dovetailed with pre-existing racism in American society. At home, over 120,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of them U.S. citizens) were rounded up and imprisoned in desolate internment camps in 1942, purely because of their ancestry (Japanese American internment in pictures | Britannica) (Japanese American internment in pictures | Britannica). Families like the one shown loading their belongings onto a moving truck in San Francisco’s Japantown in April 1942 were given days to sell or store their property before being shipped to barbed-wire “relocation centers” (Japanese American internment in pictures | Britannica). No comparable mass internment befell German or Italian Americans. In fact, U.S. discourse carefully distinguished “good Germans” from Nazi ideologues, but no such nuance was granted to those of Japanese blood (War Without Mercy - Wikipedia). The American Othering of the Japanese was near-absolute: they were collectively blamed for Pearl Harbor, suspected of congenital treachery, and described in lurid racist terms that denied their basic humanity.
(Japanese American internment in pictures | Britannica) A moving van on a San Francisco street outside the Japanese American Citizens League office in April 1942, as Japanese American families prepared for forced relocation. Over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry (mostly U.S. citizens) were interned during WWII, reflecting the intense racism that underpinned the war in the Pacific (Japanese American internment in pictures | Britannica) (Japanese American internment in pictures | Britannica).
What effect did this have on the moral psyche of American warriors? On one hand, it emboldened extreme violence. If the enemy is a kind of savage beast, ordinary ethical limits feel irrelevant. Indeed, U.S. conduct in the Pacific War was ferocious. Marines famously rarely took Japanese prisoners—few enemy soldiers were allowed to surrender alive. Accounts from Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and dozens of nameless skirmishes speak of Japanese wounded being shot and bayoneted, of entire garrisons annihilated to the last man. American troops collected Japanese skulls and ears as macabre trophies. The war became one of virtually extermination, a fact understood by leaders at the time. President Franklin Roosevelt himself, in private, referred to the conflict as a struggle of “the Aryan against the Mongol” (War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War | The Inglorius Padre Steve's World), tacitly acknowledging the racial frame. When the U.S. firebombed Tokyo and later dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, there was little moral questioning among the American public—Japanese lives had been so thoroughly devalued by years of racist indoctrination that these horrific acts were widely celebrated as righteous vengeance (“Avenge December 7!” as one poster blared).
And yet, beneath the victorious bravado, moral injury lurked. Not every American who killed in the Pacific rejoiced. Some struggled with guilt, especially those who directly witnessed or carried out atrocities. We know now that Allied veterans of WWII also suffered nightmares, regret, and what we’d today call PTSD, even if the term didn’t exist. The difference is, in WWII their cause was socially validated—they were heroes returning to ticker-tape parades, encouraged to feel pride rather than remorse. This societal response muted expressions of moral injury. As one writer observed, moral injury narratives are relatively absent from WWII accounts, compared to later wars (New Nonfiction by Adrian Bonenberger: "An Alternate View of Moral Injury" - Wrath-Bearing Tree). Cases like U.S. bombardier-turned-author Kurt Vonnegut—who survived the firebombing of Dresden as a POW and later satirized the absurdity and horror of it in Slaughterhouse-Five—were rarer, almost exceptions that proved the rule (New Nonfiction by Adrian Bonenberger: "An Alternate View of Moral Injury" - Wrath-Bearing Tree). World War II’s status as a “good war” created a powerful cultural script that suppressed open grappling with moral guilt. To admit anguish over killing the evil enemy might have seemed almost treasonous or at least unmanly in that era.
Yet the poison of racism and violence did not simply vanish when peace came in 1945. It lingered in the national psyche. Dower warned in War Without Mercy that the hateful stereotypes cultivated in WWII “remain latent, capable of being revived by both sides in times of crisis and tension.” (War Without Mercy - Wikipedia) Indeed, only a few years later, in the Korean War, U.S. troops and media again resorted to racist tropes (now against Chinese and Koreans). The pattern repeated yet more starkly in Vietnam. It seems the repressed moral questions of WWII—about indiscriminate destruction and racist contempt—returned with a vengeance in the next generation’s conflict, where they would tear America’s self-image apart.
Before we move to Vietnam, it’s worth noting one more moral contradiction of WWII: the United States was fighting a racist empire (Nazi Germany) and a militant racist tyranny (Imperial Japan) while still practicing racial segregation and oppression at home. The U.S. Army was segregated; Black soldiers who fought for freedom came home to Jim Crow laws. Such hypocrisy did not go unnoticed. It planted seeds of doubt and cynicism, particularly among African Americans and other minorities, about America’s claimed moral high ground. One could argue that this dissonance—between lofty ideals and lived injustice—was another form of collective moral injury from WWII, one that would fuel the Civil Rights struggles in the decades after. Psychoanalytically, when a nation refuses to acknowledge a gap between its ideal “ego ideal” (e.g. liberty and justice for all) and its reality (racism and violence), that gap doesn’t vanish—it festers in the unconscious of society, generating unrest and a drive to work through the trauma by demanding change.
Vietnam: The Shattered Mirror of American Virtue
If WWII allowed Americans to mostly externalize evil (pinning it on fascists and “Japs”), the Vietnam War forced a confrontation with American capacity for evil. As the war dragged on, many Americans came to see that we were the violators of norms, the invaders inflicting terror on a poor peasant nation. Nowhere was the nexus of racism and moral injury more glaring than in Vietnam. U.S. troops, largely young conscripts, were thrust into a guerrilla war in an alien land, fighting an enemy that blended in with the local population. The stress was extreme, and once again, racial dehumanization became a coping mechanism—and a tool of strategy.
American soldiers commonly referred to Vietnamese (whether enemy fighters or civilians) with slurs like “gooks,” “dinks,” and other unprintable epithets. This language was so pervasive that even years later, veterans would sometimes reflexively use it, a sign of how ingrained it had become. The purpose, of course, was to erase the individuality and innocence of anyone on the other side. As one veteran later explained, “If they’re ‘gooks,’ it’s easier to cut them down without feeling bad about it.” Training camps primed soldiers with chants like “Kill! Kill! Kill!” and brutal cadences joking about napalming villages. Some accounts even suggest that in training, recruits were taught that “before you can kill, you have to cut the word ‘kill’ out of your vocabulary. You kill a person, but you waste a gook.” In other words, you linguistically transform killing a human into destroying an object or vermin.
This systematic dehumanization had horrific real-world outcomes. Atrocities against Vietnamese civilians were startlingly common—far more so than the lone incident of My Lai that made headlines. In fact, internal U.S. Army investigations (unearthed decades later) confirmed “atrocities were committed by every major army unit in Vietnam” (A Look at Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse – Indian Cultural Forum). Search-and-destroy missions often lived up to their name: villages suspected of sympathizing with the Viet Cong were burned to the ground; livestock slaughtered; old men, women, and children shot at point-blank range. A chilling directive—“kill anything that moves”—became an open secret motto for some units, essentially a green light for indiscriminate killing (A Look at Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse – Indian Cultural Forum). When a soldier asked a superior during one operation, “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” the reply was, “Kill everything that moves.” (A Look at Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse – Indian Cultural Forum) That exchange, later made public, encapsulates the moral nightmare of Vietnam: there were no limits. And indeed, the overall civilian toll reflects this nightmare. An estimated 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war, and roughly 7.3 million were wounded (A Look at Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse – Indian Cultural Forum). Among these were countless noncombatants—one Harvard study cited by journalist Nick Turse found roughly one-third of the wounded were women and a quarter were children (Excerpt: Kill Anything That Moves | BillMoyers.com). This was not “collateral damage” in the rare accident sense; it was a daily, relentless reality of a war that, as Turse writes, became an “endless slaughter that wiped out civilians day after day, month after month” (A Look at Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse – Indian Cultural Forum).
For American soldiers on the ground, the moral consequences were inescapable (whether they realized it at the time or not). Unlike WWII, Vietnam lacked a clear moral justification or victory. Many GIs arrived thinking they were defending the free world from communism, but found themselves murdering farmers who, when not dead, would stare at them with incomprehension and hatred. This disillusionment was famously captured in the film Apocalypse Now, in a scene (drawn from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) where an American soldier laments, “We cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies.” The war corroded whatever simple faith these young men had in American virtue.
Psychologically, what happens when the ego-ideal (“I’m a liberator, a hero”) is shattered by one’s own actions (“I just shot a child”)? One common response is dissociation or numbing—some veterans recall feeling nothing at the time, a kind of emotional shutdown as they committed violence. But later, guilt seeped in through the cracks of that psychic armor. Many Vietnam vets began suffering intrusive memories, depression, or rage. Some turned that rage inward (suicides and substance abuse among returning vets were alarmingly high); others turned it outward, sometimes in domestic violence or antisocial behavior. In psychoanalytic terms, the superego (the internal moral judge) was merciless for many of these men. They had violated the fundamental prohibition against murder—often under orders—and their inner sense of themselves was forever changed. Vietnam veteran and psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, in comparing vets to Homeric heroes, noted that what often broke soldiers was a “betrayal of what’s right” by authorities they trusted. For example, being ordered to do something heinous, like kill civilians, and realizing no one would be held accountable at higher levels, delivered a shattering blow to their faith in all moral structure. The result Shay called “moral injury” is essentially a ruined trust—in moral values, in leaders, and in oneself.
Not all soldiers reacted the same, of course. Some fully embraced the darkness—there were units and individuals that truly reveled in killing, whose racist hatred was so entrenched that massacring “gooks” felt like fulfillment. Recall the earlier observation that war can be perversely pleasurable. One veteran admitted, “the majority of soldiers who have killed... know the truth (that savage destruction is pleasurable) like they know a spoon is a spoon” (New Nonfiction by Adrian Bonenberger: "An Alternate View of Moral Injury" - Wrath-Bearing Tree). Such men might not exhibit classic PTSD; they might even miss the war. But that, too, is a kind of moral injury—a twisted one—because once back in civilian life, that thrill has no legitimate outlet. It can curdle into nihilism or continued bloodlust (we’ll see how this feeds extremism later). On the other hand, many American servicemen in Vietnam retained or regained their conscience. Thousands openly protested the war while it was ongoing (the phenomenon of soldiers fragging—killing—their own officers, or refusing combat missions, grew in the later years). In 1971, the Winter Soldier hearings saw dozens of decorated vets publicly testify to war crimes they had seen or committed, in an anguished bid to force America to face the reality. One vet from the 1st Marine Division confessed: “I’ve prayed to God that I’m wrong, but I know that I’m not.... I know that the people I killed were people.” Such testimonials illustrate moral injury in plain words: a man wrestling with guilt and the need for atonement by speaking truth.
Now consider the Vietnamese perspective. For them, the war was fundamentally about survival and independence, not ideology. They saw their families bombed, children napalmed, villages obliterated in free-fire zones. The term “moral injury” might not be commonly applied to victims, but surely there is moral trauma in experiencing a supposedly civilized nation treat your life as disposable. Vietnamese civilians often described feeling bewilderment: “Why are the Americans doing this to us? What have we done?” That bewilderment can calcify into a deep narrative of injustice. To this day, the “American War” (as it’s called in Vietnam) is remembered with a mix of pride (for defeating the U.S.) and sorrow at the tremendous suffering. It left generational trauma: millions mourned the dead, and many more silently carried scars of atrocities like My Lai (where over 500 unarmed villagers were slaughtered). Some Vietnamese also undoubtedly felt hatred toward Americans—an animosity stoked by the racial dimension of how the U.S. waged the war. Vietnamese fighters were aware of slurs used against them; they saw how American racism lumped together communist guerillas and neutral peasants alike as targets. This racism may have steeled the resolve of Viet Cong and NVA soldiers—if the enemy sees us as subhuman, there is no choice but to fight to the death. In that sense, American racism perhaps prolonged the war by eliminating possibilities of trust or surrender. For Vietnamese Americans (many of whom came as refugees after 1975), the war left a complex legacy of identity and intergenerational trauma. They had been pawns in a superpower game and victims of racist vilification; adjusting to American life often meant confronting lingering stereotypes (the legacy of phrases like “Me love you long time,” originating from a Full Metal Jacket scene with a Vietnamese sex worker, which continued to stigmatize Asian women in the U.S. (“Me love you long time” Sticks Around For A Really Long Time - DVAN)). Thus, the moral injuries of Vietnam radiate outward: perpetrator and victim, and the culture that later receives those actors, all bear the wound in different ways.
Cultural Reflections: War’s Madness and Ideology on Screen and Page
American culture has grappled with the moral and racial entanglements of war in myriad ways—sometimes confronting them, sometimes reinforcing old fantasies. Let’s examine a few iconic works with a critical eye: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Saul Bellow’s novella Seize the Day (1956). Each offers insight into the American psyche, yet each also has telling blind spots and ideological subtexts.
(Download Apocalypse Now Helicopters Flying Around Wallpaper | Wallpapers.com) Helicopters against an Asian sunset in Apocalypse Now. Coppola’s Vietnam War epic depicts the surreal brutality of war (the famous “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter attack, pictured, is both thrilling and terrifying) but, as critics note, it largely treats Vietnamese people as a backdrop for American psychological drama (A New Apocalypse: The Creation of A New Cultural Memory of the Vietnam War | Modern Southeast Asia) (“Me love you long time” Sticks Around For A Really Long Time - DVAN).
“The horror... the horror”: Apocalypse Now. Coppola’s film, inspired by Heart of Darkness, transposes Joseph Conrad’s tale of colonial madness to the Vietnam War. Its protagonist, Capt. Willard, journeys upriver into Cambodia on a mission to terminate Colonel Kurtz, a highly decorated U.S. officer who has gone rogue—setting himself up as a demigod and waging a horrific private war. The film is a phantasmagoria of surreal, nightmarish scenes: a regiment of American cowboys blasting Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as they gun down a Vietnamese village from helicopters; a Do Lung bridge outpost where shell-shocked GIs fight in pitch darkness, seemingly for nothing; and finally Kurtz’s compound, littered with severed heads, where Kurtz delivers monologues about the “hypocrisy” of American war—how we drop incendiary bombs on villagers but court-martial officers who write obscenities on their planes, how we train young men to kill but won’t let them drink or swear. Apocalypse Now is often praised for exposing the moral insanity of Vietnam. Indeed, Kurtz (Marlon Brando) embodies the endpoint of unchecked imperial racism and violence—he has become a monster who mirrors the war’s collective id. His famous last words, “The horror... the horror,” are a judgment on the war’s depravity and, by extension, on all of us who allowed it.
Yet, as novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen (a Vietnamese-American who won a Pulitzer for The Sympathizer) has forcefully argued, Apocalypse Now is still an American story about Americans. Nguyen noted that the film “centered American morality”, portraying Vietnam as “an American war from the American perspective”, with Vietnamese people relegated to faceless villagers or exoticized props (A New Apocalypse: The Creation of A New Cultural Memory of the Vietnam War | Modern Southeast Asia). He recalled feeling rage during the scene in which a U.S. patrol boat massacres a sampan of Vietnamese civilians over a panicky misunderstanding (A New Apocalypse: The Creation of A New Cultural Memory of the Vietnam War | Modern Southeast Asia). The casual way the Americans move on from the slaughter, and the film’s subsequent focus on Willard’s inner turmoil, signaled to Nguyen that “this was our place in an American war”—namely, to suffer silently so that Americans could grapple with their souls (A New Apocalypse: The Creation of A New Cultural Memory of the Vietnam War | Modern Southeast Asia). In other words, Apocalypse Now, for all its anti-war power, arguably reproduces the very dynamic it critiques: it uses Vietnam as a canvas for exploring American angst, not Vietnamese reality. The film’s stunning visuals and psychedelic set-pieces—while artistically brilliant—also arguably aestheticize the war. Viewers can become so swept up in Coppola’s operatic vision (that helicopter attack set to Wagner, or the napalm exploding in a glorious orange sunrise) that the Vietnamese as people disappear entirely. We feel the Americans’ fear and madness, but the Vietnamese dead are as mute as the water buffalo Kurtz sacrifices. This raises a question: does Apocalypse Now actually undermine the racist dehumanization of Vietnamese, or does it inadvertently extend it by keeping Vietnamese largely voiceless? It’s a debate that continues. The film invites us to condemn the war’s excesses, yet it also reinforces the notion that the meaning of Vietnam lies in American psychological struggle (“a civil war in the American soul,” as Nguyen says (A New Apocalypse: The Creation of A New Cultural Memory of the Vietnam War | Modern Southeast Asia)), rather than in the Vietnamese experience of invasion.
“This is my rifle”: Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick’s film takes a two-act approach: first, it plunges us into Marine boot camp on Parris Island, then into the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The boot camp sequences are especially famous, largely due to R. Lee Ermey’s ferocious performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, the drill instructor who mercilessly berates and humiliates recruits. In these scenes, Kubrick peels back the curtain on the dehumanization of American soldiers themselves, as a precursor to making them killers. Hartman calls the young men “maggots,” “pukes,” and uses vicious racist and homophobic slurs. (One recruit, the film’s protagonist nicknamed “Joker,” is paradoxically told to write “Born to Kill” on his helmet while wearing a peace-sign pin—illustrating the schizoid mindset the military instills.) A particularly poignant storyline is that of the overweight, slow recruit Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence. Hartman makes Pyle the platoon scapegoat, tormenting him relentlessly. Under this abuse, Pyle first improves (he learns to shoot with a near-religious fervor, whispering “I am... in a world of shit... yes,” as his marksmanship blossoms), but then he breaks. In a climactic scene, Pyle snaps into a trance-like state, executes Hartman, and then kills himself. It’s a shocking dramatization of how the military’s own brutality implodes—the method of dehumanization produces a monster that devours its creator.
When the film shifts to Vietnam, we follow Joker (now a war correspondent) through the battle of Huế. Here, Kubrick shows war as both absurd and intimate. We see soldiers cracking dark jokes about the brutality (“How can you shoot women or children?” one asks ironically, echoing a real-life quip; answer: “Easy! Ya just don’t lead ’em so much!”). We see them gunning down civilians from a helicopter for sport. We see the weary nihilism taking hold—after a traumatizing battle with a teenage Viet Cong sniper, the surviving Marines march off singing the ironic pop tune “Mickey Mouse Club March,” their childhood innocence grotesquely contrasted with the flaming ruins behind them. Full Metal Jacket doesn’t overtly preach; it shows. And what it shows is the systematic stripping away of humanity—both the Marines’ and their Vietnamese targets. It is arguably one of the most unflinching looks at how racism and violence are taught. For instance, Hartman proudly tells recruits that Marines have a track record of killing Asian enemies: “Oswald got off three shots in less than six seconds... because he was a Marine. And this guy Charles Whitman killed twelve people from a clock tower... because he was a Marine!” The subtext: our job is killing, and we make killing machines. By the time these Marines land in Vietnam, the audience understands that young American men have been as much conditioned as they have been trained.
Yet here too, critical perspectives note that the film, while exposing the U.S. military’s dehumanization process, offers scant humanity to the Vietnamese. Aside from the female sniper (who utters only a dying refrain, “Shoot me,” to end her pain) and some prostitutes who utter broken English catchphrases, Vietnamese are background. The most memorable Vietnamese character is arguably the sex worker who approaches Joker and crew in Da Nang, purring, “Me so horny. Me love you long time,” in broken English. This scene, intended perhaps to show the intersection of war and exploitation, instead became a pop-culture joke—Western audiences quoted “Me love you long time” for decades as a tawdry meme, often with little regard for its racist and sexist connotations (“Me love you long time” Sticks Around For A Really Long Time - DVAN). That unintended legacy itself is telling: even a film critical of war can end up reinforcing stereotypes (in this case, of hypersexualized Asian women) through the way audiences appropriate it. A Vietnamese American essayist, reviewing Vietnam War movies, commented that “there still isn’t any evidence that they show Vietnamese people... as whole humans. Apocalypse Now... Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket [focus] on soldiers, just like their predecessors” (“Me love you long time” Sticks Around For A Really Long Time - DVAN). In short, Vietnam films have largely been by and for Americans, which subtly suggests an ongoing egocentrism: our trauma matters most.
An Existential Crisis at Home: Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. Unlike the films above, Seize the Day isn’t about war at all. It’s a novella set in 1950s New York City, following a day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, a failed salesman in the throes of personal crisis. Why bring it into this discussion? Because it’s a cultural artifact of the post-WWII era that indirectly reveals how the war’s moral and psychic fallout permeated American life. Bellow wrote it in 1956, when the memories of WWII were fresh and the Cold War’s shadow was growing. The protagonist Wilhelm is a veteran (it’s mentioned he was in the Army during the war, though he never saw combat). Now he’s middle-aged, unemployed, estranged from his wife and children, and feeling hopelessly inadequate. The story climaxes with Wilhelm weeping inconsolably at a stranger’s funeral—crying not just for the dead man but for himself and, symbolically, for the human condition.
What’s striking is that Wilhelm’s suffering is largely spiritual or moral: he feels he’s wasted his life chasing material success and social approval, losing sight of any deeper values. He is, in a sense, experiencing a crisis of meaning and identity. This resonates with the broader predicament of modern man in a post-war world, as Bellow intended (Seize the Day: Themes | SparkNotes). SparkNotes (in its analysis of the book’s themes) notes that Seize the Day reflects the “post-war world” in which people were disillusioned by the horrors that had occurred (Seize the Day: Themes | SparkNotes). Many Americans, having seen the Holocaust revelations and the atomic bomb’s devastation, were asking: How could such horrors exist? What do our lives mean in the face of that? At the same time, the late 1940s and 50s brought an economic boom and a consumerist craze (new cars, suburban homes, TV sets) (Seize the Day: Themes | SparkNotes). Bellow places Wilhelm in that very context—New York, capitalism’s beating heart, on a day he desperately hopes for a financial windfall that never comes. The war lurks in the backdrop: Wilhelm’s father, Dr. Adler, represents the pre-war values of hard work and stoicism, and he dismisses Wilhelm’s angst as weakness. But Wilhelm embodies a sort of moral injury of the everyman: he’s lost, isolated (“alone in a crowd” on city streets (Seize the Day: Themes | SparkNotes)), and searching for meaning in a society that prizes wealth over soul. We can read his tears at the funeral as mourning not just personal failures, but a loss of faith in the world’s moral order after living through an era of genocide and nuclear bombs.
Critically, one might say Bellow’s novel is limited by its focus on a white middle-class male’s interior life, with no attention to the racial upheavals or social injustices of the time. It’s true—Seize the Day doesn’t touch on racism or the experiences of, say, Black veterans or Holocaust survivors; it’s very much within Bellow’s wheelhouse of individual, intellectual struggle. In that sense, it can be seen as sidestepping the harder questions of collective morality (similar to how many mid-century American works did). Still, it offers a microcosm: Wilhelm’s cry could be seen as America’s submerged moral sorrow. Bellow, perhaps unwittingly, painted a picture of a nation that had “won” the war yet felt spiritually adrift in its wake.
Ideological Implications: All these cultural works—films and literature—highlight aspects of moral injury and racism, but none are neutral. Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket both challenge the glorification of war; they demystify the “noble warrior” myth by showing American soldiers as vulnerable, sometimes vicious, sometimes victims of their own leaders. Yet they also reinscribe a narrative where the American experience is central. This can inadvertently marginalize the voices of those we harmed. It’s an ideological choice (conscious or not) that implies American self-reflection takes precedence over directly hearing from Vietnamese or other impacted peoples. In the decades after these films, more stories have emerged from the perspective of the Vietnamese (for example, novels like The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh, or films by Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American creators), providing a counter-narrative to the Hollywood vision. Engaging with war’s legacy means listening to those stories too, not just our own echo.
As for Seize the Day, its ideology is more subtle—it elevates individual moral quest above social critique. One might criticize that as an evasion: while Wilhelm wallows, the real moral crises of the 1950s (racial segregation, McCarthyite persecutions, etc.) go undiscussed. That reflects Bellow’s era and milieu; but it also suggests how easy it was (and is) for Americans, especially those insulated by privilege, to turn inward and ignore systemic wrongs. In context, the 1950s were when many WWII vets quietly managed their trauma by just “moving on” into gray-flannel suit jobs, and society largely swept uncomfortable questions under the rug. Bellow breaks the silence to an extent by showing Wilhelm’s breakdown, yet he doesn’t connect it to larger injustices—thus, the reader is invited to empathize deeply with one man’s pain, but not necessarily to link it to a collective responsibility.
From Battlefield to Homefront: The Lingering Shadow of War on American Democracy
When wars end, their ghosts often return home. The United States emerged from WWII as a global superpower with its mythos intact, but Vietnam left a far messier legacy. The late 1970s and 1980s saw Americans wrestling with “Vietnam syndrome,” a mix of shame, defeat, and distrust in government. Veterans struggled to reintegrate, and Hollywood (as we saw) churned out movies that oscillated between regretful and jingoistic (interestingly, the ’80s also gave us Rambo: First Blood Part II, where a veteran goes back to ‘redo’ Vietnam heroically—an escapist right-wing fantasy to salve the ego). All this is to say: war trauma and unresolved moral injury didn’t stay on the battlefield; they seeped into American culture and politics.
Perhaps the most underappreciated effect is how war’s authoritarian tendencies can boomerang back into the society that waged it. Wartime requires (or at least encourages) authoritarian structures: strict hierarchies, obedience, an ends justify means mentality. Soldiers are conditioned to accept commands without moral debate. Propaganda simplifies issues into good vs evil. When those soldiers return to civilian life, many readjust and return to pluralistic values—but some do not. For a subset, the clear certainties and camaraderie of the military (even if laced with racism and violence) remain psychologically appealing. And if society does not adequately support and heal veterans, they become vulnerable to those who would exploit their skills and anger.
In the 1920s and ’30s, demagogues like Mussolini and Hitler famously recruited disaffected war veterans to bolster fascist movements. As one analyst notes, “The fascists and Nazis... deliberately targeted the many combat veterans of WWI to form political organizations dedicated to the idea that war was the highest truth.” (New Nonfiction by Adrian Bonenberger: "An Alternate View of Moral Injury" - Wrath-Bearing Tree) They inverted the moral order, celebrating violence and domination as virtues. The same potential exists in any country. In the U.S., after Vietnam, some alienated vets indeed gravitated to extremist groups. The paramilitary right-wing group Vietnam Veterans Against the War (despite its name) splintered, and some veterans joined militia movements. The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a Gulf War vet who became convinced the U.S. government was the enemy. More recently, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have appeared in the ranks of far-right and white supremacist groups.
It’s not that most vets become extremists—far from it. But a disproportionate number of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, for example, had military backgrounds. What draws them? For one, the feeling of betrayal—a key component of moral injury—can curdle into a stab-in-the-back myth. After Vietnam, some veterans (and plenty of civilians) nurtured a narrative that America lost because of internal traitors (politicians, anti-war protesters, journalists) rather than because the war itself was wrong. This sense of grievance can be harnessed by authoritarian-minded leaders. Also, many veterans miss the sense of purpose and brotherhood the military gave them; extremist groups actively try to fill that void. A 2024 report warned that “far-right groups have attempted to exploit [veterans’] vulnerability, directly contacting former service personnel via social media,” offering them belonging and structure when they lack support (Far-right groups 'actively targeting vulnerable military veterans on social media' | Royal United Services Institute). These groups often bring along the baggage of racism and violent ideology—essentially extending the logic of war (identifying an enemy, glorifying force) into domestic politics.
Now enter Donald J. Trump. It’s impossible to talk about contemporary authoritarian currents in the U.S. without discussing the 45th president, who in many ways embodies and amplifies the dark side of the American psyche we’ve been examining. Trump, though of Vietnam draft age, did not serve (famously citing “bone spurs”), yet he constantly wrapped himself in martial rhetoric and machismo. He praised brutal strongmen abroad (“he’s a tough guy,” he said of Putin, admiringly) and echoed wartime logic in domestic policy (calling immigrants “invaders” and referring to urban crime in racialized terms, effectively casting fellow Americans as an internal enemy). His rallies were suffused with an atmosphere of grievance and aggression—audiences chanted militaristic slogans and directed two minutes of hate at targets he named (the press, Hillary Clinton, etc.). Trump also displayed a shocking comfort with war crimes: he mused about killing the families of terrorists, enthusiastically supported torture (“I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”, he said), and as president he even pardoned American soldiers convicted or accused of atrocities. In 2019 he intervened in several military justice cases, granting clemency to men who had been found guilty of murdering civilians or prisoners (Trump pardons Army officers, restores Navy SEAL's rank in war crimes cases | Reuters) (Trump pardons Army officers, restores Navy SEAL's rank in war crimes cases | Reuters). Critics warned that such actions “undermine military justice and send a message that battlefield atrocities will be tolerated.” (Trump pardons Army officers, restores Navy SEAL's rank in war crimes cases | Reuters) Indeed, one of those men, a Navy SEAL, had been described by his own platoon as “OK with killing anything that moved”, including teenagers (Navy Seal pardoned of war crimes by Trump described by ...). By celebrating these individuals as heroes, Trump catered to a segment of the population that views any action against the “enemy” as justified—and by extension, signaled that legal and moral norms are secondary to tribal victory. This is exactly the ethos of authoritarianism: the Leader’s will (or the nation’s will) trumps law and ethics.
It would be an oversimplification to blame Trump’s rise solely on unresolved war trauma. Many factors converged—economic anxiety, racial backlash to a black president, the echo chamber of social media, etc. But the wars of the past and their psychic residue form part of the backdrop. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” implicitly harkened to an age of unapologetic dominance—some hear in it an echo of the WWII triumph (when America was unambiguously “great” and won wars) or of the early Cold War. It was a promise to erase the humiliation of Vietnam, the uncertainty of Iraq, and the complexity of a multiethnic democracy, in favor of a simpler glory. Psychoanalytically, one might say Trump offered a fantasy to a wounded national ego: a return to an imagined state of wholeness without guilt, where might makes right. Such a fantasy is very appealing if you’re tired of feeling guilty or confused. It’s the same psychic move as Kurtz’s in Apocalypse Now—embrace the horror, declare it righteous, and thereby silence your conscience.
Trump also fed and feeds on racism in ways that resonate with our discussion of war. He infamously called Mexican immigrants “rapists,” sought to ban Muslims entirely from entering the country, and labeled African nations “shitholes.” This raw bigotry isn’t new in American politics, but rarely had it been so unabashed from the Oval Office. It re-legitimized dormant stereotypes (remember Dower’s warning that wartime racist tropes remain latent (War Without Mercy - Wikipedia)). Under Trump, hate crimes against Asian Americans spiked, especially after he racialized the COVID-19 pandemic as the “China virus.” We can draw a line from the way WWII propaganda portrayed Asians, to the Vietnam era slurs, straight to this contemporary resurgence of anti-Asian sentiment. It’s the same psychic mechanism of Othering, activated in a time of crisis.
The danger of such racism and the authoritarian impulse is that it creates new moral injuries and traumas, perpetuating the cycle. For example, when migrant children were separated from parents at the border and kept in cages, that state violence echoed the injustices of internment camps or worse—and it inflicted trauma on families (and arguably on the soul of the nation). The officers carrying out such policies might one day reckon with the moral injury of having “just followed orders” in harming innocents. Meanwhile, communities of color in the U.S. feel under siege, which can lead to their own form of collective trauma and rage.
It’s not all doom and gloom. There has been significant pushback against these authoritarian and racist currents. Many Americans are consciously striving to confront historical wrongs—witness the debates over Confederate monuments (interesting footnote: Derek Hook, co-editor of Lacan and Race, analyzed the libidinal attachment some white Americans have to those statues, as a kind of enjoyment in a racist historical fantasy (Sheldon George and Derek Hook (eds), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory | Psychoanalysis and History)). Movements for racial justice insist on acknowledging and healing past and present injuries, rather than denying them. The U.S. military, for its part, has at least recognized “moral injury” as a real issue and has been supporting programs to help veterans deal with guilt and shame. Some veterans undertake what you might call “moral journeys” later in life—like returning to Vietnam to build schools or hospitals as acts of reconciliation, or speaking out against new wars (the veterans’ voices were strong in opposing the post-9/11 torture practices, for instance, precisely because some knew the moral cost).
Psychoanalysis tells us that what is not addressed consciously will be expressed unconsciously, often in destructive ways. America’s task, then, is to continue dragging these demons into the light: to admit when war was wrong, to listen to those we harmed, to hold leaders accountable who transgress (rather than elevate them to cult status), and to support those who carry guilt so they can transform it, not transmit it. It means recognizing that racism is not a side issue or a relic—it is a live wire that, when charged (by fear, by propaganda), can drive ordinary people to commit or condone atrocities. Healing moral injury requires a kind of national therapy: truth-telling, apologies, perhaps symbolic acts of contrition (like building memorials to civilian victims, or paying reparations—steps that are beginning in small ways).
Conclusion: Toward Integration and Insight
American wars, from the big set-piece of WWII to the quagmire of Vietnam and beyond, reveal a profound entanglement of outward violence and inward psychological struggle. We’ve seen how racism can grease the wheels of war, making it easier for soldiers to pull the trigger—but at the price of deep moral wounds that do not easily heal. We’ve engaged psychoanalytic ideas to understand these phenomena: how the projection of evil onto a racial Other enables cruelty; how the return of the repressed (unacknowledged guilt) can fuel continued cycles of violence or self-destruction; how the superego in its darkest form can become an internal sadist, punishing a person with nightmares and despair for their transgressions. George and Hook’s work on Lacan and race reminds us that race is not just a social construct “out there” but lives within individuals’ psyches as a mode of irrational enjoyment and identity (Sheldon George and Derek Hook (eds), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory | Psychoanalysis and History). Undoing racism, then, is not just about laws and education, but about grappling with unconscious desires and fears—truly a psychoanalytic task as much as a political one.
Understanding moral injury similarly requires more than clinical definitions; it demands moral discourse. It’s heartening that terms like “moral injury” have gained traction, because they allow soldiers to frame their pain not as a personal weakness but as a response to ethical breach (New Nonfiction by Adrian Bonenberger: "An Alternate View of Moral Injury" - Wrath-Bearing Tree). In recognizing that, perhaps we as a society can also reclaim some morality—by saying yes, it was wrong, and your pain is real.
As we face contemporary challenges—rising authoritarian rhetoric, new forms of warfare like drone strikes that distance us from killing, persistent racial divides—we must carry forward the lessons hard-won from past wars. One lesson is that denying the humanity of others, even for ostensibly good ends, will ultimately erode our own humanity. Another is that silencing conscience might win a battle, but at the cost of a war within the self. We saw that with Kurtz in fiction, and with many a real-life veteran or officer who lost themselves to barbarity.
Crucially, confronting these truths should not lead to paralysis or endless self-flagellation. Rather, it can be the foundation for a healthier form of patriotism and global citizenship—one that acknowledges flaws and seeks to do better. America’s moral injuries—slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, Hiroshima, My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and others—are heavy burdens, but acknowledging them is the first step in preventing their recurrence. The current debates over how (or whether) to teach difficult history in schools show this struggle in real time. Those pushing for honesty and inclusion are effectively performing a collective therapy, insisting that we integrate the repressed chapters of our story. Those pushing to censor or whitewash are, perhaps unknowingly, defending a fragile ego that fears shame—but as we’ve explored, unprocessed shame tends to resurface in uglier ways.
In wrapping up, let’s circle back to psychoanalysis for a hopeful note. Freud believed that making the unconscious conscious was key to overcoming neuroses. Lacan believed in the transformative potential of analyzing the discourses that shape us. If America is, in a sense, on the analyst’s couch, then discussing moral injury and racism openly is a sign of progress. We are naming our ghosts. We are sifting through nightmares to glean their meaning. And we are, gradually, finding new narratives to live by that don’t require enemies in quite the same way.
To be sure, the work is ongoing. But imagine an America that truly learns from its wars: that treats war itself as a last resort and a tragic failure, not an opportunity for proving superiority; that honors its veterans not just with medals, but with the commitment to never needlessly create more of them; that extends compassion to former foes and seeks reconciliation; and that rejects leaders who glorify cruelty or stoke racist hatred as un-American, full stop. This America would be stronger in a way that doesn’t rely on dominance but on integrity.
We began by analyzing the psychoanalytic dimensions of these heavy topics. In closing, it’s fitting to recall a simple human truth: empathy is the antidote to dehumanization. Where racism paints the Other as a caricature, empathy restores detail and dignity. Where moral injury festers in silence and self-loathing, empathy—from others and for oneself—allows healing. So perhaps the broad readership we aimed for can take this away: War is not just fought on battlefields, but in hearts and minds. The casualties include not only those who die, but those who live on with invisible wounds. And the enemies we must be most wary of are not “out there” in some foreign land or in some other skin, but within us—fear, hatred, indifference. Confront those honestly, and we have a chance to finally break the cycle and step off the ride of the Valkyries, for good.
Sources:
Sheldon George & Derek Hook (eds.), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory – on racism as a psychic structure (Sheldon George and Derek Hook (eds), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory | Psychoanalysis and History) (Sheldon George and Derek Hook (eds), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory | Psychoanalysis and History).
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD – definition of moral injury in war (Moral Injury - PTSD: National Center for PTSD).
Adrian Bonenberger, “An Alternate View of Moral Injury” – discussion of WWII vs Vietnam moral injury narratives (New Nonfiction by Adrian Bonenberger: "An Alternate View of Moral Injury" - Wrath-Bearing Tree) (New Nonfiction by Adrian Bonenberger: "An Alternate View of Moral Injury" - Wrath-Bearing Tree).
John W. Dower, War Without Mercy – documentation of WWII Pacific as a race war (War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War | The Inglorius Padre Steve's World) (War Without Mercy - Wikipedia) and latent durability of wartime racist stereotypes (War Without Mercy - Wikipedia).
Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves – evidence of widespread atrocities in Vietnam (A Look at Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse – Indian Cultural Forum) (A Look at Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse – Indian Cultural Forum) and civilian casualty statistics (A Look at Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse – Indian Cultural Forum).
Thuc Doan Nguyen, “Me Love You Long Time….” (DVAN) – critique of Vietnam War films for erasing Vietnamese humanity (“Me love you long time” Sticks Around For A Really Long Time - DVAN) (“Me love you long time” Sticks Around For A Really Long Time - DVAN).
Viet Thanh Nguyen interview (Yale SEA) – on Apocalypse Now centering American perspective and his reaction (A New Apocalypse: The Creation of A New Cultural Memory of the Vietnam War | Modern Southeast Asia).
LitCharts on Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth – colonial violence’s psychological harm to colonizer and colonized (Oppression and Mental Health Theme in The Wretched of the Earth | LitCharts).
Reuters report on Trump’s pardons – how excusing war crimes signaled tolerance of atrocities (Trump pardons Army officers, restores Navy SEAL's rank in war crimes cases | Reuters) (Trump pardons Army officers, restores Navy SEAL's rank in war crimes cases | Reuters).
RUSI report via The Mirror – far-right recruitment of vulnerable veterans via promises of belonging (Far-right groups 'actively targeting vulnerable military veterans on social media' | Royal United Services Institute).
Britannica on Japanese American internment – historical context of racist policy during WWII (Japanese American internment in pictures | Britannica) (Japanese American internment in pictures | Britannica).
SparkNotes on Seize the Day – notes on post-WWII disillusionment backdrop (Seize the Day: Themes | SparkNotes) (Seize the Day: Themes | SparkNotes).
Wrath-Bearing Tree, Bonenberger – on war’s pleasure and fascist use of WWI vets (New Nonfiction by Adrian Bonenberger: "An Alternate View of Moral Injury" - Wrath-Bearing Tree).
Moral Wounds and Racial Phantoms: Psychoanalytic Reflections on American War Trauma
Introduction
America’s wars have left deep psychic scars—“moral injuries”—on those who fought them and on the peoples caught in their crossfire. From the “Good War” of World War II to the quagmire of Vietnam, U.S. military violence has often been entangled with racism: enemy peoples were cast as racial or cultural Others to justify unimaginable brutality. This long-read exploration will delve into the psychoanalytic dimensions of these entwined phenomena, examining how moral injury and racism have shaped American wars and their aftermath. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory—especially insights from Sheldon George and Derek Hook’s Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory—we will probe the unconscious forces at play in wartime racism and moral transgression. We’ll critically assess the moral injuries suffered by American soldiers and the trauma inflicted on racialized populations targeted by U.S. warfare. Along the way, we’ll interrogate cultural representations like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, treating them with skepticism to expose their ideological blind spots. Finally, we connect these historical and psychological threads to our contemporary moment, where unresolved war traumas and persistent racist fantasies feed into rising authoritarianism in the United States. (Spoiler: we won’t shy away from naming names and pointing fingers at today’s would-be strongmen.)
This journey traverses battlefields and minds, past and present, in search of insight. But fear not—while the concepts are intricate, the discussion will remain accessible. We’ll break down psychoanalytic theories in plain language and ground them in vivid historical examples. The goal is a compelling, clear-eyed inquiry that illuminates how the “Othering” and moral corrosion of war haunt the American psyche, and what that means for the society we live in today.
Moral Injury and the “Other” in War
War throws ordinary men and women into situations that shatter the moral codes of peacetime. Moral injury refers to the inner anguish that arises when someone perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that violate their core ethical values
. Unlike PTSD, which is often rooted in fear and survival instinct, moral injury centers on guilt, shame, and a sense of betrayal of one’s own moral compass
. Imagine a soldier ordered to fire on civilians, or a medic forced to triage who will live and who will die—such events can leave scars on the soul that no medal or parade can salve.
Crucially, moral injury doesn’t afflict only soldiers. Societies too can experience a kind of collective moral injury when they recognize (or refuse to recognize) unjust harm done in their name. And for those on the receiving end of wartime atrocities—often populations already racialized as enemies or “inferior” peoples—the trauma is double-edged. They suffer the direct terror of violence and the moral shock of being treated as less than human. In war, racism has frequently been the handmaiden of moral transgression: by defining the Other as inhuman, soldiers find it “easier to kill that way,” as one analysis of U.S. military language starkly put it
. Dehumanizing epithets and stereotypes strip the enemy of individuality and empathy, lowering the psychological barriers to murder and massacre.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this process of Othering and dehumanization taps into deep unconscious mechanisms. Lacanian theory posits that identity is formed through contrast with an Other, and that the unconscious itself is structured by the discourse of the Other
. In the chaos of war, soldiers are often subjected to a new discourse: propaganda and training that paints the enemy in demonic or subhuman terms. Racism becomes not just a political tool, but a “psychic reality”—a part of the soldier’s inner world that “mediates [their] social relations and access to a sense of being through and against bodily flesh” (as George and Hook put it)
. In plainer terms: racial ideology seeps into the unconscious, telling the soldier, “They are not like us; their lives mean less.” This unconscious bias can be perversely thrilling to the aggressor’s psyche: the normal moral rules are suspended, offering a grim freedom to indulge violent impulses. Lacanian thinkers describe racism as operating as a mode of enjoyment (jouissance)
—the racist stereotype carries a kernel of illicit pleasure (in feeling superior, in blaming the Other, even in hurting them) that can be very psychologically potent.
The flip side of this “enjoyment” by the perpetrator is the profound suffering of both victim and perpetrator once the frenzy passes. The American soldier who was taught to revile a “Jap” or “gook” and then pulled the trigger may later find his triumphs curdling into nightmares and remorse. The Vietnamese villager or Japanese civilian, meanwhile, is left to grapple with why the Americans’ vaunted ideals of liberty and human rights did not apply to them. In both, a kind of moral confusion and injury takes root. As psychiatrist Frantz Fanon observed in the context of colonial wars, the violence and racism of such conflicts inflict psychological damage on both the colonized and the colonizer
. The colonized live in a constant “state of rage” under assault, while the colonizer is haunted by the suppressive brutality he enacts
. War’s racism thus creates a toxic relational loop: a feedback cycle of hatred, fear, and guilt that can endure long after the guns fall silent.
Let’s ground these abstractions by turning to two of America’s most significant 20th-century conflicts—World War II and the Vietnam War. Each reveals in different ways how racial ideology and moral injury became intertwined, and how they rippled through culture and politics.
World War II: Race War Beneath the “Good War”
World War II is often remembered in the U.S. as a morally clear-cut conflict: a fight against fascist tyranny and genocide, “the Good War” that saved democracy. But this comforting narrative obscures a darker reality—particularly in the war against Japan. In the Pacific Theater, WWII was, in historian John Dower’s words, essentially “a race war”, fueled on both sides by brutal racial hatreds
. American propaganda and popular culture overflowed with dehumanizing caricatures of the Japanese. Cartoons and posters depicted Japanese people with fanged teeth, as apes or vermin, or sneaking, subhuman creatures deserving extermination. Soldiers marched to slogans like “Remember Pearl Harbor—Keep ’Em Dying!” and viewed the enemy not as individual human beings but as an undifferentiated horde of “Japs.” As Dower documents, everything from “songs, slogans, [and] propaganda reports” to Hollywood films and even military intelligence reports were permeated with grotesque racist stereotypes
. This was officially sanctioned bigotry—one training film shown to GIs proclaimed that the Japanese soldier “has all the cunning of the Oriental mind ... This little rat is a dangerous enemy” (an example among many). Small wonder that many American troops came to see the killing of Japanese not as a grim necessity but as a form of righteous pest control.
Importantly, this racism was not just wartime hysteria against a foreign enemy—it dovetailed with pre-existing racism in American society. At home, over 120,000 Japanese Americans (two-thirds of them U.S. citizens) were rounded up and imprisoned in desolate internment camps in 1942, purely because of their ancestry
. Families like the one shown loading their belongings onto a moving truck in San Francisco’s Japantown in April 1942 were given days to sell or store their property before being shipped to barbed-wire “relocation centers”
. No comparable mass internment befell German or Italian Americans. In fact, U.S. discourse carefully distinguished “good Germans” from Nazi ideologues, but no such nuance was granted to those of Japanese blood
. The American Othering of the Japanese was near-absolute: they were collectively blamed for Pearl Harbor, suspected of congenital treachery, and described in lurid racist terms that denied their basic humanity.
A moving van on a San Francisco street outside the Japanese American Citizens League office in April 1942, as Japanese American families prepared for forced relocation. Over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry (mostly U.S. citizens) were interned during WWII, reflecting the intense racism that underpinned the war in the Pacific
.
What effect did this have on the moral psyche of American warriors? On one hand, it emboldened extreme violence. If the enemy is a kind of savage beast, ordinary ethical limits feel irrelevant. Indeed, U.S. conduct in the Pacific War was ferocious. Marines famously rarely took Japanese prisoners—few enemy soldiers were allowed to surrender alive. Accounts from Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and dozens of nameless skirmishes speak of Japanese wounded being shot and bayoneted, of entire garrisons annihilated to the last man. American troops collected Japanese skulls and ears as macabre trophies. The war became one of virtually extermination, a fact understood by leaders at the time. President Franklin Roosevelt himself, in private, referred to the conflict as a struggle of “the Aryan against the Mongol”
, tacitly acknowledging the racial frame. When the U.S. firebombed Tokyo and later dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, there was little moral questioning among the American public—Japanese lives had been so thoroughly devalued by years of racist indoctrination that these horrific acts were widely celebrated as righteous vengeance (“Avenge December 7!” as one poster blared).
And yet, beneath the victorious bravado, moral injury lurked. Not every American who killed in the Pacific rejoiced. Some struggled with guilt, especially those who directly witnessed or carried out atrocities. We know now that Allied veterans of WWII also suffered nightmares, regret, and what we’d today call PTSD, even if the term didn’t exist. The difference is, in WWII their cause was socially validated—they were heroes returning to ticker-tape parades, encouraged to feel pride rather than remorse. This societal response muted expressions of moral injury. As one writer observed, moral injury narratives are relatively absent from WWII accounts, compared to later wars
. Cases like U.S. bombardier-turned-author Kurt Vonnegut—who survived the firebombing of Dresden as a POW and later satirized the absurdity and horror of it in Slaughterhouse-Five—were rarer, almost exceptions that proved the rule
. World War II’s status as a “good war” created a powerful cultural script that suppressed open grappling with moral guilt. To admit anguish over killing the evil enemy might have seemed almost treasonous or at least unmanly in that era.
Yet the poison of racism and violence did not simply vanish when peace came in 1945. It lingered in the national psyche. Dower warned in War Without Mercy that the hateful stereotypes cultivated in WWII “remain latent, capable of being revived by both sides in times of crisis and tension.”
Indeed, only a few years later, in the Korean War, U.S. troops and media again resorted to racist tropes (now against Chinese and Koreans). The pattern repeated yet more starkly in Vietnam. It seems the repressed moral questions of WWII—about indiscriminate destruction and racist contempt—returned with a vengeance in the next generation’s conflict, where they would tear America’s self-image apart.
Before we move to Vietnam, it’s worth noting one more moral contradiction of WWII: the United States was fighting a racist empire (Nazi Germany) and a militant racist tyranny (Imperial Japan) while still practicing racial segregation and oppression at home. The U.S. Army was segregated; Black soldiers who fought for freedom came home to Jim Crow laws. Such hypocrisy did not go unnoticed. It planted seeds of doubt and cynicism, particularly among African Americans and other minorities, about America’s claimed moral high ground. One could argue that this dissonance—between lofty ideals and lived injustice—was another form of collective moral injury from WWII, one that would fuel the Civil Rights struggles in the decades after. Psychoanalytically, when a nation refuses to acknowledge a gap between its ideal “ego ideal” (e.g. liberty and justice for all) and its reality (racism and violence), that gap doesn’t vanish—it festers in the unconscious of society, generating unrest and a drive to work through the trauma by demanding change.
Vietnam: The Shattered Mirror of American Virtue
If WWII allowed Americans to mostly externalize evil (pinning it on fascists and “Japs”), the Vietnam War forced a confrontation with American capacity for evil. As the war dragged on, many Americans came to see that we were the violators of norms, the invaders inflicting terror on a poor peasant nation. Nowhere was the nexus of racism and moral injury more glaring than in Vietnam. U.S. troops, largely young conscripts, were thrust into a guerrilla war in an alien land, fighting an enemy that blended in with the local population. The stress was extreme, and once again, racial dehumanization became a coping mechanism—and a tool of strategy.
American soldiers commonly referred to Vietnamese (whether enemy fighters or civilians) with slurs like “gooks,” “dinks,” and other unprintable epithets. This language was so pervasive that even years later, veterans would sometimes reflexively use it, a sign of how ingrained it had become. The purpose, of course, was to erase the individuality and innocence of anyone on the other side. As one veteran later explained, “If they’re ‘gooks,’ it’s easier to cut them down without feeling bad about it.” Training camps primed soldiers with chants like “Kill! Kill! Kill!” and brutal cadences joking about napalming villages. Some accounts even suggest that in training, recruits were taught that “before you can kill, you have to cut the word ‘kill’ out of your vocabulary. You kill a person, but you waste a gook.” In other words, you linguistically transform killing a human into destroying an object or vermin.
This systematic dehumanization had horrific real-world outcomes. Atrocities against Vietnamese civilians were startlingly common—far more so than the lone incident of My Lai that made headlines. In fact, internal U.S. Army investigations (unearthed decades later) confirmed “atrocities were committed by every major army unit in Vietnam”
. Search-and-destroy missions often lived up to their name: villages suspected of sympathizing with the Viet Cong were burned to the ground; livestock slaughtered; old men, women, and children shot at point-blank range. A chilling directive—“kill anything that moves”—became an open secret motto for some units, essentially a green light for indiscriminate killing
. When a soldier asked a superior during one operation, “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” the reply was, “Kill everything that moves.”
That exchange, later made public, encapsulates the moral nightmare of Vietnam: there were no limits. And indeed, the overall civilian toll reflects this nightmare. An estimated 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war, and roughly 7.3 million were wounded
. Among these were countless noncombatants—one Harvard study cited by journalist Nick Turse found roughly one-third of the wounded were women and a quarter were children
. This was not “collateral damage” in the rare accident sense; it was a daily, relentless reality of a war that, as Turse writes, became an “endless slaughter that wiped out civilians day after day, month after month”
.
For American soldiers on the ground, the moral consequences were inescapable (whether they realized it at the time or not). Unlike WWII, Vietnam lacked a clear moral justification or victory. Many GIs arrived thinking they were defending the free world from communism, but found themselves murdering farmers who, when not dead, would stare at them with incomprehension and hatred. This disillusionment was famously captured in the film Apocalypse Now, in a scene (drawn from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) where an American soldier laments, “We cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies.” The war corroded whatever simple faith these young men had in American virtue.
Psychologically, what happens when the ego-ideal (“I’m a liberator, a hero”) is shattered by one’s own actions (“I just shot a child”)? One common response is dissociation or numbing—some veterans recall feeling nothing at the time, a kind of emotional shutdown as they committed violence. But later, guilt seeped in through the cracks of that psychic armor. Many Vietnam vets began suffering intrusive memories, depression, or rage. Some turned that rage inward (suicides and substance abuse among returning vets were alarmingly high); others turned it outward, sometimes in domestic violence or antisocial behavior. In psychoanalytic terms, the superego (the internal moral judge) was merciless for many of these men. They had violated the fundamental prohibition against murder—often under orders—and their inner sense of themselves was forever changed. Vietnam veteran and psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, in comparing vets to Homeric heroes, noted that what often broke soldiers was a “betrayal of what’s right” by authorities they trusted. For example, being ordered to do something heinous, like kill civilians, and realizing no one would be held accountable at higher levels, delivered a shattering blow to their faith in all moral structure. The result Shay called “moral injury” is essentially a ruined trust—in moral values, in leaders, and in oneself.
Not all soldiers reacted the same, of course. Some fully embraced the darkness—there were units and individuals that truly reveled in killing, whose racist hatred was so entrenched that massacring “gooks” felt like fulfillment. Recall the earlier observation that war can be perversely pleasurable. One veteran admitted, “the majority of soldiers who have killed... know the truth (that savage destruction is pleasurable) like they know a spoon is a spoon”
. Such men might not exhibit classic PTSD; they might even miss the war. But that, too, is a kind of moral injury—a twisted one—because once back in civilian life, that thrill has no legitimate outlet. It can curdle into nihilism or continued bloodlust (we’ll see how this feeds extremism later). On the other hand, many American servicemen in Vietnam retained or regained their conscience. Thousands openly protested the war while it was ongoing (the phenomenon of soldiers fragging—killing—their own officers, or refusing combat missions, grew in the later years). In 1971, the Winter Soldier hearings saw dozens of decorated vets publicly testify to war crimes they had seen or committed, in an anguished bid to force America to face the reality. One vet from the 1st Marine Division confessed: “I’ve prayed to God that I’m wrong, but I know that I’m not.... I know that the people I killed were people.” Such testimonials illustrate moral injury in plain words: a man wrestling with guilt and the need for atonement by speaking truth.
Now consider the Vietnamese perspective. For them, the war was fundamentally about survival and independence, not ideology. They saw their families bombed, children napalmed, villages obliterated in free-fire zones. The term “moral injury” might not be commonly applied to victims, but surely there is moral trauma in experiencing a supposedly civilized nation treat your life as disposable. Vietnamese civilians often described feeling bewilderment: “Why are the Americans doing this to us? What have we done?” That bewilderment can calcify into a deep narrative of injustice. To this day, the “American War” (as it’s called in Vietnam) is remembered with a mix of pride (for defeating the U.S.) and sorrow at the tremendous suffering. It left generational trauma: millions mourned the dead, and many more silently carried scars of atrocities like My Lai (where over 500 unarmed villagers were slaughtered). Some Vietnamese also undoubtedly felt hatred toward Americans—an animosity stoked by the racial dimension of how the U.S. waged the war. Vietnamese fighters were aware of slurs used against them; they saw how American racism lumped together communist guerillas and neutral peasants alike as targets. This racism may have steeled the resolve of Viet Cong and NVA soldiers—if the enemy sees us as subhuman, there is no choice but to fight to the death. In that sense, American racism perhaps prolonged the war by eliminating possibilities of trust or surrender. For Vietnamese Americans (many of whom came as refugees after 1975), the war left a complex legacy of identity and intergenerational trauma. They had been pawns in a superpower game and victims of racist vilification; adjusting to American life often meant confronting lingering stereotypes (the legacy of phrases like “Me love you long time,” originating from a Full Metal Jacket scene with a Vietnamese sex worker, which continued to stigmatize Asian women in the U.S.
). Thus, the moral injuries of Vietnam radiate outward: perpetrator and victim, and the culture that later receives those actors, all bear the wound in different ways.
Cultural Reflections: War’s Madness and Ideology on Screen and Page
American culture has grappled with the moral and racial entanglements of war in myriad ways—sometimes confronting them, sometimes reinforcing old fantasies. Let’s examine a few iconic works with a critical eye: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Saul Bellow’s novella Seize the Day (1956). Each offers insight into the American psyche, yet each also has telling blind spots and ideological subtexts.
Helicopters against an Asian sunset in Apocalypse Now. Coppola’s Vietnam War epic depicts the surreal brutality of war (the famous “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter attack, pictured, is both thrilling and terrifying) but, as critics note, it largely treats Vietnamese people as a backdrop for American psychological drama
.
“The horror... the horror”: Apocalypse Now. Coppola’s film, inspired by Heart of Darkness, transposes Joseph Conrad’s tale of colonial madness to the Vietnam War. Its protagonist, Capt. Willard, journeys upriver into Cambodia on a mission to terminate Colonel Kurtz, a highly decorated U.S. officer who has gone rogue—setting himself up as a demigod and waging a horrific private war. The film is a phantasmagoria of surreal, nightmarish scenes: a regiment of American cowboys blasting Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as they gun down a Vietnamese village from helicopters; a Do Lung bridge outpost where shell-shocked GIs fight in pitch darkness, seemingly for nothing; and finally Kurtz’s compound, littered with severed heads, where Kurtz delivers monologues about the “hypocrisy” of American war—how we drop incendiary bombs on villagers but court-martial officers who write obscenities on their planes, how we train young men to kill but won’t let them drink or swear. Apocalypse Now is often praised for exposing the moral insanity of Vietnam. Indeed, Kurtz (Marlon Brando) embodies the endpoint of unchecked imperial racism and violence—he has become a monster who mirrors the war’s collective id. His famous last words, “The horror... the horror,” are a judgment on the war’s depravity and, by extension, on all of us who allowed it.
Yet, as novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen (a Vietnamese-American who won a Pulitzer for The Sympathizer) has forcefully argued, Apocalypse Now is still an American story about Americans. Nguyen noted that the film “centered American morality”, portraying Vietnam as “an American war from the American perspective”, with Vietnamese people relegated to faceless villagers or exoticized props
. He recalled feeling rage during the scene in which a U.S. patrol boat massacres a sampan of Vietnamese civilians over a panicky misunderstanding
. The casual way the Americans move on from the slaughter, and the film’s subsequent focus on Willard’s inner turmoil, signaled to Nguyen that “this was our place in an American war”—namely, to suffer silently so that Americans could grapple with their souls
. In other words, Apocalypse Now, for all its anti-war power, arguably reproduces the very dynamic it critiques: it uses Vietnam as a canvas for exploring American angst, not Vietnamese reality. The film’s stunning visuals and psychedelic set-pieces—while artistically brilliant—also arguably aestheticize the war. Viewers can become so swept up in Coppola’s operatic vision (that helicopter attack set to Wagner, or the napalm exploding in a glorious orange sunrise) that the Vietnamese as people disappear entirely. We feel the Americans’ fear and madness, but the Vietnamese dead are as mute as the water buffalo Kurtz sacrifices. This raises a question: does Apocalypse Now actually undermine the racist dehumanization of Vietnamese, or does it inadvertently extend it by keeping Vietnamese largely voiceless? It’s a debate that continues. The film invites us to condemn the war’s excesses, yet it also reinforces the notion that the meaning of Vietnam lies in American psychological struggle (“a civil war in the American soul,” as Nguyen says
), rather than in the Vietnamese experience of invasion.
“This is my rifle”: Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick’s film takes a two-act approach: first, it plunges us into Marine boot camp on Parris Island, then into the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The boot camp sequences are especially famous, largely due to R. Lee Ermey’s ferocious performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, the drill instructor who mercilessly berates and humiliates recruits. In these scenes, Kubrick peels back the curtain on the dehumanization of American soldiers themselves, as a precursor to making them killers. Hartman calls the young men “maggots,” “pukes,” and uses vicious racist and homophobic slurs. (One recruit, the film’s protagonist nicknamed “Joker,” is paradoxically told to write “Born to Kill” on his helmet while wearing a peace-sign pin—illustrating the schizoid mindset the military instills.) A particularly poignant storyline is that of the overweight, slow recruit Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence. Hartman makes Pyle the platoon scapegoat, tormenting him relentlessly. Under this abuse, Pyle first improves (he learns to shoot with a near-religious fervor, whispering “I am... in a world of shit... yes,” as his marksmanship blossoms), but then he breaks. In a climactic scene, Pyle snaps into a trance-like state, executes Hartman, and then kills himself. It’s a shocking dramatization of how the military’s own brutality implodes—the method of dehumanization produces a monster that devours its creator.
When the film shifts to Vietnam, we follow Joker (now a war correspondent) through the battle of Huế. Here, Kubrick shows war as both absurd and intimate. We see soldiers cracking dark jokes about the brutality (“How can you shoot women or children?” one asks ironically, echoing a real-life quip; answer: “Easy! Ya just don’t lead ’em so much!”). We see them gunning down civilians from a helicopter for sport. We see the weary nihilism taking hold—after a traumatizing battle with a teenage Viet Cong sniper, the surviving Marines march off singing the ironic pop tune “Mickey Mouse Club March,” their childhood innocence grotesquely contrasted with the flaming ruins behind them. Full Metal Jacket doesn’t overtly preach; it shows. And what it shows is the systematic stripping away of humanity—both the Marines’ and their Vietnamese targets. It is arguably one of the most unflinching looks at how racism and violence are taught. For instance, Hartman proudly tells recruits that Marines have a track record of killing Asian enemies: “Oswald got off three shots in less than six seconds... because he was a Marine. And this guy Charles Whitman killed twelve people from a clock tower... because he was a Marine!” The subtext: our job is killing, and we make killing machines. By the time these Marines land in Vietnam, the audience understands that young American men have been as much conditioned as they have been trained.
Yet here too, critical perspectives note that the film, while exposing the U.S. military’s dehumanization process, offers scant humanity to the Vietnamese. Aside from the female sniper (who utters only a dying refrain, “Shoot me,” to end her pain) and some prostitutes who utter broken English catchphrases, Vietnamese are background. The most memorable Vietnamese character is arguably the sex worker who approaches Joker and crew in Da Nang, purring, “Me so horny. Me love you long time,” in broken English. This scene, intended perhaps to show the intersection of war and exploitation, instead became a pop-culture joke—Western audiences quoted “Me love you long time” for decades as a tawdry meme, often with little regard for its racist and sexist connotations
. That unintended legacy itself is telling: even a film critical of war can end up reinforcing stereotypes (in this case, of hypersexualized Asian women) through the way audiences appropriate it. A Vietnamese American essayist, reviewing Vietnam War movies, commented that “there still isn’t any evidence that they show Vietnamese people... as whole humans. Apocalypse Now... Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket [focus] on soldiers, just like their predecessors”
. In short, Vietnam films have largely been by and for Americans, which subtly suggests an ongoing egocentrism: our trauma matters most.
An Existential Crisis at Home: Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. Unlike the films above, Seize the Day isn’t about war at all. It’s a novella set in 1950s New York City, following a day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, a failed salesman in the throes of personal crisis. Why bring it into this discussion? Because it’s a cultural artifact of the post-WWII era that indirectly reveals how the war’s moral and psychic fallout permeated American life. Bellow wrote it in 1956, when the memories of WWII were fresh and the Cold War’s shadow was growing. The protagonist Wilhelm is a veteran (it’s mentioned he was in the Army during the war, though he never saw combat). Now he’s middle-aged, unemployed, estranged from his wife and children, and feeling hopelessly inadequate. The story climaxes with Wilhelm weeping inconsolably at a stranger’s funeral—crying not just for the dead man but for himself and, symbolically, for the human condition.
What’s striking is that Wilhelm’s suffering is largely spiritual or moral: he feels he’s wasted his life chasing material success and social approval, losing sight of any deeper values. He is, in a sense, experiencing a crisis of meaning and identity. This resonates with the broader predicament of modern man in a post-war world, as Bellow intended
. SparkNotes (in its analysis of the book’s themes) notes that Seize the Day reflects the “post-war world” in which people were disillusioned by the horrors that had occurred
. Many Americans, having seen the Holocaust revelations and the atomic bomb’s devastation, were asking: How could such horrors exist? What do our lives mean in the face of that? At the same time, the late 1940s and 50s brought an economic boom and a consumerist craze (new cars, suburban homes, TV sets)
. Bellow places Wilhelm in that very context—New York, capitalism’s beating heart, on a day he desperately hopes for a financial windfall that never comes. The war lurks in the backdrop: Wilhelm’s father, Dr. Adler, represents the pre-war values of hard work and stoicism, and he dismisses Wilhelm’s angst as weakness. But Wilhelm embodies a sort of moral injury of the everyman: he’s lost, isolated (“alone in a crowd” on city streets
), and searching for meaning in a society that prizes wealth over soul. We can read his tears at the funeral as mourning not just personal failures, but a loss of faith in the world’s moral order after living through an era of genocide and nuclear bombs.
Critically, one might say Bellow’s novel is limited by its focus on a white middle-class male’s interior life, with no attention to the racial upheavals or social injustices of the time. It’s true—Seize the Day doesn’t touch on racism or the experiences of, say, Black veterans or Holocaust survivors; it’s very much within Bellow’s wheelhouse of individual, intellectual struggle. In that sense, it can be seen as sidestepping the harder questions of collective morality (similar to how many mid-century American works did). Still, it offers a microcosm: Wilhelm’s cry could be seen as America’s submerged moral sorrow. Bellow, perhaps unwittingly, painted a picture of a nation that had “won” the war yet felt spiritually adrift in its wake.
Ideological Implications: All these cultural works—films and literature—highlight aspects of moral injury and racism, but none are neutral. Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket both challenge the glorification of war; they demystify the “noble warrior” myth by showing American soldiers as vulnerable, sometimes vicious, sometimes victims of their own leaders. Yet they also reinscribe a narrative where the American experience is central. This can inadvertently marginalize the voices of those we harmed. It’s an ideological choice (conscious or not) that implies American self-reflection takes precedence over directly hearing from Vietnamese or other impacted peoples. In the decades after these films, more stories have emerged from the perspective of the Vietnamese (for example, novels like The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh, or films by Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American creators), providing a counter-narrative to the Hollywood vision. Engaging with war’s legacy means listening to those stories too, not just our own echo.
As for Seize the Day, its ideology is more subtle—it elevates individual moral quest above social critique. One might criticize that as an evasion: while Wilhelm wallows, the real moral crises of the 1950s (racial segregation, McCarthyite persecutions, etc.) go undiscussed. That reflects Bellow’s era and milieu; but it also suggests how easy it was (and is) for Americans, especially those insulated by privilege, to turn inward and ignore systemic wrongs. In context, the 1950s were when many WWII vets quietly managed their trauma by just “moving on” into gray-flannel suit jobs, and society largely swept uncomfortable questions under the rug. Bellow breaks the silence to an extent by showing Wilhelm’s breakdown, yet he doesn’t connect it to larger injustices—thus, the reader is invited to empathize deeply with one man’s pain, but not necessarily to link it to a collective responsibility.
From Battlefield to Homefront: The Lingering Shadow of War on American Democracy
When wars end, their ghosts often return home. The United States emerged from WWII as a global superpower with its mythos intact, but Vietnam left a far messier legacy. The late 1970s and 1980s saw Americans wrestling with “Vietnam syndrome,” a mix of shame, defeat, and distrust in government. Veterans struggled to reintegrate, and Hollywood (as we saw) churned out movies that oscillated between regretful and jingoistic (interestingly, the ’80s also gave us Rambo: First Blood Part II, where a veteran goes back to ‘redo’ Vietnam heroically—an escapist right-wing fantasy to salve the ego). All this is to say: war trauma and unresolved moral injury didn’t stay on the battlefield; they seeped into American culture and politics.
Perhaps the most underappreciated effect is how war’s authoritarian tendencies can boomerang back into the society that waged it. Wartime requires (or at least encourages) authoritarian structures: strict hierarchies, obedience, an ends justify means mentality. Soldiers are conditioned to accept commands without moral debate. Propaganda simplifies issues into good vs evil. When those soldiers return to civilian life, many readjust and return to pluralistic values—but some do not. For a subset, the clear certainties and camaraderie of the military (even if laced with racism and violence) remain psychologically appealing. And if society does not adequately support and heal veterans, they become vulnerable to those who would exploit their skills and anger.
In the 1920s and ’30s, demagogues like Mussolini and Hitler famously recruited disaffected war veterans to bolster fascist movements. As one analyst notes, “The fascists and Nazis... deliberately targeted the many combat veterans of WWI to form political organizations dedicated to the idea that war was the highest truth.”
They inverted the moral order, celebrating violence and domination as virtues. The same potential exists in any country. In the U.S., after Vietnam, some alienated vets indeed gravitated to extremist groups. The paramilitary right-wing group Vietnam Veterans Against the War (despite its name) splintered, and some veterans joined militia movements. The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a Gulf War vet who became convinced the U.S. government was the enemy. More recently, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have appeared in the ranks of far-right and white supremacist groups.
It’s not that most vets become extremists—far from it. But a disproportionate number of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, for example, had military backgrounds. What draws them? For one, the feeling of betrayal—a key component of moral injury—can curdle into a stab-in-the-back myth. After Vietnam, some veterans (and plenty of civilians) nurtured a narrative that America lost because of internal traitors (politicians, anti-war protesters, journalists) rather than because the war itself was wrong. This sense of grievance can be harnessed by authoritarian-minded leaders. Also, many veterans miss the sense of purpose and brotherhood the military gave them; extremist groups actively try to fill that void. A 2024 report warned that “far-right groups have attempted to exploit [veterans’] vulnerability, directly contacting former service personnel via social media,” offering them belonging and structure when they lack support
. These groups often bring along the baggage of racism and violent ideology—essentially extending the logic of war (identifying an enemy, glorifying force) into domestic politics.
Now enter Donald J. Trump. It’s impossible to talk about contemporary authoritarian currents in the U.S. without discussing the 45th president, who in many ways embodies and amplifies the dark side of the American psyche we’ve been examining. Trump, though of Vietnam draft age, did not serve (famously citing “bone spurs”), yet he constantly wrapped himself in martial rhetoric and machismo. He praised brutal strongmen abroad (“he’s a tough guy,” he said of Putin, admiringly) and echoed wartime logic in domestic policy (calling immigrants “invaders” and referring to urban crime in racialized terms, effectively casting fellow Americans as an internal enemy). His rallies were suffused with an atmosphere of grievance and aggression—audiences chanted militaristic slogans and directed two minutes of hate at targets he named (the press, Hillary Clinton, etc.). Trump also displayed a shocking comfort with war crimes: he mused about killing the families of terrorists, enthusiastically supported torture (“I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”, he said), and as president he even pardoned American soldiers convicted or accused of atrocities. In 2019 he intervened in several military justice cases, granting clemency to men who had been found guilty of murdering civilians or prisoners
. Critics warned that such actions “undermine military justice and send a message that battlefield atrocities will be tolerated.”
Indeed, one of those men, a Navy SEAL, had been described by his own platoon as “OK with killing anything that moved”, including teenagers
. By celebrating these individuals as heroes, Trump catered to a segment of the population that views any action against the “enemy” as justified—and by extension, signaled that legal and moral norms are secondary to tribal victory. This is exactly the ethos of authoritarianism: the Leader’s will (or the nation’s will) trumps law and ethics.
It would be an oversimplification to blame Trump’s rise solely on unresolved war trauma. Many factors converged—economic anxiety, racial backlash to a black president, the echo chamber of social media, etc. But the wars of the past and their psychic residue form part of the backdrop. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” implicitly harkened to an age of unapologetic dominance—some hear in it an echo of the WWII triumph (when America was unambiguously “great” and won wars) or of the early Cold War. It was a promise to erase the humiliation of Vietnam, the uncertainty of Iraq, and the complexity of a multiethnic democracy, in favor of a simpler glory. Psychoanalytically, one might say Trump offered a fantasy to a wounded national ego: a return to an imagined state of wholeness without guilt, where might makes right. Such a fantasy is very appealing if you’re tired of feeling guilty or confused. It’s the same psychic move as Kurtz’s in Apocalypse Now—embrace the horror, declare it righteous, and thereby silence your conscience.
Trump also fed and feeds on racism in ways that resonate with our discussion of war. He infamously called Mexican immigrants “rapists,” sought to ban Muslims entirely from entering the country, and labeled African nations “shitholes.” This raw bigotry isn’t new in American politics, but rarely had it been so unabashed from the Oval Office. It re-legitimized dormant stereotypes (remember Dower’s warning that wartime racist tropes remain latent
). Under Trump, hate crimes against Asian Americans spiked, especially after he racialized the COVID-19 pandemic as the “China virus.” We can draw a line from the way WWII propaganda portrayed Asians, to the Vietnam era slurs, straight to this contemporary resurgence of anti-Asian sentiment. It’s the same psychic mechanism of Othering, activated in a time of crisis.
The danger of such racism and the authoritarian impulse is that it creates new moral injuries and traumas, perpetuating the cycle. For example, when migrant children were separated from parents at the border and kept in cages, that state violence echoed the injustices of internment camps or worse—and it inflicted trauma on families (and arguably on the soul of the nation). The officers carrying out such policies might one day reckon with the moral injury of having “just followed orders” in harming innocents. Meanwhile, communities of color in the U.S. feel under siege, which can lead to their own form of collective trauma and rage.
It’s not all doom and gloom. There has been significant pushback against these authoritarian and racist currents. Many Americans are consciously striving to confront historical wrongs—witness the debates over Confederate monuments (interesting footnote: Derek Hook, co-editor of Lacan and Race, analyzed the libidinal attachment some white Americans have to those statues, as a kind of enjoyment in a racist historical fantasy
). Movements for racial justice insist on acknowledging and healing past and present injuries, rather than denying them. The U.S. military, for its part, has at least recognized “moral injury” as a real issue and has been supporting programs to help veterans deal with guilt and shame. Some veterans undertake what you might call “moral journeys” later in life—like returning to Vietnam to build schools or hospitals as acts of reconciliation, or speaking out against new wars (the veterans’ voices were strong in opposing the post-9/11 torture practices, for instance, precisely because some knew the moral cost).
Psychoanalysis tells us that what is not addressed consciously will be expressed unconsciously, often in destructive ways. America’s task, then, is to continue dragging these demons into the light: to admit when war was wrong, to listen to those we harmed, to hold leaders accountable who transgress (rather than elevate them to cult status), and to support those who carry guilt so they can transform it, not transmit it. It means recognizing that racism is not a side issue or a relic—it is a live wire that, when charged (by fear, by propaganda), can drive ordinary people to commit or condone atrocities. Healing moral injury requires a kind of national therapy: truth-telling, apologies, perhaps symbolic acts of contrition (like building memorials to civilian victims, or paying reparations—steps that are beginning in small ways).
Conclusion: Toward Integration and Insight
American wars, from the big set-piece of WWII to the quagmire of Vietnam and beyond, reveal a profound entanglement of outward violence and inward psychological struggle. We’ve seen how racism can grease the wheels of war, making it easier for soldiers to pull the trigger—but at the price of deep moral wounds that do not easily heal. We’ve engaged psychoanalytic ideas to understand these phenomena: how the projection of evil onto a racial Other enables cruelty; how the return of the repressed (unacknowledged guilt) can fuel continued cycles of violence or self-destruction; how the superego in its darkest form can become an internal sadist, punishing a person with nightmares and despair for their transgressions. George and Hook’s work on Lacan and race reminds us that race is not just a social construct “out there” but lives within individuals’ psyches as a mode of irrational enjoyment and identity
. Undoing racism, then, is not just about laws and education, but about grappling with unconscious desires and fears—truly a psychoanalytic task as much as a political one.
Understanding moral injury similarly requires more than clinical definitions; it demands moral discourse. It’s heartening that terms like “moral injury” have gained traction, because they allow soldiers to frame their pain not as a personal weakness but as a response to ethical breach
. In recognizing that, perhaps we as a society can also reclaim some morality—by saying yes, it was wrong, and your pain is real.
As we face contemporary challenges—rising authoritarian rhetoric, new forms of warfare like drone strikes that distance us from killing, persistent racial divides—we must carry forward the lessons hard-won from past wars. One lesson is that denying the humanity of others, even for ostensibly good ends, will ultimately erode our own humanity. Another is that silencing conscience might win a battle, but at the cost of a war within the self. We saw that with Kurtz in fiction, and with many a real-life veteran or officer who lost themselves to barbarity.
Crucially, confronting these truths should not lead to paralysis or endless self-flagellation. Rather, it can be the foundation for a healthier form of patriotism and global citizenship—one that acknowledges flaws and seeks to do better. America’s moral injuries—slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, Hiroshima, My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and others—are heavy burdens, but acknowledging them is the first step in preventing their recurrence. The current debates over how (or whether) to teach difficult history in schools show this struggle in real time. Those pushing for honesty and inclusion are effectively performing a collective therapy, insisting that we integrate the repressed chapters of our story. Those pushing to censor or whitewash are, perhaps unknowingly, defending a fragile ego that fears shame—but as we’ve explored, unprocessed shame tends to resurface in uglier ways.
In wrapping up, let’s circle back to psychoanalysis for a hopeful note. Freud believed that making the unconscious conscious was key to overcoming neuroses. Lacan believed in the transformative potential of analyzing the discourses that shape us. If America is, in a sense, on the analyst’s couch, then discussing moral injury and racism openly is a sign of progress. We are naming our ghosts. We are sifting through nightmares to glean their meaning. And we are, gradually, finding new narratives to live by that don’t require enemies in quite the same way.
To be sure, the work is ongoing. But imagine an America that truly learns from its wars: that treats war itself as a last resort and a tragic failure, not an opportunity for proving superiority; that honors its veterans not just with medals, but with the commitment to never needlessly create more of them; that extends compassion to former foes and seeks reconciliation; and that rejects leaders who glorify cruelty or stoke racist hatred as un-American, full stop. This America would be stronger in a way that doesn’t rely on dominance but on integrity.
We began by analyzing the psychoanalytic dimensions of these heavy topics. In closing, it’s fitting to recall a simple human truth: empathy is the antidote to dehumanization. Where racism paints the Other as a caricature, empathy restores detail and dignity. Where moral injury festers in silence and self-loathing, empathy—from others and for oneself—allows healing. So perhaps the broad readership we aimed for can take this away: War is not just fought on battlefields, but in hearts and minds. The casualties include not only those who die, but those who live on with invisible wounds. And the enemies we must be most wary of are not “out there” in some foreign land or in some other skin, but within us—fear, hatred, indifference. Confront those honestly, and we have a chance to finally break the cycle and step off the ride of the Valkyries, for good.
Sources:
Sheldon George & Derek Hook (eds.), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory – on racism as a psychic structure
.
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD – definition of moral injury in war
.
Adrian Bonenberger, “An Alternate View of Moral Injury” – discussion of WWII vs Vietnam moral injury narratives
.
John W. Dower, War Without Mercy – documentation of WWII Pacific as a race war
and latent durability of wartime racist stereotypes
.
Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves – evidence of widespread atrocities in Vietnam
and civilian casualty statistics
.
Thuc Doan Nguyen, “Me Love You Long Time….” (DVAN) – critique of Vietnam War films for erasing Vietnamese humanity
.
Viet Thanh Nguyen interview (Yale SEA) – on Apocalypse Now centering American perspective and his reaction
.
LitCharts on Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth – colonial violence’s psychological harm to colonizer and colonized
.
Reuters report on Trump’s pardons – how excusing war crimes signaled tolerance of atrocities
.
RUSI report via The Mirror – far-right recruitment of vulnerable veterans via promises of belonging
.
Britannica on Japanese American internment – historical context of racist policy during WWII
.
SparkNotes on Seize the Day – notes on post-WWII disillusionment backdrop
.
Wrath-Bearing Tree, Bonenberger – on war’s pleasure and fascist use of WWI vets
.
Comments