Michael Yandell, an Iraq War veteran, wrote an article “Hope in the Void,” published in Plough, Spring, 2016. He talks of moral injury, an injury he suffered as a result of incidents he experienced and witnessed in that war.

He found out, he said, that he was not the good person he thought he was when he went into that war. “I must come to terms with who I am and then must look toward becoming something new,” he wrote.

Throughout the article, Yandell, stressed that one must be allowed to recognize guilt in order to build something new. “If a veteran enters your church, your synagogue, your mosque or your temple, be the eyes and ears to see and hear her.”

Places of faith, he says, “can serve as pathways of hope through individual and collective guilt. . . Do not,” he cautions, “allow the sufferer to bear their guilt alone.”

We don’t just listen to another’s confession of guilt. We share in his or her guilt. It is society that sends its members into harm’s way. Society is obligated to shepherd them home.