How does the army of a liberal, multicultural and often secular society develop in its soldiers the spiritual resilience to cope with war, to face trauma, death and bereavement, and to fight opponents who have the advantage of a strong and common religious faith?
That’s the question the Pentagon has been grappling with, as it confronts the apparent epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder affecting a fifth of its troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Its response is a new psychological training programme called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, which aims to strengthen the emotional, psychological and, yes, spiritual resilience of each of the 1.1 million soldiers serving in the US Army.
The person in charge of the $125 million programme is Brigadier-General Rhonda Cornum, herself an unusually resilient person. Cornum was a flight surgeon on board a Black Hawk helicopter in the first Iraq war. The helicopter was shot down. Cornum was taken prisoner and sexually assaulted in the back of a truck on the way to an Iraqi prison compound. Her capture and assault led to a fierce debate about whether female troops should be deployed in conflict zones.
But she managed to face her ordeal with resilience. She says: ‘Being a POW is the rape of your entire life. When you’re a POW, your captors control everything about your life: when you get up, when you go to sleep, what you eat, if you eat. I realised the only thing I had left that I could control was how I thought. I had absolute control over that, and was not going to let them take that too.’
Cornum turned a situation of vulnerability into an opportunity to exert her courage and agency.
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