How Iraq Turned Some American Soldiers into Monsters: Helen Benedict on the Unintended Consequences of War
America is once again at war. Helen Benedict is one of our most distinguished writers on the moral consequences of war. Her new novel, The Soldier’s House, is set in the aftermath of the Iraq war. But it could, equally, be about the aftermath of Afghanistan. Or even Iran. “The war turned me into a monster,” veterans tell Benedict, again and again. “How am I supposed to face my wife, my children, when I know I’m a monster?”
On George W. Bush, Benedict is unambiguous. “He was a war criminal,” she says. On the Iraq war, she is equally clear: America went in on lies and killed nearly a million Iraqis, used depleted uranium in violation of international law. Today, Trump is repeating the same catastrophic playbook in Iran.
In The Soldier’s House, Benedict shows how Iraq turned some American soldiers into monsters. “War is morally corrosive — especially a war where the soldiers can find no justification for what they’re doing,” Benedict says. That’s the unintended consequence of even the most morally clean war. Expect the same in Iran. If Trump’s half peace becomes a George W. Bush total war.
Five Takeaways
• He Was a War Criminal: Benedict’s verdict on George W. Bush, stated flat and without hedge. He went to war on lies. He killed, depending on who’s counting, somewhere near a million Iraqis. The Americans and the British used depleted uranium in violation of international law — polluting the land and spreading poison, producing an epidemic of birth defects among Iraqi civilians and, some veterans claim, among their own children. The forgiveness of Bush — common on the left since Trump — is, in Benedict’s view, memory loss. He was not better than Trump. He was better in some things and just as bad in others. The bar is not very high.
• The Other Half of the Story: The Iraq war produced reams of American writing about American soldiers. For years, nobody thought to write about how the civilians felt. Benedict’s novel is structured to correct that: Naima, the Iraqi widow, is given equal weight and depth as Jimmy, the American veteran. The point is to push back against the worldwide demonization and scapegoating of Muslim refugees by creating characters who are just as human as anyone we know — who could be your friend, your sister, yourself. She had soldiers and Iraqis read the manuscript to ensure accuracy on both sides.
• Why Fiction, Not Nonfiction: Benedict had already written the nonfiction: The Lonely Soldier, three and a half years of research and interviewing. But no matter how intimate the interviews, she always felt she couldn’t get deep inside the experience. In interviews, people put up self-protective barriers: things they don’t want to remember, things they are ashamed of, things that are private. Fiction allows her to go where nonfiction cannot. Take everything learned in research. Apply imagination to it. Fill it out. Illustrate the interior experience of war from moment to moment. That is the territory of the novel, and nothing else.
• Moral Injury: The War Turned Me Into a Monster: Benedict’s central subject across all her books on war is moral injury: the damage done to a person’s conscience when they do things they know, deep down, they had no right to do. A war without justification is maximally corrosive because the soldier can find no frame in which the violence makes sense. It just becomes about violence. Soldiers come home carrying that. It affects everyone who knows them. It affects towns, villages, countries. We bring the war home with us. Every poet who has written about war has said so. Benedict’s novels make it visi
