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Healing From Moral Injury with Larry Winters, USMC, LMHC
A Vietnam Vet Helps Us Understand Ourselves
Larry Winters went to Vietnam at the age of eighteen, and like many, was injured for life. What Larry saw, and what he was told to do, was just too much. His book, The Making and Unmaking of a Marine is an important work documenting what went wrong for so many – and the path toward healing and forgiveness..
Larry will be talking to our us about Moral Injury, the crushing psychological and spiritual anguish we experience when an authority or a trusted person violates our core morality.
This deep wounding challenges one’s sense of self and one’s trust in humanity. And the wound can deepen even further when there is no responsible party for resolution or reparation.
Through sharing, storytelling, and science, Larry will help us understand that moral injury is not confined to the battlefield, but deep injury can emerge in narcissistic relationships, nasty divorces, religious betrayals, and in the governing of communities.
These ethical fractures contribute to the disillusionment and despair many feel in the moment. But perhaps understanding that we all share the effects of such trauma can help to ease our pain and division.
We welcome Larry Winters, an honored war veteran – and now a psychotherapist – to understand moral injury in modern life – and discover the road to healing.
We’re pleased to announce an additional contributor for the evening: Menachem Hojda, LCSW
Menachem is the grandson of four Holocaust survivors who taught him the importance of hope. He founded his practice, Belong PC, to foster healing through connection, providing clinical therapy and supervision. Menachem teaches at Touro University and consults and trains on building cultures of belonging. He is also a Program Analyst for Oakland Community Health Network and serves on the Board of Nefesh International, and is licensed in MI, and FL. His contact information is Menachem Hojda LCSW (248) 259-6524.
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About Larry Winters
Lawrence (Larry) Winters, USMC, LMHC, is a Vietnam combat veteran, poet, playwright, psychotherapist, and nationally recognized voice on moral injury.
For over twenty-five years, he worked as a group therapist at Four Winds Hospital, specializing in trauma recovery for veterans and civilians alike. His practice centered not only on psychological healing but on the deeper, often silenced moral wounds that many returning service members carry — what scholar Jonathan Shay calls moral injury.
Larry has written extensively on the subject, drawing from personal experience and clinical insight to explore the soul’s reckoning after war. His book, The Making and Unmaking of a Marine (which can be purchased on Amazon). His essays and poems examine the rupture that occurs when duty conflicts with conscience, and how healing begins not through diagnosis, but through witness, storytelling, and truth-telling. His memoir, The Tug of War (soon to be published) and many of his essays confront this exact threshold — where grief, responsibility, and spiritual reckoning collide.
Larry was also a key contributor to Veteran-Civilian Dialogues at Intersections International in New York City, where he facilitated conversations that bridged the silence between those who have gone to war and those who have not. These dialogues broke new ground in creating public spaces for moral healing, deep listening, and communal accountability.
A passionate advocate for re-humanizing the narrative of the veteran, Larry has used poetry, visual storytelling, and public speaking to expand the national conversation on war’s moral cost. He continues to write and present on how the invisible wounds of war — what he has called “Shadow Hearts” — live in the body, the family, and the nation’s conscience long after combat ends.
Contact Information
Lawrence (or Larry) Winters
winters.lawrence@gmail.com
914-489-7881
In preparation for this event, Larry wrote:
Your Heaven is Just a Game
For eighteen years, I knelt by my bed, said my pledge, followed the golden rule.
Then came boot camp.
I learned to kill without shame.
And I kept praying.
But I never heard your voice.
I came home with silence louder than God.
And now I believe — your heaven was just a game.
That poem was not therapy.
It was confession.
It was my soul tapping the wall, saying I’m still here.
When I began writing The Tug of War, I thought I was writing about Vietnam. But the jungle was only the setting. The true terrain was internal—grief, guilt, and the moral unraveling that comes when your compass spins in your hand.
Shay spoke of Achilles not as myth, but as mirror. A warrior betrayed. A man whose honor was broken by the very structure that demanded his loyalty. And in that break, he lost his humanity.
I know that fracture. I’ve worn it like an invisible wound beneath my skin. Not PTSD. That’s the government’s name for what can be medicated.
This is different.
Moral injury is the pain of violating your own sacred code.
Of watching yourself become a stranger
in the name of duty.
And the wound doesn’t heal through time.
It heals through witness.
Through naming.
Through the slow turning of the soul toward forgiveness—not just of others,
but of oneself.
I’m not here to perform. I’m here to reveal.
To speak not as a professional, or a theorist,
but as a man who has walked this long road and still—some days—doesn’t know if he’s made it home.
And I say this now, not just for myself,
but for the others still carrying silence like a second skin.
We were trained to fight.
We were not prepared for what it meant to come back.
We need spaces—not of correction, but of connection.
We need stories.
We need ritual.
We need to sit in the company of those who won’t look away.
“A wound that goes unacknowledged becomes a doorway for despair.” — Unknown
But a wound that is honored,
witnessed,
and given voice—
can become
a doorway home.
This is what I hope to bring to the presentation I’ll be giving. Not solutions. But resonance.
Not neat answers. But a circle of acknowledgment.
And the courage to ask—not just what happened—but what was broken inside of us when it did?
This is what The Tug of War carries.
This is what moral injury demands we speak aloud.
Not for justice.
But for the soul.
Because that’s where recovery lives.
Where forgiveness waits.
And where, perhaps,
We begin again.