The Tug of War
A Reckoning with Moral Injury and Telling the Truth
Available Now!
“IF A MAN KILLS
When a man kills, he must dig two graves—
one in the earth for the dead,
and one in his soul for the dead man’s spirit,
or he will not return.”
War taught me how to survive.
It took me much longer to understand what survival had cost.
I went to Vietnam as a young Marine believing war would make me a man.
I came home carrying a battlefield no one could see.
Years later, after sitting with veterans as a psychotherapist, I began to understand that some wounds are not made by bullets or fear. They are made when what we have done, witnessed, failed to prevent, or been ordered to do collides with the person we believed ourselves to be.
We have a name for part of that wound now:
Moral injury.
The Tug of War is not simply a book about Vietnam. It is about what happens after the moment that changes us—after the battle is over, after everyone else has gone home, and we are left trying to live beside what we remember.
It is about the battlefield we carry inside.
A field manual for the inner life.
Image From The Tug of War
Why This Matters
I didn’t build this space to convince you of anything.
I built it because too many of us are carrying something we were never taught how to name.
For a long time, I believed the deepest consequences of war belonged to those who fought it. Age has changed my mind.
A war does not stay where it is fought.
It travels home in bodies. It enters marriages and bedrooms, sits down at family tables, and sometimes passes quietly from parent to child. It reaches people who never heard a shot fired.
But war is only one doorway into this territory.
There are moments in ordinary life when the world we believed in suddenly fails us. We betray someone. Someone betrays us. We remain silent when we wish we had spoken. We make a choice that cannot be unmade. Something happens to us—or because of us—and afterward there is a before and an after.
The world tells us to move on.
The body is not always so obedient.
It remembers what the mind would prefer to file away. Conscience keeps its own ledger. The soul, if we are willing to use that old word, does not seem particularly interested in our explanations.
For twenty-five years as a psychotherapist, I sat with people trying to understand why something inside them no longer lined up with the life they were living. I came to understand that healing does not always begin with an answer.
Sometimes it begins when another human being is willing to stay in the room long enough to hear the question.
That is what I hope this website can become.
A place for stories, poems, images, conversations, and questions about what human beings carry—and what might happen when we finally put some of it down between us.
You do not need to be a veteran to enter.
You do not need a diagnosis.
You do not need the right words.
You only need to bring what you carry.
Meet the Author
Larry Winters is a Marine combat veteran, psychotherapist, writer, and, for much of his life, a man trying to understand what war leaves behind.
“I went to Vietnam as a young Marine believing war would make me a man. I came home carrying questions I did not yet have words for. Some lived in memory. Others lived deeper—in the body, in conscience, in the uneasy distance between the man I had been and the man I had become.
Years later, I became a psychotherapist and spent twenty-five years sitting with veterans and others whose lives had been divided into before and after. I learned that suffering does not always announce itself as illness. Sometimes it arrives as silence. Sometimes as anger, shame, grief, or the feeling that something sacred inside us has been violated.
I wrote The Tug of War from that territory.
This is not a book about how to win a war. It is about what happens when the battlefield follows us home—and about the long journey of bringing body, conscience, and soul back into the same room.
I am still making that journey.
Perhaps, in one way or another, you are too.”
Praise For The Tug of War
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“The message . . . in this project [touches] not only veterans but also people like me who, while not having served in the military, must be educated and informed about the weight that veterans carry.”
— JOHN LEE, author of Flying Boy
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“Larry Winters’s The Tug of War is more than a memoir. It’s a reckoning. With raw courage and unflinching honesty, Larry takes us beyond the battlefield into the hidden war that lingers in the human soul long after the guns go silent. This is a book about fathers and sons, shame and forgiveness, and the fragile, necessary, and slow work of becoming whole after being violently shattered."
— BRYAN REEVES, men’s coach, author of Tell The Truth, Let the Peace Fall Where It May
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“As Winters deftly navigates the fault line between battlefield and bedside, body and soul, truth and fiction, morality and sin, we come to better appreciate the enduring moral injury imposed by war on our lives. This book is not simply an antidote to the myths and lies about the glory of war; it is a lifeline to our salvation as a species.”
— STEVEN LEWIS, author of The Lights Around the Shore