Examines the impact of war on victims, focusing on such reactions as hatred and the desire for revenge, and challenges the notion that these angry reactions should be modified. Medical and mental health professionals are asked to consider: (1) whether anger, hatred, and a felt need for revenge in people who have been grievously wronged are necessarily bad things; and (2) how such feelings raise moral questions about social justice, accountability, and punishment. The task that faces victims of war is often framed as a recovery through the processing of traumatic experience; however, this may be an unduly mechanistic and medical view of human experience, suggesting that a person needs to recover from the effects of war as if recovering from an illness. What is missing from this framework is the acknowledgment of legitimate feelings of mistrust or revenge and an effort to address issues of responsibility, culpability, and restitution. Health professionals should beware of looking at responses to warthrough a Western medical-therapeutic prism. Recovery is not a discrete process; rather, it is grounded in the resumption of the ordinary rhythms of everyday life – the familial, sociocultural, religious, and economic activities that make the world intelligible.
