Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Martha Raddatz has spent decades in proximity to the American military — embedded in Iraq, reporting from Afghanistan, sitting across kitchen tables from Gold Star families — and The Hero Next Door is the book that accumulates that evidence. It profiles men and women who served after September 11, 2001, not the generals or the decorated exceptions but the sergeant who came home to a small town in Ohio, the nurse who treated wounds she still sees at night, the Marine whose marriage broke and rebuilt itself over the better part of a decade. Raddatz is after something specific: the texture of ordinary sacrifice, the way service reshapes a person at the level of habit and body, and the question of what a country owes the people who fought in its name. The audience is anyone who has a neighbor, a child, a sibling who served and has found it hard to talk about why they are different now. Raddatz gives them language. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book's organizing premise is that the capacity for self-giving is not the property of heroes alone but is latent in ordinary people — a sergeant from a mid-sized American city, a combat medic who was working at a grocery store before enlistment. This affirms the Catholic account of the imago Dei as something carried in the body and expressed through specific acts of will, not reserved for the exceptional few. - **Fallen**: Several profiles trace what clinicians call moral injury: the internal fracture that follows when a soldier acts under orders that later seem indefensible, or when training fails to prepare a person for what they actually encounter. The CCMMP identifies conscience as the proximate norm of moral action; these accounts show what happens when conscience and command diverge, and the disorder that follows is not merely psychological but moral in the strict sense — a wound in the will's relationship to the good. - **Redeemed**: The book's most theologically suggestive material is in its accounts of long-term integration: veterans who rebuilt marriages, who found vocation in service organizations, who learned to speak about what they carried. This is not conversion in any explicit sense, but it maps onto what John of the Cross describes as passive purification — the slow, often painful reordering of a person's interior life through suffering they did not choose and cannot control. - **Prudence (memory)**: Raddatz structures her profiles around detailed reconstruction — specific dates, specific decisions, specific consequences. The effect on the reader is a training in memoria in the Thomistic sense: the book insists that the past be held accurately, not romanticized, as the only honest ground for gratitude or policy judgment. - **Justice (sacrifice)**: The virtue that runs through every profile is sacrifice understood not as self-destruction but as the free offering of one's own good for another's. Aquinas locates sacrifice within the potential virtues annexed to justice, as an act of religion owed to a good that exceeds the individual. Raddatz's secular framing does not reach that register, but the acts she documents fit the structure precisely.
✓ Strengths
- ✓Raddatz gives sustained attention to the particular — specific names, specific deployments, specific family ruptures — which trains the reader in what Aquinas calls memoria, the capacity to hold the past accurately as a resource for present judgment.
- ✓The book's structure around ordinary people doing extraordinary things under mortal pressure directly illustrates the Thomistic account of fortitude as the virtue that holds the passions steady when the body's instinct is flight.
- ✓Several profiles address the long aftermath of service: families rebuilt, wounds integrated over years, which gives the book a de facto Redeemed arc even without theological framing.
- ✓Raddatz's journalistic discipline — named sources, dates, specific theaters of operation — models the truthfulness (justice-truthfulness) the CCMMP identifies as a potential virtue of justice, because it resists the temptation to sentimentalize or to mythologize.
- ✓The book's treatment of moral injury, though not named as such, opens a pastoral door: it surfaces the internal disorder that follows when a soldier acts under orders that later seem wrong, which maps onto the CCMMP's account of conscience and disordered action within the Fallen state.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's anthropology is implicitly secular-heroic: virtue is cast as grit, resilience, and service without any reference to transcendence or final end, which means the Redeemed arc is gestured at but never grounded in anything beyond human community.
- ⚠The journalistic framing, while honest, tends to treat moral injury as a wound the veteran carries rather than as a condition that also implicates the political and institutional decisions that sent them — a fuller Catholic social-thought reading would press that distinction harder.
- ⚠Readers who have experienced combat trauma or who work clinically with veteran populations should note that several profiles include graphic accounts of wounding, death, and psychological breakdown, presented in documentary detail without pastoral framing.