On Movement: The Matter of US Soldiers’ Being After Combat

Abstract

Using ethnographic vignettes of three American soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, this article proposes an analytics of movement through which to apprehend experiences of ontological transformation brought about by the many violences of service in a combat zone. I juxtapose a range of experiences of movement to explore the subjective experience of certain kinds of bodies as they move, see, and are seen to move in certain kinds of spaces. In the case of American soldiers who have been marked by their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, this approach is a displacement of post-traumatic stress disorder, the dominant frame for understanding soldiers’ post-combat transformations. In its stead, the analytics of movement offers a sense of the vertiginous new worlds soldiers inhabit, which suggests ontology, rather than pathology, as the ground for understanding the matter of US soldiers’ being after combat.

Keywords:

• War
• the body
• soldiers
• movement
• space
• post-traumatic stress disorder
• violence
• America
• Iraq war
• Afghanistan war

Notes

The term combat has a specific meaning in the context of the U.S. military: it refers to kinetic enemy contact. The specificity of this meaning is important bureaucratically, since it makes one eligible for certain commendations, badges, awards, and compensation but it is also made meaningful by those who distinguish experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan along this axis. I use the term here in the more general sense of military service in an active war zone or zone of occupation where killing and being killed are pervasive and realistic possibilities. My decision to use this term is essentially a compromise intended to facilitate my writing and your reading, but it is one with which I am not entirely satisfied. All names used here are pseudonyms and I have altered some biographical details to ensure anonymity.

The DSM is the diagnostic ‘Bible’ published by the American Psychological Association that codifies and defines officially recognized diagnoses of mental disorders and illnesses.

For some recent powerful examples, see Finley (2011).

This strategic description of PTSD, given here for the benefit of the reader, lends it much more coherence than it has in practice. For example, though the thrust of much current PTSD research focuses on the brain and its malfunctions, the proposed new definition of PTSD for the forthcoming DSM V includes (in addition to existing criteria A-G) a new H criteria: ‘the disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g. medication or alcohol) or a general medical condition (e.g. traumatic brain injury, coma)’ (American Psychiatric Association 2010). For a masterful critique of trauma and its incoherence, see Leys (2000). For a specific and definitive genealogy of PTSD, see Young (1997).

Some examples: Of the 617 new articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today between the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan and the end of my fieldwork that contain any mention post traumatic stress and/or PTSD, 68% are about soldiers. Many news articles that describe the enduring effects of deployment focus on what is often referred to as the ‘psychological toll’ and even when PTSD is not explicitly mentioned, the characteristics of this ‘toll’ are clearly informed by it, such as a front page Denver Post article from 2004, which talks about a soldiers’ sleeplessness, intrusive images of dead Iraqis, and responses to loud noises, even though it never mentions PTSD explicitly. A long 2006 Washington Post cover story called ‘Home but Still Haunted’ seamlessly equated the generic ‘post-traumatic stress’ it mentions in the sub-headline with the diagnoses of PTSD it recounts in the lede (St. George 2006). This conflation is also evidenced in a number of newspaper articles about soldiers’ homecoming struggles, which are archived in the Proquest database and tagged with the subject Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and which describe experiences characteristic of the disorder but talk about ‘post-traumatic stress’ generally, not using the term ‘disorder’ or the acronym PTSD (Colvin 2003; Spencer 2004, 2005; Krupa 2005; Carey 2006; Haberman 2007; Boudreau 2009). PTSD is included in five of the nine brief descriptions of mental health resources listed on the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and one of the key recommendations of The President's Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors (the official response to the Washington Post Scandal) was specifically about PTSD. Another particularly powerful and elaborated case of PTSD's dominance can be found in the New York Time's controversial 2008 series War Torn about OEF/OIF veterans who committed murders upon returning home. The stories linked the veterans’ crimes to the lingering effects of deployment. PTSD figured prominently in all five feature stories and was also a central focus of the heated criticisms – both in print and online – that followed (e.g. ‘The Killer-Vet Lie’ New York Daily News 17 January 2008; ‘Stories That Speak for Themselves’ New York Times 27 January 2008).

This is part of what anthropologist Ken MacLeish has called PTSD's ‘black hole’ effect (MacLeish 2010) and related to the ‘looping effect of human kinds’ that Hacking has described in the case of other disorders (1995: 21).

Significantly, Norris et al. (2001) use cross-cultural comparison to ‘test’ the universal validity of PTSD and determine that it is a ‘meaningful construct’ beyond its American homeland.

Povinelli schematically defines carnality in this way: ‘the socially built space between flesh and environment. I distinguish corporeality from carnality in terms of the difference between flesh as a juridical and political maneuver and flesh as a physical mattering forth of these maneuvers.’ Her claim is that flesh and its ‘uneven constitution’ ‘may be an effect of these [liberal biopolitical] discourses [and disciplinary techniques] but it is not reducible to them.’ (Povinelli 2006: 7).

For the significance of emergence, see Ahmed (2000).

Soldiers at Walter Reed typically chose to expose their prostheses, though there was a tension between this exposure and ideals of passing that were also important. For an elaboration, see Messinger (2009).

For a masterful analysis of the endemic quality of war's many violences in everyday American military life, see MacLeish (2013).

Sophia seems to be almost quoting Lingis: ‘My eye as a seeing power does not double up, and superimpose upon itself my eye as a visible thing, but the visible field doubles up to inscribe itself upon that one chunk of itself which is my eye, making itself a vision on that visible. The visible organizes itself into a view, inscribes all of the visible, or some synopsis of it, on one of the visibles – my eye’ (1986: 92).

DU is used in some forms of heavy military armor and artillery. The use of DU is controversial internationally and a number of countries and NGOs have condemned its use. The issue of DU poisoning in the US military is also controversial, and it has been linked in some quarters to Gulf War Syndrome. For more details on the international debate, see the UN Secretary General's July 2008 report and its addendum (United Nations 2008a, 2008b).

On other altered modes of seeing space, see Mitchell (2001).

For examples, see Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health & Traumatic Brain Injury and the Department of Veterans Affairs (2010); Duke-UNC Brain Imaging and Analysis Center; Georgopoulos et al. (2010); NCIRE The Brain At War. The visibility of PTSD can be helpfully situated within analyses of the importance of visibility within western medical epistemology, see Dumit (2004) and Saunders (2008).

Meals Ready to Eat, the highly engineered compressed and dehydrated food that has replaced the C-Rations of earlier military eras.

It is entirely possible that James’ eating inside could be pathologized (though he says it is not about avoiding a traumatic trigger), but even if it were, understanding this as ‘avoidance behavior’ offers no way of figuring the transformed experience of taste, which James is so insistent on.

For a relevant historical context of injured soldiers’ compensation and treatment, see Linker (2011).

Keeping in mind the relevance of the visual, it is worth noting both Butler's critique and Das’ articulation of the possibilities of living in mourning draw on Levinasian ethics based in the moment of recognition of the face of the other.

For other important arguments about the necessity of various kinds of bodily attention, Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987), Butler (1993, 2004: 24–7), Csordas (1994), Massumi (2002), Merleau-Ponty (2002), and Povinelli (2006, 2011).

Allen (2008), Das (2007), Klima (2002), and Nordstrom (1997) each offer excellent examples of the significances and braiding of these aspects of life in the midst of violence.