Critical veteran researchers’ unique adequacy: accounting for friendly-fire and fratricide

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnomethodology’s concept of unique adequacy, this paper addresses the contribution that critical veteran researchers (CVRs) can potentially bring to Critical Military Studies (CMS) on the basis of their military service, post-military life, and the members’ knowledge they therefore have. CVR members’ knowledges are framed through ethnomethodology’s arguments about unique adequacy as a requirement of methods. CVR’s unique adequacy is used to explore issues around the contribution that this particular group of researchers can make in critical analysis and research practices associated with critical military studies as an intellectual project. The paper argues against the reification and promotion of veteran exceptionalism regarding descriptions of ‘the reality of war’, militarism or militarization. Rather, it is about seeing CVR’s military participation and post-military lives, their members’ knowledge and unique adequacy, as constituting a positive resource. The paper illustrates this argument by taking the phenomenon of friendly-fire and fratricide as a topic. It identifies problems in the normative literature about it using the examples from two different genres: the formal analysis of combat identification, and experiential accounts from personal memoirs. The paper then critiques a specific campaign account of fratricide from a CVR perspective utilizing the author’s own unique adequacy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limits of uniquely adequate knowledge generated from embodied veteran researcher experience, its benefits in terms of the identification of new research topics and approaches, and the ultimate necessity for critical analysis research to be underpinned and informed by reference to unique adequacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical military studies
• fratricide
• military memoir
• veteran
• critical veteran researchers
• unique adequacy

Acknowledgement

This paper has benefitted from a number of reviews. I would like to thank all of the anonymous reviewers for their patience as this paper has evolved, it is much improved due to their input. I have also benefited from readings and suggestions of the Special Issue editors, especial thanks go to Hannah West. I also need to thank all my friends and colleagues who have reviewed and improved the paper no end, especially John Beales, John Hockey, Michael Mair and Rachel Woodward. As is ever the case, I will have forgotten someone, that omission and all others in the paper are my responsibility. I acknowledge the authors of the works cited for the stimulus they provided and the people on the ground we ultimately rely on.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term ‘soldier’ is used as a metonym for all military service’s personnel and not exclusively infantry or army personnel.

2. My thanks to Sophy Antrobus.

3. That said, of the authors accounts discussed, Patrick Bury subsequently became a university-based critical veteran researcher and Patrick Hennessey (2012) has published a second book Kandak as a post-military service veteran researcher outside academia, and has gone on to become a lawyer. Both had university degrees prior to military service but their accounts are from the military memoir tradition, and not from a critical veteran research perspective. Doug Beattie rose through the ranks without a university degree before retiring as a British Army captain producing two military memoirs and a novel. (Incidentally, but not part of the account below, Beattie as a 15-year old accidently shot a friend in the head, with his father’s – a UDR soldier – rifle before joining the British Army.)

4. A Commando Unit is equivalent in size to an army battalion, approximately 650 personnel.

5. Whilst the personal and personnel imaginaries of military participation are beyond the scope of this paper, it is nonetheless worth noting that ‘honour’ many have been replaced as a personal assessment and orientation for many Western military participant by that of the ‘professional’ (see Woodward and Jenkings 2011).

6. See Parr (2018) for an account of fratricide’s impact on the family of a casualty, including the impact of the normalized account’s revelation as a ‘falsehood’).