The Wounds That Never Heal: Transgression, Liminality, and Ethical Ruin in Battlefield Thresholds

ABSTRACT

For many veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, homecoming is an encounter with an unrecognisable former homeland that has become a place of uncertainty and confounding moral landscapes. Within the liminal space of combat deployment, occupying soldiers cross thresholds which confound established moral worlds and problematise notions of purpose. Through acts of transgression, temporality and ratiocination are challenged and reconfigured. Applying the analytic of ‘thresholds’ to theorise about these encounters, this paper draws from 18 months of fieldwork with repatriated American veterans as well as my own experience as a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. As a concept, thresholds elucidate the intensity and permanence of the embodied phenomenological encounters that epitomise contemporary wartime soldiering.

KEYWORDS:

• Thresholds
• veterans
• moral worlds
• trauma
• militarism

Acknowledgements

I’m very thankful to the veterans who participated in this study. Many individual veterans do not appear overtly in this article, though the time and stories they shared with me were integral to the research. Georgina Ramsay, Greg Beckett, Ralph Litzinger, Heidi Kelly, John Wood, Lyndi Hewitt, and Seth Messinger all provided helpful feedback through various incarnations of this paper. I give special thanks to the organizers of the Futures and Ruins conference at Duke University (Samuel Shearer, Alyssa Miller, Matthew Sebastian, Jake Silver), where an early version of this paper benefited from generative commentary. Discussions with scholars at the Veterans in Society Institute at Virginia Polytechnic University impacted this paper. I also want to thank Mark Graham and Nils Bubandt, Editors-in-Chief at Ethnos, and the anonymous peer reviewers who all provided constructive feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 According to the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the use of systemic torture occurred from 2002 to 2007. The events I describe from my own experience in Afghanistan took place in 2006.

2 I recall here how Michael Taussig adequately deals with the ways in which the trope of wildness can cause disarray in the mind of one who is away from home in the service of a colonialist mission, often resulting in cold, severe violence, in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Taussig 1987).

3 My veteran status arguably renders the bulk of my scholarship on combat trauma and militarism to be autoethnographic to some degree. The decision to include a vignette of my own military experience is one that I made as a strategy to engage ‘the battlefield as fieldsite’ in a way that is generally unavailable in the anthropology of militarism. As I argue that ‘something is missing’ in my evaluation of this anthropological subfield, I mean this less as a critique of the scholarly insight of the anthropologists who conduct this work and more of a recognition that there are some qualities of the Malinowskian ethnographic method that are simply not possible in the relatively secure post-deployment locations where the bulk of the anthropology of militarism has been forced to take place. As I have been to these combat zones in the fullest capacity of participant observation, I consider it unconscionable to omit those experiences from my work.

4 It is not my intention to argue that PTSD is not a real condition or that the therapies that have been developed to treat it are useless. Rather, my point is that PTSD is a finite medical condition that does not account for all of the suffering experienced by combat veterans.

5 In Islamic culture, the term ‘Haji’ is applied to a Muslim who has completed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. In this context, it is a title of honour and conveys prestige. Among members of the United States military though, the term has become a racial slur that is applied to people of Middle Eastern descent or sometimes to Muslims in general (particularly those who are engaged in combat) and is very derogatory. It has been compared to the derogatory and racist usage of the term ‘Charlie’ to describe Viet Cong soldiers by American troops during the Vietnam War and, in some cases, as a slur to stigmatise all people of Asian ancestry.

6 The rate of addiction among survivors of combat trauma in the United States military is alarmingly high. It has been argued that an ‘assembly line’ approach towards providing medical care for survivors of military trauma has perpetuated addiction behaviours (Collura & Lende 2012: 133).

7 There is certainly documentation of individuals throughout history having left combat with a sense of personal guilt and responsibility for having committed transgressive acts. A good example can be found in Arthur Kleinman’s account of a World War II veteran suffering from the guilt of having intentionally killed a non-combatant Japanese medic (Kleinman 2007). What I am describing here is a potential cultural shift that corresponds with the movement from a conscripted military to a military of volunteers. Whereas Shay’s extensive work with veterans of the Vietnam War found a common theme of transgressive authority figures, contemporary work with GWOT veterans more commonly finds self-blame.

8 Scandlyn and Hautzinger note the presence of severe consequences for soldiers who disobey; an embodied reality that must be considered when evaluating the wartime actions of soldiers (Scandlyn & Hauzinger 2015).

9 Sociologist Jerry Lembcke convincingly argues in The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam that the common belief that returning Vietnam War veterans were insulted and spat upon by civilian leftists and war protesters is an urban legend, albeit one that has been perpetuated by the political right in the United States (Lembcke 1998).