Field Notes on the Politics of Veteran Care

ABSTRACT

The experientially remote, ethically problematic, and ‘unthinkable’ character of military violence, entrenched in stereotyping and reductive figures of the soldier and veteran, is often taken to represent a fundamental crisis of ethnographic empathy and critique. I argue that this presumption of unbridgeable otherness should itself be a primary target of ethnography, a co-produced interrogation of truth in which ethnographer and subject alike have prior investments. I relate two instances in which unexpected veteran interlocutors challenged the ‘truth’ of stereotypical figurations that I also aimed to critique in my work. Exploring these confrontational co-productions of critique, I argue for an ethnography of military sociality embedded in informants’ own capacities as critics, in which anthropology is accountable for its enmeshment in imperial geopolitics and militarised modes of care.

KEYWORDS:

• US military
• ethnographic critique
• care
• military suicide
• PTSD

Acknowledgements

I am tremendously indebted to all the public, professional, scholarly, and ethnographic interlocutors who shaped my thinking about this topic and whose perspectives I strived to do justice to here. This piece was originally presented as a talk at a symposium organised by editors of this special section, Sebastian Mohr, Birgite Sørensen, and Matti Weisdorf, at Aarhus University Copenhagen, and I am incredibly grateful for the many, many thoughtful discussions of the anthropology of military and veteran worlds that their efforts have supported. Thanks to the editors of Ethnos and the anonymous reviewers for their interest and insight. Special thanks to Bea Juaregui, Rachael Pomerantz, Jean Scandlyn, Nomi Stone, and Zoë Wool, whose thoughts and care supported this writing in important ways.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All ethnographic research described in this article followed protocols approved by the University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt University to protect the privacy, confidentiality, and autonomy of research participants. All persons are pseudonymized, as are all locations not explicitly identified.

2 By ‘autoethnographic’ I mean to signal not only my own inclusion in a number of positions salient to this text (Anderson 2006) – e.g. ‘civilian’ citizen of a militaristic liberal democracy, scholar at once critical of and curious about military institutions, socialities, and actors – but also an attention to the way that anthropology's humanist politics are productively troubled by the ‘contamination’ and ‘partiality’ that come with being open to and affected by one's field and interlocutors (Strathern 2004; Stewart 2005), especially in settings of institutionalised coercion and violence (Jauregui 2013).

3 Given the extent and influence not only of US military institutions, but of military norms, virtues, ideals, and priorities, it is difficult to overstate how thoroughly constituted diverse domains of American life are by things military – everything from sexual, gender, and kinship norms (Canaday 2009; Linker 2011), welfare policy (Mittelstadt 2015), racialized belonging and citizenship (Pérez 2015), and national mythos (Slotkin 1992; Lutz 2009a), to education (Moore 2017), technoscience (Gusterson 2008), public safety and security (Lakoff 2008; Masco 2014), entertainment (Der Derian 2009; Stahl 2009), and health and fitness (Percy 2013).

4 Unlike many other militarised liberal democracies, the US does not have mandatory military service. Conscription was a crucial source of troops for all of the US's major modern wars from its mid-nineteenth-century Civil War up through the US war in Vietnam. In large part thanks to the strategic and political disastrousness of the latter conflict, the US draft was abolished in 1973. The resulting professionalisation of military service in the US has had major implications for the political economy of American militarism, the practicalities of mobilisation, and the moral and cultural narratives attached to American military service (Lutz 2001; Bailey 2009; Mittelstadt 2015).

5 For the original context of this figure, see (Kemp & Bossarte 2013); see Lee (Lee 2015) for a thorough critique. A more recent study revises this estimate down to 20 per day (Shane & Kime 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship; a Vanderbilt University Research Scholar Grant; and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-PhD Research Grant.