Operation ‘Long Distance Parenting’: the moral struggles of being a Danish soldier and father

Abstract

This article explores how Danish soldiers and fathers combine their moral responsibilities with international military deployment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Danish soldiers and their families, I demonstrate how soldiering and fatherhood exist as conflicting gendered moral discourses in the lives of Danish soldier-fathers. I argue that military deployment becomes a situation of moral conflict where Danish soldier-fathers struggle to balance their moral engagements as both professional soldiers and present and involved fathers. Rather than looking at military deployment as a temporally and spatially bounded experience, I suggest it is more useful to understand deployment as a life circumstance that continuously forces soldier-fathers to make conscious moral decisions. From this perspective, I explore two strategies used by Danish soldier-fathers to maintain their social and moral engagement as both soldiers and fathers. Firstly, I demonstrate how soldier-fathers create alternative narratives of ‘good’ fatherhood by challenging a moral discourse of the physically present father. Secondly, I show how online technologies simultaneously become a strategy for soldier-fathers to ‘be there’ as fathers during deployment as well as a trigger of moral concern when the fathers are unable to provide the support needed on the home front. The aim of the article is thus to demonstrate how Danish soldier-fathers navigate conflicting moral terrains, as well as how they negotiate and challenge existing gendered norms and moralities through their continuous struggles.

Keywords:

• Absence
• deployment
• fatherhood
• morality
• presence
• soldiering

Introduction

It’s not really the level of danger down here [in Afghanistan] that is the issue. It’s missing my family at home… it’s extremely difficult to be down here and know that Natasja is struggling with everything alone at home with two children and a dog, even though I know we have a strong network. When [our daughter] Laura was hospitalised I kind of broke down. I couldn’t really call home because they were at the hospital, so I was just awake all night staring at Messenger waiting for updates. And at that point I have to admit that I felt completely powerless and I guess also a little bit inadequate or kind of a bad family dad because I was here and not with my family. But then on the other hand, it is my job and it comforts me that we were capable of planning this deployment […] and most important of all, that Natasja is on maternity leave while I’m away. I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself if she also had to manage a full-time job. […] So all in all, everything is good down here. I’m having a good time, I have wonderful colleagues, but I cannot help but feel a little bit guilty about my family who is home alone…(Jacob)

Being a soldier in the Danish Defence Forces nowadays means being willing to deploy to war-torn countries far from the comforts of family and home. It is part of the contract. However, as the feminist scholar Catherine Lutz has pointed out, home and war are not binary oppositions (Lutz 2001). As I demonstrate in this article, they are ethnographically conflating and deeply entangled social spaces, which pose moral questions, and call upon soldier-fathers to find ways of navigating them. During one year of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish soldiers and their families in the course of deployment, I met several soldier-fathers who, like Jacob, expressed feelings of ambivalence or conflict when asked about the relationship between deployment and family life. They would often pause, search for words or even be moved to tears when the conversation turned towards their children’s reactions to their absence. When things got rough on the home front, most soldier-fathers had difficulties accepting their inability to help, and the feeling of powerlessness left some contemplating repatriation. As it turned out, however, none of the soldier-fathers in this study did. Instead, they chose a life that demanded a continuous struggle to combine two, at times, conflicting social commitments: fatherhood and soldiering. In this article I ask: How may we understand this choice from an anthropological perspective? What made it such a difficult, yet crucial task for Danish soldiers and fathers to reconcile the world of war and the world of family? And how may we understand soldier-fathers’ efforts to balance their mutual obligations as moral issues reaching into intimate relations?

In the following pages, I will try to provide answers to these questions by turning to the anthropology of morality. The choice of theoretical framework is not new in the literature on soldiering in a Danish context. Anthropologist Thomas Randrup Pedersen has studied soldiering as a moral project of self-becoming among Denmark’s ‘new warrior nation’ (Pedersen 2017). However, whereas Pedersen focuses on young men’s individual desire to become ‘soldier-warriors’, the focus of this article is on soldier-fathers. That is, soldiers who are always also fathers, despite their geographical position and professional engagement. Consequently, the moral concerns of my interlocutors reach into intimate relations and existing norms regarding how certain family relations ought to be – and thus are – inherently social. By discussing Danish soldier-fathers’ practices and reflections within a moral framework, I aim to provide an analytical understanding of the dilemmas and ambivalences experienced by my interlocutors as a result of their mutual engagement as fathers and soldiers. Moreover, by bringing fatherhood into the discussion, this article seeks to contribute with new insights to the literature on military families and soldiering.

I do so by firstly illustrating how, within a Danish context, conflicting gendered moralities of fatherhood and soldiering leave my interlocutors in an ambiguous position in terms of meeting their social obligations at home and at work. Next, based on this point, I argue that the moral qualms of combining fatherhood and soldiering exceed the actual time of deployment and physical absence from the family and become a life circumstance continuously forcing soldier-fathers into moral reflection. Within this social context of deployment as a life circumstance, I proceed to explore two strategies used by Danish soldier-fathers to morally justify their choice of combining a professional career in the military with a family life as involved fathers. The purpose of focusing on Danish soldier-fathers’ strategies for increasing their presence in the lives of their children is not to show how my interlocutors succeeded in their moral efforts. Instead, the aim is to demonstrate how the very acts of experimenting, negotiating and even challenging existing norms of both fatherhood and soldiering became a way for soldier-fathers to exist in a contradictory social world as both.

Studying soldiers as fathers

The empirical material on which I base this article stems from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2015/2016 among soldiers from the Danish Defence Forces, their female partners and their children. In total, I interviewed soldiers, partners and children from 21 families about their prior and current experiences with military deployment, and for a year I followed seven Danish families in the timeframe before, during, and after military deployment. Some families contacted me after a presentation at a pre-deployment family event organised by the Danish Defence Forces, whereas others responded to an article I had published in the Danish Defence Forces’ internal newspaper. Most of the soldiers selected for my study were in their 30s or 40s and held the rank of sergeant or captain, and all had been deployed more than once. One soldier held the rank of corporal. Deployments ranged from three to nine months although, as is considered standard within the Danish army, most of the soldiers in this study were deployed for six months with one or two periods of leave during the mission. Over the years, the Danish army has been responsible for more international deployments than the navy or air force. The few soldiers in this study who served in the latter two were typically deployed more frequently, but for shorter periods. In Denmark approximately 32.000 soldiers have been deployed since 1992, according to statistics from The Danish Veteran Centre’s deployment database. Ninety-five percent of all Danish deployed soldiers are men and 14 percent of first-time deployed soldiers are fathers (Lyk-Jensen and Jørgensen 2012). Given that it was the husband who was deployed in 20 out of the 21 families, this study reflects the gender bias among Danish soldiers who deploy. All families in this study consisted of a male and female partner and their (younger) children, except for one family in which both the father and mother had deployment experience as soldiers in the Danish army. Of the remaining 20 families, all partners but one were working mothers outside the home. Some families were divorced and in others there were children from previous relationships. All interlocutors have been anonymized.

The overall aim of my research project has been to understand how military deployment affected the everyday lives of soldiers’ families at home. I therefore spent a great deal of time with the family members in their homes, especially during deployment. Whenever possible, I participated in everyday activities such as preparing and eating dinner, picking up children from school and daycare, playing, bedtime rituals, occasional family trips and birthdays. Even though I spent most of my time with the partners and children at home, my study is just as much about the soldiers abroad. Interviews before deployment as well as post-deployment reflections, emails and correspondences via social media constitute important parts of my empirical material. Yet, more importantly, despite being thousands of kilometres away, the soldiers were also always a present part of the family at home (See Heiselberg 2017), and therefore at all times part of this study. I return to this point later when I discuss soldier-fathers’ attempts to create a so-called ‘dual presence’. As previous studies have pointed out, military deployment has social implications reaching far beyond the battlefield and the motivation of the individual soldier (Kohen 1984; Lutz 2001; Macleish 2013; Moelker et al. 2015). Soldiers’ families are deeply affected by the absence of the soldier as well as the potential risks involved of being at war. It may be only the husband and father (or wife and mother) who is physically absent from the family; however, the consequences of deployment are always a family affair (Sørensen 2013; Sørensen and Heiselberg, forthcoming). Following feminist scholars such as Alexandra Hyde, who points to the way war and the military materialise in cyclical time and everyday space even far from army bases and frontlines (Hyde 2016), I argue that understanding soldiers’ experiences of military deployment requires an acknowledgement of the relationa, and moral bond that exist between soldiers and their families despite geographical distances .

Within anthropology, notions of presence and absence have been challenged by ethnographic accounts of things, people, and places which may be physically absent but socially present in people’s lives (Bille, Hastrup and Sørensen 2010). In like manner, migration scholars have demonstrated how social commitments transcend physical boundaries and pave the way for new possible relationships and engagements (Wilding 2006; Olwig 2007; Zengraf and Chinchilla 2012). In recent years, migration studies have particularly emphasised the importance of online communication technologies. In the words of Madianou and Miller (2012), such technologies have caused a ‘transformation of the whole experience of migration and parenting’, not by offering a solution to the struggles of being separated but by changing the way parents and children experience their relationship (2).

In the literature on military families, however, few scholars have examined the development of new technologies as a game changer in relation to soldiers’ parenting practices and experiences during deployment (for exceptions see Willerton et al. 2011; DeGarmo 2016; Blasko and Murphy 2016). Instead, scholars have studied how the absence of military fathers has influenced children’s development (e.g. Lester and Flake 2013; Chandra et al. 2010), the psychological well-being of partners at home (e.g. Andres, Moelker and Soeters 2012; Houston et al. 2013), and the relationship between spouses (e.g. Smith-Osborne and Jani 2014; Zerach and Solomon 2016). Research on the challenges of combining a family life with a single (or dual) military career tend to focus on the military and the family as separate institutions, each competing for the time and energy of the service member. It is a conflict between two equally ‘greedy institutions’, as Mady Segal phrased it in the mid-80s (Segal 1986), and in sociological terms the concept is now often referred to as a work-family conflict (Adams, Jex and Cunningham 2006; De Angelis and Segal 2015). Feminist studies have, moreover, contributed with relevant insights on the gendered aspects of this conflict by pointing to women’s position within the ‘military family’ (Jessup 1996; Weinstein and White 1997; Hyde 2016) and to the military as a ‘gendered and gendering social institution’ (Wool 2015, 25; Woodward and Duncanson 2017).

Studies such as the ones mentioned above point to important issues facing military families today and offer valuable insights into the institutional and gendered dimensions of military and family as well as the psychological consequences of deployment. However, we still know little about how soldiers actually parent when away from their children. The challenges experienced in relation to parenthood and everyday family life during deployment are typically explored from the female perspective of soldiers’ spouses at home (Ross 2014). Consequently, soldiers’ voices as fathers seem to be more or less absent in both the academic debate on ‘military families’ and the literature on the soldier. In the latter, the focus is primarily on the differences and similarities between masculinity ideals in the military and the civilian worlds (see e.g. Higate 2003; Woodward 2003), and less on the co-existence of these (at times) contradictory ideals in the everyday lives of soldiers. This suggests a need for a stronger empirical foundation on which to discuss how the dual role as soldier-father is experienced, re-envisioned and negotiated in time and space. And moreover what soldier-fathers’ experiences might tell us about the moral dimensions of fatherhood and soldiering. With the aim of addressing these issues, I now turn to my empirical context by identifying two seemingly conflicting gendered moral discourses surrounding fatherhood and soldiering.

Fatherhood and soldiering as gendered moral discourses

During my fieldwork, ‘fatherhood’ and ‘soldiering’ emerged as two moral figures which the men of this study understood themselves in relation to. Being a ‘good’ father and a ‘good’ soldier, were, in other words, defining components in the moral framework of my interlocutors. Within academia, both soldiering and parenthood have a history of being regarded as moral issues, each reaching into larger social frameworks of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (See e.g. Linn 1996; Erskine 2003; Pedersen 2017; Sørensen and Pedersen 2012; Faircloth et al. 2013; Lee et al. 2014; Mattingly 2014). Furthermore, both soldiering and fatherhood are considered gendered practices defined by certain masculinity ideals (Morgen 1994; Higate 2003; Johansson and Andreasson 2017). In that sense, as soldiers and fathers, my interlocutors navigate a highly gendered moral landscape. In the following, I explore soldiering and fatherhood as diverging and temporally defined gendered moralities in the lives of Danish soldier-fathers. This distinction will be the starting point for further analysis of soldiers’ moral practices and reflections.

Soldiering

Since 2010, the Danish definition of a veteran has been ‘a person who – individually or in a unit – has been deployed in at least one international operation. The person may still be employed by the Danish Defence Forces or another authority but may also have transitioned into the civilian educational system, labor market or something else’ (Regeringen 2010). Up until the 1990s, soldiers and war veterans were not considered a present-day phenomenon in Danish society (Sørensen and Pedersen 2012). However, in the course of the war in Afghanistan, from 2006 to 2014, when Danish soldiers fought on the ground against Taliban forces, Denmark established itself as a militarily active country, both internationally and in the eyes of the Danish population (Kristensen 2013; Pedersen 2017). Following this development, Danes have been confronted with ‘the soldier’ as an emerging social category through various platforms and social arenas (Sørensen forthcoming).

In his study of young Danish ‘grunts’, Pedersen demonstrates the central role of deployment and combat in the moral projects of becoming ‘real’ ‘soldier-warriors’ (Pedersen 2017). Within a wider Western context, the soldier is typically considered the representative of a particular kind of military masculinity, characterised by traits such as violence, aggression, and strength (Higate 2003; Regan de Bere 2003). Despite academic efforts to nuance the image of the soldier by pointing to the ‘multiple masculinities’ within the military as well as the ‘civilianisation’ of the military institution (Higate 2003), there ‘is little evidence to suggest that the traditional links between masculinity, combat, and protection have been completely severed’ (Regan de Bere 2003). During my own fieldwork, I also recognised deployment as crucial to the soldier-fathers’ understanding of being a soldier. As Lasse, a major in the Danish army, explained: ‘It’s part of an identity, being deployed every now and then, I think.’ Most of my interlocutors had been in the Danish Defence Forces since they were young, and for the majority of them, a career ‘on the other side of the fence’, that is, in civilian life, was unimaginable. In line with Samantha Regan de Bere’s argument that military masculinity is formative for British Navy sailors’ identity, it is fair to assume that important aspects of my interlocutors’ identities had likewise been shaped by the military institution. Moreover, as also pointed out by Pedersen, I suggest that soldiering, over the years, had come to define substantial elements of the moral framework by which my interlocutors understood themselves as individuals and moral beings.

From the perspective of anthropologist Jarret Zigon, one could argue that soldiering existed as a gendered moral discourse in the lives of my interlocutors. By moral discourse Zigon refers to, firstly, ‘discourses articulated by various institutions and public outlets within a society, each of which has varying degrees of power to enforce these discourses’, and secondly, ‘the embodied dispositions that allow for nonconsciously acceptable ways of living in the world’ (Zigon 2010:5). As a gendered moral discourse in the lives of Danish soldier-fathers, soldiering is intrinsically linked to the military institution and the state. Soldiers’ endeavours are a public matter, and moreover, the moral responsibility of deployment is deeply embodied, as seen in statements such as Lasse’s assertion above. On a personal level, moral discourses allow people to experience ‘existential comfort’ by taking certain things for granted, Zigon argues (ibid). As it turned out, ‘taking for granted’ the moral discourse of soldiering seemed to belong to a certain period of time in the lives of my interlocutors. All the soldier-fathers in this study were soldiers before they became fathers, and although going to war had undoubtedly caused moral dilemmas in the past, something in my interlocutors’ accounts indicated a moral shift in their attitudes towards deployment after fatherhood. Christian, a captain in the army, explains it as follows:

When you get a little older, you don’t want too many things to happen, you appreciate calm missions. You don’t need action. It is more when you’re young that you want to experience something, whereas when you get married and get children, well, then it’s really okay when nothing happens, because then you will get a calm mission and then things will go well.

Whereas previously, as in the case of Pedersen’s ‘grunts’, deployment was considered a personal adventure and a necessary step towards becoming a ‘real’ soldier, statements such as the one above suggest that deployment had come to conflict with another gendered moral discourse in the lives of my interlocutors: that of fatherhood.

Fatherhood

Over the past few decades, fatherhood has become ‘the object of a renewed debate’ in Danish society (Mosegaard 2006). Whereas spending time with your children in earlier generations was considered secondary to a man’s role of being breadwinner, Danish women’s entrance into the labour market in the 1960s and 1970s challenged traditional gender roles in the family (Rosenbeck 1987). The Danish feminist movement furthermore played a central role throughout the 1970s in advocating for gender equality, not only on the labour market but also in relation to domestic chores and childrearing (ibid). Thus, historically anchored in the women’s movement, it has by now become practically necessary and socially acceptable for fathers to contribute with domestic chores, and especially childcare. Anthropologist Maruska la Cour Mosegaard (2006) furthermore argues that it has become a goal in itself for fathers to build emotionally intimate relationships with their children. This resonates with what studies of fatherhood in other Western countries have labelled the ‘new fathers’ ideal’. According to the literature, men are encouraged to get ‘involved’ with their children by taking up the role of an attentive, caring and present parent, as opposed to the ‘distant’ father narrative of previous generations (Prokos 2002,1; Faircloth 2014). Anthropologist Charlotte Faircloth stresses that although the ‘new father’ ideal often differs from men’s actual parenting practices, as we shall also see later, it acts as a cultural model influencing what is considered ‘good’ fatherhood in specific local contexts (Faircloth 2014, 196).

Following Zigon, fatherhood, like soldiering, could be described as a gendered moral discourse. The ideal of the caring and involved father is supported by public discourses and institutions when, for instance, issues such as parental leave for fathers or child custody in the case of divorce have caught the public attention and created, at times, heated debates in the Danish media as well as in the Danish parliament (See for instance Damløv 2012; The Danish Parliament 2012). Furthermore, in the vignette that opens this article, Jacob proclaims that he is having a good time but ‘cannot help but feel a little bit guilty about my family who is home alone’. From the perspective of husband and father, Jacob recognises that being home with his family would have been the better choice; thus the moral discourse of ‘good’ fatherhood can likewise be said to work as an ‘embodied disposition’ (Zigon 2010, 5).

So, if being a good soldier means being willing – or even wanting – to leave your family to go to war, and being a good father requires that one is physically present and emotionally involved in the upbringing of one’s child, is it even possible to pursue both at once? Or from a theoretical standpoint, how do individuals navigate a moral landscape with (at least) two mutually exclusive gendered discourses? As relational beings, Zigon argues, individuals orient themselves towards several, at times contradictory, moral discourses in their attempt to maintain defining social relations (Zigon 2010). This occasionally causes ‘moral breakdowns’ which force individuals to make conscious decisions (perform ethics) with the purpose of returning to the ‘unreflective mode of being-in-the-world (Zigon 2007, 137). From this perspective, the conflict between soldier-fathers’ moral obligations as fathers and as soldiers could be interpreted as moral breakdowns. However, one might wonder what happens when the moral breakdown persists. How may we understand soldier-fathers’ ways of navigating in a world where the dilemmas caused by conflicting moral discourses continue, and where ‘existential comfort’ (Zigon 2010, 5) is a long time coming?

Military deployment as life circumstance

Deployment turns everyday life upside down and forces families to (re)consider life as it is (Sørensen 2013; Heiselberg 2017). From the perspective of Zigon, deployment could be considered a moment of moral breakdown, where the nonconscious way of morally being in the world is challenged and action is needed before the individual can once again ‘dwell in the comfort of the familiar’ everyday life (Zigon 2007, 138). Deployment is indeed a situation that compels Danish soldier-fathers to step back and weigh up the right thing to do, as the following quote by Thomas, a captain in the Danish army and father to a three-year-old son, illustrates:

In reality, it’s kind of a fundamental value for me, that thing about justice; it’s my main drive. This thing about being a soldier, right? You know, the thing about there being injustice somewhere in the world and you are doing something about it. One thing is that you can prevent it from coming here. That’s the simple version. The other thing is that you can stop it where it actually is. And that justifies me. You know, I weigh the two things on a scale and then I make a decision that the contribution I can make over there is worth more than the price of missing home. […] I’m helping more than I am missing, I think. But it’s something that I have to evaluate each time. […] A lot of things have changed since we got William. The first mission I was on [in Afghanistan] was before William. Something changes inside you when you become a parent, and you are no longer only responsible for yourself, like I was back then. Now, I would also have to make sure that I come home alive for his sake […] because it’s not only me it affects but also him, who would be missing a father. You know, would it be fair to him? Then you have to be sure about your ideology. Why am I doing this? Is my persuasion more important than the loss of his father? Can you even compare those two things? And what if I never come home again, would it then have been worth it?

When Thomas’s son William was born something ‘inside’ him changed, which turned the decision about deployment into a dilemma in need of moral justification. In other words, fatherhood added a new dimension to the moral equation of soldiering and forced Thomas to consider his decision to deploy from a new perspective. Notwithstanding, I would argue that regarding deployment as a moral breakdown captures neither the ongoing moral dialogue nor the continuous nature of the struggle for balance essential for soldier-fathers’ experiences of deployment as part of life. Zigon suggests that a moral breakdown is characterised by a ‘moment of problematisation’ or ‘difficult time’ which interrupts ‘one’s normal, everyday mode of being-in-the-world’ and forces the individual to make a conscious decision about what is the right thing to do in order for him/her to return to the unreflective ‘comfort of the familiar’ (Zigon 2007, 137–138). I find Zigon’s distinction between the ethical moment and the unreflective everyday life inadequate in this particular ethnographic context where the problem, so to speak, can be defined neither temporally as a ‘moment’ (regardless of the length of that moment) nor situationally, as when something ‘becomes disconnected from its usual relations in the world’ (ibid, 138) Inspired by Kenneth Macleish’s description of deployment as ‘the sense of indefinitely ongoing movement’ that ‘loom[s] over everything’ (Macleish 2013, 2), I propose we consider deployment as a life circumstance. By life circumstance I mean a defining aspect of life which shapes the foundation on which soldiers and their families live with each other as relational and moral beings. The following example will illustrate how deployment figured as a life circumstance in the lives of Jacob and Natasja, whom we met in the vignette that opened this article.

When Jacob and Natasja met, Jacob was already in the Danish Defence Forces and wanted to build a career for himself as a professional soldier. Jacob was well aware of the ‘lifestyle’ his job entailed and within 24 hours of their first meeting he told her: ‘If this is going somewhere, I want you to know that I am in the Defence Forces and will most likely be deployed sometime in the future.’ Jacob’s decision to inform Natasja about his situation as a soldier suggests that deployment as a future event demanded a presence in his current life situation. That is, deployment became a life circumstance for Jacob and Natasja the day they met as it forced them to reflect and consciously make a decision regarding their potential future life together. Whenever their situation seemed unbearable, both Jacob and Natasja would return to the story of when they met and the conditions under which their relationship had taken form. Creating coherence between past decisions and their present situation thus became a way for the couple to handle both the challenges of actually being separated and the uncertainty of further deployments looming in their future.

Martin, a senior sergeant in the Danish Army, is another soldier-father in this study who frequently and actively considered his choices as a soldier and father. Upon his return from Iraq, I asked him whether it was difficult to be a soldier and father at the same time. He responded:

Yes, and I ask myself whether I am doing the right thing. Is it really worth doing something where you are always on the edge and wondering whether your family will make it? And no, it’s not worth it. No job is worth your family. Or at least, that’s how I think it is. But I’m really happy with what I do[…].

The seemingly contradictory demands from the military and his family had forced Martin to step back post-deployment and reconsider the moral ground on which he stood as a father and a soldier. For Jacob, Martin, and most other soldier-fathers in this study, deployment was not just a temporary problem to be solved with the purpose of returning to the (perhaps) slightly changed moral dispositions of everyday life. Rather, the moral dilemmas and conscious moments of decision presented themselves regularly whenever deployment interfered with their social commitments as fathers and husbands. Anthropologist Joel Robbins (2007; 2009) suggests that when values pertaining to different moral domains conflict, a possibility for reflection and moral decision-making arises. Robbins calls this the ‘morality of freedom’ and compares it to Zigon’s understanding of ethics. Under these circumstances, people become aware of their moral engagement with the world and their ability to choose certain paths over others. However, sometimes moral conflicts persist and it becomes neither possible nor desirable to definitively choose one path or moral domain over another. Whereas Zigon differentiates between a moral breakdown and the nonconscious moral choices people make every day, Robbins recognises that some people’s lives are characterised by a ‘heightened sense of moral concern’ caused by competing values, making their everyday lives a site for moral debate and conscious decision-making (Robbins 2007, 311). In the sense that the moral and relational bond between soldier-fathers and their families turns deployment into a life circumstance that reaches into both past and future, soldier-fathers are continuously confronted by the question of what the right thing to do is. Examples of this are when Thomas says ‘it’s something that I have to evaluate each time’, and when Martin explains how he is ‘always on the edge’. To use the words of Robbins, the soldier-fathers find themselves in a continuous state of ‘moral intensity’ (Robbins 2007, 311).

For Danish soldier-fathers, it is not a matter of choosing, either consciously or nonconsciously, to be a good soldier or father at different points in time or at different places in the world. It is about always being both a soldier and a father and constantly trying to find the best possible ways of combining these social and moral engagements. In the next two sections of the article, I turn to Cheryl Mattingly’s perspectives on the everyday as site for moral experiment, in an analysis of the strategies used by my interlocutors to combine their moral engagements by negotiating what ‘being there’ entails as a father and a soldier.

Alternative narratives of fatherhood

Mattingly (2014, 39) points out that experience is ‘always situated within a temporal arc’. That is, people do not make isolated choices of actions but always situate their ‘present’ experiences in relation to potential futures and already experienced pasts. Framing deployment as a life circumstance is one way of acknowledging the ‘temporal depth’ of my interlocutors’ individual experiences of soldiering and deployment. Below I take a step further and look at the strategies used by my interlocutors to help them exist in a morally contradictory world by narratively re-envisioning their responsibilities and commitments as fathers. According to Mattingly, individuals are capable of questioning commonly accepted norms, categories or ideals when these fail to provide direction or a moral framework for the world as it is experienced (ibid, 34). Inspired by these thoughts, I turn to Kurt and Thomas as my empirical starting point for discussing how ideals of fatherhood were negotiated through an interpretation of presence.

Like most of the soldiers in this study, Kurt had spent a great deal of time thinking about his engagement as a soldier in relation to his two children. Kurt had already had a long career in the Danish Defence Forces as an army sergeant with multiple deployments behind him. In the excerpt below, he reflects upon his choices in relation to a conversation with a younger colleague:

Well, I have probably had the attitude that we had to make the best out of it, meaning that when I had my first trip to Afghanistan, while I had children, that was just the way it was. […] We had some problems with Joachim [his son] when I came home [the last time] and he had some serious psychological reactions [like] bursts of anger. […] I tried to be a little more attentive in that regard, but it doesn’t change the fact that I leave, again and again. […] I had a conversation with my colleague where he told me that he couldn’t understand how I could leave my children. He just had a little new one and as he says ‘I simply cannot leave her’. And then I say ‘no, I understand you, but I am doing it because I have to believe that my children’s lives are not necessarily ruined because I leave’. If I thought that my children would be damaged by me leaving then obviously I couldn’t do it. So I have to believe that they can find some kind of strength in having to be without their father for a while, and that the struggles they are experiencing can make them resilient in the long run.

Kurt justifies his decision to continue to deploy by arguing that his absence will benefit his children in the future. In that sense, Kurt sees his own responsibilities as a father not only to care for his children here and now but also to provide them with those skills needed ‘in the long run’. This understanding of fatherhood finds an echo in Thomas when he talks about ‘having a responsibility in terms of turning him [his three-year-old son] into a civilised person. He says: ‘I am not only here to take him from A to B, you know.’

Mattingly holds that cultural norms regarding parenthood may provide guidelines and frameworks for parents, but they do not determine how parenthood presents itself at different times in different people’s lives (Mattingly 2014, 41). In the excerpt above, Kurt positions his choice of deployment in relation to a strong cultural narrative of good fatherhood as being present – in the sense of being physically near – one’s children. It becomes his ‘space of conversation’, to use the words of Mattingly (42). However, it also becomes his opportunity to morally re-envision ‘good’ fatherhood from the perspective of the soldier. Essentially, for both Kurt and Thomas good fatherhood entails not only ‘being there’ in the present but ensuring their children’s development into strong and good people in the future. One could argue that Kurt creates an alternative narrative of ‘good’ fatherhood in which leaving his children may not necessarily be a bad thing but could, in fact, turn them into independent and resilient individuals. Put differently, soldier-fathers like Kurt do not passively reproduce moral discourses. They sometimes negotiate or even challenge existing moral expectations, reshaping them to accommodate the social relations and engagements that make up their world.

Figuring out how one becomes a ‘good enough’ parent is, according to Mattingly (2014), a moral project which sometimes involves challenging commonly accepted discourses as one tries to find one’s own way through the perils of everyday life. Following this perspective, creating a narrative of fatherhood consistent with their responsibilities as soldiers allows soldier-fathers like Kurt and Thomas to live moral lives as both soldiers and fathers. Yet, thinking that this decision does not entail continuous struggle or doubts would be missing the point. During my fieldwork, soldier-fathers often asked themselves the question ‘is it really worth it?’ Painting an alternative picture of one’s moral responsibility as a father was, thus, not a solution to the soldier-father’s moral qualms, but it became one way of navigating the ambivalence.

Dual presence and moral triggers

Deployment always exists as both a potential future and an experienced past. Yet, it is also very real and present in the everyday lives of both soldier and family during the actual time of separation. Moreover, the months leading up to deployment are often characterised by long working hours and training exercises throughout the country. Although the deployment period is often described as anything but normal by Danish soldiers and their families, the daily routines and rituals of everyday family life continue even though the soldier is absent from the family. In that sense, the deployment period may not be a typical scene of the ‘moral ordinary’, as Mattingly (2013, 306) describes it, but it is a situation in which normal everyday life is strived for (Heiselberg 2017). Furthermore, as I demonstrate below, it becomes a social ‘space of possibility’ – a situation which ‘creates experiences that are also experiments in how life might or should be lived’ (Mattingly 2014, 35).

Over the past decades, soldiers’ possibilities for keeping in contact with their families at home have drastically changed. Whereas letters and the occasional phone call were the only means of communication a few years back, many militaries now provide a stable internet connection on missions, which allows soldiers to have daily contact with home. When absent from everyday family life at home during deployment, the soldier-fathers of this study invented – or, in the words of Mattingly (2014, 36), experimented – with various strategies for creating a so-called dual presence so that they could be both soldiers and fathers simultaneously. However, as we shall see, these new windows into family life also triggered new moral concerns among soldier-fathers when they were exposed to the daily struggles and longings of their family members at home.

Let me illustrate my first point with Henry, whom I first met shortly before his first deployment since he became a father. Henry tried to keep up with the everyday life of his family while away. Henry’s wife, Elisabeth, informed me that Henry would sometimes watch TV ‘with’ her and Simon, their nine-year-old son. They would call him on Skype, leaving the iPad on the coffee table so that the TV show at home in Denmark could beam through Henry’s laptop in Iraq. Clearly amused by the story, Elisabeth recalled how one time she ‘forgot Henry in the bathroom’ after she had ‘brought him’ with her to pee. She only realised it when she heard distant voices from the phone in the bathroom. It was not only in the home, however, that Henry ‘participated’ in family activities. He also found a way to continue his engagement in Simon’s football team, which he coached when at home. He explained:

We followed each other online. And that worked very well. I also ‘went’ to some football matches, because you’re on … you’re online everywhere nowadays, so I remember texting Elisabeth and asking her to video-chat with me during the game. So, I was online there. I could see him [Simon] keeping the goal. The connection wasn’t perfect, but you got the feeling of being part of it every now and then.

The various ways Henry, more or less successfully, tried to take part in the everyday activities of his family illustrates a general tendency among the soldiers in this study. Despite being physically absent, the soldier-fathers all tried to live up to a gendered moral discourse of the involved father, experimenting with how their virtual presence could be weaved into the ‘normal’ routines of their families’ everyday lives – or, in Mattingly’s (2014) words, with how life ‘should be lived’ (35).

Mattingly’s (2014) main argument is that the everyday, as opposed to the extraordinary moment, is an overlooked social space for moral experiments and that moments of daily life call for actions which have the possibility to transform ‘social and physical spaces’ (35). Following these thoughts, I would argue that online communication technologies opened a space for soldier-fathers to experiment with and negotiate their presence, and thereby transform their roles as both fathers and soldiers. In ‘An Anthropology of Absence’, Bille, Hastrup and Sørensen (2010) argue that ‘what might appear as a binary opposition between presence and absence is in fact often conceptualised within a continuous and ambiguous spectrum (10). In the case of Danish soldier-fathers, the moral discourse of the ‘present’ father became subject to interpretation when Henry ‘went’ to Simon’s football matches or ‘participated’ in his bedtime ritual although physically thousands of kilometres away. Online communication technologies allowed the soldiers to negotiate the meaning of presence. In that sense, the ability to stay connected with their families made soldier-fathers capable of combining the moral discourses of soldiering and fatherhood. Anthropologists Miller and Slater (2002) have argued that when parents and children are separated, ‘the internet assuaged some of the problems and sense of guilt leaving the children behind, since it made possible a new mediated parenting’ (190).

Yet, the use of online communication services simultaneously triggered a new moral concern, since it forced the soldier-fathers to be both soldier and father at once, in other words to act on and relate to issues at home while on the mission. As Thomas described:

It has been the most difficult thing in the mission, […] knowing that she [partner] was struggling at home […] and that I couldn’t help. I could turn the camera and see the dirty dishes and the piles of laundry but I couldn’t do anything about it from there [Iraq].

Based on the idea that soldiers are better able to concentrate on the mission if undisturbed, the Danish Defence Forces recommend that family members do not burden the soldiers with ‘the struggles of everyday life’ (Danish Veteran Centre 2012). Despite the emotional conflict expressed by Thomas in the excerpt above, like most of the soldiers I talked to, he strongly disagreed with this caveat and insisted on knowing what was going on at home. ‘I don’t think you should spare the soldier anything at all. You need to know what goes on at home’, as Martin, for instance, put it. However, the constant ‘presence’ of the family in e.g. Afghanistan or Iraq was not only an emotional challenge for the soldiers in relation to their families at home. Soldier-fathers’ dual presence also had consequences for the social interaction between soldiers on the mission. Martin continues: ‘And the social part of it down there [in Iraq], no one did anything together. Everyone just sat with their heads bent [to look at the screen].’ In that sense, soldier-fathers also negotiated the moral discourse of soldiering by challenging the meaning of presence during deployment.

To return to Robbins, I have already argued that soldier-fathers live with a heightened sense of moral concern because of deployment as a life circumstance. This moral concern, I would argue, is further triggered by new technologies creating a dual presence and consequently demanding a dual responsibility of soldier-fathers to be ‘present’ in more than once place at the same time. This has consequences for the kind and quality of the social presence that is possible, both at home and on the mission. Nonetheless, the attempt to manage some kind of moral balance, however fragile and temporary, is exactly what drives the soldier-fathers to experiment and keep on trying to find ways of staying connected to their families during deployment – even if it entails being left in the bathroom while the rest of the family gets on with their everyday business.

Conclusion

This article illustrates the continuous moral battle taken on by Danish soldier-fathers in their attempt to be both professional soldiers and involved and present fathers. The literature on military families points to a conflict between the family and the military; yet we are often left with unanswered questions as to how soldiers experience this conflict, solve it, address it or simply live with it. Empirically, soldiers who are also fathers always experience life as both; however, the moral implications of fatherhood are rarely discussed in relation to soldiering. I have addressed these issues by exploring soldiering and fatherhood as seemingly contradictory moral discourses in the lives of my interlocutors. To be a good father, one is expected to engage emotionally by being present in the upbringing of one’s children. To be a good soldier, on the other hand, one must be willing to deploy and leave one’s family behind. I have provided an empirical understanding of this apparent dilemma by exploring how deployment is experienced in the lives of soldier-fathers. Instead of looking at deployment as a limited period of time with a fixed beginning and end, I argue that military deployment is experienced as a life circumstance, shaping how soldiers and their families live their lives together before, during and after deployment. In their attempts to live morally consistent lives, the soldier-fathers of this study developed and experimented with various strategies. One of these strategies was to tell a different story about what being a good father entailed: a story in which the occasional absence of a parent would not necessarily have negative consequences. Another strategy was to create a virtual presence at home during deployment. By means of online communication technologies, soldier-fathers managed to maintain a sense of presence in their families’ daily lives. However, this presence had consequences for their social relations on the mission as well as their sense of responsibility towards the struggles of family members at home. The various strategies used by Danish soldier-fathers show how existing moral discourses are constantly negotiated and challenged as people try to navigate their way through the ‘catalogue of contradictions’ (Irvine 2016, 13) that make up their social worlds. Whether they succeed or not has not been the point of this article. Instead, I have tried to draw attention to the efforts of trying, and to the moral and social commitments driving those efforts.

Notes on contributor

Maj Hedegaard Heiselberg is PhD student at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen and the Danish Veteran Centre. Her PhD project investigates how military deployment affects everyday family life, and how ideas about intimacy and closeness are negotiated during times of physical separation. Maj has published the article ‘Fighting for the Family’ in Critical Military Studies and has contributed to the LSE blog ‘Parenting for a Digital Future’ with a piece on parenthood from a distance. Maj is also currently a member of the NATO HFM-258 research group ‘The Impact of Military Life on Children from Military Families’.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Birgitte Refslund Sørensen for her critical questions, helpful advice and our inspiring conversations during the process of writing. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen Thomas Randrup Pedersen, Mette My Madsen, Ida Hartmann Christensen and Professor Tine Gammeltoft for constructive feedback on earlier drafts of the article. Also thanks to senior researcher Anni Brit Sternhagen Nielsen at the Veteran Centre’s Knowledge Department for encouragement and enthusiasm along the way and to the three anonymous reviewers. Finally, a warm thank you to the soldiers and families who shared their time, thoughts, and experiences with me. Your hospitality and kindness are truly appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.