Between 2007 and 2008, Zoë H. Wool conducted her fieldwork with injured veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, seeking to understand the social and medical processes which they experienced upon return from deployment. Her ethnography contains many powerful stories, with rich and vivid details, including those of life-changing injury and death. Wool believes that soldiers – and injured veterans – have unique symbolic and cultural roles within a nation. She chose Walter Reed because it has been known as the heart of the military, with iconic status in the nation’s consciousness. Wool takes the reader on a journey where the wounded veterans live and adapt to their lives after their war injuries. Walter Reed is a site where veterans recuperate, physically, emotionally and socially, and it is indeed a powerful site for fieldwork.
Life at Walter Reed is intense and uncertain, but Wool is also interested in how injured veterans recapture their ordinary lives. She writes about trips to McGinty’s Irish pub and smoking with veterans at the same time as including narratives about life-altering decisions about medical issues. Wool captures the everyday struggles, personalities and identities of the veterans and brings them alive. She emphasizes both their individual and shared experiences of family and marriage and explores how every soldier handled their situations differently. The inner battles of depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that were previously only shared with their military family now become a central part of their recovery. The vulnerability and strengths of each one of the soldiers in After War is brought to life with such power that the reader is emotionally connected to their journeys.
The struggles and triumphs of members of the military have a unique cultural meaning in the life of the nation. Unfortunately, the ordinariness of their lives can be forgotten if we reduce them to nothing more than symbols of sacrifice. Interestingly, ‘sacrifice’ was a term that many soldiers did not use. ‘Soldiers were adamant that their jobs were not about the nation or sacrifice or heroism’ (105). Wool stresses that the word ‘sacrifice’ is a very poor description of their feelings and experiences. They felt unworthy of the attention and the gifts they received at Walter Reed due to the feelings that they were only doing their jobs. Not one of them made a conscious decision to stand on an explosive device, or to deliberately sacrifice their bodies when they enlisted. Also, being told ‘thank you for your sacrifice’ did not do justice to the complexity of their war experiences. Wool highlights the discomfort soldiers felt in being exposed to ‘too much gratitude’ (128).
Within the gates of Walter Reed, what the soldiers deemed ‘normal’ was seeing someone in a wheelchair or seeing an amputee; but when they left the gate, the ‘wounded warrior’ comes into effect. Outside the hospital, the actual wheelchair or the empty pant leg becomes ‘abnormal’. PTSD and post-combat transformation was common among the injured soldiers at Walter Reed. Although PTSD was considered a treatable disease, it was life altering. The transformations that were made in the recovering soldiers affected not only themselves but their families as well. Wool does not explore the controversies about PTSD as a diagnosis, but instead suggests that a better way to understand this experience is through ‘the analytics of movement’ (132). In an (unfortunately rather jargonistic) discussion of the soldiers’ bodies, Wool highlights the ways in which PTSD encompasses some, but not enough, of the changes in the ways an injured soldier relates to the world after combat trauma. She suggests that thinking about bodies and movement is a more effective way of understanding these changes.
The strength of the book lies in the personal stories that Wool uncovered during her time at Walter Reed. One story introduces us to James, an amputee soldier. He is married, in his early twenties, and has an infant daughter. Not only did James endure a challenging recovery, his marriage was also tested many times throughout his time at Walter Reed. James’ wife, Erin, also figures in the book, as they reconstruct their new life together after his injury. They move into an apartment building set aside for wounded veterans, even though James feels uneasy about displays of gratitude which he feels is excessive. Almost all of the stories in the book are about male soldiers. The only female soldier that was interviewed by Wool was Sophia. The unconscious habits which she developed in war, such as checking for her exits in case of danger, remain with her in civilian life. Her trained tactical wisdom overflows into her everyday life, and Wool highlights her internal struggle to return to a normal life which is not hypervigilant.
Through such stories, Wool demonstrates that soldiers are in need of healing to be able to hold on to their relationships, marriages and friendships. Such recovery is also necessary to keep their sanity and self-worth. In this context, she emphasizes the importance of trips to McGinty’s Irish Pub in regaining their sense of normalcy. But Wool suggests ‘they don’t become properly ordinary’ (193) when they return with war injuries. However, Wool does not rely on traditional disability studies literature to analyze their journeys. This departure from disability study theories is evident in chapter titles which include ‘The Economy of Patriotism’ (Chapter Three) and ‘Intimate Attachments and the Securing of Life’ (Chapter Five).
I am a veteran and I recently worked at Walter Reed. Having been deployed overseas myself, I was able to relate to the idea of ‘returning to normalcy’ that the soldiers in After War had discussed. After reading Wool’s book, I am eager to return to Walter Reed with a new sense of understanding and a fresh set of eyes. This is an enormously powerful recommendation for a book – that someone who has ‘been there, done that’ sees the material through new eyes. The stories of these veterans are so compelling, and Wool has captured their voices very well. Their recovery is something that is powerful enough to be felt by everyone.
University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA
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© 2016 Ann Sifuentes
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1214427