Returning Home After War: Representations of Romanian Veterans in a Contemporary War Novel (Schije/Shrapnel)

Abstract

Military homecoming is commonly viewed as a distressing experience. However, the novel Schije (Shrapnel, in English) tells a Romanian paratrooper's (Toma) positive story of returning home from the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021). By exploring spaces, emotions, and relationships that help Toma to recover, this article makes a two-fold contribution to the existing literature. Firstly, it shows that homes play a restorative role in veterans’ life. Secondly, the experiences of Romanian veterans and their families illustrate the changing nature of civil-military relations in Romania after 1989, thereby shedding light on the intersections of neoliberalism, postsocialism, and militarism in contemporary warfare. Overall, this article deepens and broadens the role of cultural representations in shaping understandings of war, military service, and veterans.

Keywords:

• military homecoming
• war
• veterans
• Romania
• fiction

Introduction

Toma would have liked to have been asked how it felt to return home, rather than what it was like to have been deployed overseas for almost two years. To return home to a wife who had an affair with another man, to a kid that wanted to become a soldier when he grew up, [and] to shoot terrorists just like his dad, [to leave behind] a godforsaken village, situated in a different part of the planet, where you went to kill people [only to return] to another dead village, where the only things that are moving are the mayor's hands and those of his clique, elbows deep in this village just like in a body that donated its organs for transplant (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 115).¹

These inner thoughts belong to Toma Stratan, a Romanian paratrooper, who is the main character of Schije/Shrapnel (2017). Written by Ioana Baetica Morpurgo, the novel describes Romanian veterans’ experiences of returning home from the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021). Although Toma's experiences resemble those of other veterans, his thoughts hint at the impact of corruption on Romanian rural areas, which is partially related to the reforms that accompanied Romania's transition towards liberal democracy and market economics after the fall of Communism.

Toma served in Afghanistan within International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from 2009 to 2011. ISAF was a multinational military mission which was launched in the aftermath of the United States of America's invasion of Afghanistan (2001). Other military allies (including Romania) formed a coalition of forces which ended the Taliban rule and established an interim authority to reconstruct Afghanistan (Suhrke 2008). In 2003, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) assumed command of ISAF. Although ISAF was replaced by Resolute Support Mission (RSM) in 2015,² NATO led the multinational mission in Afghanistan until its withdrawal in 2021 (NATO 2022a).

Although Romania joined NATO in 2004 it had sent troops to Afghanistan ever since the war started and continued to do so until NATO withdrew from the country in 2021. An informed reader would recognize that Toma served in Afghanistan at the peak of ISAF's presence in the country when the number of troops rose to 130,000 (NATO 2022b). During the same period, Romania deployed up to 1,900 troops to Afghanistan (Ministry of National Defence n.d., p. 7). By the time NATO withdrew from Afghanistan, Romania had contributed with 32,000 troops to ISAF/RSM and lost twenty-seven (27) soldiers (Ministry of National Defence n.d., pp. 3 & 73).

Although the experiences of Romanian veterans have been recounted within military blogs, military magazines (e.g. Viaţa Militară/Military Life) or memoirs (e.g. Harabagiu 2020), Schije/Shrapnel is the first Romanian novel that explores Romanian veterans’ return from Afghanistan and that addresses the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a relatively new concern within the Romanian society. In so doing, it describes Toma's struggle with the memory of war and depicts the emotional mechanisms that he builds to cope with his war trauma. Therefore, I argue that home is a site of healing in veterans’ lives by producing renewed emotional attachments to certain people and places that contribute to veterans’ recovery. Moreover, Schije/Shrapnel situates Toma's return home within the socio-economic and political transformation that has shaped Romania after the fall of Communism, which is linked with its integration to NATO and the EU. Therefore, I argue that Toma's homecoming illuminates intersections between neoliberalism, militarism, and postsocialism within contemporary warfare.

This article contributes to the existing literature on family, love, friendship, and intimacy within cultural representations of war by querying the role of homes in veterans’ lives (Welland 2018, Gray 2022, Dalton 2022a). Specifically, it steers cultural studies of war towards examining webs of relationships, spaces, and emotions through which veterans and their loved ones (re)build their lives. Moreover, this article refines the existing empirical work which focuses mostly on the Israeli, North American, and Western European armed forces (Woodward et al. 2009, Engelkamp and Offermann 2012, Morag 2012, Kitchen 2018, Dodds and Hochscherf 2020). Although there has been a growing interest in other parts of the world, including Sri Lanka (de Mel 2007), Argentina (Natale 2022) or Japan (Frühstück 2007, Dalton 2022b, 2022a), the experiences of the armed forces from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and particularly their cultural representations, have been largely overlooked. To this end, this article adds a postsocialist dimension to the feminist and critical scholarship that examines military households at the intersection of militarism and neoliberalism (Chisholm and Eichler 2018, Chisholm and Ketola 2020, Gray 2022, Spanner 2022).

However, this article uses the concept of home instead of the household. While the latter has a largely material dimension by being ‘the most “basic economic” unit’ of society through which relationship of production and consumption can be analyzed’ (Mallett 2004, p. 68), the concept of home is defined as a ‘space inhabited by people, family, things and belongings’ (Mallett 2004, p. 63). Put it differently, the concept of home captures the social, material, and emotional dimensions of the intimate living space. Furthermore, the meaning of home is closely associated with traveling to and from a place that has some emotional significance thus evoking memory, sentimentality, and nostalgia (Mallett 2004, p. 77–79). Finally, yet significantly, home is located nationally, transnationally, and internationally thus it may be easily replaced with community, village, town, city, or nations. It is also a place where connections between bodies and neighbourhoods, communities, villages, cities, or nations are strengthened or eroded (Brickell 2012).

This article is structured in five sections. The first section situates Schije/Sharpnel within the wider literature on veterans and highlights the role of fiction within our understanding of war, homecoming, and veterancy. The second section examines the main features of the post-1989 Romanian military home at the intersection of militarism, neoliberalism, and postsocialism. The third section summarizes the plot of the novel. While the fourth section presents Toma's return home as a nostalgic experience through which he tries to come to terms with the changes that his home, family, and village went through during his absence, the fifth section examines the role of intimacy, friendship, and filial love in helping Toma to recover from trauma. The conclusion summarizes the main findings of this article.

Researching veterans

There is an extensive academic interest in veterans’ return home from the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. Several themes may be distinguished: health and wellbeing; life history perspectives; socio-economic analysis; (feminist) gendered analysis; and cultural representations. Nevertheless, this literature focuses almost exclusively on Western veterans (U.S., British, Dutch, Canadian, or Norwegian ones), thereby leaving unaddressed the experiences of CEE veterans who also fought in these wars.

Health studies focus on the mental and psychological impact of war on veterans. Existing research has examined the development of PTSD, traumatic brain injuries or depression among U.S., British or Dutch miliary personnel (Browne et al. 2007, Engelhard et al. 2007, Schnurr et al. 2009, Maguen et al. 2010). It has also explored the impact of sports activities on veterans’ recovery. For instance, Danish or British veterans recounted that physical activity alleviated their war trauma (Evans et al. 2020, Serfioti and Hunt 2022, Walker et al. 2022).

Moreover, life history approaches have been used to examine how Norwegian, Swedish, U.S. or British veterans make sense of their military life (Ahern et al. 2015, Gustavsen 2015, Wool 2015). In this respect, personal relationships or friendships with other veterans contribute significantly to their rehabilitation (Hinojosa and Hinojosa 2011, Worthen et al. 2012, Magaly Freytes et al. 2013, Caddick et al. 2015). Scholars have also examined the negative effects of veterans’ health problems on their financial wellbeing, including the U.S. and British veterans’ experiences of homelessness (Humensky et al. 2012, Metraux et al. 2013, Elrond et al. 2019, Burdett et al. 2021).

Gender and feminist scholars queried the impact of war on women that served in Afghanistan or Iraq, including the U.S. and British military women’ experiences of PTSD, sexual trauma, homelessness, or their inability to access appropriate healthcare (Street et al. 2009, Eager 2014, Koblinsky et al. 2017, Leslie and Koblinsky 2017, Godier-McBard et al. 2022). More widely, feminist scholarship examined the gendered and affective narratives through which U.S. female veterans seek recognition for their military service (Welland 2021) or the Swedish and Danish military women's self-reflections regarding their peacekeeping role in Afghanistan (Bergman Rosamond and Kronsell 2018).

Veterans have also been represented within cultural artefacts. Media representations usually shift between hero, victim, villain/perpetrator images. This ambiguous representation affects the British recruitment and retention policies (McCartney 2011) or serves as a justification for the generous system of benefits that U.S. veterans receive post-deployment (Kleykamp and Hipes 2015). Nevertheless, research has shown veterans’ discomfort with their over-representation as traumatized figures (Schmidt 2020, Parry and Pitchford-Hyde 2022).

Moreover, photographic representations of the disabled/wounded military body constitute it as an object of desire (Caso 2017) or as an exceptionally heroic, more-than-human figure (Cree and Caddick 2020), thereby contributing to the visual militarization of the everyday life. Although films and documentaries have equally reinforced the ‘hero-ification’ of the veteran body (Kelly 2013), they tend to offer a more nuanced representation of post-deployment life. The negative consequences of homecoming have been represented in films about the Vietnam such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), or Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989). Moreover, the film Home of the Brave, directed by Irwin Winkler (2006) describes the negative impact of war on veterans who served in Iraq (Díaz Ferrer 2013). Alternatively, the positive role that families may play in veterans’ lives is depicted in films like Welcome Home (directed by Andreas Senn, 2009) or Death of a Friend (directed by Züli Aladag, 2009) (Engelkamp and Offermann 2012).

Finally, yet significantly, veterans’ experiences have been represented within memoirs, novels, or short stories, which have been written by authors that have or do not have direct military experience. U.S., British, German, Canadian, or Romanian veterans have all published memoirs about their military service in Afghanistan or Iraq (e.g. Kleinreesink 2012, Wiseman 2014, Harabagiu 2020)., Kleinreesink (2017) and Woodward and Jenkings (2018) examined the productive nature of these memoirs, including the authors’ profile, their scope in writing memoirs, their readership, or reasons for military censorship.

Short stories written by U.S. veterans and their loved ones depict the complexity of post-deployment (Scranton and Gallagher 2013, Klay 2014). They also illustrate veterans’ struggle to communicate their war experience and the impact that war trauma has on their lives. (Ryan 2016). More widely, novels such as Sand Queen (Benedict 2011) or Fives and Twenty-Fives (Pitre 2014) provide vivid descriptions of veterans’ struggles to cope with the memory of war, their interactions with civilians or the spaces where they served (albeit through racialized terms) (Ryan 2016, Haytock 2017).

However, there are also novels that present homecoming as a positive experience. For instance, some memoirs describe veterans’ recovery as a journey of resilience (e.g. Wiseman 2014). Similarly, Veronica Kitchen (2018) shows that romance novels represent the positive impact that intimate relationships have on veterans’ lives. Likewise, Schije/ Shrapnel also provides a relatively hopeful representation of veterans’ return home. Toma's recovery is linked to his return home and village, where he reconnects with his loved ones. Therefore, one of the distinguishing features of this novel is that Toma's home and village are hardly ever abstract places of destination. Instead, they are material and emotional spaces that shape and are transformed by his war experiences.

By arguing for a more nuanced understanding of military homecoming, this novel recalls the role of fiction in shaping public understandings of war. Firstly, war novels have instructive functions. Although ‘fiction stories are not direct copies of reality’ (Mar and Oatley 2008, p. 175), they simulate it by introducing readers to experiences, environments, cultures, or countries that they cannot or do not want to access directly. Likewise, Kitchen (2018) argues that war fiction offers a holistic representation of military life. While autobiographical narratives focus on individual stories of post-deployment life, novels present homecoming as a collective experience by depicting the diversity of military lives, emotions, and spaces that constitute it.

Secondly, war fiction has a formative function. Fiction creates the opportunity for ‘empathic growth’ by teaching readers to ‘extend [their] understanding toward other people, their beliefs and emotions’, especially if those people are different from them (Mar and Oatley 2008, p. 181). Therefore, war novels invite readers to go beyond the narrow representation of the contemporary soldier as a traumatized hero. This contributes to a better understanding of the heterogeneity of military experiences and shapes public perceptions of veterans, including people's possible social interactions with them in ‘real life’. Thirdly, fiction readers do not only identify with the characters that they encounter but also respond to them, their actions, and beliefs (Mar and Oatley 2008, p. 183). Since ‘novels are not just forms of entertainment, but they are also vehicles for the delivery of powerful political and social messages’ (Boaz 2020, p. 255), they encourage readers to reflect on the meanings of sacrifice, military service, and military violence.

Postsocialist military homes: a view from Romania

For cultural and feminist scholars, home is a material and emotional place that transcends time and space (Pink 2004, Brickell 2012). It is a material/physical space where individuals lead parts of their private lives (Pink 2004). Moreover, home shapes and is transformed by individual and collective emotions from hope, love, and desire to fear, shame, and loss, all of which relate to belonging and estrangement (Blunt and Varley 2004, Durnová and Mohammadi 2021). Nevertheless, ideas about home transcend time and space, especially since home and nation are easily interchangeable (Brickell 2012, p. 575).

By building on this literature, feminist and critical military studies scholarship has situated military homes at the intersection of broader processes that shape contemporary warfare: neoliberalism, militarism, nationalism, and (post)colonialism (Hedström 2017, Basham and Catignani 2018, Chisholm and Ketola 2020). By gendering homes spaces, they have critiqued the reliance of military and private security actors on the unpaid emotional labour of female partners, thereby illuminating the operation of militarism across intimate lives, relationships, and spaces (Chisholm and Eichler 2018). They have also cautioned against the (self-) representation of the armed forces, their spouses, and their families as resilient entities (Spanner 2022), which transforms war trauma into an individual, rather than an institutional matter of concern. Finally, yet significantly, this literature has examined the transformative role of militarism within wider communities where military professionals are embedded temporarily or permanently (MacLeish 2015).

Nevertheless, militarism and neoliberalism are experienced differently depending on socio-cultural and political contexts. An examination of military homes from Romania, and more broadly CEE, is missing from the existing literature. We know relatively little about their transformation after the end of the Cold War and how their postsocialist trajectory has influenced their subsequent adjustment to contemporary warfare.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, CEE countries transitioned towards liberal democracy and market economics to secure EU and NATO memberships. Just like its counterparts, Romania formulated these aims by drawing on a ‘return to Europe’ discourse. According to local authorities, Romania's reintegration in Europe could only be realized with the help of Western authorities. They had a moral duty to support its transition since at the Yalta Conference they allowed Romania to fall under the Soviet umbrella despite Communism's lack of popularity in the country (Gheciu 2017, p. 114–115). Therefore, Romanian transition was ‘imagined as an ongoing process of catching up with the West’, with the aim to re-adopt the Western liberal values and beliefs that have been weakened by Communism (Zarycki 2014, p. 30–31).

Within this context, the reform of the military and defence sectors followed a Western model. This involved a reduction in the number of forces and weapons, the decommission of military bases or a decrease in their activities, and a change of military's mission and operations (Zulean 2012). These processes of demilitarization and (re)militarization affected civil-military relations, including military homes.

Firstly, the departure of military professionals abroad is an entirely new phenomenon for the Romanian military. During the Cold War, Romania's training activities were confined to national territory with limited participation to the Warsaw Pact's military exercises (Watts 2005, p. 95). After 1989, the role of the military changed with Romanian military professionals participating to peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions which take place all over the world (e.g. Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, Somalia, or Afghanistan) (Matei 2002).

Therefore, the post-1989 Romanian soldier resembles with its Western counterparts by combining readiness to sacrifice with flexibility and resilience (Basham and Catignani 2018). Echoing the traits of the neoliberal military workforce, the Romanian military professional is employed temporarily on a contract that is renewed every four years and that may be transformed into a permanent one after fifteen years of service (Romanian Parliament 2011). While abroad, Romanian military professionals may travel home every six months (Ministry of National Defence 2019).

Although contemporary dynamics within the Romanian military home echo feminist critiques of the military's reliance on gendered divisions of labour according to which men fight while women stay behind to care for homes and families (Elshtain 1982), it is important to note some of the defining elements of the postsocialist trajectory of the Romanian home. The post-1989 processes of deindustrialization affected women more than men (Massino and Popa 2015), thereby restricting their access to job opportunities. This situation forced women to return to their homemaker roles or to seek employment opportunities elsewhere. A growing number of Romanian women (and men) began traveling to Western Europe for work purposes, with women overwhelmingly joining the global industry of domestic care, which has been linked not only with the feminization of poverty and migration but also with a ‘care drain’ in the countries of origin (Piperno 2012).

Secondly, the professionalization of the Romanian military implied an end to military conscription, which took place in 2007. While developing recruitment strategies to attract manpower, the military represented itself as a desirable employer, which could provide young people entering the job market with similar, if not better opportunities than the private companies that emerged after 1989 (Szvircsev Tresch and Leuprecht 2011). Participation to overseas missions became an opportunity for professional development and securing financial stability, including the possibility to buy property or durable goods given that each six-month deployment could bring about between 21,000 and 25,000 euros (Gascón Barberá 2020).

Thirdly, the deployment of military professionals within conflict zones meant that the Romanian armed forces had to deal with a growing number of soldiers experiencing war trauma. The Ministry of National Defence has only recently acknowledged the existence of PTSD. Official statistics indicate that only thirty (30) out of more than 40,000 military professionals have been diagnosed with PTSD (Sasu 2018, Bolocan 2019).

Therefore, military homes have become the main social and emotional spaces within which military professionals and their loved ones deal with war trauma. To some extent, this aspect is addressed in one of the few existing docuseries about Romanian military veterans, Homefront, which was produced by the national Romanian broadcasting company (TVR). Therefore, the examination of military homes should involve both an analysis of how they are affected by war trauma and how they contribute to its alleviation. This is particularly important since as a ‘a repository of feelings and memories’ (Jacobs and Gabriel 2013, p. 216), home is likely to play a significant role in veterans’ post-deployment life.

To conclude, the changing nature of civil-military relations after 1989 has transformed Romanian military homes. They have become spaces where the everydayness of war, military, and violence connects and collides with the transnational and international dynamics of warfare. As ‘lived place and (…) a spatial imaginary’ that transforms and is shaped by war (Blunt and Dowling 2006, p. 142), the Romanian military home sits at the intersection of militarism, neoliberalism, and postsocialism. Therefore, I argue that Schije/Shrapnel offers insights for how the intersection between neoliberalism, postsocialism, and militarism is experienced, negotiated, and questioned by military professionals and their loved ones in Romania. In so doing, I show the transformative potential of homes within veterans’ lives, including how they shape veterans’ homecoming. Before addressing these aspects, I summarize the plot of the novel.

Schije/Shrapnel: a summary

Toma Stratan served in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011. His mission ended after being injured in an ambush, during which his best friend, Cristi, was killed. Toma returns home to his village, Celei,³ hoping to rebuild his life along Livia, his wife, and their son, Răducu. However, upon his arrival, Livia tells Toma about her imminent departure to work in a care home in Italy. Toma will later discover that she has left with one of his friends, Costi, who became her lover in his absence.

Separated from his wife, Toma must deal with his war trauma almost entirely on his own given that the Romanian health services prove to be ill-equipped to address PTSD. Throughout the novel, PTSD symptoms (e.g. flashbacks, substance abuse, headaches, inability to sleep or relax) are vividly contrasted with a series of events that constitute Toma as a hero, including being decorated by the Romanian president for his service in Afghanistan. However, Toma does not only struggle with the changes that affected his life but also with the changes that affected his village in his absence. For instance, he has an ongoing fight with local authorities about the illegal restitution of the local forest, which involves the mayor's son-in-law, Dan Albu.

Within this complex personal and socio-political context, Toma develops individual mechanisms of survival by reconnecting with a few important people from his past. He rebuilds his relationship with Răducu, who is also affected by his mother's departure and who is now being cared for by his paternal grandmother, Margareta. Moreover, partly due to their shared loss, Toma develops an intimate relationship with Amalia, Cristi's widow. Amalia was Toma's first love. Finally, yet significantly, Toma renews his friendship with Lionel, a former classmate, and a young Gypsy.⁴ Their bond becomes so strong that Toma eventually shares with Lionel his war experiences. The novel ends with Toma and Răducu traveling to Bucharest, where the former wants to return his military medal and have a conversation with the Romanian president about the purpose of the war in Afghanistan. When Toma is denied entry to the Presidential Palace, he fights with the security personnel and throws his medal over the fence. This upsets Răducu, who is dreaming of becoming a soldier. After reconciling with his son, Toma drives them back home leaving the reader with the impression that Toma will eventually recover from his war trauma.

Spaces of homecoming: the home, the forest, and the Roman Fortress

Toma's war trauma is heightened by the changes that his marriage, home, and village experienced in his absence. His efforts to cope with these social and material transformations illustrates the productive role of home spaces within veterans’ recovery and rehabilitation. In this respect, homes are hardly ever abstract places of destination. Instead, they transform and are shaped by war experiences, including veterans’ return home.

Toma's departure to and return from war are shaped by the economic consequences of Romania's transition towards liberal market economics, particularly deindustrialization and economic restructuring. During Communism rural residents usually commuted to nearby cities to work in factories. However, after 1989 commuting rural residents were among the first fired from their professional jobs, thereby forcing them to return to subsistence agriculture. Moreover, the economic uncertainty of the 1990s determined some city dwellers to migrate to rural areas, thus only increasing the number of people who lived in rural areas and lacked access to meaningful jobs (Horváth 2008, p. 775–776). The economic decline of rural areas was heightened by an ill-fated process of decollectivization: people received small plots of land; they lacked the necessary technological equipment to work their land; and the Romanian state lacked a clear strategy to develop the agricultural industry (Iancu et al. 2022). Reform was also affected by ambiguity regarding ownership over land, land concentration and land grabbing, or corruption (Vasile 2020).

Within this precarious economic context, military service represents one opportunity for rural residents like Toma to secure financial stability. Opinion polls show that rural residents are more inclined to join the military than their urban counterparts (INSCOP 2015). Indeed, Toma's best friend, Cristi, who was killed in Afghanistan, convinced him to enrol in exchange for its generous financial rewards: ‘You can have your roof mended with tiles, you take Livia to Venice, are you coming?’ (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 46–47)

However, Toma's return from war is far from experiencing this idealized future insofar as war changed both his body and identity. His military career has ended prematurely due to an injury, forcing him to return to his village which lacks any economic prospects. Physically injured and emotionally damaged due to Cristi's death, Toma's return home is marked by PTSD, displacement, and alienation. Moreover, his decision to go to Afghanistan and his subsequent war trauma affects his marriage. He fails to reconnect physically and emotionally with Livia partially due to his PTSD symptoms. Their estrangement is heightened by Livia's departure for Italy to work in a care home. She travels there together with Costi, her new lover.

Livia's decision to leave is linked with her desire for emancipation, therefore it is not very different from Toma's decision to go to war. She herself wanted to have a better life far away from the village, where she had been experiencing a double burden. As a military spouse, she was expected to act as a dutiful wife that cares for the home in the absence of her military spouse. As a female rural resident, she had to fulfil her duties as a daughter-in-law. Within Romanian rural areas, a bride usually moves into the groom's house where she is expected to look after the house that she and her husband will inherit once parents-in-law passed away (Nicolescu 2011). These arrangements limit her ability to decide her own trajectory in life. Feeling constrained by these expectations, Livia acknowledged to herself that Costi was only ‘a pretext to leave Romania: He could be any other man, as long as it was not Toma. And anywhere else, as long as it was not Romania’ (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 280).

Although the care industry, that is heavily reliant on women from Eastern Europe or the Global South, exposes Romanian women to abuse, exploitation, racialization, or loneliness (Hopfgartner et al. 2022), they usually see immigration as an opportunity for emancipation, including the ability to acquire new knowledge or to position themselves as Western individuals (Vlase 2012). However, just like in Toma's case, the neoliberal promise of a better life may never materialize for Livia either. Employed in a demanding job, Livia lives with Costi in a basement room that lacks natural light, and the reunion with her son, Răducu, is postponed indefinitely since he chooses to live with his father.

Furthermore, Toma finds it difficult to adjust to the material changes that affected his home. In his absence, Livia used the money that he had earned by serving in Afghanistan to modernize their house. This included discarding the wooden porch of the house or substituting the old, wooden, table, that they inherited from his grandfather, with an IKEA coffee table. Although Livia's home decorations seem to indicate normative gendered expectations peculiar to a military family according to which spouses care for homes (Gray 2022), these material changes have a broader personal and political significance.

Specifically, they reflect Livia's desire to assert ownership of their home, which challenge the gendered expectations imposed on her by her living arrangements. These material changes also reflect her quest to be recognized as an emancipated Western subject that only continued through her departure for Italy. In this respect, the material changes to their home (and Livia's departure) speak directly to the post-1989 Romanian process of Westernization, which was/is based on ‘consuming the occidental other (i.e. eating, dressing, behaving, etc. as he/she does)’, with the aim to distance oneself from the perceived backwardness associated with Communism (Mihăilescu 2014, p. 86).

While for Livia the transformation of the home represents freedom and modernity, Toma's inability to adjust to these changes is directly related to the fact that these transformations have been made with the money that he had earned by fighting abroad. Since these changes have replaced the traditional features of their home, which Toma associates with an idealized agrarian life, the new home stands for a ‘flawed and unsatisfying present’ that only enhances his trauma (Peled 2017, p. 235). The modern features of his home are a material symbol of the dissolution of Toma's marriage and his assumed loss of masculinity while simultaneously indicating the loss of a stable identity in time and space, all of which have been provoked by his service in Afghanistan.

Finally, yet significantly, Toma's failure to re-adjust to his civilian life is heightened by the changes that took place in his village. Particularly upset about an episode of illegal deforestation, he complains to the local police commissioner, who refuses to take any measures against it. Toma eventually confronts the foreman of the illegal deforestation, Dan Albu, who assures the former that the forest was returned to its alleged owner (the local priest), who signed a contract with Monsanto,⁵ which wants to extend the nearby corn field. Consequently, Albu is buying the wood from the priest. This episode speaks to Romania's ill-fated reform of the timber industry after 1989, which is affected by extractivism, illegal logging, and extensive deforestation. These practices thrive on an informal network of state authorities, elected leaders, local and national private businesspeople, and transnational actors just like the ones described by Schije/Shrapnel, whose illegal activities affect local livelihoods, disenfranchise local populations, and contributes to ecological degradation (Vasile 2020, p. 1954).

Overall, Toma's difficulty in coping with the changes that took place in his absence, which have been directly or indirectly impacted by militarism, shows the role that nostalgia plays in veterans’ transition. Although a return home is premised on the possibility to recover the pre-military sense of self, this is hardly ever possible given the impact that war has on familial relationships, intimate domestic spaces, and veterans’ self-identities. Therefore, veterans’ ‘ability to feel at home on return is a long and challenging process’ that may never be completed, especially since homes themselves have changed in their absence (Blunt and Dowling 2006, p. 229).

Svetlana Boym (2001, p. xiii) defines nostalgia as ‘a longing for a home that no longer exists or has ever existed’ by building on its Greek etymological roots ‘(nostos – return home, and algia – longing)’. Furthermore, she distinguishes between restorative and reflective nostalgia. While the latter accepts the fragmentation and the uncertainty of the modern world, the former, which speaks to Toma's experiences of homecoming, is aimed at reconstructing ‘the lost home’ through a continuous search for authenticity, ‘truth and tradition’ (Boym 2001: xviii).

Although Boym argues that the first one is specific to individual and social memory, while the second one refers to practices of national memory that sustain nationalist and religious movements, I believe that restorative nostalgia also operates at the personal level, especially when individuals feel displaced and alienated by modernization. Specifically, Toma's experiences of restorative nostalgia reflects a spatial and temporal craving towards earlier stages of his life which are perceived as integral to his identity. In this respect, his experiences echo earlier understandings of nostalgia as a psychological illness. In his medical dissertation (1688), Johannes Hofer used the term of ‘nostalgia’ to describe the pathological dimensions of the commonly known condition of homesickness that affected Swiss soldiers fighting abroad, i.e. a longing for one's place of origin be it their home or homeland (Boym 2001, p. 3).

Restorative nostalgia is clearly manifested in Toma's reactions to the material changes of his home and village. As spaces that remind him of his childhood and contributed to his formation as an adult, the loss of his home and village as he knows them means a loss of connection with his past self, which he was trying to recover on returning home. Therefore, saving the forest could help him maintain a connection with his pre-war identity, thereby aiding his possible successful transition/return to civilian life.

Although changes to his home and village heighten Toma's feeling of alienation, he finds solace in visiting the ruins of an old Roman fortress, Sucidava, which used to be his and Cristi's favourite place as children. As a symbol of past, authenticity and continuity, the fortress is a restorative nostalgic place that alleviates Toma's feeling of displacement, which has been produced by modern life: ‘[A]irports, supermarkets, highways, battlefields and TV shows, computer games, loud music in every coffee shop, prolonged dirty politics, religious dogma, and thousands of bad films’ (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 160).

Toma's displacement also symbolizes the wider experience of Romanians living through neoliberal transition. In this respect, some yearn toward ‘slower rhythms of the past, for continuity, social cohesion and tradition’ as an attempt to fight the negative impact of transition (Boym 2001, p. 16). This may take different forms, including a revived interest in nature, rural life, and traditional values and products (Mihăilescu and Bogdan 2009, Mihăilescu 2011). This desire to return to a lost time – perceived as a symbol of stability – is a quest for authenticity that emerges as a critique of the West, and its free-market economics that have not brought about the desired benefits for everybody, including Toma and his community.

Social bonds of homecoming: intimacy, friendship and filial love

Homecoming produces renewed relationships and social bonds, which unravel veterans’ memories of war. After returning home, Toma rebuilds his relationships with his son Răducu, Amalia (Cristi's widow) and respectively, his former classmate Lionel, all of which help him to recover from his trauma. In this respect, Toma's renewed attachments to his loved ones show the transformative role that intimacy, friendship, and filial love has on veterans’ lives.

Răducu, Toma's seven-year-old son, plays an important role in helping him to cope with war trauma. The role of his affection in easing Toma's war memories is obvious from the very first pages of the novel. For instance, Toma's flashbacks are quickly interrupted by his son when he jumps on his bed and ‘wraps his arms around his [Toma's] neck’ (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 14–15).

Particularly affected by his mother's departure, Răducu begins harming himself, misbehaves at school, finds solace in talking with his imaginary friends, and spends most of his time playing war-themed computer games while dreaming of becoming a soldier just like his father. Toma becomes aware of his son's emotional problems and is particularly affected by his son's confession that he is being bullied at school by being called ‘The Taliban’. This determines Toma to hug his son and to make him promise that he will never become a soldier.

Increasingly, local Romanian NGOs have raised concerns about children like Răducu, whose parents immigrate abroad for work purposes while leaving them at home. Usually affected by their mothers’ departure, children experience self-isolation, depression, low self-esteem, or suicidal tendencies. They may also report poor school results or develop anti-social behaviour (Munteanu and Tudor 2007, Toth et al. 2007). These emotional experiences are not different from the mental health problems displayed by military children who are affected by their parents’ deployment (White et al. 2011). Although Răducu's experience is somewhat unique by having to deal both with the physical absence of his mother and the emotional absence of his father, it ultimately shows that military children need support both during and in the aftermath of their parents’ deployment (Chandra et al. 2010, de Pedro et al. 2011, Frain and Frain 2020). Within Romania, mental health support is only available for children whose military parents are deceased (Romanian Parliament 2020) thus leaving outside their remit children such as Răducu.

The bond between Toma and Răducu strengthens throughout the novel, particularly since Toma witnesses Răducu's care toward him and the wider community. When Costi returns home for a few days, Toma confronts him about his betrayal and fights with him. Răducu himself starts kicking his mother's new partner. Elsewhere, Răducu asks Toma to explain the meaning of political asylum. When Toma explains that political asylum is a type of bread, Răducu suggests offering political asylum (i.e. bread) to a homeless person that they have met earlier that day. Toma finds Răducu's naïve logic endearing and prompts him to smile, which is a rare gesture for him throughout the entire novel.

The role of the affective bond between Toma and Răducu in helping the former to cope with war trauma is made clear in one of the final scenes from the novel when Toma extends his right hand which used ‘to be glued to the machine gun’ to stroke the boy's forehead (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 195). This is an important gesture because, throughout the novel, Toma would automatically rest his hand on his head whenever he was not acting ‘as if meant to keep his head in place, so it does not pull apart from the rest of the body’ (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 195).

Răducu himself is aware that their bond is important for Toma. At the end of the novel, he shares with his father that he has rejected his mother's offer to go and live with her in Italy because he believes that Toma needs him more than she does. Răducu's (assumed) responsibility of caring for his father shows that sometimes war ‘refigures familial intimacies’ by reverting the typical representation of a parent-child relationship through which the former cares for the latter (Harker and Martin 2012, p. 770).

More broadly, the relationship between Toma and Răducu speaks to the recent literature that examines the experiences of military children (Beier and Tabak 2020, Pennell 2020, Yarwood et al. 2021). Just like their parents, military children are neither heroes nor victims. Rather, they are ‘engaged and purposeful social actors’ who build social bonds through which they ‘negotiate and resist the experience of violence’ by using whatever resources that are available to them (Beier and Tabak 2020, p. 289).

Furthermore, the intimate relationship between Toma and Cristi's widow, Amalia, is a source of mutual support in navigating war trauma insofar as they are united in their grief for Cristi. Although initially the intimate relationship between Toma and Amalia is aimed at gaining pleasure to relieve the impact of war, this relationship becomes more and more important for Toma. This is especially true since it unfolds in Amalia's house, a place that elicits joyful memories of his friendship with Cristi: ‘They roared with laughter, in this house, where the summer evenings seemed endless. Everything exuded life – the garden and their hearts as well’ (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 134–135). Significantly enough, the house and the relationship with Amalia provide comfort during intense moments of uncertainty such as when Toma begins fearing that Livia will take Răducu away from him.

Amalia also finds her relationship with Toma comforting because it provides a temporary relief from the grief of losing Cristi. Their relationship brings about a sense of normality in her life, p. ‘She did not know either why it seemed perfectly normal to receive Toma's visit so late at night. As if she was waiting for him without knowing’ (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 394). In this respect, the sexual relationship between Toma and Amalia is ‘marked not only by reciprocal pleasure and matched desire, but also as something that offers empowerment and support’ during moments of pain, anxiety, and stress (Welland 2018, p. 446).

However, the relationship between Toma and Amalia benefits him more than does her, as she tries to commit suicide toward the end of the novel. Toma saves her, but Amalia asks him not to visit her again because she felt that it was ‘useless’ (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 400). This episode shows yet another failure of the Romanian authorities in recognizing the impact of military death on family members. Although, as a military widow, she is entitled to receive psychological support (Romanian Parliament 2020), she is never offered such opportunity. At the same time, this episode shows the Romanian society's lack of awareness of the impact of war on military spouses. For instance, at the hospital, the nurses believed that Toma was her husband and that she tried to kill herself because of him.

Finally, yet significantly, Toma's renewed friendship with his childhood friends represents a source of ‘aliveness, healing, and joy’ that counter the memory of war (Penttinen 2013, p. 3). Moments spent at the local pub allow for a sense of relief amid his PTSD symptoms: ‘By spending time with Costi at La Viorel [the pub's name]’, Toma ‘had the feeling that he is finally coming home’ (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 17). In a different scene, Toma has a lively conversation with his friends during which they imagine themselves forming a new political party which will enact laws in their favour.

A particular friendship becomes a source of self-healing for Toma. Toma reconnects with Lionel, a former classmate. According to Toma, ‘Lionel managed to cut some invisible strings, he threw away all the extra burden, he liberated the words between them, alongside many other things’ (Baetica Morpurgo 2017, p. 276). Due to the connection that they have developed, Toma confides in Lionel and tells him about his experiences in Afghanistan and his struggle with PTSD. Friendship, just like intimacy and filial love, has a positive impact on Toma. Elina Penttinen (2013: 75) argues that self-healing ‘is inherently empowering’ because it shows that people possess the capacity to rebuild their lives despite the most difficult circumstances that surround them, including war trauma.

Two reasons explain the social bond between Toma and Lionel. Firstly, this is premised on their somewhat shared experience of marginalization, which is largely informed by the same social and political structures that shape their lives. While Toma feels like a castaway within his own home and community after returning from war, Lionel is marginalized due to his belonging to the Gypsy community.⁶ Just like everywhere else in Europe, the Gypsy community has been historically ‘marginalized and vilified’ in Romania (Loveland and Popescu 2015, p. 331). It has experienced slavery, segregation, discrimination, and racialization, all of which shape their current exclusion from education, employment, healthcare, or the cultural industry. Their exclusion has only been reinforced by the intersection between postsocialism and neoliberal governance which failed to address their concerns or needs (van Baar 2012).

Secondly, both Toma and Lionel navigate the socio-economic and political conditions that shape their lives to the best of their abilities, sometimes collaborating to subvert them despite having different reasons in doing so. For instance, Lionel steals corn from the Monsanto field, an activity that Toma joins in on one occasion. While Lionel steals corn to ensure the physical survival of his family, Toma's act is a means to take revenge for the illegal logging that affects his community. In another scene, Toma and Lionel secretly replace the church incense with hashish to take revenge on the priest’ complicity in Dan Albu's illegal business. Although these acts do not ultimately undermine the forces that shape their lives, Lionel and Toma are not ‘frail victims’ (Penttinen 2013, p. 21). Lionel manifests his agentic capability against actors that ignore, and even contribute to his marginalization, while Toma resorts to these acts as ‘a strategy of survival, a way of making sense of the impossibility of [his] homecoming’ (Boym 2001, p. xvii).

Apart from exposing the pain, suffering, and grief of homecoming, Schije/Shrapnel also shows the positive impact that intimacy, love, affection, and friendship have on veterans’ lives. These interpersonal relationships have replaced Toma's apathy and numbness with care for others, thereby making his ‘life (…) liveable in the most extreme of conditions’ (Welland 2018, p. 454). In this regard, cultural studies allow for a deeper understanding of the impact that war has on people's lives by presenting military homecoming as a collective, rather than an individual journey.

Conclusion

Postsocialist transition toward liberal democracy and market economics changed states, institutions, policies, and people across CEE. The Romanian military was transformed into an all-voluntary, smart, and professional institution with broad implications on civil-military relations. By building on the intersection between neoliberalism, postsocialism, and militarism to examine representations of Romanian veterans within Schije/Shrapnel, this article has examined the emotional and social mechanisms through which veterans cope with war trauma. Firstly, it has shown that military home is a site of nostalgia that provokes not only discomfort but also happy memories that eventually unravel the memory of war. Secondly, this article has shown that veterans’ return home facilitates renewed emotional attachments that help them to cope with the impact of war.

This article has broadened our empirical understanding of veterans’ experiences of contemporary warfare by paying attention to how Romanian veterans like Toma navigate the forces that shape his life: neoliberalism, postsocialism, and militarism. Although Toma's experiences resembles those of his Western counterparts (i.e. military service is an opportunity for financial wellbeing), his return home makes for an interesting case study for examining military transformation alongside rural transformation in Romania after 1989. In this respect, the novel Schije/Shapnel represents a useful tool to interrogate some of the negative consequences of Romania's socio-economic transition and its subsequent integration to NATO and EU.

Furthermore, this article shows that war novels like Schije/Shrapnel describe military homecoming as a collective, rather than an individual journey. In this respect, this novel provides extensive depictions of spaces, emotions and ties through which Toma makes sense of the impact of war. By introducing us to the social universe of homecoming, I believe that war fiction shows that homes are hardly ever abstract places of destination. Rather, they are spaces that shape and transformed by war insofar as they both enhance and alleviate veterans’ trauma. Therefore, this article shows that military homes should always be regarded as social and emotional spaces that play a transformative role in veterans’ return home. While highlighting the restorative role that homes play in veterans’ lives, fiction eventually reminds us that the figure of the ‘traumatized hero’ does not always capture the emotional complexity of military homecoming. To this end, cultural representations leave us better equipped to examine ‘the fulness of war experience’, particularly by drawing attention to emotions, relationships, spaces, and places that tend to be disregarded within cultural studies of war such as those from CEE (Penttinen 2013, p. 4).

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Martin Hurcombe, Rachel Woodward, and Tom Allbeson for inviting me to the workshop on War and Culture Studies – What's Next? where I have developed some of the insights addressed in this article. I would also like to thank the entire editorial team of the Journal of War and Culture Studies, in particular Martin Hurcombe and Rachel Woodward for their insightful comments, suggestions, and support in writing this article. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their generous, thought-provoking, and encouraging comments on this article. Many thanks to Jocelyn Mawdsley and Maria-Adriana Deiana, who read and commented on earlier versions of this article. Hanna Ketola, Punam Yadav, Maria O'Reilly, Heidi Riley, and Tiina Vaittinen, all encouraged me to write this article while also offering invaluable suggestions and comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Academy: [Grant Number PF20\100088].

Notes on contributors

Sorana Jude

Dr Sorana Jude is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow based at Newcastle University. She explores representations of space, gender, and military violence within Western and non-Western contexts. Her current project examines NATO's war preparations in Romania while simultaneously tracing change and continuity in narratives about NATO, soldiering, and militarism from Socialist to postsocialist Romania. Her work has been published in ‘Critical Military Studies’, ‘Review of International Studies’, and in an edited volume on ‘Making War on Bodies: Militarisation, Aesthetics and Embodiment in International Politics’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Notes

1 All translations are mine.

2 RSM was tasked with training and advising the Afghan Security Forces.

3 Celei is a village situated in Southern Romania.

4 I use the term ‘gypsy’ rather than ‘Roma’ without any pejorative connotation. Its meaning is closer to the author's use of the term ‘ţigan’.

5 Monsanto is known for producing life-threatening GMO crops and for having produced Agent Orange, which was used during the Vietnam War.

6 I use ‘Gypsy community’ as a shorthand to refer to the general experience of discrimination and vilification of people who identify themselves with this community. However, this is not a monolithic community. Gypsies have different socio-economic experiences, may speak different languages, or dialects, and may identify themselves differently, according to their territorial, national, or community affinities (Marushiakova and Popov 2016).