Critical veteran researchers’ unique adequacy: accounting for friendly-fire and fratricide

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnomethodology’s concept of unique adequacy, this paper addresses the contribution that critical veteran researchers (CVRs) can potentially bring to Critical Military Studies (CMS) on the basis of their military service, post-military life, and the members’ knowledge they therefore have. CVR members’ knowledges are framed through ethnomethodology’s arguments about unique adequacy as a requirement of methods. CVR’s unique adequacy is used to explore issues around the contribution that this particular group of researchers can make in critical analysis and research practices associated with critical military studies as an intellectual project. The paper argues against the reification and promotion of veteran exceptionalism regarding descriptions of ‘the reality of war’, militarism or militarization. Rather, it is about seeing CVR’s military participation and post-military lives, their members’ knowledge and unique adequacy, as constituting a positive resource. The paper illustrates this argument by taking the phenomenon of friendly-fire and fratricide as a topic. It identifies problems in the normative literature about it using the examples from two different genres: the formal analysis of combat identification, and experiential accounts from personal memoirs. The paper then critiques a specific campaign account of fratricide from a CVR perspective utilizing the author’s own unique adequacy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limits of uniquely adequate knowledge generated from embodied veteran researcher experience, its benefits in terms of the identification of new research topics and approaches, and the ultimate necessity for critical analysis research to be underpinned and informed by reference to unique adequacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical military studies
• fratricide
• military memoir
• veteran
• critical veteran researchers
• unique adequacy

This paper is about the members knowledge and unique adequacy that veteran researchers can bring to critical studies of military phenomena. Using insights from ethnomethodology, it argues that critical veteran researchers are well-placed to contribute to critical military research, not because of any essential insights that their members’ status provides, but because of the additional competences to analytic perspectives that their experience brings, i.e. their unique adequacy as a researcher. To do so, it examines the related issues of friendly fire and fratricide.

It is a truism that personnel from across very different service branches and trades are implicated in the multiple ecologies of war. Sustained, intense, shared, kinetic experiences of battle and other spaces are core to military experiences in armed conflict. Performing adequately as a military operative in such environments requires an on-going process of aculturation (Thomas and Znaniecki 1919), and their members’ knowledge and practices of understanding (Garfinkel 1967) can make the critical veteran researcher’s research capacities uniquely adequate as a resource for scholarly understanding war, its effects and its meanings.

This uniqueness lies not simply with engagement with war as such, because war is experienced by non-military combatants, civilians and others such as journalists as much as by military personnel. Rather, their unique adequacy relevant to a researched topic is informed through a sustained presence in a military environment as a member of that community and the member’s knowledge acquired. From an ethnomethodological perspective, this is what is understood by the terminology of members’ knowledge and the unique adequacy requirement of methods (Garfinkel 2002), and in the context of discussions of critical veteran researchers this terminology highlights these researchers’ capacity to understand and participate adequately as a member at these sites, and as veterans of them (Jenkings and Beales 2022). What is unique to the military veteran is not just their experience, but their potential for understanding having been a member of a specific community of practice (Wenger 1999) and as a member of the discipline of critical military researchers.

Their military member’s knowledge may be enhanced by various practices they have undertaken (direct engagement in armed conflict, for example), and will be developed over time and enculturation. Temporalities are significant not just because of members’ knowledge about a ‘moment in time’, but also because of on-going experience, acquired throughout a military life in varied communities of practice (Wenger 1999). This in turn gives contextual meaning to such experiences. A temporal journey that extends beyond the moments in time when a members’ knowledge has been negotiated, developed and refined during their military training and service, and evolves through the reflections and collaborative practices of life as an ex-service person and veteran. The insights of this long reflection are contextualized by the life previously lived and are informed by on-going experiences and emerging new knowledge, including that which comes as a consequence of being part of a veteran community.

For the critical veteran academic researcher, their unique adequacy will be informed by relevant member’s knowledge from the academic discipline of which they are also a member, i.e. their academic work and studies. It can also be informed by a range of other life experiences beyond this. The key point, however, is that it is this dual position that can provide a unique basis for critiques of military phenomena and practices, and can potentially inspire new avenues for further research. This is not to discount other perspectives of course; the strength of the critical military studies perspective rests on the diversity of analytic approaches to military participation, armed conflict, militarism and so on. More broadly, given the global reach and commonality of experience of military phenomena, it is possible to argue that uniquely adequate social knowledge of the military is widely shared, is certainly not exclusive to past and present members of military forces, and cannot be understood through a simplistic civil-military binary framing (Jenkings 2018).

The point of this paper is, nevertheless, to identify with greater precision what it is that veteran researcher contributions can bring. It does so by framing this analysis through Garfinkel’s (2002) programme for ethnomethodology (and Garfinkel himself encouraged ethnomethodologists to engage with military phenomena) and its argument for researcher’s unique adequacy to be incorporated into the selection of phenomena for investigation and the design of the research methodology. Ethnomethodology values unique adequacy and members’ knowledge highly enough to make it a requirement for undertaking ethnomethodological research (Garfinkel 2002). This paper is not suggesting that critical military studies makes unique adequacy a formalized research methods criterion as it is in Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology writings. Rather, and the theme is developed here in response to the issue of the contribution of critical veteran researchers to critical military studies (see West and Antrobus 2021), its argument is that in their member’s knowledge critical veteran researchers already possess something which ethnomethodology values highly. It utilises this via the unique adequacy requirement to reduce the ironicisation and misrepresentation of the phenomena under investigation. From a critical military studies perspective critical veteran researchers’ unique adequacy may do a lot more than that, as this paper will illustrate.

The paper first briefly outlines the ethnomethodological topic of unique adequacy, set out in full in Jenkings (2018). Friendly-fire and fratricide are then introduced, followed by accounts of theses in the formal analytic accounts of combat identification analysis, and then in the non-critical analyses of military memoirs involving soldiers¹ own accounts. A critical analysis using an approach drawing on a critical veteran researcher’s unique adequacy is then undertaken of a formal account from a military campaign history of a friendly fire and fratricide incident. This event is taken as a prospicious example for a heuristic analysis where a critical veteran researcher’s member’s knowledge in the form of their unique adequacy to undertake research can be usefully applied to critically analyse the absences within a formal and normalizing account, illustrating what has been left out and illustrating how potential topics for further critical analysis emerge. The CVR in question is the paper' author’s here.

Unique adequacy and CVR

Following Garfinkel (2002), ethnomethodologists are required to be competent in the practices used by the members of the group participating in and producing the phenomena under investigation. They must aquire members’ knowledge – or a close approximation – to undertake an ethnomethodological study. Members’ knowledge is not simply factual information, but the capacity for embodied participation as a competent member in the situated production of the phenemonon itself. There are degrees of competency framed as ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ (see Garfinkel 2002, 175-176). This requirement for competency potentially requires ethnomethodologists ‘to fully embed themselves into social activies and acquire the competence and skills of the participants in order to understand and pursue the activities just like the participants themselves’ (Vom Lehn 2014, 106). This is what is meant by unique adequacy.

The unique adequacy requirement of methods in ethnomethodology is not a requirement for non-ethnomethodological analysis research (which would include most CMS researchers), but it can be used in part to usefully inform research practice in critical military studies (see Jenkings 2018). Two points are significant: firstly, an aim of the unique adequacy requirement is to try to ensure the right selection of methods for the phenomena being investigated (Jenkings 2018); secondly, as Jenkings (ibid.) also notes, researchers may already be members with unique adequacy of the phenomena they are investigating. It is therefore possible that as veterans, researchers within critical military studies can be seen as already having members’ knowledge and a unique adequacy regarding researching the phenomenon of interest, such as military service, military organizations, or participation in combat. The potential contribution of critical veteran researchers to critical military studies research is therefore straight forwardly, from an ethnomethodological perspective at least, located in such researchers’ members’ knowledge and unique adequacy capacity regarding the phenomenon being researched. However, its relevance for a project is no means guaranteed. Why? Because although some experiences such as ‘basic training are largely generic, veteran status does not automatically guarantee their unique adequacy’s relevance. Just as military phenomena are varied, not all veterans have had the same training’ and experiences and what they have may not be directly relevant to the particular phenomena investigated. For example, former RAF colleagues² have informed me of instances where technical failure of aircraft due to professional errors that are seen by members of those communities of practices as equivalent to fratricide, but I have no specific members’ knowledge about this aspect of fratricide. My capacity for fulfilling the unique adequacy requirement is therefore not all-encompassing regarding fratricide, so limit must be built into the study. This paper focuses on fratricide in infantry combat situations, which is where my unique adequacy largely lies as a former Royal Marine and this can be, and has been, built reflexiley into this analysis.

Friendly-fire and fratricide: an introduction

A so-called friendly-fire, or a blue-on-blue incident is when ‘friendly personnel [are] targeted and engaged by other friendly forces’ (Bell 2010 pxxviiii). Death (and injury) by friendly forces is termed ‘fratricide’ (see Syms (2012) for a historial overview), although fratricide as a term has expanded to include other consequences of friendly-fire such as materiel destruction. The US Army definition illustrates this with fratricide understood as

“the employment of friendly weapons and munitions with the intent to kill the enemy or destroy his equipment or facilities, which results in unforeseen and unintentional death or injury to friendly personnel (U.S. Department of the Army, 1993, p. 1.).” (Greitzer and Andrews 2010, 173).

This is not to be confused with ‘collateral damage’, which is the euphemism for the death or injury of ‘neutral’ personnel, usually non-military personnel in the theatre of war, such as local peoples, and increasingly media representatives. Broader definitions of fratricide can include neutral personnel, with Kirke (2012) defining it as ‘The engagement by a military force (of any size) of any target that is outside the rules of engagement and target priorities laid down by the commander’ (p37). The key difference between the two is the focus on an ‘enemy’ in the former, and on actions ‘outside the rules of engagement’ in the latter, reflecting the complexity of modern asymmetrical warfare and the problematic identification of the ‘enemy’ in both theory and practice. Indeed, identification problems ‘ … the inability of warfighters to identify friends, foes, and neutrals in combat’ is given as the ‘leading cause’ of fratricides (Andrews 2010, pxxxi).

Surprisingly, in the UK ‘until the mid-1980s, i.e. post Falklands, no requirement to report specific fratricide incidents existed’. (Gillespie 2012, 201). Indeed, according to Kirke,

“Fratricide first emerged as a large-scale issue in 1991 after the First Gulf War. The trigger for this new interest was the fact that a considerable majority of the (unexpectedly small) overall number of Allied casualties were due to fratricide.” (2012, 37)

Where calculable, the number of casualties from fratricide varies from war to war, but 20–25% of all injuries and deaths as fratricides is an accepted figure. In World War II, U.S. Congress in 1993 estimated 19% (Keebler et al. 2010); in the First Iraq War ‘over 20%’ (Andrews 2010 preface xxxi) with 24% also cited (Keebler et al. 2010). However, that figure relates to personnel only, and for example ‘fratricide accounted for 77% of the combat damage sustained by U.S. armoured vehicles’ (Keebler et al. 2010, 113) in Desert Storm. For UK Forces the personnel statistics are ‘surprisingly’ variable. Gillespie (2012, 218) in a footnote states that: ‘Fratricide figures of 4% of Falklands, 80% Operation Granby and 50% Operation Telic have been given by the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory. Personal communication, Dr Paul R. Symms, 2010’.

Clearly, fratricide incidents are not uncommon, military history is replete with them, and a number of popular texts are dedicated to describing these events (Bryan 1976; Bickers 1994; Regan’s 1995a, 1995b). These and similar titles are regularly repackaged and reprinted for popular consumption, and contain incidents from the history of death by or survival from friendly-fire as a sub-section of the sub-genre of the ‘Great Military Blunders’ approach to popular military history. Such texts are largely lists of events often discussed thematically in a limited fashion, and rarely detailing protagonists’ future life stories. More extensive accounts of individual instances do exist, see for example Snook (2000), Friscolanti (2005) and Corbett (2012). Family members also write accounts, for various reasons, for example Piper (2000) and more recently Parr (2018). Unsurprisingly, individual accounts from military, investigative journalist or family perspectives approach fratricide differently, but have various similarities across groups. Accounts also exist of the experiences of victims and survivors (Matthews 2011), often including accounts of those killed. Notably, accounts of those who instigated friendly-fire are rare, except in the accounts of tribunals, if publicly available (Elsey et al. 2016). A recent, and very rare exception to this is War Story in which Steven Elliott (2019) detailed his role in a fratricide amongst US Army Green Berets and its aftermath. More usually, soldiers’ accounts of friendly-fire tend to be embedded in their military memoirs or campaign histories, and not as their central theme. Where fratricides are central topics is in the specialist literatures focusing on its prevention, such as combat identification research, to which I now turn.

Fratricide events and combat identification analysis research accounts

Formal analyses of fratricide are of limited scope, and arguably contribute to normalizing militarism and its casualties. Normative accounts being here understood, as critiqued by ethnomethodology, as those based upon systems of supposedly known-in-common social conventions where ‘the concrete situation must be recognizable as an instance of a class of typical situations, and the behavior of the actor must be recognizable as an instance of a class of appropriate action’. (Suchman 1987, 63) Fratricide estimates for specific conflicts and incidents within broader conflicts vary ‘because of the fog of war and the negative stigma that fratricide brings’ (Greitzer and Andrews 2010, 174). Stigma, however, not only hinders accurate counting of incidents due to unreliable reporting, but negatively effects and affects individuals, and indeed groups, and their performance, and this makes it of significant concern for military organizations. This is a recognized problem, one where ‘The challenge is to minimize this unwanted companion to war that has been shown to produce devastating effects on troops in addition to the tragic loss of life’. (Greitzer and Andrews 2010, 174). Combat identification analysis accounts of friendly-fire incidents and any consequent fratricide deaths provide a normative position where fratricide is subsumed under, and normalized by, an analytic concern with improving of military efficacy. This form of analysis is framed as being one of reducing fratricide’s occurence and its consequent negative impacts on operational performance. The context of the analysis is one where despite military investments in technologies, procedures, protocols and training to reduce fratricides they remain inevitable because the modern battlefield is increasingly ‘dynamic and lethal’ (Pharaon 2010, 327) and fratricide remains at 25% of casualties (ibid). The details of context of the problem get defined and refined in terms of technological complexity, with information-rich decision-making requiring computer-generated monitoring practices with their users suffering almost immediate attention fatigue (Shingledecker et al. 2010), thus increasing misidentification and fratricide (Fincannon et al. 2010). Fratricide is also framed as spatially problematic, involving the contrasting distance of unmanned drones operators with the proximity of urban warfare operatives with the ‘myriad of participants, including joint and multi-national forces, heterogeneous enemy factions, civilians and non-combatants’ (Summers 2010, 129) further defining fratricide incidents.

The normative and normalizing analytic focus of fratricide in combat identification analysis is misidentification: a twofold problem of false positives and false negatives (Andrews, Herz, and Wolf 2010, 83), where: ‘Both fratricide and missed opportunities can result in loss of life, loss of equipment, reduced morale, political repercussions, and extended mission prosecution time all of which can impact significantly on operational effectiveness’. (Mistry et al. 2010, 218) This encapsulates the formal analytic and normative reification of fratricide as a problem of misidentification and its impact in terms of operational effectiveness. Other elements of fratricide such as confusion, depressed morale, loss of confidence in leadership and other friendly units as well as the ‘detrimental political consequences, especially with a coalition force of different nations’ (Barnett 2010, 314) become aspects of military efficacy.

However, once fratricide has been reified as combat identification failure, analytic focus and significance is inevitably given to details leading up to the event, rather than its broader post-event impact and consequences on individuals and groups other than in the abstract. It becomes an analyst’s problem rather than a member’s problem; those analysts are no longer describing the experience of fratricide of those involved. Jormakka (2012, 219) helpfully points to a limit of this analysis when stating: ‘[Fratricide] has several consequences beyond the simple infliction of casualties. There is always at least one person who feels responsible and the psychological stress of having committed fratricide, or having carried out a near miss, can be very high’. Therefore it is to other literature we must look, beyond combat identification analysis and official enquiries, if we are to develop a critical analysis. Members’ accounts of fratricide assist with this.

Fratricide events and military memoirists’ accounts

A major source of veterans’ accounts of fratricide is the military memoir, and whilst authors’ perspectives vary, rarely are they informed by critical disciplines. The three post-2000 accounts of fratricide discussed here are by former UK military personnel and are written firmly from within the military memoir tradition.³ They clearly illustrate the different focus of memoirists’ accounts in comparison with the combat identification analysis accounts discussed above.

Patrick Bury (2010) in Callsign Hades, provides a visceral firsthand account of friendly-fire:

An artilleryman has been ordered to man the once-empty sangar. Nervously, he approaches. Speedy spots his torch beam. In his agitated state he thinks the Taliban have got around us and are re-infiltrating into camp. He has no comms with me. He brings his rifle to his eye and in the blackness takes aim, despite the advice of Joe Bog nearby.

I hear a single shot.

The red streak races out of Speedy’s barrel and smashes into the wooden post inches from the artilleryman’s head. He sees where it came from. He loads his machine gun. As do the others in the fire support tower. Things are now completely out of my control.

I am frantically trying to work out what’s happening when hot, red 7.62-millimetre copper crashes over our heads. The boys throw themselves into a black ditch as bullets impact all around, churning dirt in front of them and biting into the wall behind, raking over them. The weight of the fire is incredible, a wave of violence smashing against them. Naf and I are transfixed for a moment and then dive for cover behind a compound wall. Branches break overhead.

‘HADES FOUR ZERO! THIS IS HADES FOUR ONE! STOP FIRING! STOP FIRING!’ I scream into the radio.

The net is garbled with panicked voices. We fire illumination rockets and flares to show we’re friendlies. They fire on us again. Then it stops.

Quiet.

Oh, no. Please no casualties from that. Please.

[…]

We traipse through the gate relieved to be alive but embarrassed about the blue on blue.…

When we have all calmed down, we realize that blue on blues in this complicated, unsure place are not as avoidable as we’d wish them to be. Heavily armed young men make mistakes sometimes.(Bury 2010, 134-135,137)

In this account we get a description of the events from the perspective of the author and of other soldiers, from two or more locations. This is of course a retrospective account of the action. The author on returning to camp would have made a patrol report and in doing so would no doubt have asked the other soldiers for an account of their actions and included these. With no casualties the event is reported and normalized as ‘embarrassing’ and inevitable. Bury does not explicitly relate the lasting impact of this event, or on whom, but through recounting the growing anxiety of operating in such a theatre of war implicitly suggests it. Combat Identification analysis could account for this but while Bury does not in this instance focus on it, the impact on the individuals of ‘bullets impact all around, churning dirt in front of them and biting into the wall behind, raking over them … a wave of violence smashing against them’ is the phenomenon the participants experienced and have to deal with.

Patrick Hennessey’s (2009) The Junior Officer’s Reading Club also includes a friendly-fire account. Here he recounts when air support he has called in targets its ordnance ‘too close for comfort’; this account is more explicit about its psychological impact:

The roar and crack-thud of the missile coming in, sure enough, on top of our position, was felt rather than heard. My first thought was that we’re all dead as the thick stone wall started to collapse on top of us, and then the ANA were running around and screaming like madmen and there was dust and tingling everywhere and mouthed and silent shouted FUUUUUUUCKS! At least one of the guys reacted pretty badly and started ripping off his kit, screaming up at the Apache pilot and anyone within range between firing off massive bursts towards the enemy positions, still untouched 100 meters further forward which, once we’ve calmed him down, seemed to have had the effect that the choppers couldn’t. It was the shockwave and the deafness and the winded gasping for air which slowed down time and what I couldn’t believe is that, despite the rantings of the ANA and a few burst eardrums and cuts and bruises, we were all in one piece. (Hennessey 2009, pp.234-135)

The impact of the friendly-fire attack, which doesn’t produce fatalities, is reported as palpable and lasting:

I’ll always be more haunted by the sight of what could have been round the corner than the actual screaming terrorized family huddled in the rubble of the missile strike. Streaked with tears and covered with dust like shattered ghosts they were so alive that I was gasping with relief that the fifty-fifty calls were good. The thick walls which somehow saved our backs somehow saved their fronts, and I’m thanking my I don’t know what for the 500-pounder we didn’t drop which would have killed us all, for the 10 metres north the missile didn’t land, which would have killed the section, the 10 metres west it didn’t come in, which would have killed the family, or the clearance drills we didn’t use, which would have had me even now staring down the point of my bayonet at a mess of women and children and horrific narrowly avoided carnage of my own doing, so for all the tears and screams I can only stand there wildly and giddily thankful. (Hennessey 2009, 236, emphases in original)

In Hennessey’s account we get another visceral account of friendly-fire from the author’s perspective, and the actions of others as witnessed by him, and the locally contingent factors that prevented a bloody fratricide event. No further complaint is made of the Apache pilots, and indeed blame is normalized via the Taliban who forced the family to stay while they used the building to attack the British troops, quite possibly for the propaganda value of their likely death or injuries. The relief that no casualties occurred is normalized in terms of how lucky they had been and what could have happened. While apparently ‘casualty free’, the friendly-fire event is nonetheless recalled as a horrific experience and Hennessey reports being ‘haunted’ by what ‘could’ have occurred. The long term impact of the soldier losing control and standing screaming at the Apache helicopter is not followed up, neither are the Apache’s two pilots’ responses to nearly killing their own troops, but this non-fatal event is clearly traumatic even if normatively accounted for – as one would expect from this genre – rather than critically dissected and developed. The impact on the civilians is also not developed. Less clear is what a Combat Identification account would add. The friendly-fire had been called in by Hennessey, the margins for error are small, but the phenomenon he draws attention too is not identification practices but impact on individuals at the time and his being ‘haunted’ by the event afterwards.

Doug Beattie (2009) in his memoir Task Force Helmand recounts a fatal fratricide event when a British soldier unintentionally discharges their weapon into friendly troops. Whilst still normative in terms of the description it does touch on and allude to the longer term consequential aspects. We join the event at the description of injuries:

One appeared to have been hit in the leg and the side of the body, while the other had taken a couple of rounds in the chest. Finding out exactly what the chain of events was would have to wait for a while – first of all we needed to save these men’s lives. (Beattie 2009, 128)

[…]

‘Zero, this is Amber 40 Delta. I am on my way back to your location with two wounded ANA soldiers. I need the medical centre warned and I also need an RMP to meet us at the gate.’

RMP – Royal Military Policemen. There would be an investigation. The rounds had come from a British gun and these were only manned by British soldiers. One of my guys was going to have some explaining to do. Ashen-faced, the man in question had already told me – briefly – how he’d cocked the weapon and it had started to fire automatically. In the military this is known as a runaway gun. He’d only managed to stop it by grabbing the belt of ammunition as it was sucked through the weapon, breaking the flow of bullets. Discovering why the gun had operated with a mind of its own, or indeed if this really was what had happened – was the soldier telling the truth? – would be down to the police inquiry.” (Beattie 2009, pp.129-130)

[…]

Beattie informs us in a footnote that:

In March 2009, after a long and thorough investigation, the young soldier was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing and the cause of the accident was put down to a weapon malfunction. (Beattie 2009, 132)

In this account we see that the cause of friendly-fire after a RMP investigation is due not to human error in combat identification, but a technical malfunction and Combat Identification would have nothing to say regards the event. Nevertheless, we can barely imagine the trauma involved in shooting and killing these friendly soldiers for the individual soldiers and its witnesses, and sadly the trauma does not stop for everyone when an individual is absolved of responsibility after the due process of a military tribunal. We are not privy to the details of that investigation which is the responsibility of the RMP and judicial due process. Beatie does not elaborate, but we can imagine that the process was traumatic for the soldier involved and that such post-fratricide activities are aspects inseparable from the few seconds of the fratricide event itself. These are not just confined to the unfortunate soldier, but to their family, colleagues and friends, to victims who were injured but survived and their family, colleagues and friends, as well as witnesses to the event, especially those additionally brought into the judicial process. In a sense, such fratricide incidents take on a life of their own and the impact of the event and its social – and legal – ramifications are just beginning too. The potential damage of this process is vividly illustrated by Steven Elliott’s (2019) near fatal PTSD experiences in the years following the fratricide event. As already noted, fatal fratricide accounts are not normally written by the protagonists, but by survivors or participants in ‘near misses’ where events are normalized amongst the group and recounted in terms of the memoir genre and the account moves on. Memoirs of combat soldiers in the 21^st century can be quite descriptive and give the perspective of the author as witness, but they do not usually attend to wider literature, and are normative in genre content and normalizing of friendly-fire events. Many are produced very soon after the events described, unlike previous wars, without the perspective, scope and content that this could afford – and tend not to be critical of policy and practice (Jenkings 2018). This does not mean that they are not informative, but that they do require a critical reading. Significantly, a critical reading that is informed by a veteran researcher can reveal and develop what they omit, and indeed why. Further, such a critical reading can also inform and enhance the critical reading of non-veterans and non-critical veterans.

Fratricide and unique adequacy informed CVR studies

A key point in this paper is that veterans produce accounts, but that these by themselves may not be enough. As with accounts of friendly-fire and fratricide by normative research such as combat-identification research noted above, they do not take a critical approach – or easily facilitate one. This is not just the case with the majority of Combat Identification approaches and the genre of military memoirs, but is also the case with accounts of friendly-fire in camapaign histories and military history more generally. However, the critical veteran researcher can provide a critical analysis informed by their unique adequacy and their ‘flesh-witnessing’ (Harari 2008) if they participated in the events, or similar events, to those described. This section, for illustrative purposes, therefore contrasts a normative researcher’s account and a critical veteran researcher’s account of the same fratricide, the latter critiquing the former. Both descriptions are by veterans of the 1982 Falkland’s War, and both served in the same Royal Marines unit, 45 Commando, at the time of the fratricide event recounted.

The initial normative non-critical account is Gardiner’s (2012) The Yompers: With 45 Commando in the Falklands War. The contrasting critical veteran researcher reading, and consequent version of events, is my own. Neither can give a visceral account of the memoirist as participant in the fratricide but both, if differently, can give witness to its aftermath and ‘meaning’ for participants. Taking a critical approach using my unique adequacy as a critical veteran researcher I critique Gardiner’s account to expose the normative nature of such accounts account and indicate themes for further critical military studies research.

One night during the Falklands War, one group of Royal Marines from 45 Commando⁴ ambushed another group, resulting in a number of fatalities and injuries. Apparently, the Mortar Troop section gave an incorrect grid reference for their location and were subsequently ambushed as enemy by members of Yankee Company whom they were intending to support. This was not accidental crossfire but deliberate and targeted fire. In Gardiner’s (2012) military history and campaign account the event is described thus:

Shaw [the Yankee Company troop officer] could see no identifiable weapons or headdress. He opened fire. After about a minute, he shouted an order and one of the mortar-men must have heard him because a shout in English came across: ‘We are call sign 52!’ They stopped firing. Eventually, proper identification was made, but by then Sergeant Bob Leeming, Corporal Peter Fitton, Corporal Andy Uren and Marine Keith Phillips of the mortar section had been killed. (Gardiner 2012, 122)

To my knowledge no participant in the ambush has published a participants’ military memoir style account and Gardiner’s account is in the normative analytic style of a campaign history. Gardiner’s perspective on the friendly-fire event is that ultimately:

Incidents where you shoot at, or are shot at by, your own side in war – ‘blue-on-blues’ or ‘friendly fire’ or ‘own goals’ are all too common. Most soldiers with any war experience have been involved in a blue-on-blue. X-Ray Company had already been shot at by the Commando Logistic Regiment in Ajax Bay. In the Falklands War, HMS Cardiff was to later shoot down a British Army helicopter, and a Special Boat Service sergeant would be killed by the Special Air Service. Three civilian women were killed by British naval gunfire on one of the last days of the war. I knowingly gave my own grid reference when calling for mortars on Two Sisters [an Argentinian-held twin peaked mountain]. On the northern Sister, it was sometimes difficult to tell which was Argentinian artillery and which was ours. (Gardiner 2012, 122)

Thus Gardiner’s lack of critical analysis of the fratricide incident, and friendly-fire in general, reproduces in his account the normalizing practices of combat-ID approaches, and the first person non-critical analysis of the memoir. Gardiner closes down his opportunity for a critical analysis in his narrative and further normalizes fratricide and the potential consequence of friendly-fire, when stating that:

It is deeply painful to inflict casualties on one’s own side, but while always doing everything we sensibly can to avoid them, we must accept them, we must accept them as the mistakes in good faith that they always are. Those men killed in such incidents are killed in action, just as surely as if they had been shot by the enemy. (Gardiner 2012, 123)

This account fits in with the normative military studies approach of combat identification which avoids personal details and long-term consequences of war for participants, which those with unique adequacy know are the key issues for those involved. Such silencing practices cannot be adopted by the critical researcher, veteran or otherwise, who undertakes critical social research ‘underpinned by a critical dialectical perspective which attempts to dig beneath the surface of historically specific, oppressive, social structures’ (Harvey 1990, 1). The veteran can use their unique adequacy of military training and warfare as an active member of a military unit to develop this critical methodology to unveil the structured relations of our knowledge, in this case war, and more specifically our knowledge of the impact on those who experience it. For example, Gardiner’s account does not mention that there were also non-fatal casualties as well as the four fatalities mentioned in the book. They survived their physical injuries but have had to live with that ambush, the physical injuries, and their survival since – some with PTSD and potentially a life of ‘survivor guilt’. These members of Mortar Troop did not go on to participate in the up-coming attack on the Argentinian-held Two Sisters – they were fighting for their lives on a hospital ship.

This absence which I can see in my reading is available due to the unique adequacy of my ‘veteran as present at the conflict’, and as one who could have easily taken their place performing the same role. Such normalizing exclusions make wars seem less dangerous and with fewer casualties and, not insignificantly, also make war less available or accountable to analysis. The critical veteran researcher (with their unique adequacy and even potential participation) is well placed to identify the cleansing and silencing of the practical realities of warfare in the normative accounts of military practices and make them available to analysis and accountablity. Critical analysis, unlike much normative non-critical analysis, can go on to consider the impact of friendly-fire’s victims injuries, their future military career and the economic and psychological impact of the fratricide on them and their families’ future. It can truly critically describe the full phenomena of war. Locating exclusions in the literature in this way is an important first step in a critical analysis.

For example, while Gardiner rightly notes Mortar Troops’ remaining members’ professional performance in the ensuing battle for Two Sisters, and their successful (if potentially temporary) normalization of the death and injury of their colleagues, no mention is made by Gardiner of the soldiers from the Yankee Troop who had actually done the shooting at the ambush. They have been omitted from the narrative, their experiences are both silenced and expunged from the event and as a consequence they are ignored in the account and our understanding of the phenomena of friendly-fire and fratricide. This undoubtedly belies the impact of fratricide on its accidental perpetrators. To be a victim of fratricide is no less a sacrifice, Gardiner notes, and no less honourable than to be shot by the enemy which is how it is normalized in terms of the victims of fratricide. However, to shoot one’s own colleagues, i.e. to be on the delivering end of a fratricide, is not the same as having killed enemy personnel which soldiers usually find traumatic anyway, no matter how accidental such an action might be. Many soldiers do not live comfortably with shooting and killing the enemy (Grossman 1995), never mind their own side, and especially comrades they may actually know and be friends with. No matter how ‘inevitable’ such incidents are in the abstract, or innocent of any culpability they may be in the particular, normalizing such experiences to themselves (and others) is ‘difficult’ for most soldiers. Of course, I am not saying everyone is affected in the same way, or that the long-term consequences are the same for all, but as a veteran I am witness to the devastating effects of the career the friendly-fire takes on.

Analytically, we may suspect that one of the most problematic things for soldiers involved in fratricide is their sense of being morally betrayed (Shay 1994). Most soldiers, if we take the example of the ambush, are doing what they are doing on the instruction of others, as rarely is the initiative theirs. However, it is they who will commit the act that results in the fratricide, and whether the blame is with them or elsewhere or nowhere does not change this. They will potentially carry that stigma to their identity regardless of any fault of their own (Garfinkel 2019, 281). This is not something they will have been prepared for, yet acting professionally, being a good soldier and following orders can nonetheless result in great burden to the sense of self, not to mention any sense of guilt which may be attached to this and increases the initial trauma. Yet, the normative practices of the institutional organization of the military evident in combat identification accounts, and the places of representation such as memoir accounts are silent, or near silent, on fratricide – especially those not normally regarded as victims, its perpetrators. Fratricide is not usually something military personnel or veterans are willing to discuss, often not even amongst themselves, as the relative silence in the literature illustrates.

Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, even Shay’s (1994) Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, an otherwise exceptional book, also largely passes over fratricide. However, Shay raises for us the issue of ‘moral injury’ when involved in trauma. The things that soldiers can see and participate in during war can be traumatic and to overcome this aspect of any ensuing PTSD there is a need for discussion and acceptance of the reality of what was seen and done, and to maintain silence towards those traumatized is to worsen their symptoms.

If we take the issue of fratricide, to be a victim of it is traumatic and this is injurious to the individual; it involves a form of ‘betrayal’, but the individual is largely blameless or at least clearly a victim. However, to commit fratricide is to be traumatized in a different way. It is an act of great harm on one’s own colleagues and community. It brings no honour to the individual killed, none to those instigating the event, and potentially only ‘dishonour’ to one’s regiment.⁵ This is not a new situation; the negative aspect of fratricide explains its omission as a cause of death in Homer’s foundational war narrative The Iliad (see Shay 1994). In contemporary military forces, identity is focused upon the display of professionalism (King 2013) rather than honour as such, yet involvement in fratricide is to display, or to be open to the accusation of, unprofessionalism – and dis-honouring of the individual, their squad, and their regiment. There is the stigma of association with such an event, and the possibility of a ‘spoilt identity’ (Goffman 1963), at least in the participant’s own eyes. Compounding this is that military and veteran communities ‘never forget’; these are communities based on remembering. Those involved in fratricide may remain in the military family but that itself may sustain the inability, or lack of opportunity, to forget their involvement. Indeed, governmental Veteran’s policies aimed at ensuring a lasting military identity for former military personnel may potentially increase the problems surrounding fratricide involvement if veterans consider that their military identity has been compromised.

Importantly, fratricide also inevitably involves blame. Even if the military as an organization, or personnel themselves, do not apportion it to others, there is self-blame. Yet, within accounts of dealing with self-blame these people’s stories are left out of normative accounts. Nor are these morally wounded (Shay 1994, 2002) participants of war always seen as casualties of war or regarded its legitimate victims. This was brought home to me years after the Falklands when another member of my troop from training drank himself to death, and I discovered subsequently that his PTSD involved self-blame for a fratricide. He refused all help and I believe that it was in part the ‘normative silence’ around fratricide and who constituted a victim that eventually killed him. I know others who have – usually through drink – also effectively committed suicide as a result of real or perceived involvement in fratricide. Yet, unlike other countries such as the USA, the UK refuses to collect statistics on ex-forces suicide rates, and certainly not analyse them as aspects of friendly-fire incidents. This is a form of institutional silencing, and doubly so as it does not recognize the cause of those suicides, or the suffering that led to them.

The critical veteran researcher can highlight specific omissions in topics directly related to their unique adequacy, but can also have suspicions informed by their flesh-witnessing and members’ knowledge about additional potential omissions in other accounts, highlighting their importance and raising topics for further critical analysis. This is not to say that non-veteran critical military researchers’ own unique adequacy as analysts may not also be able to see such omissions. I am not arguing for a binary opposition, but rather emphasizing that the critical veteran researcher has a unique adequacy which may allow them to see such omissions and relevant topics due to their unique combination of members’ knowledge alongside their disciplinary training as a critical military studies practitioner.

Discussion and conclusion

Studies of the military have previously been criticized for their lack of reflexivity of methods (Higate and Cameron 2006). This paper, by way of illustration of accounts of friendly-fire and fratricide and my own member’s knowledge of such phenomena as a critical veteran researcher, veteran and critical scholar, has aimed to illustrate some of the ways that the veteran as a critical military researcher with their (former-)military personnel’s members’ perspective can add to their critical military studies in their research. Here, my own unique adequacy as a critical veteran researcher has been reflexively used to both critique formal analytic and normative structures of military knowledge which aim to make the military more efficient and effective (Carrieras and Caetano 2016) and to construct a heuristic example of the potential benefits of a critical veteran perspective.

Ultimately critical military research is about revealing the depth, breadth and complexity of militarization in society. What the critical veteran researcher can additionally bring to such research and research agendas are the insights derived from prolonged exposure to aspects of the military life – both in-service and post-service – that through critical reflection and analysis of their flesh-witnessing (Harari 2008) can lead to the design of appropriate research methodologies utilizing their unique adequacy. Arguably, this may facilitate the opening of new avenues of investigation and interpretation that may otherwise be overlooked.

The critical veteran researcher’s flesh-witnessing and members’ knowledge as a participant of the military and as a veteran, which may not be directly or even indirectly available to non-veterans, constitutes a unique adequacy that can potentially locate issues and inform ensuing critical analysis. Not that all veterans have the same training, knowledge and experiences and hence veteran researchers’ insights as veterans will differ, as will the utility of their unique adequacy and members’ knowledge. For example, as a Royal Marine veteran I may have little to say about the specific battle practices of submariners, although I may have more generic knowledge from my own training and experiences about the impact of injuries to a team member in combat conditions which could be relevant. This veteran’s knowledge is of course not sufficient in itself, one must be a competent critical researcher too as, and this must be stressed, it is this combination applied in their research practices that constitutes their unique adequacy as critical veteran researcher. Neither should veteran-based unique adequacy be seen in simple binary terms with the members’ knowledge of non-veterans, nor exclude it, as the two are not homogenous (Jenkings 2018). As has been illustrated above such unique adequacy informed research does not itself have to be ethnomethodological but, as illustrated through the concept of unique adequacy, ethnomethodology can help illustrate how critical veteran researchers make a distinctive and valuable contribution to critical military studies. Significantly, this is not simply due just to the critical veteran researcher members’ knowledge as a veteran, but their having the member’s knowledge of a critical military studies scholar too. It is this unique adequacy that they can bring to their research and their collaboration with others. Their insights, it is argued, can in turn allow for a better understanding of those phenomena and how they can be investigated further by all interested scholars.

Using the concept of unique adequacy that ethnomethodology provides, this paper highlights the contributions that critical veteran researchers can make to critical studies of military phenomena. One of the first stages of doing any critical research is to critically examine the existing accounts of the phenomena in question to see how those accounts structure our understanding, and what those narratives promote or ignore. A starting point, I suggest, is for the critical veteran researcher to critically analyse such normative accounts utilizing their members knowledge as veterans producing uniquely adequate interpretation. One aspect of this uniquely adequate interpretation is through drawing on their member’s knowledge to expose what is left out from normative accounts, how these omissions have helped create a biased perspective and one usually supporting militarism, the militarist status quo and the normalization of militarism as practice and form of oppression. Critical veteran researchers’ unique adequacy can additionally draw reflexively (Higate and Cameron (2006), Hockey (2016), Carrieras and Caetano (2016), Walker (2016) on their experientially grounded members’ knowledge of the ‘reality’ of the normalized events. This paper illustrates what critical veteran researchers can do in this process due to their previous, and often on-going, membership of military communities and does so with the illustrative example of fratricide. I suggest that the topic selection and analysis of friendly fire and fratricide and my critical analytic reading of the friendly fire literature and its omissions and misrepresentations, are informed unique adequacy as a critical veteran researcher with both veteran and members’ knowledge. In the example at the heart of this paper, this reflexivity drew on personal and communal veteran’s experiential knowledge that the impact of fratricide moves beyond the confines of the moment of the incident, and its immediate causes, to the impact on those indirectly involved, detailing who those are, and also includes the injured and deceased’s close family.⁶ The Marines killed and injured in the friendly fire incident described by Gardiner included colleagues and personal friends, some of whom I had gone through basic training with. This is part of my members knowledge as a veteran and, as this paper demonstrates, informed the unique adequacy deployed in locating a phenomena, developing a topic, facilitating a critical reading of the literature to refine that topic, in the reflexive design of appropriate research design and analysis of data produced (Jenkings 2018).

However, there is an additional point of further significance to the broader critical military studies project that this analysis makes. As a critical social research it has as a fundamental principle the aim to reveal details of forms of oppression, for example, around class, race or gender. Here I have taken militarism as a structured form of oppression with its normative knowledge structures, such as those inherent to combat identification analysis or the norms of representation evident in memoir accounts masking that oppression. Such knowledge structures are phenomena of interest for critical analysis within Critical Military Studies (Basham, Belkin, and Gifkins 2015). This paper argues for the utility and potential of a critical veteran researcher perspective in accounting for the effects of such knowledge structures. This paper is not suggesting that critical veteran researcher informed studies might look very different to other approaches in critical military studies. Rather, critical veteran researchers’ unique adequacy with regards studying these phenomena can usefully inform the development of critical military studies of those, and other phenomena. The aim is enhance CMS research agendas rather than replace them. This may not always be possible, but critical veteran researchers appear to be increasing in number and successfully collaborating with non-veteran researchers. The aim has been to use the concept of unique adequacy in ethnomethodology, to argue that that is what the critical veteran researcher brings to critical military studies and the collaborative work underlying research and analysis practices (Jenkings et al. 2008; Jenkings and Woodward 2014). As this paper shows using friendly-fire and fratricide as a prospicious example, it is their potential unique adequacy through of a combination of military and researcher members’ knowledge and comptences which provides a way of conceptualizing and understanding critical veteran researcher’s on-going contributions to CMS .

Acknowledgement

This paper has benefitted from a number of reviews. I would like to thank all of the anonymous reviewers for their patience as this paper has evolved, it is much improved due to their input. I have also benefited from readings and suggestions of the Special Issue editors, especial thanks go to Hannah West. I also need to thank all my friends and colleagues who have reviewed and improved the paper no end, especially John Beales, John Hockey, Michael Mair and Rachel Woodward. As is ever the case, I will have forgotten someone, that omission and all others in the paper are my responsibility. I acknowledge the authors of the works cited for the stimulus they provided and the people on the ground we ultimately rely on.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The term ‘soldier’ is used as a metonym for all military service’s personnel and not exclusively infantry or army personnel.

2. My thanks to Sophy Antrobus.

3. That said, of the authors accounts discussed, Patrick Bury subsequently became a university-based critical veteran researcher and Patrick Hennessey (2012) has published a second book Kandak as a post-military service veteran researcher outside academia, and has gone on to become a lawyer. Both had university degrees prior to military service but their accounts are from the military memoir tradition, and not from a critical veteran research perspective. Doug Beattie rose through the ranks without a university degree before retiring as a British Army captain producing two military memoirs and a novel. (Incidentally, but not part of the account below, Beattie as a 15-year old accidently shot a friend in the head, with his father’s – a UDR soldier – rifle before joining the British Army.)

4. A Commando Unit is equivalent in size to an army battalion, approximately 650 personnel.

5. Whilst the personal and personnel imaginaries of military participation are beyond the scope of this paper, it is nonetheless worth noting that ‘honour’ many have been replaced as a personal assessment and orientation for many Western military participant by that of the ‘professional’ (see Woodward and Jenkings 2011).

6. See Parr (2018) for an account of fratricide’s impact on the family of a casualty, including the impact of the normalized account’s revelation as a ‘falsehood’).