Proud to ‘fly a desk’ and wear a medal? Interrogations of military pride through the eyes of the RAF veteran

ABSTRACT

Framed by the author’s status as a former Royal Air Force (RAF) service-person and subsequently as a critical sociologist, this article considers the performative role of pride in both exceptionalizing and legitimizing military actors and the RAF, respectively. In so doing, auto-ethnographic material is included to reveal the mundane and unremarkable, yet illustrative experiences of the RAF clerk whose lifeworld as a military actor in a support role differs sharply from how he or she might be imagined by the wider public. In order to demonstrate this disparity in perception, attention is paid to the relative ease of RAF basic training, tensions between the assumed hardships of active service in a war zone and its reality, and the role of racism and individual agency in the RAF. Rather than pride, these reflections invoke a mix of authorial guilt and shame, the latter of which is rooted in the political role played by an institution whose violence is normalized and its members eulogized. The wider, normative aim of the article is animated by my own modest attempt to demilitarize through revealing the work pride does in canonizing an institution revered by the public.

KEYWORDS:

• Pride
• RAF
• legitimize
• demilitarize
• exceptionalize

Introduction

Drawn from my auto-ethnographic experiences of the Royal Air Force (RAF) as an airman during the final years of the Cold War, in this article I critically consider a key element of British military exceptionalism. I do so against the backdrop of the reverence with which the institution is held amongst the wider public through an experiential foregrounding of the pride that circulates amongst, between and within military actors and the wider public. Attempts to cultivate support in the form of pride from the host population help to make possible the armed forces use of state sanctioned¹ violence. In this sense, military pride is an important topic of concern, particularly when revealed as a key element of armed forces myth-making pertaining to the alleged extraordinary qualities of military men and women who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of state security.

In order to illuminate pride’s significance in the military context then, I focus on the interaction between two key autobiographical moments drawn from distinct career paths, those of RAF service in the first instance, and life as a critical sociologist in the second. In the light of exposure to critical academic thought, the engagement between the military and civilian worlds has engendered a sense of political responsibility around how best to respond to the long-term legacy of the ‘behind my back’ character of RAF socialization (Hockey 1986) to which I was subject. In particular, it invites a critical analysis of the productive elements of pride I had developed prior to enlistment as a young person from an armed forces family, values that were subsequently reinforced whilst serving in the RAF.

Animating this enquiry is the long-term legacy of immersion into the RAF that has over the years assumed a politically troubling status in the light of my exposure to critical insights around the nefarious uses to which the armed forces have been put in the name of empire, geopolitics and closely linked, national security.² Whether or not ex-service personnel confront the political implications of their military role in later years, the legacy of service for those of us of a critical academic persuasion must surely engender a period of reflection around the violence we helped to make possible. Thus, to learn of Britain’s use of military violence to brutally implement and maintain a colonial empire (Gott 2006), and more recently, the armed forces role in human rights abuses, torture, racism, sexism, and homophobia perpetrated by a number of its people (Bennett 2006; Woodward and Winter 2006; Cobain 2012; Blakeley 2010), together with its active lobbying for war (Dixon 2018), it is clear that the institution was not simply a ‘force for good’ in the world as my proud and youthful self might have believed. These sentiments chime closely with the recognition that ‘veterans often have an ambivalent, and sometimes hostile, relationship with the state and the military’ (Bulmer and Eichler 2017, 162). Given this, it is now appropriate that the ethico-conceptual dimensions of my intellectual and critical work should be directed towards the earlier militarized self in order to recover ‘the abstracted, the lost, the silenced [and] the distant’ (Jazeel and McFarlane 2010, 113) of my militarized youth in ways that interrogate the affective dimensions of pride and how it shaped my emerging subjectivity. However, this is not simply a question of the pride that I experienced as a junior airman, but in addition extends to the significant influence of a public ‘looking in’ who in turn, reinforce the familiarity of pride and its routinized currency in legitimating this most violent agent of the state. Even when wars become unpopular, it is the exceptional status of ‘our boys and girls’ that remain impervious to critique by either the media or the public (Basham 2016; Parry and Thumim 2017, 42). Simply put, military actors represent the foundational units of pride that play a central role in sustaining violent military intervention, particularly when the body-bag dilemma is invoked.³ In sum then, this line of critical enquiry has laid bare the early years of my service as an active and enthusiastic member of the ‘kill-chain’, a role that I now regret and view as deeply problematic.⁴ This project can in some sense be seen as an attempt to demilitarize my masculinity as one way to re-humanize the self in ways that challenge the armed forces sexist, homophobic, and racist cultures (Sharoni 2008; Schrader 2019).

The public as proud supporters of ‘our’ (Exceptional) armed forces

Indexed by public opinion polls,⁵ framed through the language of sacrifice and presented as the zenith of the public good, the armed forces are imbued with a revered status whose use of violence is couched in terms of inevitability: the ‘necessary evil’ required to counter the myriad insecurities of a threat laden world as countless Strategic Defence Reviews remind us.

In recent years, attempts to counter recruiting shortfalls address the associated long-term legacy of the unpopularity of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and more generally to ‘educate’ the public about the crucial role of the armed forces, have been seen by critical scholars to have facilitated a process of so-called creeping militarization involving attempts to foster pride and respect towards the armed forces amongst the wider public. Government and Ministry of Defence (MoD) driven interventions aims to legitimize an institution that, due to its negligible footprint, is for the public not only out of sight but is also for many, culturally moribund. While this is the case, and despite ongoing efforts by scholars to interrogate the means by which the institution and its members are not just normalized but eulogized, the role of pride in critical analysis derived from the under-utilized experiential dimensions provides for an original line of enquiry.

Most notably, it is the willingness to lay down one’s life for the nation state⁶ and its correlates of masculinity, loyalty, honour, and discipline upon which this selfless act depends that differentiates the military actor from his or her civilian counterpart. Extending this logic, and nested within ideas of the soldier as super-citizen (Kershner 2011), are further virtuous elements invoking physical and mental resilience or, in a more traditional sense, the embodied stoicism required to overcome testing military training regimes. The unique fortitude essential to function effectively amongst the horrors and hardships of combat stands as a further quality demanded of service people.⁷ That we might be proud in the UK context of the remarkable achievements of ‘our boys’ and at the time of writing, one of our combat trained ‘girls’ (Beale 2020) is unsurprising then, since the public imaginary is routinely influenced by popular representations of the extremes faced by military personnel that invariably invoke matters of life and death (Baynes 2017). Set against this backdrop, my article problematizes one of the more generalized aspects of military pride framing servicemen and women – that they are superior to civilians (Glenton 2021) and, in the specific case of the RAF, are exceptionalized since they are said to embody the uniquely militarized values of ‘Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence’. Taken together, these qualities undergird the RAF’s conception of pride amongst its people in ways that give rise to ‘justifiable confidence in oneself and in the Royal Air Force, based on heritage, achievements and our ethos. Pride breeds excellence’.⁸ However, what if the realities of many – if not the majority of those who are/have served in the RAF or other of the two services were antithetical to the mythologized framings that continue to influence the public’s pride and respect for these unique actors? Should we hold these men and women in such high esteem if their attributes and behaviours were closer to the lives of their relatively demeaned foil, ‘the civilian’? In focusing on the reverence accorded to the physical and emotional toughness of military actors in particular, and the respect that they elicit through these exceptionalized spheres, might overt declarations of military pride from veterans (usually men known as ‘blazers’ for example; Glenton 2021), also begin to look questionable? What if we were to adopt a more critical position on the political role of the armed forces and their volunteers.⁹ These questions set the tone for the remaining sections of the paper that problematize not only the work that military pride does in legitimating the armed forces in a general sense but more specifically the ways that it might be challenged as a trope of exceptionality¹⁰ when viewed through the canonized figure of the military actor.

From the public to the military actor: proud to serve!

During the early months of 2019, I was at a gathering of some fifteen former British service personnel from across the ranks and three services as part of a wider network of veteran-academics. As those present engaged in various questions set by the Chair, one of the participants stated with some passion that he was ‘proud of his service in the Royal Navy’. As a social emotion, I detected the wider group’s collective sense of pride signalled in their display of an ‘erect posture, an inflated chest and bright eyes’ within the context of eliciting parallel feelings in the room¹¹ (Britt and Heise 2000, 254/255). That we shared a common military biography added to the sense that indeed this was a safe space within which such sentiments could be expressed in contrast to the wider, potentially hostile university setting and its dangerous ‘woke politics’. The ubiquity and subsequent normalization of the linkage of military with pride rendered the declaration unremarkable, and as many of the members in the room nodded in agreement with the former sailor, the conversation moved on with little hesitation. However, it was at this point that I reflected on the extent to which I was proud of my eight years in the RAF. I was not proud. In fact, in the light of my intellectual journey from airman to critical scholar, I was deeply troubled, disappointed, and somewhat perplexed about the response of network members. Speaking to both my naivety and the idealism linked to spuriously extrapolating my own intellectual journey and shifting political values to others, it seemed that despite immersing themselves into university life, these men and women continued to reflect on their military service in reverential terms. In these moments at least, and no doubt made possible by the collective dynamic, members reminisced fondly about their lives in the armed forces. These reflections jarred with my sense of regret that my militarized labour had not only been appropriated through duplicitous means, but more than that, the armed forces had in recent years been implicated in violent, imperial interventions of which these individuals had been a part. Thus, framed through the problem-solving approach (oriented at making militaries more effective), there was nothing in the way of substantive critique of the armed forces amongst the group along the lines of emancipatory stances where attempts to demilitarize might be viewed as progressive, for example.

As an outlier in the group, I took time to reflect on the effect invoked in me by others’ declaration of pride which led, in turn, to a consideration of the ideological work done by pride when fused with military. More broadly, expressions of military pride and the hackneyed status of ‘soldiers as heroes’ routinely crowd out alternative opinions and sentiments in a multitude of public and private spaces (Kelly 2013; Glenton 2021). While this revered status may circulate amongst a number of former and currently serving personnel, to be sure, there are many more that downplay this rendering.¹² Exemplary in this respect is a former Battle of Britain ‘flying ace’ who ‘dismissed claims that his fellow pilots were brave, saying that “I don’t think that the average chap was brave at all …”’ (Blackall 2020). Yet, despite the considerable unease and outright rejection expressed by a vocal community of currently and former serving men and women around such reverence, a YouGov survey conducted in 2018 found that strikingly, 32% of civilians polled agreed with the statement that ‘all those serving in our [UK] armed forces should be described as heroes whatever their role and experience’ (Smith 2018; emphasis added). No matter how uncomfortable current or former armed forces constituencies might feel, the hero moniker is productive and often deployed instrumentally in the public sphere to generate resources as the charity Help the Heroes has found to its benefit (Parry and Thumim 2017). Much like ideas of military pride, notions of heroism, as argued by the former soldier Matt Gallagher who served in Iraq in the US forces, are found to be ‘messy, complicated’ and in need of careful ‘nuancing’ (Botti 2018).¹³ Given this, how might we begin to understand the key elements of the pride making process?

Military pride-making and the embodied collective

Durkheim writes of effervescence drawing on the intoxicating potency of the collective, as noted in the ability for soldiers to act as a whole through drill, for example. The euphoria generated is deeply embodied, gendered, and for many of those who perfect such tightly choreographed practice represents the first real success they have experienced since their failures in civilian life, ranging from failing formal school examinations through to the inability to enact a robust adolescent masculinity or achieve anything other than perhaps being employed precariously performing a low-wage job. As military drill Sergeants begin to praise rather than condemn their fledgling recruits, the latter may glow with pride (Hockey 1986). Their sense of achievement is derived from the ability to act collectively; their resonance with fellow recruits generates a sense of power, belonging, affinity, and empathy. Though Goffman writes that recruits are mortified by various ritualized humiliations, their sense of pride may paradoxically emerge from the capacity they have to endure such shared and routinized suffering (Hockey 1986) in ways that undergird a keen connection with a new and revered military masculine identity. Living in close proximity further bolsters the sociality of military pride through which recruits are both homogenized and also come to know one another intimately as individuals, often according to their region of origin and concomitant accent. Functional for the disciplinary structure, what begins as a profound sense of disorientation during the initial stages of recruit training (Belkin 2012) becomes supplanted by a degree of certainty and growing confidence in their ability to master new skills ranging from weapon-handling through to the administering of first aid as key elements of this masculine right-de-passage. As Coburn argues in regard to the relational dimensions of pride:

‘Emotional resonance is an individual’s signal to another that “I am present with you, regardless of our differences” … This process is quintessentially human and is affected paradoxically via our human similarities and sameness, on the one hand, as well as via our substantial discrepancies in our personal subjectivities on the other’ (Coburn 2001, 309/312).

Ingold goes further when he notes that:

‘By watching, listening, perhaps even touching, we continually feel each other’s presence in the social environment, at every moment adjusting our movements in response to this ongoing perceptual monitoring … Indeed it could be argued that in resonance of movement and feeling stemming from peoples mutually attentive engagement, in shared contexts of practical activity, lies the very foundation of sociality’ (Ingold 1993, 160).

Framed as the key symbolic and public moment during which expressions of pride from the audience and loved ones alike are actively encouraged, suitably attired parents and/or significant others might be said to swell with pride as they look upon these transformed individuals. As noted on the MoD’s Infantry Training Centre website, ‘The Passing Out Parade at the end of the course is often one of the proudest moments in a soldier’s life’ (MoD 2015). In this sense, pride is more than a self-conscious emotion (Carver, Sinclair, and Johnson 2010, 698; Poggi and D’Errico 2011, 434) but rather, in the case of its exemplary militarized expression, is both deeply social and obligatory. Pride expressed at the parade is also relational, and it bifurcates the society into two – the eulogized soldier whose journey is made possible by a widely recognized and deeply gendered rite-de-passage, and the civilian who can only ever experience pride vicariously (Glenton 2021). In this schema and of particular salience to the military, ‘pride is also linked to … power … [and] power relationships: by expressing pride you claim you are superior […] to the other’ (Poggi and D’Errico 2011, 446). These brief comments on military pride-making preface the autoethnographic sections of the paper. I start with some thoughts on the knowledge produced here, given that – unusually – it is the voice of the non-traditional or support actor (an RAF clerk) that is foregrounded. What of my positionality in the tail rather than the tooth of the institution?

The authorial voice and positionality: the tooth and the tail

As an RAF Administrative Clerk between 1983 and 1985 and then a Personnel Administrator from 1985 to 1991, my primary role was to facilitate the smooth-running¹⁴ of RAF bureaucracy ranging from employment in the General Office where colleagues’ pay, housing, postings, deployments, and leave were co-ordinated, through to work in a Tornado aircraft squadron’s intelligence cell with oversight and control of classified targeting documentation, and as such ‘closer to the action’ (in this instance, ‘bombing sorties’¹⁵ during the 1991 Gulf War). Usually, desk-bound and behind the wire, the role of the military clerk in the broadest sense, however, is often perceived to be that of the caricatured ‘Fobbit’ (Tidy 2016, 111) who remains safe and secure in their forward operating base (FOB). These military actors occupy the lowest reaches of a masculinized hierarchy of risk and tend to be comprised of clerks, cooks, stewards, drivers, and suppliers in the RAF context (Higate 2003). Given the increasingly diffuse nature of the so-called ‘front line’, they may be equally vulnerable to being killed or maimed by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). These relatively low-status actors are located in an occupational hierarchy headed by fighter pilots, for example.¹⁶ Yet, ‘we continue to “know” war primarily through the battlefield experiences of the combat soldier’¹⁷ (Tidy 2016, 102; Parry and Thumim 2017, 43). Individuals labelled as Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers (or ‘REMFY’s’; Lair 2011) are often dismissed as devoid of authority since they are at some distance from the ground truth of direct combat (Tidy 2016). The case of the anti-war activist Joe Glenton is a case in point where in a cynical post to the Army Rumour Website (ARSSE) that underscores the demeaned status of the REMFY, one sarcastic blogger stated: ‘Glenton had seen the “horrors of war” whilst serving up scoff [food] in the cook house at Kandahar [in Afghanistan]’ (ARSSE 2013). Geographical proximity to military violence has become a key element of how far and to what extent it can be known in an epistemological sense, together with who has the legitimacy to speak of it. However, in building on the work of Tidy (2016), it is important to move beyond associating proximity to violence with veracity and authority around how it might be represented. Indeed, first-hand involvement in, or direct exposure to military violence does not necessarily provide for a pristine rendering. To be sure, the concept of ‘flesh witnessing’ for those who are present at, or perpetrate face-to-face violence also invokes its own complexities around representation (Bourke 1999). A degree of distance from ‘the action’ then provides an equally valid perspective on war and violence, and in this way, it is ‘bums on seats … that engage war as data’ (Tidy 2016, 111) that have the potential to furnish a complementary perspective from which to apprehend the social organization of violence and the role of pride in making it possible.

Beginnings: pride through the life course

In 1983 as a rather naïve 17 year-old who had failed all of his school qualifications, I was driven to the RAF recruiting office by my father, a man of whom I was extremely proud, given his status as a non-commissioned RAF Chief Technician who worked on every type of aircraft over the decades including Lancaster Bombers and latterly, Lightning interceptors at the height of the Cold War. On arrival at the office in Grimsby, and in the presence of a recruiting Sergeant, I sat the requisite aptitude test with the lacklustre results limiting RAF trade choices to the role of cook, driver, or clerk.¹⁸ Though wilfully deceived by the recruiting Sergeant (Friesen and Eddy 2019) who stated that being a clerk was a great job and that I could change to another trade if I didn’t like it, I opted for ‘flying a desk’. In my desperation to don the RAF uniform, I was willing to become what was humorously known as a ‘tactical typist’ and over the next 8 years, based in both the UK and abroad, I loved, and later on in my career, loathed the RAF with equal measure.

I relished the freedom from responsibility, sense of status, being given somewhere to live, not having to think too much about what to do and carrying out my role as a clerk according to strict bureaucratic procedure. Life was easy as a desk bound airman. I sat in a cosy office while colleagues grafted in all weathers as aircraft technicians, RAF Police, and such like. We – the clerks – were known as shinies since the seat of our trousers was rubbed smoothly and eventually developed a sheen as a result of many hours sitting at a desk. I also loved the travel and was proud of being part of a large and important organization entrusted with the most vital of roles – that of national security. Day in and day out, both implicitly and explicitly, we were told that our jobs really mattered and had importance well beyond the humdrum existence of the average civilian worker. We felt privileged, superior, different, and, in a sense, believed we had been hand-picked to perform these crucial roles. In line with military culture, we had a robust (read: inflated) sense of self, grounded in a masculinized ontological security derived from collective pride derived in my case from a job that brought few physical or mental challenges. To illustrate: walking into the mess for lunch one day at RAF Bruggen in West Germany around 1985, I had what might be seen as something of a peak experience that filled me with a deep sense of pride. As I gazed at the mass of uniformly clad diners engrossed in animated work-related conversations, it suddenly dawned on me that I was one of them! Here, the elation I derived from this realization was more than the sense one gets from being on any old team. Looking back through the eyes of my 18 year old self, I could see that it was also linked to the ways that masculine existential anxiety was both neutralized and excited through the fostering of dense social bonds (King 2006) converging on pleasure, hardship, and a strong sense of military identity – key components of pride in this context. Accompanying one’s ‘successful’ masculinized status was the realization that I had a job for life and could avoid the horrors of surviving on the dole. I was secure in who I was, where I was going and how I would survive as I felt respected by my peers, and in a more abstract sense, felt that the public were proud of our achievements. The RAF had allowed me to escape the vicissitudes of life under Thatcherism where many of my civilian cohort were in Youth Opportunity Programmes (YOPs). These schemes were viewed as a source of cheap labour and a further way in which the government was able to massage the unemployment figures; these ‘opportunities’ were hardly a source of pride. Receiving £27.50 as my first weekly pay packet in February 1983 during recruit training trumped the YOP allowance of my civilian friends’ £25, with the prospect that the pay would continue to rise throughout my service. To be sure, I was safe and secure in a Cold War institution where, despite being subject to frequent training that invoked the Soviets’ impending presence on the plains of West Germany, the dangers of war remained almost entirely absent. However, notwithstanding my initial naivety and idealism in respect of an RAF career and in returning to our room of veterans, of what was I proud exactly?

Proud of my physical achievements? The myth of military embodiment

Sometime after the formal process of attestation in the Grimsby recruiting office where I swore allegiance to the Queen in late January 1983 was the experience – endured some 3 miles from Lincoln at RAF Swinderby – of recruit training. This period of RAF training was intended to affect the transition from civilian to airperson prior to trade training, the latter of which varied in length and intensity from months to years depending on the specific nature of the occupational role (RAF Regiment). Yet, sensitivity to the diversity of basic recruit training across the armed forces is key here with regard to questions of pride. Unlike the British army's basic training, RAF basic training of 6 weeks at the time was the shortest in duration of all the services. Second to this were the restrictions on being able to leave RAF Swinderby for the purposes of leave. Again, surprisingly, it was only the first weekend of recruit training that one was restricted to camp, and with the arrival at Swinderby happening mid-week, this meant a maximum of around only 10 days absence from family or friends (at least if they could be reached within the 48-hour constraint of the remaining free weekends available to the recruit). This made the typical experience of boarding school (where I spent two years prior to enlistment) look harsh in regard to its many months of protracted isolation from loved ones. I was fortunate to live within 2 hours of RAF Swinderby at that time, thereby allowing me to make full use of weekend leave passes. Even within the first few days of service I had been amongst civilian friends, thereby neutralizing the homesickness characteristic of the majority of military training regimes.

Then, there was the physical side of meeting RAF recruit training standards which required the mastering of parade square drill,¹⁹ a one and a half mile run to be completed within 11 minutes, and the ability to complete a small number of sit-ups, pull-ups, and press-ups. While these standards may of course be challenging for some, it is fair to say that they were not beyond the ability of the majority of able-bodied teenagers at that time,²⁰ requiring only the minimal of preparation. In comparison to the army infantry, the Parachute Regiment, and of course those succeeding at Special Forces (SF) selection, the level of achievement required was well within the grasp of many civilians – even those who might not consider themselves ‘sporty’. RAF Clerks and members of the SF are both part of the military but that is where the similarity ends in regard to physical requirements. Other tests required of us were similarly relatively straightforward and comprised in summary of disassembling and assembling a self-loading rifle (SLR), live firing drills on the range, parade square drill, the ability to take a few breaths of CS gas (or tear gas) in the gas chamber while shouting one’s military service number, the passing of basic written examinations, the withstanding of sleep deprivation, and being yelled at and bullied by drill instructors. Taken together and not withstanding how memory work may serve to diminish the sense of challenge at the time, it is fair to say that this period of 6 weeks was – in the grander scheme of things – considerably less onerous than uninformed civilians might imagine. The point here is that there exists a disconnect between embodied dimensions of RAF basic training and wider public perception for reasons linked to the latter’s veneration of military bodies as homogenous in respect of their unique resilience and toughness. Explanations for the conflation of numerous sharply contrasting armed forces training regimes cohere on the imagined (and increasingly in civilian life, actual) sight and experience of the military boot camp (McSorley 2013): 104; Glenton 2021). In this sense

‘militarized male bodies receive attention that other heterosexual male bodies do not, and military training regimes are imitated by civilians … troops take enormous pride in [these embodied processes] (Crane-Seeber 2016, 41/44, emphasis added).

Imaginaries of military bodies (McSorley 2016, 104) are argued to turn on the ‘fantasy of absolute ablebodiedness’ (Cree and Caddick 2020, 5) where war-injured men and women might be recast as exceptional individuals, as the Invictus Games demonstrates. These actors are worthy of elevated levels of pride, awe, and respect because they transcend the limits and abilities of not just civilian bodies but those fashioned in the armed forces and then again in the face of great physical and mental adversity. The point here is that the diversity of military masculine rites of passage tends to be conflated in ways that fit the wider admiration accorded to the armed forces and their people. I recall only one RAF recruit who failed basic training outright and but a handful who were back-flighted on account of their weapon handling ‘incompetence’; in some sense, it was difficult to fail. The case of the failed recruit was telling and underscores the influence of basic military training more broadly on the rapid formation of in-groups and out-groups, with this individual framed as weak, deviant, and pathetic. The emergence of violent opprobrium from the newly formed in-group for this recruit focused on his apparent unwillingness to ‘hack it’ from a psychological rather than physical perspective as homesickness got the better of him; there was little here of which either us as colleagues or the wider public could be proud. In retrospect, my collusion in this individual’s demeaned status is a matter of regret and certainly not a matter of pride as I was swept along with the hostile views of the in-group of which I was now an unquestioning part.

Saddam Hussein: my part in his ejection from Kuwait²¹

Festooned with military kit, including a respirator (gas mask), NBC suit, and SLR, it was August 1990 when I clambered aboard a Hercules aircraft with a measure of both trepidation and excitement. The aircraft flew from Brize Norton to Bahrain as part of the build-up to the so-called first Gulf War, aimed at ejecting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Many of my civilian friends were intrigued by my deployment to war. Some were in awe and undoubtedly proud of me as part consequence of the wider respect held towards the armed forces and particularly those who ‘go to war’. Following the frenetic media coverage at the time, they could only imagine the hardships with which I would be confronted as conflict became ever more likely.

Yet – and the butt of many an army squaddie’s joke that the RAF has it easy in these kinds of situations – was the reality of this deployment: two months in Bahrain’s Sheraton Hotel followed by four months in the Holiday Inn. Aside from the 12-hour shifts at the airbase in Muharraq (indoors of course and under the cool air of the air conditioning unit), life was good, very good. Fantastic international cuisine was available in the hotel, our rooms were cleaned daily, fresh towels were abundant, we had many meals in expensive local restaurants (often paid for by grateful Kuwaitis’), the use of a fully equipped gym, large amounts of bonus pay, and to cap this off, a medal for serving in a conflict zone – all many miles from the front line which was in a different country.²² In sum, the biggest achievement was being away from home, though that was in some sense mitigated by the vast number of ‘bluey’ letters that arrived every day by the sackful. Concerned civilians (mainly young women who, encouraged by the tabloid press, may have seen their correspondence as the opening gambit in a dating strategy) expressed their concern at our ‘desperate’ plight, with some even sending food parcels containing quintessentially English fare. The juxtaposition of emergency supplies with consuming what we viewed as exotic foods in local restaurants most evenings was a topic of much hilarity, compounding our beliefs around civilians’ inferiority and ignorance. My experience on return to the UK was mixed. Friends and family greeted me as if I was a hero, yet my experience had been far from what they imagined. I had no reason to feel proud of what I had achieved, with the pride expressed by friends and family for my (apparent) sacrifice engendering a deep sense of mendacity inflected with bemusement and confusion.

The military as agent of violence: something to be proud of?

The combination of meeting similarly jaded individuals together with my gradual maturing from a somewhat bewildered and excited apolitical teenager into a questioning individual soon brought the deeply political character of the armed forces into sharp relief. This growing awareness of complicity in British foreign policy helps explain a key motivation for the current article and more widely veteran activism, ‘to make right the perceived wrongs … [I] once perpetuated’ (Schrader 2019, 61) .

My interest in further understanding the institution and my role in it was accelerated through critical conceptual tools first encountered during an A-Level sociology course taken during the final year of service. For example, it came as something of a surprise to learn more about the longer historical arc of the invasion and occupation of the Falklands/Malvinas islands in 1982 (a highly influential event that – like Joe Glenton – had me enraptured with its seductive jingoism), to say nothing of the political capital accrued by Thatcher manifest in her success in the 1983 general election on the back of the deaths of so many Argentinian and British troops. As Dorling and Tomlinson note in this particular instance, ‘many English people thought that Falklands were Scottish islands’ and that in actuality ‘in 1833 the British “ethnically cleansed” the islands [and] expelled Argentinians after invading’ (Dorling 2019, 52). Of course, while such insights and the critical lexicon making these possible were beyond my orbit at this time, nonetheless I began to begrudge the brilliantly sublime character of an institution that had the power to turn naive youngsters into proud agents of foreign policy, willing and able to kill and injure unknown others for deeply questionable geopolitical aims. Though not without institutional compensation, I began to sense – albeit somewhat intuitively in the early days – that I had been taken for one hell of a ride as both military socialization and the political impact of the armed forces despite being in plain view had remained almost entirely out of sight (Belkin 2012). Made possible through processes that had played out beyond discursive consciousness, my feelings of pride were challenged that in turn fuelled a sense of emotional disorientation and creeping resentment at the grand deception enacted upon me.

The dream evaporates: pride as distraction

While being an airman was compelling and seductive in equal measure, it was the discovery of the Wizard behind the (camouflaged) curtain that came as a real shock. The realization that things were not as they seemed quickly morphed into genuine disappointment as I realized that I was but another interchangeable cog in a machine whose stock-in-trade, ultimately, was death and mutilation. I was not ‘special’, the impact of military interventions was more about hegemonic national interest than those of ‘failed’ states and the institution itself was not subservient to our political masters since it regularly usurped the power of the Executive (Dixon 2018). Increasingly, I felt deeply troubled about the once revered promised land that was so much a part of my early years. Largely without me realizing it, the institution had thoroughly occupied my youthful imaginary. Early memories included arranging seats in rooms for potential RAF recruits prior to my dad delivering an inspirational talk about life in the service. I was thrilled as a young boy to be driven around in a Commer van emblazoned with RAF livery. It made me feel special and grown-up. In passing my dad’s RAF uniform every morning on the way to school, I looked forward to holding a position that would likewise elicit pride in others and myself. Nevertheless, as the years passed in the RAF, I began to see that the period of secondary socialization to which I had been subject was not for my own benefit but for that of the institution; the fostering of pride in one’s self and the institution was but one diversion from this fact. In John Hockey’s terms, I was beginning to grasp what had been going on behind my back. The lens through which I apprehended the world was largely attributable to the work the RAF had put in to constituting me as a particular unit of proud military capital. The processes they employed to enable such a transition were made all the more potent through narratives of pride that shaped subjectivity, most obvious when interacting with (inferior) civilians. In turn, these tried and tested practices fostered prevailing ways of seeing important to the organization through which one was appraised as a complicit member of the armed forces, or as a questioning (marginalized) other. Resistance was allowed and in some senses encouraged but within certain safe parameters that were functional for the RAF (Hockey 1986). These micro acts merely rocked rather than capsized the boat, the balance of which relied on a carefully curated admixture of (apparent) intransigence, bland conformity, and a sense of pride. As Joe Glenton states in regard to the British army:

‘while there is some scope for creative thinking in the military, this is only within very narrow parameters. Figuring out a more efficient way to move vital stores, attack an enemy position or bomb a target from the air might well get you promoted. Questioning the entire military system or, God forbid, the war you are fighting will get you disciplined or, I can attest, jailed’ (Glenton 2021, 148)

The militarized appeal to our younger, and insecure masculine selves didn’t flow from the RAF’s altruism to facilitate our flourishing as human actors in the wider sense, but rather hollowed us out for wholly instrumental reasons through its anti-intellectual culture (Glenton 2021, 58). To a degree at least, each airman and airwoman was imbued with their own misplaced belief that they were high status and largely autonomous actors replete with a relatively unfettered agency. Thus, at the heart of military life (and it might be added, many other organizations) is a profound duplicity – masked by a sense of one’s value and worth – that may not be obvious to its members. Everything that is done for those serving in the armed forces is skilfully calibrated to instantiate a form of psychological docility and social acquiescence of which pride is a key component.

When life’s journey is mapped out to such a fine degree as is the case with the armed forces, significant acts of transgression or deviation don’t just feel dangerous but become ontologically impossible. One’s horizons of possibility are constrained in ways that also provide a certainty in the world. We had long forgotten, or more appropriately, had on account of our junior years at the time of enlistment, only partially experienced the ideological vistas of a civilian existence beyond the wire where relative freedom to ‘be’ (politically) otherwise was possible. Some relished this form of mental incarceration (we called them ‘NATO potatoes’ or ‘cabbages’), others didn’t care, and a handful railed against the system scoring small gains with over-length hair, unpolished shoes, highly accomplished acts of skiving, and a myriad of banal, everyday acts of petty subversion (Higate 1998). In sum, the pride we were encouraged to develop was very much based on a narrow, depoliticized agenda established by the RAF that, in turn, was rooted in cultures of masculinized whiteness that again in retrospect – are now a matter of regret, embarrassment, and shame.

Constituting the racialized other: proud to be white?

It’s 1990, and 7 years into my career. In these final years, I served at RAF Marham in the flatlands of Norfolk and was by now, studying at night school for A-levels in Sociology and English, in preparation for my plan to leave a year later and attend university. The experience of studying sociology meant that military and civilian life-worlds clashed with real force, such that my questioning of the armed forces and my place within them occupied every waking hour in one way or another. At this point, and to be sure, I was in, but not of the RAF. The dominant value systems circulating in the institution that I had become so adept at navigating, was now anathema to my re-wired sociological brain where a sense of shame was in the ascendancy as I became aware of the injustices and contradictions at the heart of the institution. I came to realize that RAF culture constituted women and those of colour as inferior in subtle yet potent ways. Idle conversation between colleagues was often racist, sexist, misogynistic, and almost always sexualized in ways that would be deemed inappropriate even in the context of 1980s Britain. Hardly a word could be uttered without it being linked to sex – the creativity of these connections was at time impressive but somehow depressing and predictable (Hyde 2015) with one former colleague informing me that he thought of women as little more than ‘vaginas’ on legs’. Another of my colleagues (who I shall call Harry) really hated South Asians and regularly used the racial slur P*kis to describe them. Delivery of paperwork to our squadron by an individual fitting such a derogatory description was met by Harry with disgust: how could a brown person be allowed to serve in (our/white) armed forces? During these visits, Harry became extremely angry in ways that seemed wholly out of kilter with his otherwise light-hearted and jokey northern demeanour. Yet, his revulsion was unremarkable, normalized, run of the mill, and even my own critical turn found its limit at racism. I thought to myself ‘do I hate them [the racialised others]’? I wasn’t really sure. Should I hate them? What would it feel like to hate them? That I failed to challenge Harry despite my growing infatuation with sociology was, in retrospect telling, and speaks to the potency of the wider racialized belief systems in play at this time. Just another day of routinized white supremacy fuelled by default complicity that we were better than civilians that, more broadly, stood as the key definitional attribute of being a member of the (white) armed forces of which we were meant to be proud.²³ In a scene portrayed by Dorling (2019, 57), a white British character visiting the Empire Exhibition in 1924 states when confronted with an African woman skilfully weaving cloth ‘they are backwards … they only understand drums’. The weaver replies ‘you want to know what your white skin makes you? It makes you white. That’s all, no better, no worse than me’. The authors conclude by stating that

‘the message is incomprehensible to a man who is convinced of the British superiority of British whites over all “coloureds” and all foreigners.’ (Dorling 2019, 57).

Serving individuals made a choice – accept their role in the institution that provided them with a good deal of everyday security in terms of access to food, shelter, money, status, a sense of belonging, purpose, pride, and superiority or alternatively take responsibility for their indubitable political role in an institution directly implicated in violent foreign policy, its links with the arms industry (or ‘Big Death’ as Joe Glenton argues), and, as recent revelations illustrate, torture by proxy powers and the perpetration of war crimes (Baldwin 2020; Perlo Freeman 2021; Williams 2012). The former is easier, the path of least resistance; remain disinterested in the entanglement of one’s professional and personal life with the politics of violence. As one of my colleagues told me at the time, ‘put yer head down and do yer bird’. The latter is rather more difficult. Criticism of the institution invited exclusion, ostracism, isolation, and bullying. It marked one out as different, weak, non-committal, flaky, and tainted with impending civilian-hood if the decision to leave became public. Going out on a limb in this way was terrifying. Thoughts of a civilian future engendered waves of ontological insecurity as the future fragmented into a kaleidoscope of uncertainty around where to live, getting a job, and becoming one of the demeaned civilian population of whom few were proud in quite the same way as their military peers. In sum, exposure to critical sociological thought undermined my pride in an organization that felt sealed off from the wider, altogether more progressive host society of which – psychologically at least – I had now become a part.

Final thoughts

In this paper, I have argued that pride is a functional conceit for the armed forces in that, through the fostering of embodied belonging rooted in deep social bonds, the institution successfully manoeuvres individuals into the ‘kill chain’. I have done so by drawing on distinct career trajectories that invoked a proud military masculine voice in the former, and a similarly privileged, yet dissenting de-militarized masculine intervention in the latter. Military masculine pride is calibrated towards instantiating responses deemed to be ‘operational effective’.²⁴ It is also intended to bolster a collective sense of self-worth that extends to garnering respect from a wider public fascinated by the mythologized exploits of military actors. Here, the discourse of unique achievement and inherent superiority of the armed forces collective is nested within the figure the sacrificial liberal sovereign subject. Allegedly born of an exceptional tenacity, physicality, and drive to get the job done through the ability to ‘crack on’, his or her perceived efforts are framed in regard to the foil of the inferior civilian who is believed to lead a comfortable and largely futile existence.

A key element of this critique of the RAF and its role in imperial foreign policy is also one that shines a light on the institution’s misogynistic and racist cultures (West and Antrobus 2021). Veteran activists frequently invoke these latter elements of structural injustice with the corollary of their transition from regular soldiers, sailors, or air-people to civilian also one of the military masculine reassessments (Bulmer and Eichler 2017). That militarized gendered subjectivity is troubled in this way may help to explain veterans’ frequent resentment, regret, and rage directed towards the armed forces as new forms of ontological security are sought during this period of identity turbulence (Glenton 2021). While undoubtedly viewed as perfidious by many in wider society, veterans' frustration rather than pride of their previous employer and their role in imperial foreign policy (Glenton 2021, 184) should spark critical debate around the ways that some of the poorest and most vulnerable in society are exploited. In this way, pride expressed through approbation for violence merely lubricates the legitimacy of military force and the corollary of militarism upon which it depends. A more appropriate response to the repatriated bodies of dead soldiers through the streets might be one of the constructive engagement with the deferential audience whose political faculties are weakened in the face of the personalized visceralities of war that cohere on the site/sight of the ‘fallen’. Might I suggest that the ‘fallen’ be better commemorated if their memory forms the basis of a conversation that is staunchly and unapologetically anti-militarist and anti-imperial and centres on the self-interested geopolitical imperatives animating the use of violence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. What does it mean to claim that the ‘state sanctions violence’? While outwith the scope of the current article, questions that foreground the top-down view and primacy of state power demand critical scrutiny as Paul Dixon has argued.

2. In claiming that the ‘military’s’ main purpose is security’ Claire Duncanson and Rachel Woodward (2016: 13) elide the violence unleashed on (often) racialized populations and the allied insecurities these interventions generate. Euphemistically referred to as ‘collateral damage’ are the many thousands of civilians who have died at the hands of the British and US militaries over many decades; few would argue that either Iraq or Afghanistan are secure despite the vast military involvement in these regions over recent decades. A more appropriate understanding of ‘security’ able to grasp its ideological deployment, might entail a focus on the work it performs in legitimizing the use of military violence according to geopolitical, geostrategic, and arms industry aims and influences for example.

3. Military losses fuel a binary debate where advocates for continued deployment aver that those killed in the field ‘should not die in vain’ versus others who lobby for withdrawal, and therefore ‘cutting their losses’.

4. While seemingly benign, my responsibility for providing aircrew with classified maps and images of ‘targets’ in Kuwait during the first Gulf War while working in the intelligence cell is now a matter of deep regret and puts me closer to the violence than many in my trade of Personnel Administrator.

5. Paul Dixon argues that ‘the military has always been one of the UK’s most respected institutions, alongside the NHS and the BBC. There was a dip in popularity after the invasion of Iraq. Since 2005, “favourable” opinions of the armed forces have gone from a low of 54% in 2005 to 88% in 2017. Most significantly, those having a “very favourable” impression have gone from 14% to 61%.’ This data comes from an MoD Public Opinion Survey conducted in 2017. See: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/684573/Public_Opinon_Survey_-_Summer_2017.pdf accessed 27 February 2020.

6. Government sources reveal that a total of 3,117 military personnel were either injured or killed over a cumulative period of 28 years of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq (see: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9298/CBP-9298.pdf and https://www.gov.uk/government/fields-of-operation/iraq accessed 13 October 2021). However, while these figures divert from the true cost of the conflicts (in terms of the inestimable number of Afghan and Iraqi casualties and military personnel suffering unreported mental health issues), in 2020 alone 24,470 people were killed or seriously injured on the UK’s roads (see: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/956524/road-casualties-year-ending-june-2020.pdf accessed 14 October 2021.

7. This ‘fortitude’ is a matter of professionalism borne of advanced training regimes rather than something to do with the inherent and unique qualities of the military actor in question (King 2006).

8. See: https://www.raf.mod.uk/recruitment/media/3897/20200703-raf_ap1_2019_rev_3_page_spreads.pdf accessed 29 October 2021.

9. The UK’s ongoing enlistment of child soldiers and the armed forces (particularly the army’s) continued targeting of the poorest regions of the nation complicates the notion of ‘choice’ open to such disenfranchised actors.

10. Though it is important to stress that a small number of armed forces personnel undoubtedly perform in exceptional ways – the notion of ‘bravery’ springs to mind here. Yet, a focus on these acts diverts from others rarely conceived of as exceptional – surviving as a rough sleeper with little or no resources during a harsh British winter (whether civilian or former military) is a remarkable achievement though rarely seen as such.

11. For an archetypal representation of military pride, see: https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-20305222-close-up-soldier-standing-front-american-flag-4k accessed 27 February 2020.

12. The documentary film-maker David Botti states that the majority of those serving ‘are non-combat related. I’ve heard from a number of veterans who had these types of jobs, and feel even more discomfort at being called “heroes”. For them that’s exactly what they were: “jobs”. Yet they felt the public expected them to be something more. So, once you drill down into this issue, it really does become quite complex – not all veterans had the same experience, and they are affected by the general public perception in different ways.’ See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34791821 accessed 27 February 2020.

13. A contradictory view intended for veterans is presented by the US military in the following way ‘Whatever roll [sic] you might take on after the military, it is important to the spirit of the warfighter to understand that nothing has been undone. If you have earned the title of Marine, Ranger, SEAL, or others, that title remains. You may feel it most when you are in uniform, but the title you earned is inherently yours to keep and no person or job can take that away. There is a certain amount of pride that should exude from you as you carry yourself into the workplace and there is nothing wrong with others knowing exactly who you are. See: https://www.military.com/veteran-jobs/career-advice/military-transition/pride-and-humility-transitioning-out-of-the-warfighter-elite.html accessed 27 February 2021.

14. A task at which my proficiency was always in question as attested to by annual assessments despairing of my inability to file and type in a satisfactory manner.

15. The sanitized phrase ‘bombing sortie’ distracts from the visceral realities and horrors of this form of industrialized violence involving decapitation, being burned to death, being suffocated, and, if the victim is fortunate enough, being killed quickly.

16. The fictionalized (deeply egotistical and narcissistic) WW1 pilot played by Rik Mayall in the BBC’s hit comedy Blackadder is a case in point with regard to the adoration he invokes amongst some in his potential trainee pilot audience. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UlaAHdcRMg accessed 26 October 2021.

17. The media pundit and former RAF aircrew John Nichol served as an RAF navigator yet in the early days of his public appearances, and presumably as one way to enhance his credibility, referred to himself as a pilot.

18. Or so I was told. I never got to see the results of the aptitude test and have been told in the interim that – regardless of the actual performance in the test – recruiters may only flag up those trades that are ‘undermanned’ as one way to fill their quotas.

19. McNeil captures the visceral dimensions of pride in this context when he states: ‘Marching aimlessly about on the drill field, swaggering in conformity with prescribed military postures, conscious only of keeping in step so as to make the next move correctly and in time somehow felt good … A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual’ (McNeill, 1997: 2; cited in McSorley 2016, 106).

20. Moral panics over troops ability to fight due to being overweight have begun to appear with some regularity in the media. A recent example can be found here:https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/one-five-troops-fat-fight-13412625 accessed 27 February 2020.

21. Presented here in humorous terms and inspired by Spike Milligan’s memoir of his experiences in the Second World War entitled ‘Adolf Hitler: My part in his downfall’ is the serious point that such practices rely on the accumulated labour of all of those that took part.

22. Those of my colleagues serving at RAF Akrotiri on the distant island of Cyprus (likely spending their down time on the beach) also received a Gulf War Medal. While RAF Tornado aircrew with whom we worked closely also enjoyed this luxury living, numerous of them were killed and injured on operations.

23. Evidence for the continued racialized dynamics of military culture is easy to find in the form of numerous recent reports (Wigston 2019). However, against the backdrop of the learned liberal discourse (Basham 2013) that presents a veneer of apparent equality in respect of matters of gender and race, a cursory look at the ARSSE website and its views from amongst the ranks demonstrates that racism and sexism flourish in the form of ‘banter’ and ‘irony’.

24. Operational effectiveness is essentially an empty signifier. I once asked a senior military commander to define it and he replied ‘we know it when we see it’. Arguments that led to the exclusion of gay personnel turned on their apparent threat to ‘operational effectiveness’ that turned out to be wholly spurious after the ban was lifted.