Men After War

Stephen McVeigh, Nicola Cooper, Stephen McVeigh, Nicola Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135964658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book is an innovative collection of original research which analyzes the many varieties of post-conflict masculinity. Exploring topics such as physical disability and psychological trauma, and masculinity and sexuality in relation to the "feminizing" contexts of wounding and desertion, this volume draws together leading academics in the fields of gender, history, literature, and disability studies, in an inter- and multi-disciplinary exploration of the conditions and circumstances that men face in the aftermath of war.

1 Introduction

Men After War

Stephen McVeigh and Nicola Cooper

On 9 August 2012, Angus Stickler of the BBC Newsnight program and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that the British military charity Help for Heroes had been criticized by some of the UK’s wounded troops for spending money on capital building projects rather than the care of former servicemen and women.¹ Debate over the charity’s activities in the British press brings to the fore questions which have been a perennial concern for both states and their institutions and their former service personnel. In the aftermath of conflict, how are former service personnel perceived by state and society on their return from the conflict zone? Who bears responsibility for the care of men and women injured in the service of the nation? This public debate occurred despite the existence of the Armed Forces Covenant, which sets out the terms of the relationship between the nation and its armed forces, and the obligations the nation owes to military personnel. The covenant has existed as an unwritten social and moral commitment between the state and the Armed Forces that has developed through long-standing convention and customs.² Although it currently has no legal basis, it implies that in return for the sacrifices that service personnel make, the state has an obligation to recognize that contribution and retain a long-term duty of care toward service personnel and their families. Criticisms over the last few years that the Military Covenant was being steadily eroded has prompted a series of welfare-related measures intended to improve the terms and conditions of service personnel, their families and the treatment of veterans. Upon taking office in May 2010, the government outlined a commitment to “work to rebuild the Military Covenant” which would include the writing of a new Tri-Service Covenant. In June 2010 the Prime Minister, David Cameron, also pledged to enshrine the principles of the Military Covenant in law. On 16 May 2011 the government published the first Armed Forces Covenant and a document outlining the measures it intended to put in place over the next few years in order to support that covenant. The government also announced its intention to amend the Armed Forces Bill, which is currently in the House of Commons, in order to enshrine the principles of the covenant in law.³

In spite of these moves to improve the lot of former service personnel, the BBC investigation uncovered complaints that Help for Heroes was subsidizing multi-million-pound Ministry of Defence building projects, when such money was needed for practical everyday help for injured service personnel and veterans. Injured troops and their families claimed that despite extra government money and the hundreds of millions of pounds raised by military charities every year, they were still not receiving the help they require. The investigation uncovered examples of wounded veterans having to pay for physiotherapy and for prosthetic limbs, reports of amputees with ill-fitting prostheses being told to pad their stumps with multiple pairs of socks and a black veteran who was initially issued with a white prosthetic hand. Harris Tatakis, a former corporal in the Royal Marines stated

I gave 13 years of my life to serving and I just feel like the moment you’re injured that’s it, you’re seen as a burden. You feel throughout you’re having to beg to get what you want, or to get fixed. It’s a very degrading process to go through.

What is interesting about the public debate surrounding the investigation’s findings is that it highlights not only pragmatic issues, such as the level of care accorded to veterans of conflict in return for their sacrifice, but it also raises questions concerning the status of men after war, their identities, their sense of their own, changed, masculinity and their relationship with the nation and society at large. It is this nexus of issues which the present volume will investigate.

MASCULINITIES AND MILITARISM

Men After War is a collection that seeks to explore masculinities in the aftermath of military combat. The connected issues of gender and masculinities have received significant scholarly attention in recent decades which has revealed a rich terrain of academic inquiry. This critical thinking in masculinities has been fruitfully applied to the particular condition of the soldier.⁴ Writers who have developed analyses of masculinity have suggested that there exists a prevailing masculine identity (hegemonic masculinity) to which males are generally encouraged to aspire.⁵ For many of these writers, this form of masculinity is characterized by precisely the same sort of qualities, traits and values which are prized by military institutions: “by the interrelationship of stoicism, phallocentricity, and the domination of weaker individuals, competitiveness, and heroic achievement.”⁶ Further, military organizations endorse and reinforce these particular models of masculinity through rituals, pageantry and commemorations which represent the public endorsement of such values and their institutionalization in national culture.⁷ A burgeoning literature has subsequently emerged which focuses in the first instance on military masculinities: explorations of the ways in which male identities are bound up with concepts of manly virtues, codes of honor and national values. This was led in part by the notion that military masculinity represented an idealized apogee of male identity. As Graham Dawson has observed, the soldier hero has proved to be one of the most durable and powerful forms of idealized masculinity within Western cultural traditions.⁸ Similarly, in characterizing ‘manly virtues’ as “will, power, honor, courage”, Mosse asserted that “the warrior provides a climax to a concept of manliness inherent in much of the construction of modern masculinity”.^9,10

But, as Higate and Hopton note, the relation between militarism and masculinity is also a symbiotic one:

Historically, there has been a reciprocal relationship between militarism and masculinity. On the one hand, politicians have utilized ideologies of idealized masculinity that valorize the notion of strong active males collectively risking their personal safety for the greater good of the wider community to gain support for the use of violence by the state [ … ] On the other hand, militarism feeds into ideologies of masculinity through the eroticization of stoicism, risk-taking, and even lethal violence.¹¹

Research in this field has been concerned with the ways in which society has adopted, absorbed and re-circulated soldier paradigms and indeed the extent to which “military masculinities are embedded into discourses of nationalism.”¹² Heroic military narratives have been given a particular inflection in discourses of the nation generated since the emergence of the nation-state. Intimately bound up with the foundation and preservation of a national territory, the deeds of military heroes were invested with the new significance of serving the country and glorifying its name. Soldiers not only represented the nation in arms, but they were also seen as the embodiment of national character and values. The soldier is a national avatar, a foundational figure and is evocative of the history, self-image and identity of the nation. He often functions as a point of origin from whence the myth of a community may spring. The figure of the soldier has thus evolved across time and national community in response to changing national narratives and reconfigured national and global identities.¹³ Among its most important contributions, this volume explores how these conditions persist once war is over, to consider the ways in which the associations and meanings wrapped up in the man as soldier are modified by the transition to the man as veteran.

While much published work on the soldier has concerned itself primarily with the ways in which the citizen can be transformed into a warrior, the (until quite recently) peculiarly homosocial realm of armies and combat and the unique experience of war, less work has been undertaken in the realm of ‘post-soldiering’, or what we have in the present volume termed ‘men after war’. While there exists an abundant specialist sociological literature on the medical and psychological repercussions of wars on veterans, there has thus far been less work beyond these fields. Some studies have dealt with the capacity of war to challenge and overturn accepted social norms and conventions of manliness. Attention has, for example, been paid to war’s very capacity to ‘un-man’, be this through physical or psychological injury: trauma, shellshock, disability or wounding.¹⁴ Much work has thus addressed the central question of the body of the man at war.¹⁵ A pioneering work in this field is of course Bourke’s Dismembering the Male (1996), which examines the effects of the Great War, and of military experience in general, on men of different classes and ages and their gender identities. Bourke’s chapters illustrate the themes which emerge from the study of men’s own accounts of their war experience: mutilating, malingering, bonding, inspecting and re-membering.

THE TRAUMATIZED VETERAN

What emerges from both the sociological and the less prevalent cultural studies work is an emphasis on the man after war as a traumatized and problematic figure and social actor. Sociological literatures have tended to foreground the difficulties experienced by men re-entering society after combat, to emphasize the list of social ills such as alcoholism, criminality and homelessness common among former servicemen and to identify the frequency of trauma and other mental health problems and their various treatments.¹⁶ By way of illustration, recent studies reveal that more Falklands veterans are believed to have committed suicide than were killed in the fighting in 1982. They also demonstrate that, in Britain in 2012, 20,000 ex-servicemen are in jail or on probation.¹⁷

While the need to care for wounded former service personnel has provided a catalyst for innovations in prosthetics, orthopedics and surgery, society has been less well-equipped to deal with the psychological impact of war and conflict. It is important to note that although the concept of shellshock was observed in the men fighting in WWI, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was only formally recognized in 1980. Thinking has changed recently in relation to the treatment of PTSD: as Jones and Wessely have observed, one key debate surrounding PTSD is whether or not each war engenders its own unique form of trauma.¹⁸

Changes in the ways in which wars are waged over time, whether these changes are technological or strategic, have meant that soldiers and veterans have been variously affected, with every new war creating new dimensions and definitions of physical and psychological trauma. In turn, such changes have provoked advances in medical technology with further consequence for men and society after war. The extensive use of the improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003 provides a useful illustration. While body armor and newly designed vehicles tried to counter the risk of IEDs, the military also changed its approach to treating those injured by the bombs. As a result, American soldiers wounded in Iraq had a better chance of survival than in any previous U.S. war, with more than 90% coming home compared to around 76% in the Vietnam conflict. However, improvements in medical technologies have increased and complicated the dilemmas not only for those injured as a result of war but also for those treating and subsequently caring for them. Gross describes how the principles of contemporary just war, unlike those of medical ethics, often go beyond the welfare of the individual to consider the collective interests of combatants and non-combatants and the general interests of the state. Military necessity, it is argued, plays havoc with patients’ rights such as the right to life, the right to medical care, informed consent, confidentiality and the right to die. The principles of triage in battle conditions dictate not need-based treatment but the distribution of resources that will return the greatest number of soldiers to active duty.

Thus, there emerges a conventionality to thinking about men after war: the veteran is the man who survives war, and that survival is usually secured at a price; he has invariably suffered some measure of trauma, be it physical and/or psychological. Society’s role is to decide how best to ‘re-normalize’ the traumatized and how to create of the injured or disabled a re-functioning citizen. This is not a new phenomenon: several chapters in this volume attest to societies’ historical need to minimize the visible scars of war and to re-form masculine identities disabled or disfigured by war. The prevalence of this scholarly emphasis on military trauma has tended to concretize the image of the veteran as a damaged loner suffering from flashbacks, nightmares, anger and depression, symptoms often leading to violence, alcohol and substance abuse, job loss, family breakdown and even suicide. This association between ex-servicemen and socially unwelcome patterns of behavior recurs in this volume’s chapters, demonstrating that the dilemmas regarding the social cost of the veteran have been a perennial and ongoing concern. Many discourses then, both past and contemporary, primarily figure the veteran as a member of a disturbed and socially disadvantaged underclass. The conferral of veteranhood in these discourses can therefore become a stigma, and the ways in which society mitigates the effects of war upon the individual, the way society engages with the veteran and, subsequently, how the veteran responds to these societal contexts are dominant themes in this volume.

DESERVING...