Making WAR AT FORT HOOD - Grade: 84 PDF

Preview

Summary

essay notes...

Description

Introduction    

 



   

 

  



  

 

War is perceived as an exception. Many unexamined (psychological) factors of war. Civilians make up the vast majority of modern war dead. ‘THIS BOOK ARGUES THAT THESE AND OTHER FORMS OF VIOLENCE WROUGHT OR ABETTED BY STATES AND OTHER SOVEREIGNS ARE FUNDAMENTAL TO THE EXERCISE OF POWER OVER HUMAN BEINGS RATHER THAN REGRETTABLE EXCEPTIONS TO ENLGIGHTED IDEALS..’ Wars protecting innocent life, “war on terror”, involve subjecting human life to a CBA. The machine (Smith). Responsible for both sustaining and endangering soldiers’ lives (page 11). The human body is essential for day-to-day labour of war. Mauss (2006) “man’s first and most natural instrument. Reinforced as the wars on terror couldn’t carry on without the physical presence of tens of thousands of such bodies. ‘The solider is at once the agent, instrument and object of state violence.’ Foucault (1979) writes, discipline renders a docile body productive by subjecting it to countless minute and technical compulsions. Agamben (1998), ‘homo sacer’, soldiers are human life that it outside the law and therefore can be killed. The army put services in place to improve the soldiers mental and emotional well-being, in addition to the economic subsides that provide for the solider. He is a biopolitical subject not merely kept from dying but also made to live (Foucault 2003). Ethnography objective. THE ENTAILMENTS OF LIVING IN AND WITH BODIES THAT ARE INSTRUMENTS AND OBJECTS OF VIOLENCE. The soldier’s exceptional position is a stepping-off point for understanding the affective currents and exchanges in which soldiers are enmeshed: the lived effects of war. Soldiers are caught in the most restrictive, overdetermining and flaringly vulgar power structures. Berlant (2007) “slow death”. Shaping people’s lives in the community surrounding Fort Hood unfold in ways that are episodic, slow or struck. Dime’s story reveals the terror and anxiety of war, as well as the pleasures and satisfactions associated with it. Killed and wounded bodies are the foundation of which the political and ideological aims of war are materialized (Scarry 1987). This is a basic feature of military life, especially for the community of Fort Hood. Soldiers and their families are iconic national avatars and the losses they experience are valorised and fetishized in the media representations and political discourse. The army is a wide-ranging system of order and ordering violence. One which distributes worthiness, extracts value and wreaks violence accordingly. The army audience wishes to hail militarism. The army is a profoundly gendered institution, encouraging and relying on connotatively manly practices, traits and dispositions. The suppression of care and empathy in order to be able to command and inflict violence. Woman account for 13% of active duty US soldiers. However, specialties (MOS) remain closed to women. The woman in the army are deeply invested in the masculine homosociality of Army corporate culture. For example, , an engineer said “I hate females so much”.







  





On the flip side, the partners of men who’s counterparts have been deployed set up infrastructures to support one another. However, what infrastructure is in place for the partners of woman serving. The FRG’s are both connotatively and demographically feminine. This can lead these men to make themselves feel feminized by their peripheral or proxy attachment to the insutution. Historically the army has promoted African Americans and Latinos to senior positions at significantly higher rates than the private sector. Military service can be a real pathway to residency or citizenship for both documented and undocumented immigrants. Although, the US army are still institutionally racist, such as the US Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. ‘Its critics see it as cynically exploiting the economic precarity of non-whites while cultivating, in true imperial fashion, the hatred toward racial others at home and abroad that facilitates the taking of life and the domination of populations. “There is zero tolerance for racism in the army”, whilst ironically a group of exclusively black soldiers were fathered in the next room. The army offers an escape from class disadvantages, however, Finley (2011) argues “joining up may represent a choice from among limited options”. The highly dependent local economies spawned by military bases reproduce or even exacerbate existing class inequalities. Some people in Killeen spoke resentfully of the Army’s dominance of the local economy and observed the lack of alternative prospects amounted to “breeding soldiers”. When a solider was asked what misconceptions they thought civilians had of them, they answered, “that we have a lot of money. However, there is a lot of money, with fort hood and Killeen having a direct and indirect annual input into the local economy of $6 billion dollars. This section discuses both race and class in the army.

Chapter One -

‘The first chapter depicts the setting for this work and the “exceptional” ambiguity of the Army’s presence in everyday life – as something that is experienced as natural, but also constantly commented on and critiqued by the people who live with it.



The Fort Hood community is, as Taussig calls a “nervous system”. ‘Shaped by the excessive and contradictory rules and regulations.’ ‘Everything is structured but there is much that can’t be counted on. There is a rule for everything, but not always a reason.’ In Fort Hood ‘bureaucratic processes are both intrusive and reassuring, sustaining and punishing.’







 

 





 

 

  

‘The way that all this institutional apparatus makes one feel both closely monitored and largely invisible resonates eerily with the way that soldiers, when confronted with personal problems or breakdowns of bureaucratic order, may find themselves “falling through the cracks” of the institution and its mechanism of care, maintenance and support. Even within Fort Hood people are organised by their relative proximity to war. The base is divided north-south between operational and administrative functions. North is the actual fighting and the south is responsible for bureaucratic management etc. Today Fort Hood boats the world’s biggest concentration of armoured military vehicles. In many ways Fort Hood is just an ordinary place where ordinary people live. Conventionalism of Army life and the working and lower middle class, middle-American populations that the military disproportionally draws from. Uniformed soldiers are the most notable sign of war’s everyday presence. The army has a two-tiered rank system, firstly enlisted soldiers and then NCO’s. Soldiers are directly accountable to superiors within their chain of command, however rank entails a host of formal and informal interpersonal protocols. For example, calling officers “sir” in addition to posture, bodily disposition and eye contact. Soldiers are students of symbology and sartorial etiquette due to the wealth of information offered by uniforms. Soldiers uniform, in particular their badges, become a barometer of their worth. MacLeish witnessed first-hand what it feels like to live in a body subjected to AR 670-1’s 362 pages and thousands more pages of regulations too. Common stereotype of ‘debased’ and ‘out of control’ military communities. Reckless actions as service men were ‘used to doing it in Iraq’. An acquaintance, who was a social worker dealt with two types of Trauma. The first was the trauma of her own work and then the secondary trauma of an overstressed institutional work environment. She added she hated Killeen and she was glad to be gone. Killen is associated with racialised and class pathologies, which the army “tends to attract”. The war had great effects on the people it left behind in Killeen. For example, the wife’s who shouted at their children and the church was full because of the mortal dead lurking in the desert lands. The writer talks about a world, within the domain of the military and how she and her acquaintance were ‘outside of this world’. It is once again mentioned how the army attracts “people who were young and of limited prospects and experience. There is a juxtaposition in the army of feeling “damaged and dignified”, “proud and in need of help” or “cynical about and satisfied with their work”. This resembles the nervousness of the army system.



Debbie created ‘the Foundation’, which testifies the basic unmet needs of some soldiers and military families. Such needs should be tend to by the Army’s autocratic pastoralism. For example, a solider with testicular cancer about to be discharged from the Army without disability compensation of health care showcase the harsh realities of the US Army. Debbie radiated maternal warmth, with people who she supported calling her “Mum”. Soldiers came to Debbie when they didn’t fit in comfortability into other structural domains.

Chapter 2

-

‘The second chapter analyses the corporeal “feelings” that soldiers associate with being in Iraq in harm’s way, and the particular bodily sensibilities engendered by the natural and material environment that soldiers find themselves in.



In Rieckhoff’s, Chasing Ghosts (2006), Iraqis attributed supernatural capabilities with the US Army, such as sunglasses which gave X-ray vision and their boots could disarm mines. However, this doesn’t take away from the fact there is something supernatural to what soldiers are capable of. Benjamin (1969) addresses the technological progress evident in modern warfare, which has intensified destructive forces upon the rise of “think-killing” as opposed to “man-killing weapons”. One example of the technological warfare is the bombs that reduce trucks to knots of smoking black metal. This chapter helps us to understand soldiers vulnerability to violence just as much as their ability to produce and withstand it. Mortality is only a “weak proxy” for the conditions soldiers are subject to as they survive to confront unprecedented conditions (Gawande 2004). Seremetakis (1996) addresses the ‘involuntary’ body responses soldiers feel without even thinking about them, it is the human nature of their senses and feelings, which come unbidden and unwilled. ‘When we feel we are obliged to do something about our feeling as they both incite and constrain us’. This is paralleled by the involuntariness of military discipline and hierarchy.



   











   

 

Some soldiers spend a third of their lives regularly deploying to Iraq. For some, this is the largest-looming entity around which so-called normal life was periodised, structured and conceived. Chad said to understand what life is like for soldiers “you have to look at ’what makes the war?’”. The tiny anxieties uncertainties of preparation and travel, the loss of control and individual autonomy and the heat and weight. Even the good (out there) is shaded by the fact that everyone is “miserable for long periods of time”. The uniform isn’t always up to scratch, for example, Dime pinched the front of his ACU blouse between two fingers and said “by the way, put in your book that these things are fucking retarded!” They sucked in the desert he said. After years of such abuse what does this mean for your body, you always need to use foot powder and carry baby wipes and for woman you need to change your menstrual pad twice as frequently as you would otherwise. The need to consume water quickly becomes interwoven with assaults on comfort, health and personal safety. The mineral in the water in Iraq can give you kidney stones but you can’t not drink it. Soldiers live on MREs and hot water. Sometimes soldiers would pay locals ten us dollars (11,920 Iraqi dollars) for ice when they could get it. Does US Army boost local economies? When on patrol soldiers go to the bathroom in a plastic bottle, they’re afraid to get off the tank in case they get blown up. Woman end up holding it in until they get somewhere private, however the result can be kidney infection. Although, little plastic funnels can help woman pee standing up but the army can’t get freshettes for woman soldiers. Woman are also at risk of sexual assault. ‘As long as you go to bed with a clean conscience’, this provides evidence that once you join the army illegal things, such as killing become legal, soldiers are exempt under extreme circumstances.



    



Soldiers are not the one calling the shots, the one making the decision to be there, that is someone far way, who himself doesn’t have to go and has cursed the soldiers body with the madness of going out in the heat Weight is similar to the heat in its invisibility. Soldiers end up with “hand me down gear” getting shoulder injury from this, sitting in a toobig vest while driving convoys that lasted a day or two, or more. Kelly addresses that due to the conditions and uniform soldiers become exhausted but what does weeks of exhaustion do to you or fifteen months? “There’s a lot of reasonability putting that fucker on” (Dime), once again subscribing to the militarism and patriarchy through the conditioning in training. It is involuntary. Heat and weight tell a story about the biopolitical subjectivity of contemporary war. Heat tells the story of the hostility of the foreign environment. Weight tells the story of the technology that protects and empowers the soldiers body. “But they’re then made accountable for them as individuals, through the responsibility to drink water, wear your vest and Kevlar, change your socks, don’t complain and don’t get hurt.



“I used to complain about wearing gear”, he said, “but no more”. He has these two reminders, the thing that almost killed him and the thing that barely kept him alive. Socially embedded objects remain behind not only in narrative and consciousness but also in flash.



The New York Times published an article showing the exact numbers of casualties attributable to the lack of axillary plates in the vests (Moss 2006). This resulted in families spending their own money to send body Armor to their soldiers (Banerjee and Kiner 2004). ‘The state possessed the technological means to protect soldiers but between its own negligence and the resourcefulness of the enemy, US soldiers were being killed at a rate that the public found too high. The bare fact is human bodies were being offered up to die. ‘The politician lies to the solider that he will be cared for and lies to the public that the soldiers will not continue to be endangered. No one has to think about the bodies ready to be ripped apart.’ Advanced warfare appears as signs of tactical and technological superiority but in practice all these things exist in relation to insurgents Armor-piercing bullets, RPGs so on and so forth. Businesses target soldiers with advertisements, such as “IN JUST THE BLINK OF AN EYE, YOU CAN LOSE AN EYE” compensating for the lack of gov. intervention. Blackwater private security contractors had the newer, lighter, more effective Armor which the army wasn’t able to provide for soldiers. “On the other side of the government’s Armor and the enemy’s bullets, it’s your own flesh on the line and some actuarial calculation has been made about how much pain and damage your body can be expected to endure. “One has to be capable of killing to go on living”, the slider has to be capable of surviving in order to go on killing (Foucault 1988).





   







 

In the combat zone, operational knowledge is key as to realising what can hurt you and what can’t. For example, an involuntary response to involuntary circumstances, which didn’t come to you in time, can get you killed. Upon arrival, if it is a soldier first time, they may not be used to the war zone. Therefore, their body may not be accustomed to the specific of its enabled and vulnerable state. Scouts were nicknamed “bullet catchers” as they “drove around waiting to get shot at”. Scouts set out to “catch bullets” on purpose. Scarry (1987) defines war as a contest of injuring.





 

  



Soldiers were not probably equipped in the battlefield “you think you’re in a suit of Armor; it’s a goddamn façade! It goes right through a tank, it’ll go right through it like a hot knife through butter. “each one equals two lives, as if they and the names of their future victims written on them already, the way that US servicemembers wrote aggressive jingoisms, dirty jokes and patriotic memorials on the cannons, bombs and missiles unleashed on Iraq in the first months of war. “they only fucked with her because they considered her an equal; it was what they would done to anyone.” “The person is still there, and you have to ‘get them out of there,’ but he’s everywhere and he’s gone at the same time.” Soldiers spoke far more about feelings of vulnerability and exposure than they did about killing. Right and responsibility to kill carries a vulnerability that stems from the soldiers abjection from the law. “don’t never fear, because that’s the number one thing that gets soldiers killed. “Soldiers can’t be afraid of the consequences of their actions nor have moralistic consequentiality about their ability to kill. Schmitt (1985) declares sovereign I he who has no fear and no bad dreams.

Chapter 3

   

       

 

 

       

‘The third chapter looks at how vulnerability to violence takes intimate form through technology, time, medicine and structures of institutional support. Chapter 3 will analyse in depth the features of Trauma. Soldiers would often remarket things were simpler there (Iraq) than they were back home (Texas). “We are ‘attached to others’, [and thereby] at risk of losing our attachments”. The human body is vulnerable simply because it is biologically and socially alive. Jessica “would picture in her mind a car with government plates parked at her front door, and a couple of soldiers in shiny shoes and class as there to notify her that he had been killed”. “The emotions, like the senses, are involuntary, unleashed as one “comes up against the outside world”. When I met soldiers and told them about my project, they would routinely enjoin me to talk to the spouses because “they have the harder job”. Difficult to assure your significant other during blackouts etc. Lydia found virtue in having been protected from the knowledge of her husband’s brush with death. There is no perfect management of vulnerability. Systemic vulnerability is a collective phenomenon. Cindy said “just as the army ‘owns’ the solider, it owns you too. The army explicitly controls where you live now and where you will go next, the house you will live in and the people you will live and work with. The weight and wait bound up with each other. The physical wear and tear of these obligations can naturally and sometimes suddenly work against the capacity of the body to fulfil them. The soldier’s relentless labour can jeopardize his ability not only to perform his job but also to support himself and his family economically and understand himself as physically and socially whole individual. WTU – “mission is to heal”. Eventually, WTU soldiers are found fit and returned to duty or they pronounced disabled, their worthiness for compensation is judged and quantified and they are discharged from the army. “dead man’s profile”, the army’s “system for classifying individuals according to functional abilities”. Doctors only focus...