Drawing on narrative and post-structural feminist sensibilities, I query the relational nature of healing in the aftermath of war of these 21st century wars (Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF)) as they are experienced and understood through this contemporary U.S. culture. Thus, in the course of this study, I met with and interviewed military and non/military participants. In this sense, I was able to meet with OIF/OEF military personnel including those veterans who had terminated their active or reserve duty with a military branch. I met with currently ‘active military’ as enlisted personnel, ranked professionals and/or reservists. These participants were currently employed with a branch of the military or National Guard and/or were still be connected to, or otherwise involved with the Iraq and Afghanistan ongoing wars when I met with them. I met with participants ranging in age from 24 - 62 years, ranging in rank from enlisted personnel to high level officers, and spanned the spectrum of military branches including the Navy, Marines, Army, National Guard or National Guard Reserves.
Thus, listening to the accounts of warriors and those who support them, I trouble the ways in which bodies speak to and through us as a means of expressing [beyond the language we are accustomed to] the profound disjuncture or fissures in the lived experience of repeated trauma as enacted through these wars in particular. Each person’s story exposed the nuanced ways in which suffering could not be isolated, captivated or clearly defined. Here I draw our attention to the ways in which we experience both suffering and support in relational and institutional contexts. I probe those inter-related master scripts, power structures and vast forms of sense-making apparatus that function as both enabling and constraining texts. The crux of this project lies in listening both with and through body/narratives and further querying scripts that traverse the personal, familial, social and political terrain. I probe ontological and epistemological ideals regarding the relationship between warriors, the loved ones who support them and the embodiment of social and institutional structures, systems, and objects. Participant’s narratives speak to the ways in which combat and trauma moves through and transforms a warrior’s and a support warrior’s body.
Critical to this endeavor is the understanding that discourse coheres in an amalgamation of multiple and complex power relations. Thus I probe our inherent signifying practices and work to transcend the binaries that ultimately emanate from a reliance on Cartesian biomedical models. Where such a model works to isolate, and individualize illness, I draw on scholars such as Frank (1995), Grosz (1994), Harter , Japp & Beck (2005), Lindeman-Nelson (2001), McKerrow (1998), Morris (1997, 1998) and others, to further trouble social constructs that not only undergirds what it means to be a warrior, but importantly, what it means to “support our troops.” Herein, issues of the corporeal, embodiment, and our intercommunicative texts rage in the confluence of body-being facing multiple deployments and limited resources. We have terrific advances in technology that allow for significant rates of increased body survival. Yet, given the historical dearth of research regarding combat trauma, during and in the aftermath of war, we have failed as a culture to listen, acknowledge, and consequently prevent such burdens that traumatize the souls of our young women and men. Moreover, we have barely begun to acknowledge those traumatized by default, support warriors whom also harbor considerable angst. This work then forefronts the relational components of how it is we come to identify illness and healing.
With this understanding I seek to frame vulnerability as an emotionally rich concept for pursuing relational healing. Where we are culturally inclined to relegate pain and anguish to the private sphere, our inculcation in war requires (demands) the response of a social body. Healing is both public and private in profoundly complex ways. I am thus compelled to ask, to listen with, for and from not only those bodies as they appear central to this dilemmas – our warriors – but also those bodies on the periphery – those that take up a space frequently silent in the deluge of attending to trauma in the aftermath of wars. I take up this question probing our cultural responses and understanding of what it means – beyond the rhetoric, beyond the infiltration of abundant texts that want to rally us all to “Support our Troops?”
The proposition I forward here, is one that lies within us. Drawing on our vulnerabilities, a wisdom (and great potentiality) resides in our most vulnerable moments; a vulnerability that implies great strength. This – is indeed a paradox not only for the warrior but for us as a nation. The possibility that strength lies in our fragility rests paradigmatically opposed to our understanding of living in a body where the reasoned mind subordinates the body.