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Combat Soldiers and Their Experiences of Violence: Returning to Post-heroic Societies?

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Handbook of the Sociology of the Military

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Abstract

In Afghanistan, armed forces from Western countries such as Germany actively used violence in combat for the first time since the end of World War II. This active use of force in Afghanistan caused in some Western troop contributing countries a rupture resulting from a discrepancy of values and realities between so-called post-heroic societies and its armed forces in robust deployment. During their ISAF mission, a large number of soldiers were no longer mere passive victims of violence during attacks but were also confronted with the challenge of actively participating in combat and having to kill, if necessary. Based on half-structured in-depth interviews with German soldiers returning from Afghanistan as well as on interpretation of research material from other troop contributing countries, this paper focuses on the subjective perceptions and interpretations of military violence by soldiers. In a second step, we also discuss how these soldiers reintegrate as members of post-heroic societies and what challenges they face upon homecoming. The ‘theorem of post-heroic societies’ is questioned here as civil-military relations go well beyond this hypothesis: Soldiers and civil societies alike display more diverse answers to experiences of violence in theatre nowadays.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, most members of Western societies oppose the use of violence, on the other hand we are every day confronted with the “performative quality of violence as spectators” (Schmidt and Schröder 2001: 5 f.) and we expose ourselves to the omnipresence of depictions of violence in the media which often illustrates our “unspoken fascination by violence, this irritating lust for excess” (Langer 2013: 75).

  2. 2.

    The expression ‘soldiers returning from Afghanistan’ has been used intentionally in this context, because not all interview partners see themselves as veterans (cf. Sussebach 2014).

  3. 3.

    The interview passages quoted in this text have been edited slightly in order to remove empty phrases that disturb the reading flow, unless they contribute anything essential to the meaning of the respective statement. However, I have tried to repeat the soldiers’ expressions as accurately as possible.

  4. 4.

    At this point I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the soldiers who have supported my research project and allowed me valuable insights into their experiences and thoughts.

  5. 5.

    On the one hand this is due to the fact that in the course of my research I have met only few women with combat experience. On the other hand, female soldiers are rarely serving in the protection companies outside the camps. So for example in 2010, more than two thirds of the female soldiers of the 22nd contingent in Afghanistan performed supporting functions and thus mainly served within the camp. Langer (2012: 12), however, were able to ascertain in the course of an empirical study in Afghanistan in 2010 that a gender-specific difference between men and women with combat experience cannot be statistically proven. According to them, both groups display a similar willingness to use violence themselves after a prior exposure to violence. In other words, the data suggest that “the real physical experience of military violence tends to erase gender-specific effects of socialization” (Langer 2012: 15). This result was also supported by my male conversation partners who were unable to detect any gender-specific differences during combat.

  6. 6.

    The Israeli historian Harari (2004: 19) believes that field memoirs written by the junior ranks rate among the probably most influential historic texts ever written. The way war is perceived by the western public has been shaped by these texts in a significant way.

  7. 7.

    In this context, I would like to draw particular attention to the projects of Koelbl (2011, 2014) and Würich and Scheffer (2014). The edited volume by Böcker et al. (2013) also points out important internal points of view. On the whole, apart from scientific analyses, a broad range of documentations, reports, photo exhibitions, documentaries and movies, radio features, theatre plays and even Graphic Novels have been created about the mission in Afghanistan. Taking a closer look at these different approaches to the mission/war in Afghanistan would be worth a separate research project.

  8. 8.

    Eight soldiers died in Afghanistan in 2002, and in 2003 seven soldiers were killed in action (http://www.bundeswehr.de/portal/a/bwde/!ut/p/c4/DcJBDkAwEAXQs7hAZ2_nFtg0o0b7o_mkRROnJ-_JLD_qg6gXDmqWUaaAfmluaas53WJSol5KX08L0OxAbwWklZvRhVQOYvdvQw3JuKnlbHLuQ_cB0U_KLg!!/, last accessed on 01.12.2014).

  9. 9.

    David Riches (1947–2011) was one of the most important British representatives of the ethnology of violence. In his anthology “The Anthropology of Violence” (1986) he opened the research on violence for anthropologists as well.

  10. 10.

    The sociologist Randall Collins mentions a continuum between fear and tension as well as between competence and incompetence which can take effect during combat (2011: 106).

  11. 11.

    The philosopher Ernst Bloch was the first to use the expression “non-simultaneity”. Against the backdrop of the coexistence of heterogeneous stages of social and economic progress he attempted to critically explain the popularity of National Socialism in Germany (cf. Bloch 1985). Since the 1980s, Bloch’s thesis of non-simultaneity has also been applied to social developments characterized by simultaneity and multiple dimensions (see e.g. Albrecht 1991).

  12. 12.

    Johannes Clair wrote his book (2012) about these four November days of operation “Halmazag” from a Corporal's point of view.

  13. 13.

    In this context, the Swedish ethnologist Weibull (2012) mentions a so-called “post-deployment disorientation” which undoubtedly affects more soldiers returning from deployments abroad than a diagnosable post-traumatic stress disorder.

  14. 14.

    See also interview with former German Minister of Defence Thomas de Maizière, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/thomas-de-maiziere-im-gespraech-giert-nicht-nach-anerkennung-2092201.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2, last retrieved on 01.12.2014).

  15. 15.

    This number was calculated by an officer with operational and combat experience who was able to approximately ascertain how many soldiers per contingent were involved in combat situations, how many of them were deployed for the second, third or fourth time and who knew in which years the Bundeswehr was taking part “in active combat” (cf. Zimmermann 2014). The official data provided by the Federal Ministry of Defence about the number of awarded combat medals does not offer much clarification in this respect, because on the one hand the medals have sometimes been awarded based on very different criteria and also because some soldiers may have participated in more than one combat situation.

  16. 16.

    Experiences of violence can be potentially traumatizing, but they do not necessarily lead to a PTSD. Who is traumatized in which moment, in what manner and by which event always depends on a variety of different factors. “Thus the killing is at times banal and not traumatic; it is not too easy, nor too hard to bear.” (Bar and Ben-Ari 2005: 150).

  17. 17.

    Jonathan Shay noticed that the war experiences of Vietnam veterans resemble the events already described in Homer’s antique epic “Iliad”—problems with reintegration were mentioned there as well, some of them lasting for years. Along these lines a Vietnam veteran emphasized: “I truly haven't slept for twenty years …” (cf. Shay 1998: 17).

  18. 18.

    The German Navy has a lot of operational experience and is thus aware of these problems with reintegration. Whenever possible, after a completed mission far away from us in geographical terms such as e.g. off the Somali coast, they ship soldiers to a so-called “harbor for Europeanization” in order to make it easier for them to get used to the western oriented way of life again, before going back to their families.

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Tomforde, M. (2018). Combat Soldiers and Their Experiences of Violence: Returning to Post-heroic Societies?. In: Caforio, G., Nuciari, M. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of the Military. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71602-2_11

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