Weary Warriors Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers
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Weary Warriors Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers Pamela Moss and Michael J. Prince Weary Warriors This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. Weary Warriors Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers Pamela Moss and Michael J. Prince berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. First published in 2014 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2014, 2019 Pamela Moss and Michael J. Prince Open access edition published in 2019 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moss, Pamela, 1960- Weary warriors: power, knowledge, and the invisible wounds of soldiers/ Pamela Moss and Michael J Prince. — 1st ed. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-346-8 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78920-110-9 (open access ebook) 1. Military psychiatry—Philosophy. 2. Veterans—Medical care—Social aspects. 3. Veterans—Psychology. 4. Soldiers—Psychology. 5. War neuroses— Social aspects. 6. Post traumatic stress disorder—Social aspects. 7. Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984—In uence. 8. Sociology, Military. I. Prince, Michael J. II. Title. UH629.M68 2014 616.890088’355—dc23 2013041919 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78238-346-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78920-110-9 (open access ebook) An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the sup- port of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collabo- rative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access versioncan be found at knowledgeunlatched.org This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribu- tion Noncommercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license. The terms of the license can be found at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. For uses beyond those covered in the license contact Berghahn Books. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. Contents List of Tables vii Preface viii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction. Weary Warriors Walk among Us: Combat, Knowledge Circulation, and Naming Traumatized Soldiers 1 Chapter 1. Ravished Minds and Ill Bodies: Power, Embodiment, Dispositifs 17 Chapter 2. Unse ling Notions: War Neuroses, Soldiering, and Broken Embodiments 34 Chapter 3. Classifying Bodies through Diagnosis: Knowledges, Locations, and Categorical Enclosures 59 Chapter 4. Managing Illness through Power: Regulation, Resistance, and Truth Games 92 Chapter 5. Cultural Accounts of the Soldier as Subject: Folds, Disclosures, and Enactments 113 Chapter 6. Fixing Soldiers: The Treatment of Bodies, Minds, and Souls 138 Chapter 7. The Soldier in Context: Psychiatric Practices, Military Imperatives, and Masculine Ideals 161 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. vi Contents Chapter 8. Soldiering On: Care of Self, Status Passages, and Citizenship Claims 186 Chapter 9. Military Bodies and Ba les Multiple: Embodied Trauma, Ontological Politics, and Patchwork Warriors 214 References 229 Index 256 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. Tables 3.1. Diagnostic Categories of Hysterical, Neurotic, and Traumatic Illness among Military Service Personnel and Medical, Colloquial, and Operational Names Describing the Bodies and Minds of Combat Troops Enduring Deep Emotional Distress or Psychological Wounds 70 3.2. Neuropsychiatric Casualties Admi ed to the #2 Canadian Exhaustion Unit, 1 January to 9 February 1945 72 3.3. Similarities among Three Cases of Shell Shock Cases Described by Charles S. Myers 79 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. Preface War, death or sickness did lay siege to it. –William Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished. –Wilfred Owen, Mental Cases In Weary Warriors we examine psychologically wounded soldiers from confl icts spanning the American Civil War, through the two world wars, the war in Viet Nam, UN peacekeeping missions, Iraq, to the current war in Afghanistan. Our interest primarily is not with the question of why soldiers are stressed or how they become exhausted from a given war, nor is our interest to detail the specifi cs of individual weary sol- diers emerging through a particular war in order to compare illness and combat experience. Our chief interest rather is with the questions of why and how claims of combat stress are regularly contested by psychiatric and military authorities, and how combatants themselves, individually and in various forms collectively, struggle for recognition, treatment, and support for war-related neuroses. Major questions we address are these: How do material bodies and bodily discourses of individual lives create weary warriors? How are psychological wounds and the emotional dis- tress of military personnel taken up by diff erent confi gurations of power and knowledge over time? How are distinctions between the well soldier and the ill soldier established and enacted? How do soldiers fi nd support institutionally within and outside the military? And, a er discharge into civilian life, where and how do veterans with ill bodies seek help and understanding? We have wri en this book with three groups of people in mind. The fi rst group is a group of scholars and students in military studies and the history of warfare, the sociology of health and illness, disability and This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. Preface ix public policy studies, social and cultural geography, and the growing area of Foucault studies based prominently in history, philosophy, political science, and women’s studies. We see that these students and scholars in these fi elds share an interest in psychiatry and trauma and in the subjec- tivity of embodied individuals in pain and distress. A second group is vet- erans themselves from both recent and distant ba les as well as veterans’ partners, other family members, and organizations representing veterans in advancing their claims to state organizations and medical institutions. A third group includes professionals: caregivers and health practitioners working with veterans dealing with pos raumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health issues as well as policy- and decision-makers in legislatures and executive departments of government that administer the programs and regulations that govern the lives of so many weary warriors. While these people remained at the front of our minds as we wrote, we cannot claim that this book was wri en for them as readers. Indeed, it is the fi rst group, scholars and students, which are most likely to read this book. And that is okay with us. Our overall goal is to show how a particular way of thinking—developed in dialogue with the works of Mi- chel Foucault and of several poststructural feminists—breaks open what weary warriors are and how those warriors get constructed. Once we un- snarl the knots that have produced traumatized soldiers as ill in the way they are ill and reentangle lines of thinking that have been submerged or le out of the way we think about soldiers enduring deep emotional and psychological distress are thought, we can begin to act diff erently. By acting diff erently, we do not mean forcing traumatized soldiers into prewound lives or ensuring assimilation into existing social and cultural environments. We mean that weary warriors need to be taking up their place within society, at home, and in their lives without being marked with a ostracizing mental illness, while feeling alive and ready to engage in living every single day, and having ample and appropriate support to reduce suff ering. With such an array of interests, titling our project proved diffi cult. Fol- lowing Judith A. Lyons (2007: 312), we recognize that the “term ‘warrior’ is controversial, o en deemed politically incorrect [within civil society]. However, it is deliberately used … to highlight that the experience of war does change a person.” Charles R. Figley and William P. Nash (2007b) employ the expression “war fi ghters” to designate those who served their country in ba le through the armed forces as combatants. Noah Richler (2012) calls Canada a warrior nation as do, more critically, Ian McKay and Jamie Swi (2013). Trevor Greene and Debbie Greene (2012) refer to the warrior path for a soldier’s journey of survival and healing following a This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.