The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq initiated a surge of texts by US soldiers who utilized recent Web 2.0 technology to forge new types of war narratives, such as the so-called "milblogs." Milblogs merge letter and journal writing with journalistic reporting, and they maintain contact between soldiers and their social environment. They are at once public and private communication. Military psychology since Vietnam has referred to warrior traditions of Native American communities to discuss public narration and ceremonial acknowledgment of a soldier's war experience as vital elements for veteran readjustment and trauma recovery. This article analyzes an exemplary milblog to argue that the interaction between blogger and audience does similar cultural work and has comparable ceremonial and, therefore, therapeutic functions: Soldiers publicly share their experience, reflect on it with their audience, receive appreciation and support, and thus mutually (re-)negotiate group identity.
(2010) earned the Rolf Kentner Prize of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies and was published in 2015. His latest project, Ceremonial Storytelling, explores civic rituals and post-9/11 firsthand narratives written by US soldiers and veterans. Usbeck currently serves as Research Scientist at the State Ethnographic Collections Saxony, Germany.
The post-9/11 wars produced a new generation of US veterans. As the military campaigns dragged on over extended periods, public discourse on the wars refueled ongoing discussions from the Vietnam era about veterans’ social and psychological wellbeing. The public increasingly voiced concerns about psychological injuries such as posttraumatic stress, veterans’ postwar reintegration struggles, and suicides. This article will discuss two NGOs organized by and for veterans to analyze how their activism responds to the sense of social crisis prevalent in these public debates on veterans’ affairs. It will present the projects’ online self-representation and their documentation in activist scholarship and journalism to carve out how civic engagement in veterans’ affairs challenges the traditional myth of American individualism to promote volunteerism and community service as vehicles for reintegration, promoting – and enacting – the civil-military social contract.
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