‘This place isn't worth the left boot of one of our boys’: Geopolitics, militarism and memoirs of the Afghanistan war

Abstract

This paper argues for the continued significance of the text as a source and focus in critical geopolitical inquiry. It establishes the utility of the military memoir in explorations of popular contemporary geopolitical imaginaries, and considers the memoir as a vector of militarism. The paper examines the memoirs written by military personnel about service in Afghanistan with the British armed forces, specifically about deployments to Helmand province between 2006 and 2012. The paper explores how Afghanistan is scripted through these texts, focussing on the explanations for deployment articulated by their authors, on the representations they contain and promote about other combatants and about civilian non-combatants, and the constitution and expression of danger in the spaces and places of military action which these texts construct and convey. The paper then turns to consider how a reading of the military memoir with reference to the genre of testimonio might extend and inform our understanding and use of these texts as a source for exploring popular geopolitics and militarism.

Practices of Authorial Collaboration

“…Their focus is on the individual's experience rather than on broader reflection on the rationale for a conflict and its progress through time. They may attend to wider geopolitical concerns (Woodward & Jenkings, 2012a) and may be used to develop understanding of wider sociological, political, and anthropological issues in military participation (Brown & Lutz, 2007;Duncanson, 2011;Kieran, 2012;Kleinreesink, 2012;Woodward, 2008;Woodward & Jenkings, 2012b), but their primary focus and intent is with communication about the lived experience of participation in a specific conflict or war (Harari, 2008;Hynes, 1998;Vernon, 2005). They are almost always experientially based accounts by ground combat and infantry personnel and those working closely with them, and by aircraft pilots; accounts by rear-echelon, communications, and logistics personnel are very rare.…”

“…However, by seeing them as part of the collaborative work of more than the individual, and re-imagining the communities of practice that are involved, these critiques are more robust and dismissals are less easily promulgated. The memoir is increasingly part of a call for social justice, as the example of (primarily) Latin American "testimonio" literature shows (see Woodward & Jenkings, 2012a). To accommodate such accounts in the social sciences, we need to move toward a post-positivistic understanding of "authorship," that we suggest involves not just an orientation toward the writing of "others" but also reflexively with regards our practices of "authorship.…”

Of bats and bodies: methods for reading and writing embodiment

“…I wish to question how this concept can close off rather than open lines of communication between the 'out there' and the 'back home'. I do not dismiss the 1 Myself, and likely others who draw on Harari's work (Woodward and Jenkings, 2012b;Duncanson, 2013;Woodward and Jenkings, 2013) owe him a depth of gratitude for the concept of 'flesh witnessing'. My treatment of this concept here is with the intention to develop it further, rather than be a dismissal of its usefulness.…”

“…They can challenge, confirm, refocus and reorient public ideas about what war means and what it does (Woodward and Jenkings, 2012b;Dyvik, 2016). War stories have always had the capacity to do this, but within the genre of 'war literature' military memoirs occupy a particular space.…”

“…War stories have always had the capacity to do this, but within the genre of 'war literature' military memoirs occupy a particular space. In the UK alone military memoirs have an estimated market value of around five million pounds, and in the US they frequently appear on 'best seller' lists (Woodward and Jenkings, 2012b; see also Bosman, 2012;NPR, 2014). In addition to their popularity, they are set apart through their claim to 'truth', which often affords them a 'privileged authority' over the meanings of war and how it should be interpreted in the public sphere (Harari, 2008: 7;Scranton, 2015).…”