Abstract
Based on ethnographic research among women married to servicemen, this article explores the diffusion of militarisation across time as well as social space. The study setting is a garrison town in Germany during the deployment of women's husbands to Afghanistan. Rather than prioritising the grand narratives of linear time prevalent in IR and military history, however, this article takes into account cyclical and everyday modes of temporality that have traditionally been associated (and undervalued) as feminised ‘zones’, including reproduction, the domestic sphere and local social space. The article explores the temporal register of an operational tour and demonstrates the material, discursive and emotional labour undertaken by military wives in smoothing and converting this rupture into stability through everyday practices. Accounting for the diffusion of militarisation over time as well as space in this way provides further evidence that its causes and effects are intricately gendered.
El tiempo presente de Afganistán: dar cuenta del espacio, el tiempo y el género en los procesos de militarización
Basado en investigación etnográfica con mujeres casadas con militares, este artículo explora la difusión de la militarización a lo largo del tiempo y del espacio social también. El entorno del estudio es un pueblo guarnición en Alemania durante el despliegue de los esposos de las mujeres en Afganistán. En vez de priorizar las grandes narrativas de tiempo lineal prevalente en las disciplinas de relaciones internacionales e historia militar, sin embargo, este artículo toma en cuenta los modos cíclicos y cotidianos de la temporalidad que han sido tradicionalmente asociados (y sub-evaluados) como “zonas” feminizadas, incluyendo la reproducción, la esfera doméstica y el espacio social local. El artículo analiza el registro temporal de una misión militar y demuestra el trabajo material, discursivo y emocional llevado a cabo por las esposas de militares para suavizar y convertir esta ruptura en estabilidad a través de prácticas cotidianas. Dar cuenta de la difusión de la militarización a lo largo del tiempo así como del espacio de esta manera provee más evidencia de que sus causas y efectos están intrincadamente generizados.
阿富汗的现在式：在军事化的过程中解释空间、时间与性别
本文根据对与军人结婚的女性之民族志研究，探讨军事化在时间及社会空间中的扩散。本研究的背景，是在将女性的丈夫派遣至阿富汗时，德国的一处驻军城镇。不同于国际关係（IR）将军事历史中盛行的线性时间之大叙事置于优先地位，本文将传统上与女性化的“范围”相关（并受到轻视）的週期及每日时间模式纳入考量，包含再生产、居家领域与地方社会空间。本文探讨一次外派服务期中的时间注记，并显示军人妻子透过每日生活实践，缓和此一断裂、并将之转化成安定时，所从事的物质、论述及情绪劳动。以此般方式解释军事化在时间及空间中的扩散，提供了进一步的证据显示，其导因与效应是相当错综复杂地性别化的。
This essay is about the importance of temporality in thinking about militarisation as a process, especially as it has been understood with respect to gender and the social construction of space. Based on six months' ethnographic fieldwork living on a British Army camp overseas, it documents the everyday experiences of women married to servicemen during their husbands'' front-line deployment to Afghanistan. The article is part of a broader research project that explores the question of military wives' power and positionality vis-à-vis the British military institution and its implications for how to conceptualise ‘what counts’ as militarisation. The thinking I develop has evolved from a reading of Massey's collected work in Space, Place and Gender (1994). Massey's feminist critique focuses on the gendered dichotomies that structure understandings of the places where and times when politics is supposed to ‘happen’: in the global arena rather than at local level, for example, in linear time [as represented by ‘History (capital H)’ (Massey 1994, 253)] rather than in cyclical, everyday time (1994, 256). In this essay, I argue that such binary understandings of space and time (and the lack of attention to gender they imply) have also limited the empirical and analytical grounds for understandings of militarisation. I seek to address this oversight by paying attention to the spatial and temporal register of militarisation as it shapes the everyday experiences of women married to servicemen.
The multiple spaces and times of militarisation
The empirical focus of this article is an attempt to address the relative paucity of research on women married to servicemen in the context of the British armed forces in particular, and to address a gender bias towards both men and masculinities in the study of militarisation. Scholars define militarisation as ‘social pervasiveness and preparedness for organised violence’ (Higate and Henry 2011, 134), focusing on the ways in which military power ‘is woven through the social fabric’ (Kuus 2009, 548). Examples include the racialised identities of sex workers around US bases in South Korea (Moon 1997, 34–37), the reproduction of Britain as a multicultural nation (Ware 2012, 256) and the orientalist production of enemy ‘others’ (Gonzalez 2010, 104). Such work illustrates the productive power of militarisation, which Lutz (2002) has defined as ‘a process of inscription’ that results in the ‘less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality’ (723). This understanding of militarisation as a ‘step by step process’ (Enloe 2000, 3) that works in cooperation with other vectors of power has been usefully explored in relation to the social construction of space (Woodward 1998; Higate and Henry 2009, 2011). The study of what Woodward (2004) has called ‘military geographies’ includes a range of in-depth research on garrison towns and overseas bases such as the one at the centre of this study (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009a; Lutz 2001, 2009; Sandars 2000; MacLeish 2013; Gillem 2007; Hawkins 2001; Cooley 2008). Although much of this work analyses the power relations in flux around military sites, however, it does less to explore the grey areas and edges of militarisation as a lived experience, in other words, how it is understood, absorbed or negotiated by subjects in everyday life. In this article, I use the experiences of women married to servicemen to explore the presence of military power and some of its effects.
The ethnographic fieldwork on which this article is based comprised six months' participant observation and over forty interviews with women married to servicemen and some of their spouses. It was conducted in a British Army garrison town in Germany in 2012. The British Army has maintained a presence in Germany since the end of the Second World War. Some regiments such as the one at the centre of this study have been based in Germany for well over a decade. Owing to the long-term nature of such installations, most postings to Germany are ‘accompanied’, where families move with service personnel to live in Germany for periods that can range from two to over 15 years depending on a soldier's rank and unit. This study focuses on one particular regiment and its close-knit community, my access to which was coordinated on an informal basis through a family connection. The cohort includes women of different ages and social backgrounds, married to soldiers of all ranks and ages. Owing to the informal basis of my access to the regiment, and the levels of confidentiality and anonymity that this requires, interview excerpts are not prefigured by any particular biographical details.1 It is also important to note that the experiences and attitudes I document in this article pertain exclusively to the female spouses of male service personnel. Despite the increasing number of married and unmarried servicewomen in the British Army, the regiment on which this study is based included relatively few women at the time of my fieldwork. Thus, my focus on army wives as a majority population underserved by research in a British context is empirically supported.
As important as the location of my fieldwork is the time when it took place. I arrived in Germany half way through the regiment's six-month operational tour in Afghanistan. This meant that for a large part of my fieldwork, most of the regiment's (male) service personnel were absent. Although I stayed long enough to experience the staggered return of the troops, when winter turned to summer and the camp evolved from a quiet, bare vista of tarmac to a space for parade practice and family barbecues, my analysis in this article centres on the period during the operational tour and its very particular temporal, as well as spatial, register. This was a period when half the dining facilities on camp were shut down and the lounge bar of the sergeants'' mess where I lived was in darkness most of the time. But it was also a period of dinner parties, pizza evenings, book clubs and spinning classes organised by wives on and off the camp; a time when the communal life of the ‘regimental family’ as it soldiered on (sometimes falteringly) in Germany was sustained largely by women's reproductive labour and social networks. Aside from the cake stalls and coffee mornings that constituted my participant observation on camp, my interviews were carried out with women in the private spaces of their homes, where they often reflected on their experiences with humour and candour. Paying attention to these deeply gendered times and spaces (both public and private) indicates that military wives'' experience of the deployment was far from cosy, sheltered or in any way decorative. Studies of domestic garrison towns in countries such as the USA have explored their function as what Lutz calls ‘battle's other – the homefront’ (Lutz 2001, 7).2 In what follows then, I explore the spatial and temporal register of an operational tour and the effects of combat operations ‘back home’. Looking beyond the effects of political violence as they are most viscerally and visibly attached to the bodies and minds of service personnel (Goodell and Hearn 2011; Wool 2013) or indeed the hypervisualised or abject bodies of enemy ‘others’ (see, for example, Amar 2011; Wilcox 2014), I describe a continuum through which the ‘theatre of war’ becomes unsited and manifest in the everyday times and spaces of women's lives. The social construction of what I call ‘a-place-called-Afghanistan’ in Germany troubles the division between the combat zone and the home to posit military wives as agents of translation and transformation who help to smooth out, if not resolve, the rupture and contradictions between them.
A-place-called-Afghanistan
During the regiment's operational tour, there was a sense in which Afghanistan and Germany became twinned locations whose weather reports, news bulletins and messages to loved ones were broadcast constantly on British Forces Broadcasting Services. Desert bulletins and place names followed reports of northern European snow and sleet, a regular and pervasive presence that was not always appreciated, as Alison3 complains:
Yes I've definitely missed him more this time, and you're just constantly, just constant reminders, I mean even just getting into the car and listening to the bloody radio, that's what does my head in – the first two, three months when I was a bit you know, “oooh”, turning it on and they've got all these messages from Afghanistan and all this news from Afghanistan and you just can't escape it, unless you speak German.
Afghanistan constitutes a simultaneous presence and absence in Germany: it is made to appear through so many different channels, at the same time as it is also the object of conscious forgetting. While Afghanistan is present and concomitant with life in Germany through everyday communication networks, the basic ‘fact’ of its presence for women married to servicemen is also characterised by distance and unknowability. Its invocation recalls not the physical or political geography of a country in its own right, but the simultaneous presence-and-absence of a loved one. For example, Afghanistan gains shape and form through world maps blu-tacked onto children's bedroom walls, a device used to ‘locate’ parents, whose presence is pinned into position next to last year's holiday destination or granny and grandpa's house in the UK. On such maps, a-place-called-Afghanistan is marked by its physical borders, mountainous terrain and capital city, even if this defies the limits of a very small child's comprehension. Speaking of her two-year-old daughter's nursery school, a servicewoman whose own deployment preceded her husband's with only two weeks together as a family in between, notes: ‘And they had a map of the world, and she knew mummy was there. And then a picture of mummy on Afghanistan’. In such narratives, the map is a device that functions at the meta-level of conversations between adults, where pathos is created between the innocence of a child and the knowing significance of Afghanistan for the adults, a gulf mirrored in the difference between the map's abstract topography – the shape and contours of a landlocked country in Central Asia – and the political geography of borders and nation states that sustains a British military presence and the absence of the child's parent. Indeed, if the trick of the map functions as a reassuringly abstract visualisation to a child, it functions as a knowing materialisation of the danger, heroism and national significance attached to Afghanistan for adults. The power and pathos of the map as an expression of the presence of Afghanistan lies in its will to innocence, and inheres not so much in what it shows, but in what it hides.
The map on the child's bedroom wall is an appropriate materialisation of the complex and many-layered construction of a-place-called-Afghanistan and its role as a container for particular narratives of war and its generic threats. As ‘Afghanistan’ gains shape and form in Germany, it loses its geopolitical autonomy as a peopled territory and nation state, with its politics of location simplified to the limited dimensions of an ‘occupied territory’. ‘Afghan’ as it is more often called, is always-already abbreviated as the object of international intervention and war, and as such is abstracted to a degree that renders a-place-called-Afghanistan curiously vague.4 Correspondingly, its spaces are limited to a series of familiarised indigenous or military place names such as Helmand Province, Lashkar Gah or ‘Bastion’, or generic army acronyms that are used with varying levels of confidence, as is evident in Emma's misrecognition of an acronym when I use the term in its unabbreviated form:
A: Was he on a Forward Operating Base or…
E: Um, no he was in a FOB or something, he basically lived in a tent.
Seeing space as a moment in the intersection of configured social relations (rather than as an absolute dimension) means that it cannot be seen as static. There is no choice between flow (time) and a flat surface of instantaneous relations (space). (1994, 265)
The presence of Afghanistan
With respect to the study of military power, perhaps the most obvious form of time is that ‘of which History (capital H) is made’ (Massey 1994, 253), where understandings of military power tend to crystallise around the moments and places where battles are lost and won. The events of 9/11 are the defining example in this context, marking what Lundborg describes as ‘a border in time’ (2012, 1). A sense of history being made emerged from participants' attempts to characterise the ongoing cycle of deployments since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which represented a sea change in the meaning and experience of an operational tour. Mel recalls events that happened thousands of miles away as they unfolded according to the intimate, routine activities of everyday life, but were also made peculiarly public:
'03 was the first one, what I call the war-y bit [laughs], which was horrendous. […] I think it was about 3 weeks before any of us heard anything. And it becomes an obsession then, it becomes almost like a chain letter. Because the news is on 24 hours a day, it was as if the wives were on duty, like on STAG, watching the news, and you'd phone and say I'm going in the bath, ring me if you see anything. Or I'll record this now and you watch the news and I'll record this and you're kneeling up against the telly looking, like trying to see if you can catch a glimpse.[…] So you can see it all happening but have no more idea really of what's going on than Joe Bloggs down the street.
The temporal register of the operational tour that was unfolding during my time with the regiment can also be plotted according to the points when ‘historical events’ occurred.5 During my fieldwork, two British soldiers were killed by members of the Afghan Security Force at a military base in Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province. This incident, like all other security breaches, prompted the implementation of ‘op minimise’. Op minimise is a standard procedure by which all non-official communications between the theatre of war and the outside world are shut down after a major security incident. This means that, in the period immediately after the incident until op minimise is lifted, service personnel are unable to make contact with friends or family. From time to time in Germany, therefore, Afghanistan falls suddenly and unexpectedly silent. While op minimise prompts a series of well-scripted procedures and protocols throughout the military organisational structure, for the community in Germany it manifests itself in a heightened state of alert that is vague, frenzied and without object. In the silence and speculation that constitutes op minimise at home, the precondition for rationalising one's fear is that op minimise is designed to prevent leaks to the media before the military have been able to inform the families of the service personnel involved. Hannah, while recounting her experience of op minimise, concedes that
The brilliant thing about the system they run you know, as tragic as it is and as bad as you feel for those families, you know [that] if you're reading that news, [then] it's not your soldier and that's the whole reason it exists, that's why they have op minimise out there so that there's no leaks.
The protocol followed by wives during op minimise involves monitoring the MoD website and crosschecking the information released by 24 hour news media. Several women recounted their own response to this incident during interviews, with others retelling the same stories second-hand (stories I had also heard through the welfare office). The fact that I heard of the same women's reactions several times illustrates the ripples and reverberations of an event three thousand miles away as it circulated through social networks at a pitch of anxiety which, at the same time, was inflected with self-regulating ideas about the propriety of different emotional responses. In this particular case, op minimise had in fact failed and details of the event had been leaked to the press before they were released on the MoD website. When Hannah saw news of the incident on the television, she checked the MoD website and there was no information available:
And so I was sat here thinking, Oh my God, oh my God. Two soldiers have been shot in Lashkar Gah camp, where Edward works. I was waiting for the car to come down the drive, I was beside myself. And I know – even though I knew in the back of my mind I was being silly and […] the chances are it wasn't him statistically speaking […] – I just knew they hadn't managed to get hold of the next of kin or whatever it was. So I was, oh I was in such a state. I called [the welfare officer] in the end actually. Just because – even though I knew that I sounded utterly stupid and neurotic, I was just going out of my mind, I had to speak to somebody. And I knew that he might know who it was, which he did. And I thought to myself, I don't want to be that person who calls and is like, Oh has anything happened to my husband? […] But part of me did think, you know I haven't called up the welfare office for anything during this tour at all, I've never you know, phoned up in floods of tears or had a crisis or anything so I thought, No this is my crisis moment and I'm going to ring them.
What the rupture of op minimise shows is that even when particular spaces have been constructed as fixed and stable, such as ‘home’ as a place of identity, security and ‘reassuring boundedness’ (Massey 1994, 169), they cannot be understood as insulated against the contingency of political events and dismissed from an understanding of the depths to which ‘international relations’ penetrate. Fundamentally, it is a spatial logic that posits soldiers in the role of geopolitical actors who are ‘mobilised’ as part of the global reach of contemporary US and British military power, for example, while their wives are ‘left behind’ (Massey 1994, 10) to maintain place as a fixed locus of belonging (Massey 1994, 180). Such a configuration underestimates the ways in which any place is an active site of presence that is constituted in different ways at different times. What is at stake in a multi-dimensional understanding of militarisation and its effects, one that takes into account the contingency of time and the experience of the same events in different places, is the imperative to take the presence of Afghanistan as it is experienced by the families of service personnel as seriously as a soldier's experience of being present in Afghanistan.
But the mandate to pay attention to everyday times and spaces of militarisation goes beyond the need to look simply at moments of rupture and discontinuity. As Woodward has argued, war is merely the most obvious manifestation of military force, the apex of a pyramid that at its base includes the ‘continual preparations which states make in order to be able to wage war’ (2004, 4). Although military bases such as Camp Bastion have gained totemic visibility as part of current theatres of war, for example, more detailed accounts of the everyday workings of such bases attest to a curious degree of ambiguity with respect to their war-fighting purpose. Paying attention to their internal, day-to-day function illustrates how even those bases that might be described as ‘front line’ installations betray the more banal manifestations of military presence:
[t]ours in Iraq and Afghanistan, lengthened to one year like a tour in South Korea, have many of the accoutrements of garrison life, such as gymnasiums, cafeterias, post exchanges, and other qualities that evince a more stable garrison life than a nation at war. (Morgan 2006, 208)
In the same way that battle's other is the homefront, ‘war's shadow’ is ‘readiness’ (Lutz 2001, 7). Research on or around military bases (Lutz 2001; MacLeish 2013) reveals the repetition, rehearsal and simulation entailed in the military's requirement for ‘combat readiness’, which ‘because it involves peering into the void of the future and the blurry shapes of the present’, Lutz argues, ‘must also be mythic’ (2001, 87). The everyday life of the army, therefore, is founded on temporal conditions that go beyond the sudden interruption of events, and are bound up in the contingency of what might happen. Militarily, these conditions reach their apotheosis in the pre-emptive strike, and within critical scholarship, war games and combat readiness can tell us much about the mythologies of the nation and its others (Lutz 2001, 87). Less common, however, is research on the everyday lived experience of this contingency, an altogether more diffuse process of militarisation. In the concluding section of this essay, therefore, I wish to consider some of the everyday forms this contingency takes, which can be understood as the way in which Afghanistan makes its presence felt.
The present tense of Afghanistan
Take, for example, the ‘knock on the door’, a persistent motif that was commonly invoked by service personnel and their spouses alike. The phrase functions as a ready-made euphemism for the news of a soldier's death, referring to the visit a spouse would receive from the families liaison officer in the event that her husband was killed or seriously injured in action. Figuratively, ‘the knock on the door’ unsites death from the battlefield and reinscribes it between the boundary of the public institution and the private home. It also represents the domestication of a death whose cause is military force and political violence but whose transformation into a feminised form highlights the limited social spaces and resources available for women to gain control over the precarity laid at their doorstep. Although the ‘knock on the door’ is, like combat readiness writ large, ‘preparation for a task more often deferred than taken up’ (Lutz 2001, 108), it is far from a figment of collective imagination. Feminist scholars have argued that tracing the emotional geographies of war must ground the ‘emotional experiences of gendered bodies within the material realities of the everyday – and seeks to connect these with representations of the national and the international’ (Tyner and Henkin 2015, 3). At the same time that it is spectral and speculative therefore, the present tense of Afghanistan is reinscribed on a micro-scale in the small spaces and repeated events of women's everyday, embodied practices. And what this again shows is the degree to which gendered divisions of space, time and labour (comprising the home, routine time and domesticity) are the first line of defence against the messy diffusion of militarisation:
You can't sleep, you worry and you think – and d'you know this sounds really silly, I used to clean my house from top to bottom before I went to bed in case I got that knock at the door in the middle of the night. I didn't want the person giving me bad news to see how messy the house was. […] Because if I'm going to have a stranger in my house telling my bad news I don't want them thinking I've lived in a mess. It was a ritual for me. I was – I would make sure – I would never go to bed without – because obviously if something happened as well I'd be shipped – I'd be flown wherever. And I thought the last thing I want is people, either friends of mine having to come in here and collect things for me, coming in to my messy house. It was just, it was something I felt – I didn't want strangers thinking that I was messy that was all. The possibility of a stranger coming in here was quite, I thought, was going to be quite high. That someone was going to have to come in and collect belongings of mine to take wherever I was going to be.
Finally, what the present tense of Afghanistan helps to formulate is precisely the quality of pervasiveness that scholars argue is fundamental to how militarisation operates (Higate and Henry 2011, 134). Militarisation in this sense dwells in everyday life, it has been documented in forms that include cans of soup (Enloe 2000) and wedding cakes (Dowler 2012). Yet such analyses of militarisation often remain detached from their effects: from the lived experiences, social relations and embodied practices that make militarisation mobile, processual and transformative. My analysis in this essay focuses on forms of militarisation that in many ways are more abstract, a range of multiple and simultaneous spatio-temporalities – presence and absence, here and there, and past, present and future. By focusing on the temporal as well as the spatial kinesis of militarisation, I have sought to avoid modes of analysis that reify particular places and moments and create a singular definition of their significance which, in the process, becomes detached from the lived experience of the power relations they set in motion. Crucial to this is a feminist critique that pays attention to routine and reproductive time as well as linear time; that seeks to connect wives'' domestic and emotional labour to the soldiering labour of their husbands, and that explores the emotional contingency produced by ‘readiness’. What paying attention to the messy spatio-temporalities of militarisation offers then is some sense of the ways in which militarisation is inhabited by women married to servicemen.
What the examples I have offered here in turn expose are the false binaries that have come to structure understandings of military power. In his queer analysis of military discipline, Belkin critiques the ‘normative alignment’ (2012, 58) of ‘oppositions which signified, replaced and slipped into one another’ (Belkin 2012, 35) to shape assumptions about military masculinities. Scholars have identified this flaw within militarisation as an analytic, in particular the linearity implied by its expression of ‘processes that take the “civilian” and make it “militarised”’ (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009b, 449), and which conceal a host of attendant dualisms such as ‘inside/outside; foreign/domestic; war/peace’ (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009b, 449). The fraught and ambiguous position of women married to servicemen as I have explored it here calls into question the very divide between the military and civilian spheres, as well as a number of further dualisms that Massey has shown ‘so easily map on to each other and also map on to the constructed dichotomy between female and male’ (1994, 258). And it is in this sense perhaps that the contradictions that structure militarisation have also been smoothed out by the lack of attention to gender in scholarship thereon. My analysis in this article demonstrates that militarisation – as a state of being, as a lived experience – is nothing if not the very conflation and confusion of military and civilian, the simultaneous coexistence of multiple times and spaces, a grey area.
I would like to thank the editors of this themed section, Marsha Henry and Katherine Natanel, for their input and encouragement, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the article for their challenging and insightful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Indeed, the fragility of confidentiality within a small community and the difficulty of maintaining anonymity are symptomatic of an organisation with so many potential modes of identification, for example, the strong national affiliation, location or kind of regiment concerned or social structures such as rank within it, any combination of which narrows down the criteria for identifying the regiment, its members and their families.
2. Importantly, the experiences I document here are also formed by women's location in a ‘foreign’ country, physically removed from the familial, social and cultural resources of the UK. Arguably, families posted overseas are more reliant upon the support of the regiment's welfare office, garrison facilities such as British schools and supermarkets, and are more dependent on the army community for local and informal support than those in the UK. Research on military wives as transnational subjects (Jervis 2008, 114) has shown that, in such circumstances, gender combines with military power and other vectors such as national identity to reinforce a host of traditional roles and expectations regarding women's labour and identities. The experiences I document in this article therefore are formed in very particular circumstances where the homefront is not ‘at home’ per se, but is geographically untethered from both the theatre of war and the nation state. It is not within the scope of this article to explore the full dynamics that inhere in these additional vectors of spatial and temporal distance or proximity. What the examples I explore do indicate, however, is that alongside the unsiting of war and its translocation through the everyday times and spaces of women's lives, those times and spaces conceived of as the ‘homefront’ are also unsited and very much in flux.
3. All names have been changed to preserve the anonymity of participants.
4. Indeed, what I am proposing here – a whole country twinned with a provincial German city – is a fallacious compression of space. To a similar degree, therefore, my own representation of a-place-called-Afghanistan in this article fixes it into place from a particular geopolitical, social and cultural perspective and in relation to a specific strand of recent critical scholarship (see, for example, Basham 2013; Duncanson 2013). Beyond the limits of my ethnographic data and this article, there are of course a whole host of historically- and geographically-specific articulations of Afghanistan as a social, political and cultural space that also work to constitute its multiple meanings. It is essential to note that my ethnographic data cannot support any kind of assumption about the material ‘reality’ of life in Afghanistan for service personnel or, even more remotely, the Afghan population. The kind of multi-sited ethnographic data that would illuminate the flow of space and time across both Afghanistan and Germany is therefore beyond the limits of this project, and the experiences of those men and women on tour in Afghanistan during my time with the regiment are to a degree consigned to the fixity of being far away in another place (and, of course, in the past).
5. I use ‘historical event’ to describe a security incident such as might be reported by the international or British media for example. That is not to reduce or inflate (depersonalise or over-politicise) the meaning or significance of any one event. Rather, by ‘historical event’, I again invoke Lundborg's formulation of the process by which events become ‘history’, which he argues ‘needs someone who can decide what a historical event actually refers to, where its borders are to be located, how these borders can be linked to the borders of other events, and how all these borders together constitute the basis of a narrative order that can take us from a specific point in the past to a moment that defines our present ‘being’ (Lundborg 2012, 2).
6. For example, the military institution is reproduced through spatial and temporal enclosure, synchronisation, repetition and routine (see Foucault [1975] 1991; Goffman 1961). This includes a soldier's ability to reproduce him or herself as part of the whole. Hockey (1986) has shown that where such domestic skills come to function as an integral part of discipline, or are used to maintain or subvert the social hierarchy of rank, their discursive power turns on their feminisation in relation to the ideal archetypes of military masculinity.
7. And it is the particular vulnerability of soldiers’ bodies that also represents the failure of human vulnerability as a basis for community: the degree to which vulnerability and grief, in war especially, are constituted according to enemies and allies, prompting Butler to ask ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?’ (2004, 20, emphasis in original).
