After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed 9780822375098

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AFTER WAR

Critical Global Health 

Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography

A series edited by Vincanne Adams and João Biehl

AFTER WAR the weight of life at walter reed

ZOË H. WOOL    Duke University Press  Durham and London 

2015

© 2015 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Text designed by Courtney Leigh Baker Typeset in Futura and Whitman by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wool, Zoë Hamilton, author. After war : the weight of life at Walter Reed / Zoë H. Wool. pages  cm — (Critical global health) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5971-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-6003-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-7509-8 (e-book) 1. Walter Reed Army Medical Center. ​2. Soldiers—Wounds and injuries—United States. ​3. Disabled veterans—Medical care—United States. ​I. Title. ​II. Series: Critical global health. uh463.w84 2015 362.1086'970973—dc23 2015023349 Cover art: Platon, Sergeant Tim Johannsen and his wife, Jacquelyne Kay, in a rehabilitation unit at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C., 2008. Photograph © Platon / Trunk Archive.

contents

List of Abbreviations vii  Preface xiii  Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 1

The Extra/ordinary Atmosphere of Walter Reed  25

2

A Present History of Fragments  63

3

The Economy of Patriotism  97

4

On Movement  131

5

Intimate Attachments and the Securing of Life  157

Conclusion 189 Notes 195  References 217  Index 233

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abbreviations

ACU

Army combat uniform: The camouflage-printed uniform worn during combat since 2005, when it replaced the battle dress uniform (bdu) and desert combat uniform (dcu) of earlier eras. BT

Basic training. C-LEG

A state-of-the-art prosthetic leg with a computerized knee joint made by the Otto Bock Company, whose marketing emphasizes the technophilic details of the device and a sporty, physically active, and normative body and lifestyle for its wearer. At the time of my fieldwork, the C-Leg was considered the cutting edge in prosthetics. CO

Commanding officer: co is not a rank but a relation. Though any commissioned officer in charge of a particular unit of any size could be called its commanding officer, your co is usually the officer with whom you have the most direct contact. In practice co was generally used to refer to the person in a soldier’s chain of command who is most likely to be the one to discipline or care if he did something wrong. DEP

Delayed Entry Program or Delayed Enlistment Program: An army program that allows enlistees to delay the start of their contract for 365 days. Its

main use is to contract people who are seventeen years old and cannot actually begin service until they turn eighteen. DOD

Department of Defense. EFP

Explosively formed projectile or explosively formed penetrator: A selfforging shaped charge that, when exploded, propels a superheated piece of metal that forms aerodynamically into a projectile. As they were found in Iraq, efps were usually composed of a canister full of explosives with a convex copper disk for a lid, which was formed into a projectile that was dense, hot, and fast and could penetrate the hardened steel of armored vehicles. They were usually considered a subspecies of ied. EXFIX

External fixator or external fixation device: Sometimes also called a halo, an ExFix is a steel and titanium scaffolding that surrounds and stabilizes a shattered limb and is anchored into the bone with a series of protruding screws. GI BILL

The original gi Bill was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act passed in 1944 as a way of providing financial support for returning soldiers (or gis, which stands for “government issue” and is said to be derived from “galvanized iron”), including loans, medical expenses, employment insurance, and tuition funds (its most well-known benefit), to help them establish civilian lives. In 1984 an updated version called the Montgomery gi Bill was passed, and in 2008 a new post-9/11 gi Bill was passed with an even more explicit emphasis on training, education, and benefits for family members. IED

Improvised explosive device: The particular species of homemade bomb that became characteristic of insurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq they were often hidden on the side of or beneath roads traveled by U.S. military vehicles and were sometimes detonated by pressure switches and sometimes by remote. IVAW

Iraq Veterans Against the War: Modeled on Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ivaw is an organization of American service members and veterans

viii 

abbreviations

who have served since 9/11 and who are organized in opposition to the war in Iraq but who also organize around other issues, like ptsd awareness and sexual violence in the military. MATC

Military Advanced Training Center: The $11 million state-of-the-art rehabilitation facility that was opened at Walter Reed in 2007. MOS

Military occupational specialty: The particular job of an enlisted soldier for which he or she receives training. An mos could be infantryman, radio operator, paralegal specialist, or plumber. MP

Military Police. MRE

Meal ready to eat: The nutritionally engineered, dehydrated, and vacuumsealed food for soldiers in the field. mres are the high-tech replacement of the C-Ration of earlier military eras. NCO

Noncommissioned officer: A service member still in the e (Enlisted) pay grades of rank e4 or corporal or above who is in a supervisorial role. NMA

Nonmedical attendant: The person living with and helping an injured service member while he or she requires treatment at a military medical facility that is at least one hundred miles from the service member’s home. nmas are (usually) entitled to a per diem and travel expenses from and to their own home and are expected to assist the service member with nonmedical activities of daily living. At Walter Reed, nmas were usually wives, girlfriends, or parents, though occasionally brothers and friends would fill the role. They were entitled to a $60 per diem, for which they had to file paperwork and receive orders (i.e., official authorization). OEF

Operation Enduring Freedom: The name for the U.S.-led mission in ­Afghanistan that began on October 7, 2001, as a response to 9/11. It also includes operations in Guantánamo Bay, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan,

abbreviations  ix

Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. On December 28, 2014, the Obama administration declared an end to the operation. OIF

Operation Iraqi Freedom: The name for the U.S.-led mission in Iraq that began on March 19, 2003. On February 17, 2010, the Obama administration changed the name to Operation New Dawn (ond) to reflect the changing nature of the U.S. role there. PICC LINE

Peripherally inserted central catheter line: A tube that runs from the heart to the outside of the body (usually the bicep) through the most direct intravenous route. There is a port on the outside of the body to which intravenous medicine can be attached. At Walter Reed picc lines are most commonly used for administering aggressive antibiotics. PT

Physical training or physical therapy: Usually in the military, pt means physical training (i.e., exercise). At Walter Reed this meaning slides into physical therapy in a subtle way. PTSD

Posttraumatic stress disorder: The psychiatric diagnosis developed to recognize the particular psychic trauma of U.S. soldiers returning from the Vietnam War. Though the criteria are shifting, generally ptsd can be applied when a person’s response to (experiencing or witnessing) a traumatic event includes a specified combination of pathological remembering or forgetting of the event, avoidance of things associated with it, emotional and affective numbing, heightened arousal, sleep disturbances, and other symptoms that begin after the event. The diagnosis was first recognized in the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and has undergone significant revision in subsequent editions. PX

Post Exchange: The px is a subsidized store on an army base where only people with military id (including dependents) can shop. They are often huge, sprawling, Walmart-like places selling everything from food to furniture and clothing.

x 

abbreviations

SFAC

Soldier and Family Assistance Center: A central location where soldiers and their family members can access services, get information, or ask for help about everything from child care to leave forms and substance abuse counseling. The sfac at Walter Reed also featured a huge storage room from which staff could retrieve dvds, sweatshirts, and other items if soldiers or family members needed or wanted them. TBI

Traumatic brain injury: A brain injury acquired by sudden impact to the head, including concussive force, physical impact to the head, or penetrating wound to the brain itself. Of the three types of tbi clinically differentiated—mild, moderate, and severe—mild tbi (or mTBI) is the most common in the current U.S. military context and, along with ptsd, is often identified as one of the signature injuries of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. TRICARE

A comprehensive suite of managed care health insurance products that is heavily subsidized and available to all members (civilian and military) of the Department of Defense and their dependents. TSGLI

Traumatic Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance: An extension of the low-cost sgli provided to service members by the va. tsgli entitles soldiers to $20,000 to $100,000 per limb lost. The payments for soldiers I knew were $50,000 per limb. tsgli was created in 2005 under Section 1032 of the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief. USO

United Service Organization: A nonprofit, congressionally chartered, private organization founded in 1941 as an umbrella to unite other existing charitable groups wanting to support members of the U.S. military. They are perhaps best known for their tours, during which they bring entertainers (usually comedians and musicians) to perform for service members stationed around the world, especially downrange.

abbreviations  xi

VA

Department of Veterans Affairs (formerly the Veterans Administration): The branch of the U.S. government that oversees veterans’ issues, including administering the gi Bill and running a sprawling medical treatment and research network comprising over seven hundred facilities.

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abbreviations

preface

Fieldwork This book is based on ethnographic fieldwork work carried out from September 2007 to August 2008, primarily with severely injured soldiers and their family members (including spouses, parents, siblings, children, or some shifting combination thereof) rehabilitating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and living for some time at the communal Fisher House there. My ethnographic work at Walter Reed was spread throughout the year but concentrated in September–November 2007 and May–August 2008. From March to June 2008 I did a good deal of work with Iraq Veterans Against the War (ivaw), both at their Winter Soldier testimonial event and with members of their D.C. chapter. From December 2007 to February 2008 I was primarily focused on Ft. Dix, a large mobilization base in New Jersey, where I learned about mental and behavioral health programs and the role of the chaplaincy and sat in on suicideprevention training and other briefings for deploying soldiers. Throughout the year I attended congressional hearings related to the “war on terror,” talked to think-tank affiliates who worked on relevant topics, and interviewed a small number of 9/11 survivors and first responders in New York and D.C. This multisited work yielded rich insights, many of which are embedded in this book, but I have found myself continually drawn back to the lives of those I’d met at Walter Reed. Those lives are the substance of this book.

Women That this book addresses masculinity is not only a function of the fact that the soldiers I worked with were men. It is also a function of the essential masculinity of the generic figure of the soldier in the United States. Of course, those facts are related. Because of this, when I write of soldiers in this book—both the ones I worked with and the ones iconically conjured in the American imaginary—I write in a specific, rather than “generic” masculine (see also MacLeish 2010: 27–31). But I also acknowledge that this has the effect of obscuring the experiences and even the existence of soldiers who are not men. In ways that do not entirely overlap with their unmarked male-gendered counterparts, being a “female soldier” is a profoundly complex subject position, as is being an injured female soldier.1 Former major Tammy Duckworth and former lieutenant Dawn Halfaker have both spoken publicly about their experiences as woman amputees,2 and there is an increasing attention to women in the military in general, for example the widely screened documentary Lioness (McLagan and Sommers 2008), and nonfiction books like Soldier Girls (Thorpe 2014) and Undaunted: The Real Story of America’s Servicewomen in Today’s Military (Biank 2014). Some of these complexities are being made more apparent through the public problematization of sexualized violence against women in the military and the rise of a special category of military sexual trauma, an intensely gendered category of victimhood.3 The specific masculine in which I write here, and the explanation of it under the heading “Women,” also performs a double erasure of transgendered members of the military, of whom there were an estimated 15,450 in active service in 2014 (Elders and Steinman 2014), even though they are effectively banned from the military. As of this writing, the army is revising that ban. Rather than give these issues only the incidental attention I could offer them here, I have left them aside for others more well equipped than I to address. Almost all of the women who do appear in this book are the wives, girlfriends, and mothers of soldiers. As I have revised chapters, their own lives have receded into the background, and they appear here through their connections to injured soldier husbands or sons. In order to make space for the experiences of soldiers at the center of this book, I have pushed their wives and mothers to the margins, and occasionally off the page altogether. But, as I hope will be clear, their lives are no less complex and no less marked

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by the violence of war than the lives of their soldier sons and husbands and boyfriends and are certainly worthy of a book all their own. The Unsaid Throughout the book, as I write of the violence of war, I am also keenly aware of the violence I do not note. I think in particular of the civilians whose worlds and lives these soldiers have invaded in the course of their work and whose deaths have made up an estimated 90 percent of war casualties since the 1990s.4 This is a direct consequence of the array of technologies of modern warfare, from Predator drones to car bombs, and of the rationales and logistics of modern war that have not admitted the contained space of the battlefield since at least the total war of World War II. I hope this silence will not be read to suggest that these unwritten lives and deaths and sufferings are, in Judith Butler’s (2009) sense, ungrieveable, or somehow less human or less worthy than those I do describe, though it is important to acknowledge that my silence is itself structurally enabled by such ideas and that the attention given those lives in most of the United States remains grossly impoverished. Accounts of Iraqi civilian experiences contemporary with those of the U.S. soldiers I describe here can be found in Voices from Iraq (Kukis 2011), Baghdad Burning (Riverbend 2005), and Collateral Damage (Hedges and Al-Arian 2009).

preface  xv

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acknowledgments

First and foremost, I thank the soldiers and families with whom I worked at Walter Reed. Not only did they allow—even encourage—me to be with them in a profoundly precarious moment, but they insisted on, and persisted in, the ordinariness of their lives. In doing this, often with a clarity and poetry that took me by surprise, they showed me how to pull at the thread of the extra/ordinary. I have done my best to work that thread with care and can only hope they recognize their extra/ordinary selves in this work. Many thanks to the others at Walter Reed who eased my entry there and to everyone at lrmc who welcomed me to my first taste of the field and were so instrumental in getting me to my next one. I’m very grateful to Scott Ewing, Geoff Millard, Jose Vasquez, and other members of ivaw for their assistance and friendship during my time in D.C. Though the obstacles proved insurmountable, I do not take lightly the efforts of those who helped me at Ft. Dix, including Francis Booth, Chaplain Heisterman, and especially Denise Horton. And though they do not appear here, I thank the 9/11 first responders and survivors who shared their often painful stories with me. My fieldwork was generously supported by a Dissertation Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and I have also received support from the Vonda McCrae Clarke Memorial / Ontario Graduate Scholarship in Anthropology, pilot research and numerous travel awards from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and the Ethnographic Writing Fellowship at the Centre for Ethnography,

University of Toronto Scarborough. The Department of Anthropology and broader community at the University of Toronto, where I completed my PhD, was an ever increasing font of intellectual energy. For their shared thoughts, unflagging support, and friendship over the years, I thank Joshua Barker, Naisargi Dave, Andrew Gilbert, the late Jennifer Jackson, Tania Li, Andrea Muehlebach, Gavin Smith, and the late Krys Sieciechowicz, as well as all the regular participants in the scl workshops with whom I have been lucky to participate in many ongoing conversations. I am especially grateful to Todd Sanders for his invaluable diligence and support, especially in the most uncertain moments, and to Michael Lambek for his insightful and incisive comments, terrific support and confidence, and ongoing council. Kori Allen, Lindsay Bell, Lauren Classen, Mieke deGelder, Sheri Gibbings, Sharon Kelly, Ashley Lebner, Natasha Pravaz, Alyson Stone, and Jessica Taylor have all been wonderful readers, advisors, and friends for the past decade or so. Loving thanks to my dear reader, friend, confidant, and companion in all things, Shaylih Muehlmann; to Janet McLaughlin, who makes me feel at home and think about the place of justice in it; and to the brilliant and unflappable Judy Taylor, who continually offers me wise counsel, good food, a warm bed, and reality checks. In 2010 I was given the great gift of two months as the Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting Summer Scholar fellowship at sar in Santa Fe. That time was invaluable, as was the strange magic of El Delerio, and the company, council, and (usually needed!) distraction of my friends there, especially James Brooks, Erin Debenport, Jason Pribilsky, Celia Ballì, Duane Slick, Nima Paidipady, and Siva Arumugam. The completion of this manuscript would still be under way were it not for a nimh-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University, which I held from 2011 to 2013. For that time I am indebted to the founding director, David Mechanic, and to Debby Carr, Peter Guarnacia, Beth Angel, and especially my supervisor, Allan Horwitz, for his faith and support. I also thank Peg Polansky for keeping the place running. I learned a great deal from the interdisciplinary conversations fostered at the Institute’s weekly brown-bag talks, as well as from many conversations (and glasses of mescal) with all my fellow fellows, especially Eugenia Conde, Ken MacLeish, Shellae Versey, and Owen Whooly. At Rutgers I was lucky to participate in the Economies of Affect working group, which offered great conversations as well as invaluable comments on early portions of this manuscript, and xviii 

acknowledgments

to audit Ed Cohen’s core theory class. I do not remember how I thought before it, but I am certain it was not as well. Over the years I have found myself participating in spaces, conversations, collaborations, and friendships of almost unimaginable intellectual richness and generosity. These have sustained and nourished me and sweetened my work and life in ways that continue to fend off the bitterness academic life so often brings. I will never know how to thank Ken MacLeish for being the very essence of all this in my life. I do know that my most well-crafted thoughts—especially any found in these pages—are honed in conversation with him. Other such intellectual treasures include the scl workshop at the University of Toronto, sar, and the Science Studies Ethnography workshop at New York University, a true treasure of a space run by the brilliant and gracious Rayna Rapp and Emily Martin. The workshop has been especially formative to my thinking about science, technology, and medicine over the past four years, and for that I am grateful to all the regular workshop participants. Julie Livingston, mensch among mortals, shows me how to navigate the world with serious humor, attention, and care and has helped me sort out many circular thoughts around conference tables and kitchen tables. And thanks to the companionship and occasional commiseration through the last years of this process from Alison Cool, Emily McDonald, Alison Howell, and Vanessa Agard-Jones, and also to Nick Dupree for helping me refuse the tyranny of independence. I’m newly moved to think and write by many interlocutors in ongoing conversations about forms of life near death and besides hope, including Anne Allison, Angela Garcia, and Lisa Stevenson. I have tried to sow some seeds of our conversations into this book in the hope that they’ll grow future projects. I thank the indomitable Beth Povinelli, force of supernature, both for her work, which got me thinking along such tangled tracks, and for her terrific support, which has helped keep me going. I am triply indebted to Veena Das for her writing, which first showed me a way to think about violence and the ordinary, for her comments and questions as the external examiner of my dissertation, which were the starting point for making that text into this book, and for her continued support. I have been shown uncountable kindnesses by many scholars working on issues related to war and militaries who have helped to shape my work. In particular, for their generous counsel and support, I thank Erin Finley, Lesley Gill, Hugh Gusterson, Matt Gutmann, Alison Howell, Beth Linker, Joe Masco, Seth Messinger, David Serlin, and Jennifer Terry. Tremendous acknowledgments  xix

thanks to Cathy Lutz for her support and her tireless work. Ken MacLeish and Erica Weiss both provided extremely astute comments on sections of this manuscript, which invigorated my thinking, as have the reflections of the members of the War and Global Health Working Group, organized by Omar al-Diwachi and the irrepressible Vinh-Kim Nguyen. My thinking about war and the lives and situations of those who wage it has further benefited from many encounters with others working on these same issues in the Costs of War Project at Brown University, the War and Intimacies Workshop at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Military Bodies workshop at the University of Michigan. I am grateful to all my friends and colleagues at Columbia, who welcomed and supported me in many ways as I put the finishing touches on this manuscript. In particular, Nadia Abu al-Haj, Cassie Fennel, Steven Scott, and Brian Goldstone all offered invaluable comments on chapter drafts. Ellen Marakowitz and Beth Povinelli made it possible for me to take the necessary time to both live and work, which none of us can do without support. I am indebted to my editor at Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker, for allowing this book to be what it is and for helping me to see it, and to both him and editorial associate Elizabeth Ault for their combined enthusiasm and patience, in perfect measure. Heartfelt thanks to Viv Cornejo, Alec Milton, Rebecca Picherack, Alison Rapoport, and Elsa Silverman for their support, especially during my fieldwork. Deepest love and gratitude to my mother, Bridget Potter, for her beyond-the-beyondness; my father, Robert Wool; and my sister, Vanessa Potter Wool. Love and thanks also to Hyacinth Campbell, Barbara and Barry Siskind, Sy Silverberg and Cat Uhlin, Mark Silverberg and Lynda Ceresne, Emma Kleiman, Bob Silverberg and Carol Loffelmann, and Aidyn, Zoë, Daniel, and Colin. Ultimately I am grateful to and for Cory Silverberg, who has been abidingly present—before, during, after, and aside from my fieldwork and writing—instigating all manner of queer comforts in our lives, filling our bookshelves with sexuality, disability, and children’s literature, and allowing us to be undone by each other. That we now get to fill all the little crannies of our souls and worlds with Sadie and share her with so many amazing people is an indescribable privilege and joy. The best of this book came about only with this abundance of support. The errors and shortcomings remain mine alone.

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acknowledgments

introduction

By late October 2007 Jake had been at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for about a year. He was among a slowly changing roster of two dozen severely injured U.S. soldiers and their family members all living at the nonprofit Fisher House, a privately managed communal house for injured or ill soldiers and their families within the gates of Walter Reed.1 Though the Fisher Houses were originally built with previous generations’ slowly aging veterans in mind, they were now almost entirely devoted to young soldiers like Jake who had been suddenly, dramatically, and grievously wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the family members tensely pulled to their sides. Jake was one of hundreds of other injured soldiers living at Walter Reed, most of them in the on-post Mologne House hotel, whose accommodations were much less well suited to the ongoing projects of remaking domestic life under way at Walter Reed. The small proportion of injured soldiers unattended by family members lived in the barracks of Abrams Hall. Their kin had remained in or returned to their various domestic elsewheres, and regardless of the attachments or fraternities in which these soldiers’ lives might be enmeshed, at Walter Reed such soldiers were collectively referred to as “single.”2 But Jake’s situation was by far the more common. Like Jake, most soldiers at Walter Reed were attended by a brother or a wife, a girlfriend or a parent, some intimate relation whose sustained presence enervated the institutional space of Walter Reed with the nervous conditions of domestic dramas. All of this marked a departure from earlier eras, when it was only the likelihood of an injured soldier’s death that

might occasion the domesticating presence of family members at Walter Reed. Jake, a twenty-four-year-old national guardsman deployed to Iraq with a light infantry unit based in the Northeast, was one of the first soldiers I came to know at Walter Reed. Day after day the contours of this strange new moment of his life emerged. He explained that the pressure from the tight, gray, knitted cap he often wore, even in D.C.’s summer heat, helped alleviate his incessant headaches, a result of his traumatic brain injury (tbi). Once he remarked on his excitement that in five weeks, he would finally have his foot amputated; it had been destroyed in a blast from an improvised explosive device (ied) and he’d been fighting for the amputation for months. He figured he’d finally be able to work out again afterward and wanted to lose some of the weight he’d gained that gave his face and body a soft and sometimes boyish appearance, despite his square jaw and aquiline nose and the tattoos that swept up his forearms toward the long sleeves of the cotton T-shirts and fleece pullovers he had a habit of shoving up above his elbows. He would trade in his cane for a prosthetic leg and the occasional use of a wheelchair. The number of pounds he shed through renewed physical therapy and exercise would quickly surpass those accounted for by the amputated portion of his leg. During the three years he would eventually spend at Walter Reed, after being blown up and before being medically retired from the military, Jake spanned many seemingly discrete institutional, domestic, and spatial arrangements within which the everyday work of remaking life and living on unfolded. His mother had moved into the Fisher House and then relocated to nearby Virginia for what foreseeable future there was, settling into a new house and a new job to keep her both close by and otherwise occupied. Jake’s fiancée, Tanielle, had been pregnant when he was injured. Once his mother moved out of the Fisher House, Tanielle moved in, and she and Jake took a trip back home to South Carolina to get married before she had the baby. But then Tanielle had to spend more and more time back home in South Carolina. First it was to manage her own health during the pregnancy and then birth of a son. Then, after she and Jake conceived a second child at Walter Reed, her doctor put her on bed rest, and she went back home and spent most of her time with her mother, who, it seemed, wanted to keep Tanielle and Jake apart. After the birth of their daughter and the long-awaited amputation of Jake’s leg, the instability of their short

2 

introduction

marriage went critical. Jake told Tanielle to pack her things and go. He moved himself into the Abrams Hall barracks; he was a still-married single soldier and a conditional father of two whose mother was building a life of her own nearby this place he was, thanks to his delayed amputation, finally getting noticeably closer to leaving. Tense and temporality are not easy to sort out here. The trajectories are never clear, nor are the ramifying effects of military, familial, and medical forces. This zone of life—the space of Walter Reed and the limbo of life blown apart and not yet pieced together, not yet sedimented into life stories of before and after—is full of visceral intensity and uncertainty.3 For soldiers it is a moment coaxed into an ever fragile and fragmentary banality, but it is always also notably situated within the spectacular national event of the “war on terror.” This book explores what it is like to live suspended in that tension—the sometimes uncanny ordinariness of such seemingly extraordinary circumstances—when the most intimate contours and forms of life are rendered into matters of grave consequence and concern to a national public formed around the management, display, and erasure of war violence. Set within a century-long history of this wartime publicity, this book considers the national significance of the soldier body as an icon of normative masculinity, the various scales of disturbance produced when that body is injured, and the awkwardness and discomfort that arise when soldiers’ quotidian efforts to live on in the afterwar collide with the myth-laden post-9/11 public imaginary of them. In this space and across these scales I trace the ways that the social and material configurations, the enfleshments, that constitute ideal forms of normative intimacy and unmarked ordinariness in the United States appear as the solution to the problem of injured soldier life, a solution that is impossible in the present at Walter Reed and is imperiled by a future through which the violence of war and the exceptional status of the soldier will continue to ramify.4 Writing ethnographically about the intimacies and lived intensities of a kind of life publicly renowned but practically unknown, I found it difficult to know at what scale to begin. But rather than beginning with the “war on terror,” or even with the machinations of state power and sovereign violence to which lives such as Jake’s have become forever bound, I ground this book and its arguments in the textures of ordinary life’s emergence within the roiling wake of war. I begin with the intimacies and “ordinary ethics” (Lambek 2010) that constitute the contours of banality, commonness,

introduction  3

and intimacy in which life may be endured or sustained. This strikes me as the necessary mode in which to begin the project of conveying the weight of soldierly life born in this precarious moment. That I ground this project so closely in lived experience and everyday encounters is in part an artifact of the cultivation of ethnographic attention. Small acts of daily life are the anchor points to which I learned to tether my understanding of what the something was that was happening at Walter Reed.5 This, after all, is the thing anthropologists do. And this project’s analytic and theoretical interventions are similarly anchored: tethered to the socially and morally invested sensibility and weight of forms of life in all their situated ordinariness and their situations of living. But this is not simply an outgrowth of the practical facts of ethnographic attention itself. These kinds of interventions are called forth by the qualities of and attempts to write about radical uncertainty, indeterminacy, bodily presence, instability, and pain wrought by violence that is not yet part of a past (e.g., Nordstrom 1997; Taussig 2003). In this case it is the manifold violence of war and of a particular kind of American war fought in a geographically distant war zone. While the violence continues, and is newly made, in those zones of killing, it also continues to ramify—and to viscerally extend—in the zone of life that is Walter Reed. Because it is anchored in the embodied experiences of the ongoing and disorienting extensions of war violence, this approach departs from ethnographic work on modern militaries that focuses on soldiers as ideologically informed political actors (Gutmann and Lutz 2010; Weiss 2014), as working symbolically to make identity and meaning within the structures and cultures of military institutions (Higate 2003; Irwin 2008), or as actors positioned within a globalizing American process of militarization and imperialism (Gill 2004; Lutz 2001, 2006, 2009). In understanding the many extensions of war violence at Walter Reed primarily as they register in the flesh and the forms of life that sustain it, this approach also moves in a slightly different direction from the important ethnographic work on soldierly illness and injury that foregrounds the symbolic, social, and institutional politics of pathology (Finley 2011; Hautzinger and Scandlyn 2013; Kilshaw 2008; Young 1995a). Here, as in other, often very different spaces, where violence or pain, debility or death destabilize categories of personhood, thinking about precarious life in “intensified zones of being and not being” (Povinelli 2011: 10) rewards close and often sensuous and affective attention to basic practices 4 

introduction

and modes of being in the presence of others.6 This is a tighter scale of attention. As Veena Das (2007: 7) has noted, when violence tears at one’s world “life [is] recovered not through some grand gestures in the realm of the transcendent, but through a descent into the ordinary.” Ordinariness, then, matters a great deal. And it is precisely under apparently extraordinary conditions that a feeling of ordinariness becomes, as it were, questionable, available for interrogative address. What is at stake in the work of that descent into a life that feels to oneself or registers to others as ordinary? And what of situations in which those two registers of the ordinary are not the same? How might we address ordinariness in a moment conventionally conceived as bereft of it, a moment characterized by transitions and impermanence so profound that they cut right to and through the body itself? What does ordinariness mean in a moment that is exhausting and protracted but whose endurance and end are secured by vast institutional apparatuses? What does ordinariness look like in a place and among a group of people such as American soldiers who are discursively and historically rendered, very specifically, extraordinary? When viewed from the perspective these questions suggest, we glimpse the vanishing point where the figure of a torn world and the ground of an ordinary one come so much together that they are not clearly distinguishable in the living of life but only by the artful and discretionary lines that are drawn to make them suitable for schematic representation, lines that our culturally educated eyes tend dutifully to follow. Part of the project of this book is to focus attention on that vanishing point, where the ordinary, an unmarked form of life, and the extraordinary, a vaunted and spectacularized one, flicker back and forth like some trick of the eye, while simultaneously attending to what is at stake in the various efforts to draw those lines, to distinguish the ordinary from the extraordinary in the context of the contemporary American afterwar.7 The effect is a multiplication of phantom ordinaries, unmarked and normative ones that linger in an impossible space beyond or before the reach of the afterwar, and precarious and contingent ones that embrace the facts and features of war-torn life but tremble at the inescapable touch of a social world that insists a war-torn ordinary is anything but. The themes that organize the chapters of this book—the contradictions and uncertainties of life in the aftermath of injury (chapter 1); the iconic meaning of Walter Reed (chapter 2); the moral economies within which life and death are valued in America (chapter 3); the markedness of spaces, bodies, and ways of being bound to war violence (chapter 4); introduction  5

the reconfiguring of heteronormative masculinities and domesticities (chapter 5)—developed out of thinking through the many particularities of Walter Reed and the social and biological lives of soldiers with whom I worked. They also demonstrate the continuity between the “extraordinary” problems and facts of life and death at Walter Reed and more “ordinary” problems and facts of life and death in late liberalism, with all the spaces and senses of precarity and temporalities of deferral that characterize it (Povinelli 2011). The fact that these are soldiers, and their injuries sustained during war, marks this situation in unique ways. National violence takes its shifty place within this process, and the national iconicity of the injured soldier renders it particularly public. But it also resembles less spectacularized situations of precarity—for example, those moments of cruelty (in Lauren Berlant’s [2011] sense), in which striving toward a normative form of the good life, what I would call an unmarked ordinary, carries threatening hazards, or the central friction of sexuality in crafting properly embodied personhood when the form of the body has been rendered improper through less nationalistically freighted causes, like illness, birth, or “ ‘personal” injury (Jain 2006a, 2013; McCruer and Mollow 2012; Menderson 2011). That is to say, afterwar life at Walter Reed is and is not like generic forms of normative American life, and the irresolvable tension between its historic, public, war-torn particularity and its contiguity with those normative forms of life is the binding thread of this book. The task at hand, the aspiration of this book, is to convey the particular intensity of a feeling of ordinariness that is emergent at Walter Reed but that is always marked as more, and a sense of the substance and weight life acquires there. It is also to make clear that while the exigencies of coming back to life at Walter Reed are indeed marked by the inescapable extraordinariness of American soldierly life, they are also experienced, and best understood, not primarily through their distance from what we tend to think of as ordinary American life but through their intimate correspondence with it. So this is not an ethnography of Walter Reed in perhaps the most classic sense: it is not a description of the running or functioning of an institution, nor a rich exemplar of the culture of U.S. military rehabilitation, nor even a generalizable account of what life is like at a military hospital for groups of American soldiers during times of war. As I elaborate in chapter 1, soldiers at Walter Reed did not, in any durable way, constitute a group or a cohort, nor could those living within its gates be described as a community, often an appropriate descriptor of life within U.S. military bases (e.g., Hawkins 6 

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2005; MacLeish 2013; see also Lutz 2001). What’s more, not only were the features of life and rehabilitation substantially different than in each of the preceding wartime eras Walter Reed had witnessed (of Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and World War I), but the institutional coordination of life there, and the kinetic and medical military technologies that arrange bodies there, shift so rapidly as to make the ethnographic details of daily life in this place remarkably evanescent, transforming it in significant ways from one year to the next.8 Rather, told from within the tension of ordinariness of American soldiers engaged in the intimate project of coming to live that unfolds within a stubbornly public space, saturated by a history of patriotism, iconic masculinity and fitness, national allegories of the value of war, and the particular iteration of these public meanings in an America six years after the event of 9/11, this book concerns the possibilities and valuations of life in the afterwar. It explores what it is like to be blown up as an American soldier and to then be pulled toward an ideal American ordinary of nonsoldiering life, while stuck in a place that, for all its proliferating claims about the injured soldier as a hero, a “tactical athlete,” a family man who is “no less of a person” for his loss of limb, seems to protest so much that all possibilities of life are called frighteningly into question.9 This book explores how, in a context marked by national violence and the unmooring of self-founding attachments, ordinariness matters. It matters to injured soldiers who share a feeling of ordinariness in their common lot, a lot that others anxiously render extraordinary. It matters to these same soldiers as they move toward an aspirationally normative civilian future and are animated by an ambivalent desire for a life that others recognize as ordinary. The chapters in this book take up the contradictions of this historical and intimate situation as they characterize both the public aspects of injured soldier life at Walter Reed and the textures of daily life that constitute it in the living. This introduction elaborates the backdrop against which both the figural and the finely textured dimensions of injured soldier life take their shape. It sketches modern national imaginaries of soldier bodies, biopolitical questions about the valuing and worthiness of human life, and the specificity of this moment of American war within the U.S. Army, all of which all come to bear on injured American soldiers in particular ways. Chapter 1, “The Extra/ordinary Atmosphere of Walter Reed,” ethnographically introduces the themes that unfold throughout the book and eases us in to the contradictory rhythms of daily life: the boredom and intensity, the introduction  7

intractable instability of bodily forms, the fragmentary and visceral presence of war, the deep but fleeting forms of sociality that abide between injured soldiers, and the thread of sexuality that binds up personhood in sometimes awkward ways. Chapter 2, “A Present History of Fragments,” offers a thematic public history of Walter Reed, tacking back and forth between the past and the present to convey the way Walter Reed is rendered as an iconic site of military medical excellence and is simultaneously haunted by the violence of American war and the dilemmas of disabled masculinity, transience, technology, patriotism, and the moral economy of sacrifice that are tied to it. The following three chapters proceed from the most publicly mediated dimensions of daily life at Walter Reed to the most intimate, moving deeper into the intractable task of remaking life in the afterwar, a task burdened by all the historical and ethical weight that is foisted on injured soldiers and their families at Walter Reed. Chapter 3, “The Economy of Patriotism,” focuses on encounters between injured soldiers and the grateful strangers who surround them, exploring what it is like to be placed at the center of an incoherent and simultaneously affective, moral, and material economy of patriotism, which simultaneously obscures some violences of war and recognizes others while giving no part to much of the experience that surrounds them. Chapter 4, “On Movement,” is about the contingencies of space and soldiers’ bodies in it. It explores a range of experiences of inhabiting a body and world transformed by the material and visceral knowledge of combat, experiences that become apparent when soldiers move and are seen to move through spaces beyond the gates of Walter Reed. These transformations are generally made legible through frames of pathologization— most notably the frame of posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd)—that seek to reorder behaviors that seem to have become disordered in the aftermath of war. By focusing ethnographically on these experiences of transformation, however, I seek to put such pathology in abeyance and attempt to grapple with the veracity of these transformations in their own right. Chapter 5, “Intimate Attachments and the Securing of Life,” turns toward questions of life after Walter Reed, focusing on the dilemmas of sexuality, dependence and independence, couplehood, domesticity, and the socially weighted contours of what is supposed to be the good life after war. Across all these chapters I follow the thread of ordinariness, that emergent sense of being in common with others, and extraordinariness—the insistence or creeping awareness that one’s life is marked by violence or exception or things that ought not to be embraced within the fold of the 8 

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ordinary. I explore the ways ordinariness and the extraordinary become uncomfortably tangled as injured soldiers and their families live from one day to the next, oriented toward a future that seems to promise nothing but an unmarked, American ordinary, while stuck in a present that will not abide it. And I develop a sense of what is at stake in this tangle of the extra/ordinary, set as it is within a broader context in which the body of the injured American soldier tests the very limits of worthy life and embodied liberal personhood while simultaneously calling forth anxious public valorization, investment, and insistence on the worth of soldierly life and limb. Men and the Body of the Nation In the United States, where there is no compulsory military service and, since 1973, no draft, soldiers inhabit a public imaginary that—especially in times of national anxiety—binds them to an exceptional form of personhood inflected with heroism and patriotic commitment (Allen 1999). This heroism and patriotism have also always been linked to the violence of war, that foundational violence of the state that, through the ironic logic of the sovereign exception, is both the guarantor of democracy and the threat of its hiatus (Agamben 2005; Johnston 2007; Schmitt 1934). The American soldier is thus a deeply ambivalent figure: his attributed valor is rooted in the insidious threat of national violence. This ambivalence permeates understandings of American soldierly life at various scales. For example, Catherine Lutz (2001) describes a Janus-faced soldier figure circulating in the community around Fort Brag in Fayetteville, North Carolina. During World War II civilians there feared that returning soldiers would create a havoc of crime and unrest. . . . ​Fear about the soldiers’ antisocial tendencies was evident throughout WWII. [North Carolina’s] main black newspaper published a poem, for example, written in defense of the soldier: Everybody cheers a soldier, On his fighting way. And then they call him a “hero” When in the grave he lay. Well, a soldier’s greatest battle, Is in the time of peace introduction  9

When every body scorn[s] him, And treat[s] him like a “Beast” And now with these few remarks, I must close And I hope you won[’]t offend. But the next time you meet a soldier, Just treat him as a friend. At the same time, soldiers had been depicted in advertising and official rhetoric as “friendly, generous, easy-going, brave, the citizen soldier[s] of America,” and people knew that the ranks included people as loving, talented, young, good-humored, handsome, and healthy as their own sons, brothers, and husbands. (81–82) And, Lutz (2001: 207) notes, during the “hot peace” of the 1990s citizens of Fayetteville came to know the soldiers in their midst as archetypes of masculine morality and discipline but also as debauched and transient inhabitants of their hometown, as men (usually) who heroically serve and sacrifice for the nation but also as parasitic and overentitled consumers who don’t pay their fair share and who, despite evidence to the contrary, bear responsibility for the drugs and violence that afflict their impoverished neighborhoods. As one Fayetteville resident said, “If my son was out there everyday being trained how to decapitate the Vietnamese and other bad guys and then he came home to his wife and crying baby son, who knows what could happen” (207). Both the valorized and the vilified face of the soldier tie him to violence and to an embodied heteronormative masculinity central to the production of nationally valued and reproductive forms of personhood in the United States. This is not incidental, as processes of imaginatively and materially constituting the nation necessarily include the imaginative and material production and configuration of particular kinds of gendered bodies (Canaday 2009; Kimmel 2006; Mayer 1999; Mostov 1999).10 Sex and reproduction, and the maintenance and regulation of socially constituted and gendered bodies (including that of the soldier), are fundamental to the establishment and government of modern national populations (Foucault 1990; Mosse 1985). And sexuality—that normative, pathologizing, and often public social force that is exerted on and extrudes bodies and the relations between them—is central to how a nation, its citizenry, its territories, and their limits are imaginatively and juridically constituted. 10 

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Just as the delineation and management of marked, marginalized, queer, or denigrated bodies is essential to such efforts (Berlant 1997; Canaday 2009; Foucault 1995; McClintock 1995; Povinelli 2006, 2011), so is the production of normative figures of heteronormative masculinity, like the soldier. Normative masculinity, inextricable from a tangle of morality, sexuality, aspirational idealism, and productive sociality, has also been a vital site of national reproduction in the unfolding of modern Western states (Mosse 1998). The historian George Mosse argues that from at least the end of the eighteenth century much of the burden of national self-making was given to the idealized bodies of men. Notions of virility and physical and moral fitness of men and their nation, a nation and its men, were projected onto idealized images of fit male bodies and also literally enacted in very material and sometimes deadly contact between them (16–24).11 Perhaps not surprisingly, then, American soldier bodies are an anxiously cultivated epitome of national ideals. The health, wealth, and order of the state are read through and enacted by them. They are fetishized symbols of the violent acts such order entails. The image and physicality of the soldier body can thus be understood to belong to the nation in myriad ways: as shaped by national imaginings and disciplinary techniques; as a subject made, remade, and made visible by the moral logics of the nation; and as an object supposed to function as its proxy and in its interest. But the nature of this belonging, this relationship between the nation and the soldier it imagines, has always been fraught and characterized by contradictions that grow out of the shifty and uncomfortable place of the violence of war in America (see Huebner 2008).12 The fighting soldier body and its nationally configured masculinity has been disciplined and ennobled, decried and obscured, displayed and defaced. And the injured soldier body, which insinuates a threatening display of just one of the many deadly elements that undergird the existence of the modern state, has been subject to an array of additional treatments. The bodies of injured soldiers during World War I were the focus and impetus for the foundation, in earnest, of a science of rehabilitation in the United States (Linker 2011), a science that had been lingering latent in the treatment of the less valued, less visible bodies of ill and disabled children (Allan 1958). From its start, this coordinated treatment of injured soldier bodies in the United States was inextricable from both the notions of normative masculinity in which the soldier body had long been rooted and introduction  11

the ideal forms of productive and “independent” social and family life that were central to then current ideals of “Americanism.” As Dr. Charles Mayo (1918: 780), cofounder, with his brother William, of the Mayo Clinic, put it in his remarkable 1917 inaugural address as president of the American Medical Association: Great industries have in the past unnecessarily destroyed thousands of human lives and turned on the public many more thousands of cripples dependant on public charity. . . . ​ The economic law of supply and demand has gradually been brought into force, and the waste of human life must cease. We hear on every hand of projects and efforts for the conservation of human life, a movement which is the outcome not of any philanthropy or sentiment but of necessity. Men can no longer be replaced with the old-time ease, and their individual value to the community has increased accordingly. . . . ​ Now that the war is producing injuries by the thousands, a new impetus is given this work, that by training in special employment and artificial aids such persons may be as happy as possible and selfsupporting, and not mentally disabled and a drag on the community. During World War II increased efforts at rehabilitation would be spurred by the moral desire and economic need to return men to work (Allan 1958: 161). Thus, like the image of the (fighting and normatively functional) soldier body, the treatment of the injured soldier body, especially the amputee, was addressed to national ideals grounded in normative notions of stable and productive male bodies arranged in familiar physical and social configurations. As Beth Linker (2011: 4) puts it in her history of rehabilitation in World War I America, “Rehabilitation was thus a way to restore social order after the chaos of war by (re)making men into producers of capital. Since wage earning often defined manhood, rehabilitation was, in essence, a process of making a man manly.” Reflecting on a century of war and rehabilitation at Walter Reed, she notes, “Then, as now, rehabilitation holds out the promise that the wounds of war can be healed (and thus forgotten) on the national as well as individual level” (7). Work on the body of the injured soldier—rehabilitative and imaginative alike—is thus also work to smooth over public visions of war and postwar life in contemporary America, to obscure the violence and pain of

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war in gestures of hope and gratitude that are nonetheless based on their presence. The public and intimate reconstitution of the injured soldier is addressed both to the public, generic figure of the soldier and to the intimate ordinary man he may become. This is a kind of doubled position, both staged and closed, both institutional and domestic, both overdetermined and self-founding, and never only one or the other. In this context sexuality, masculinity, fitness, economic independence, and future life can become mutually indexical, a multilayered site of the rearticulation of personhood projected, in the context of rehabilitation, toward an unmarked future ordinary life. In this context soldiers at Walter Reed are collectively and often compliantly exploring possible futures, imagining normative futures in which they can, through the “bootstrap performatives” of autological self-making (“I discover myself”; “I am”; “I desire”; “I willfully give of myself”), inhabit the preferred mode of liberal self-sovereignty (Povinelli 2006: 183). It is within this nexus of America and its productive bodies, violence and its in/visibilities, masculinity and the stakes of its fleshy and flawed appearances in the body of the (injured) soldier, that this book’s questions about the value of forms of life arise. Accounting for the Worth of American Soldiers The soldier is one of those special categories of subjects that beg critical questions about the supposed sameness and equality within national populations, like the immigrant or the criminally irresponsible or the other queer kinds of person constituted through the elaborated provisioning of rights and obligations and their denuding limits (see Canaday 2009). As the anthropologist Kenneth MacLeish (2013: 13) notes, “The soldier challenges this fantasy [of liberalism’s universal, autonomous, self-sovereign individual] in especially acute fashion, as he is perpetually subject to the will of others and exposed to bodily harm in ways that are utterly transparent, rationalized, and legitimate. Probing this condition not only illuminates the lives of those who inhabit it but raises much broader questions about the limits of personhood.” In the special case of the soldier, these questions turn quickly to the ordering and valuing of violence, death, and embodied life itself that form a tinkerable deep structure of modern and late liberal regimes of sociality and governance. Bodying forth both heteronormative masculinity (Higate 2003; Jarvis 2004; Linker 2011; Mosse 1998) and

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queer sociality (Serlin 2002, 2003, 2006), the soldier is addressed not only to the destruction of bodies but to gender, sexuality, and the reproduction of life in especially nationally relevant forms. Vacillating between the uniformity and rationalized efficiency of high modernism and the bootstrapping “army of one” of liberal self-making, the position of the soldier spans competing ideologies of individuated agency, capacity, and the diffusion of social obligation, dependence, and independence.13 The categorical pairing of soldier and citizen offers a particularly acute lens through which to trace the production of personhood in America and other modern liberal democracies (Canaday 2009; Cowen 2008; Mayer 1999; Mosse 1998). That soldier and citizen throw processes of personhood into stark relief in these contexts is not especially surprising: it makes sense to think about being a person in America through the lens of soldier and citizen to the same degree that it makes sense to think about America through its militarized history. Histories of social policy and of the practices of state intervention into the fitness and worth of national populations show that “in the modern world, the welfare and the warfare state increasingly become indistinguishable from one another” (Cooter, Harrison, and Sturdy 1998: 4; see also Skocpol 1995). But ironically the shifting moral and cultural significance of these structures of civil (welfare) and military (warfare) entitlement point up the devastatingly uneven distribution of social value that flowed through or was diverted by these structures. For example, though war pensions for veterans of the Civil War were the very first public welfare entitlements in the United States (Skocpol 1995), the contrast between the contempt for and action against the so-called welfare queen of the post-Reagan era (Zucchino 1999) and the post-Vietnam, post-9/11 valorization, sacralization, and public and private support for soldiers and veterans—the collectivity proudly evoked in terms like troops and wounded warriors—could hardly be more stark. Such passionate distinctions obscure the functional confluence of welfare and warfare, as well as the fact that many of the troops may count welfare recipients among their closest family members (see also Cowen 2008). The zealous defense of military pay, entitlements, and spending in current U.S. politics also makes it easy to forget that the lives and bodies of American soldiers were not always considered so precious. This shifting evaluation of soldierly personhood—something beyond, for example, the cultural distinctions between Vietnam-era veteran homecom-

14 

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ings and those of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan—offers an important context within which to understand the complex economies of life’s value within which injured soldiers at Walter Reed find themselves. In the World War I era, entitlements for soldiers were viewed with skepticism and the fear that unless benefits were leveraged to transform soldiers, injured soldiers especially, into workers, entitlements would turn them into lazy and corrupted pensioners like the Civil War veterans before them were seen to be, little more than flab to be unfairly borne by the social body (Linker 2011). The reform and retraction of veterans’ benefits at that time was crafted by the same Progressive principles of social work and justice ever vigilant against “dependency” that motivated the establishment of workmen’s compensation and other social insurance schemes that many Progressives hoped would eventually extend equally to all Americans. But in the early 1930s veterans began to emerge as uniquely compensable, as a social category of person whose life had an excessive moral value and whose worth required special financial compensation. The hotly contested proposition of soldiers’ unique worth led to the spectacular Bonus March of 1932, when tens of thousands of World War I veterans descended on Washington to demand adjustments to compensation that they had been promised by Congress in 1924, on the grounds not that veterans were entitled to exceptional repayment for their warfront service but that soldiers deserved the same compensation as others who had been conscripted to home-front labor and who had earned far more in wages (Dickson and Allen 2006; Waters 1933: 19). Days after a proposed veterans’ compensation bill was defeated in the Senate, tens of thousands of protesting soldiers were violently forced out of their encampment on the Anacostia River in a dramatic and fiery army assault. Though it was not immediately successful, the 1932 Bonus March highlights the contentiousness around the special status of soldiers and veterans within the calculations of social worth that would constitute the New Deal. In the historical moment that hovered between the depths of the Depression and the explosive heights of World War II, President Roosevelt addressed the American Legion. He explained the dramatic cuts to veterans’ bonuses and disability compensation that followed the Bonus March, saying something almost unimaginable from the mouth of a president today: “No person, because he wore a uniform, must thereafter be placed in a special class of beneficiaries over and above all other citizens” (cited in Frydl 2009: 53). Indeed the volatilities of the

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American moral economy proved Roosevelt wrong, and the special, transcendent value of soldierly life was consolidated in 1944 in the gi Bill. In the cautionary words of one senator who at the time still hoped for a more equal valuing of all American lives, “The soldiers will definitely become a privileged group” (cited in Frydl 2009: 4). In more recent eras, as the welfare of populations is increasingly disaggregated into the work and responsibility of individuals stripped of collectivizing social and cultural registers of worth, soldiers are newly recognized as a worthy and privileged social group. They are seen as having earned and being owed, sometimes through the bare facts of individual bodily exposures, sometimes through the multidimensional subjection to or production of a special disciplinary identity, with both its vilified and valorized aspects. In the contemporary era, worth emerges around and through soldiers in a way that seems to confound even the contradictions of late liberalism. For example, it is precisely not grounded in a claim “against exclusion from a discursive formation of universal justice,” as liberal forms of collective recognition ought to be (Brown 1995: 58). The value of the American soldier is today precisely not equal to others, an interesting contrast to a state like Israel, for example, whose compulsory military service is entangled (if increasingly controversially) with the status of citizenship itself and where it is nonservice that raises the specter of inequality (Lomsky-Feder and BenAri 1999: 5, 9; Weiss 2011).14 If it had not become so untouchable, so sacred, this special value would threaten to make apparent that “transparent fiction of state universality” (Brown 1995: 58) that ironically enables the increasingly differential distribution of the value of life, making poverty and social, sexual, and bodily queerness in all its forms deadly in America. The figure of the soldier encompasses and embodies these contradictions of social value and the myths of the singular value of life in which late liberalism has so much invested. So part of what is made stark in thinking about personhood through the soldier and citizen is the differential political valuing of varied kinds of human lives, the abiding incommensurabilities produced by such differential distributions of value within the United States, and the ways those differences are occluded or ignored and incommensurabilities maintained. These issues are also at the heart of the social problem of disability, most starkly and disturbingly reflected in legal and ethical debates around when and if a person is better off dead than disabled (see Johnson 2006: 201– 28), as well as in philosophical reflections on how the value of a person 16 

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is related to one’s “capability” to be participatory within the frame of a liberal social contract that neglects such a person by design (Nussbaum 2007; see also Davis 2002). Disability is seen to invalidate personhood in modern and postmodern liberal social and political imaginaries (Hughes 2000, 2012). And it poses an essential challenge to valued forms of productively embodied normative masculinities (Shakespeare 1999; Shuttleworth 2004), among which the soldier holds a special place. An amplification of the “dilemma of disabled masculinity” (Shuttleworth et al. 2012), the impaired body of the war-injured American soldier sits at “the juncture of the discourses of the warrior and of the disabled” (Gerber 2012: 5), marking a fleshy convergence of seemingly incommensurable forms of life that are valued as exceptional in very different ways. Around the edges of a soldierly life—in edgy zones of contact (bureaucratic, patriotic, historical, intimate, violent) where being edges toward not being, iconic fitness edges toward invalidity, and soldier edges into civilian—these values and their incommensurabilities are produced in anxious overabundance. Who This Book Is About in General and in Particular If the who of this book, the historically freighted figure of the injured American soldier, can be generally described in the ways I just have, how might I best introduce the particular soldiers who populate these pages? In what ways might I position them so as to give you a sense of who they are, or at least who they were as they figured in this general terrain, this ground of American soldierly injury and all its supervalant meaning? I can give you a general sense by offering you some of their common particulars: Nearly all of the soldiers I met at the Fisher House in 2007–8 were lower ranking enlisted members of various army branches. Most had enlisted in their state’s National Guard or Army Reserve sometime since 2003—two years after 9/11, the year of the invasion of Iraq, four years or fewer before ending up at Walter Reed. Most were between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five and had been very seriously injured, many requiring one or more amputations, on their first deployment in Iraq, most by an ied or explosively formed projectile (efp) or, occasionally, other large munitions like rocket-propelled grenades. But there are many exceptions to this generalization, many excessive and shifting particulars. For example, when I first met him, Jake would have fit these contours quite well, though he was not among the many requiring introduction  17

an amputation. By the time I left Walter Reed, Jake had had one amputation, fitting him all the more closely to these contours. But he’d also been promoted to sergeant, attaining the status of a noncommissioned officer (nco). And besides, since he’d had to lobby so hard for his amputation, it would be unfitting to say he was among those who “required” amputation surgery without specifying by whom it was required and signaling the way the iconic contours of his body were infused with his willful negotiation of a particular array of possibilities that was significantly different for him than for other soldiers.15 There are other exceptions: soldiers who were shot, not blown up; soldiers who were older or more senior in rank; soldiers who had been medics. There was, very occasionally, a female soldier. But there is a coherence to these varied experiences with war. There are many broad generalizations that would suggest, more or less, the shape of the lives that populate this book. To suggest this shape, I could tell you a composite story, perhaps about a teenager who signs up at the age of seventeen because joining the army seems like the least worse option, and because the recruiter in his public school lunch room in, let’s say, suburban Georgia seemed like a really good guy, and perhaps because his father and uncle and cousin were all in the army for a while, so enlisting was easily within the realm of possibility. And maybe he meets a girl whom he marries and impregnates in a fit of vigor and responsibility and panic just before he heads off to some desert city full of targets he is itching to shoot at. And maybe he is bored by all the nothing that seems to add up to war and he gets high as a fucking kite off combat, and then one day he’s sitting in a tank with the com system hooked up to his iPod and then there is force and heat and fire and pain and his leg isn’t his leg anymore because it’s decomposed into its constituent parts that look like any other kind of meat and everything is different only in lots of ways it’s all just the same because he’s still bored and gets high as a fucking kite off combat. I could tell a story like that. But such generalizations are too clumsy. Like rag dolls, parodies of the human form cobbled together from bits that don’t quite fit, each piece losing its color as it is cut from the life to which it belongs. Instead of generalizations I could rely on statistics to count up all the particulars and position the lives I describe in this book as exemplary, as particulars more or less like all the rest. I could say that between 9/11 and June 2008, Walter Reed was home to 7,800 of the 33,572 service members

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then officially wounded in action in Operation Enduring Freedom (oef) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (oif), the two main military fronts in the entity officially known as the global war on terror (gwot).16 I could say that as of January 19, 2009, oef and oif had led to the amputations of 1,184 limbs, 55 percent of them due to ied blasts (Fischer 2009), and that such blasts are the most common cause of all gwot casualties: 31,625 service members were blown up as of May 31, 2011, after the effective and official end of operations in Iraq, and 28,697 of them survived the blast.17 I could tell you that between 2003 and 2007, the Military Health System spent $23.2 million on prescription drugs for tbi and ptsd, or that at least 20 percent of returning service members (now over 2 million individuals) are thought to suffer from ptsd (Chiarelli 2010; Tanielian and Jaycox 2008). I could tell you that in 2010 military suicide rates surpassed civilian rates, and that rates for suicide and ptsd are highest in the army (Chiarelli 2010), which is also the deadliest branch of service, accounting for about 80 percent of medical evacuations. I could tell you that only about 20 percent of oef and oif medical evacuations are occasioned by combat injuries, and a roughly equal percentage are due to “non-hostile injuries” and that, as has long been the case in U.S. wars overseas, the majority of evacuations are due to illness and disease (Fischer 2010). I could tell you that of the twenty-four pay grades in the U.S. Army, 61 percent of army personnel are concentrated in the lowest five, or that people categorized as “Black” are significantly overrepresented in the middle ranks (pay grades e6–e9).18 I could tell you that people categorized as “White” are overrepresented in all officer ranks and that their disproportionate presence increases the higher you go. But then I’d want to mention that they’re also overrepresented at the bottom (pay grades e1–e4). I could tell you that when you break death rates down by race, “Whites” are a bit more likely to die than “Blacks” or “Hispanics,” given their representation in the force.19 And I could tell you that despite all that, recruiters almost always fall short of meeting their targets for minority groups and exceed their targets for “Whites.”20 I could tell you all of these very specific things. I could share these actuarial trivia that, despite or perhaps because of the military’s propensity to

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count and keep records, are so hard to figure that the closer you look, the fuzzier they get. But while these fuzzy numbers might manage to confirm or complicate your ideas about who is in the army and who dies and is hurt there these days, they don’t tell you what it is like to be one of these particulars. And they don’t tell you anything about the strange experience of being rigorously and publicly counted and accountable, counted on and accounted for. These numbers say nothing of the strange sort of exemplariness by which all these particular people are supposed to be characterized.21 And so this book is written in a different register, in an attempt to understand and convey how the general saturates the particular and how the particular complicates the general. These same themes are threaded through the book in tensions between expectations and exceptions, the generic example and the actual instance, and questions about how we tell one from the other and when it matters that we do. I think here of one particular injured soldier I knew at Walter Reed, Javier. While working on a grant application based on this work, I meant to speak generically of some of the ways soldiers’ bodies are marked by the violence of war. I meant to write “the blue-green bits of shrapnel beneath their skin.” Instead I wrote, “the blue-green bits of shrapnel beneath his skin.” To write my generic description, I bring to my own mind the face of one particular soldier I knew. Not even his face, just his left cheek and jaw that were peppered by these bits of metal. I remember it shiny, slathered with ointment after a laser treatment to remove them. His face helps me see the color of shrapnel, almost like something organic, an ingrown hair, a five o’clock shadow hovering beneath the skin. But in the act of writing I am betrayed. I don’t remember this mnemonic image, this icon. I remember Javier. Like each piece of metal lodged beneath his flesh, his shining face has a history and a life that inhabits. I realize that there is no such thing as generic shrapnel. I suggest that the qualities of living I convey throughout this book are essential to what it was to be an injured soldier at Walter Reed in 2007–8 and that being is inextricable from U.S. histories of war, ideologies of patriotism, and national economies of moral debt, as well as normative forms of life and social attachment that might seem to have nothing to do with them. These particularities are formed in relation to these generalities.

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And so this book is about how ordinary life is only and always contingent and how, their lives freighted with sometimes overwhelming significance, the soldiers with whom I worked at Walter Reed are exemplary in their living of extra/ordinary lives. The Question of Ordinariness The lives of injured soldiers at Walter Reed are characterized by an unstable oscillation between the extreme and the unremarkable. They have lived in ways such that the decision to join an “overly kinetic” (AylwinFoster 2005) military at a time of war was not really so strange; in fact it seemed the option most likely to improve their lives at the time. They went to war, if one can call it that, where the sound of alarms warning of mortar attacks became so ordinary that they learned to sleep right through them, and where crowds of children so often portended a bomb that they grew to hate them. These became the contours of their ordinary lives. They did their jobs, much of the time riding around in vehicles, some occasionally shooting at and killing people who were going about their own lives and jobs. Sometimes these lives and jobs were aimed like weapons fixed on killing these soldiers, and sometimes they weren’t. And then, most often when doing that most ordinary task of riding in a vehicle, they blew up. The experience of work and life at war was exchanged for something else, a life saved and almost lost, a moment unlike any other and yet common to tens of thousands of soldiers, including those who shared the space of that same blownup vehicle and who might be dead but might also be back riding in an identical vehicle waiting to be blown up again, for that singular moment to repeat itself, an anticipation that seemed impossible and felt inevitable.22 At Walter Reed everyday life had a different rhythm. A feeling of ordinariness there came together out of boredom, pain, drug-induced fogginess, impact-induced memory loss, unruly and leaky bodies, and new social attachments that seemed to matter so much and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Though others insisted on the extraordinariness of this space, to injured soldiers this all became ordinary, if only for now. Through it all there was another aspirational ordinary life that seemed far away in place and time, one that seemed to run away from soldiers while still pulling them near. This was the normative ordinary life of an ideally

introduction  21

middle-class anonymity, an everyday good life with an easy and unbroken rhythm unmarred by pain and sickness, quickened by leisure, motivated by a simple counterpoint of work and rest (Lefebvre 1991: 29–42). Each of these ordinaries—the ordinary of war, the ordinary of Walter Reed, the ordinary of life after—is threatened by the potential and limit imminent within it. War is not ordinary, and yet it was. The facts of life at Walter Reed are extraordinary, and yet it is the accrued feeling of their ordinariness that makes them barely bearable. The illusive and unremarkable ordinary of suburban middle-class life is almost exotic in its distance. Like the orthographic form of the extra/ordinary, something extra, excessive threatens the integrity of each of these ordinaries like a falling wall or timber. The slash cleaves the ordinary and its extra apart and together, linking them in a precarious and suffocating relation. In this way an ordinary is rather different from modernist notions of “the everyday,” theorizations of which form a small canon of their own.23 I use the term ordinary here rather than everyday (terms often used interchangeably in anthropology) both to emphasize the felt sense of a life’s unmarkedness, its commonness, and to emphasize the instability of such a mode of life, the fact that such a mode of living is always unstable, always extra/ordinary. Thinking through this tension of the extra/ordinary calls attention to the ways that what feels and can be counted as ordinary is emergent and particular and evocative of the possibilities and limits of a located social world. This structural property of the ordinary—the idea that it is culturally or situationally syntagmatic—is also at play in anthropologies of suffering that draw critical attention to the unspectacular violence that can adhere in day-to-day living (Bourgois 1996; Das et al. 2000, 2001; Kleinman et al. 1997; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Part of the affective and descriptive power of some such work comes from the way it produces a certain kind of ethical disorientation (e.g., Farmer 1997; Scheper-Hughes 1992): the moment in which the everyday is marked by violence becomes the moment of a moral turn in which the anthropologist insists those daily experiences of suffering that have come to seem ordinary in a particular world should not be accepted as ordinary. The consequence is to vitiate more extreme versions of cultural and moral relativism and assert a universal moral imperative based on a human sameness that exists in a shared capacity for suffering beneath a veneer of cultural difference.24 I do not take this moral turn. In my analysis the moments in which suffering and the legacies of violence seem ordinary are the moments in which I want to insist on the feeling 22 

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of ordinariness shared by soldiers at Walter Reed. I focus on the ways life is lived in this marginal ordinary, on what it is like to live a life so deeply, suffocatingly nestled in the extra/ordinary, and on the stakes and lived consequences of this configuration of the ordinary and its extra.25 At Walter Reed the feeling of ordinariness emerges through generative tensions between marked and unmarked forms of American life. It is a zone of life marked by radical instability, fraught with legacies of war, the strictures of the U.S. military, a deep acquaintance with death, public performances of patriotism, and experiences of physical pain that not only set soldiers apart as a common lot but threaten to make life dangerously thin and even to set each injured soldier apart from his family and fellows through the transitional and transient nature of living at Walter Reed and the problem of pain that can make life and its sustaining attachments so heartbreakingly doubtful (Scarry 1987). But the questionableness of the ordinary at Walter Reed, the thing that seems to set it apart from unmarked ordinary American life, leads me to propose a certain continuity (not to be confused with a straightforward sameness) between the marked lives of injured soldiers at Walter Reed and the unmarked lives of imagined ordinary others in America “out there.” To be clear, this is not an argument for the banality of suffering or vulnerability. My point is not that we all suffer to varying degrees and should therefore ground a progressive or moral or critical theoretical orientation to life in the empathetic recognition of an undifferentiated fact of vulnerability. My point is not, in other words, that ordinariness always emerges and therefore all forms and spacings of social life have the same measure, weight, and value; they do not.26 I would like to move away from considering life and its basic value in terms of this lowest and most generalizable common denominator of life itself, that thing we would universally (and always only theoretically) share if stripped bare. Instead I want to consider forms of life and their alwaysanything-but-bare fleshiness in instances and instantiations that are socially specific and that also share the general predicament of sociality, of being with others in a place for a time. By thinking through the emergence of ordinariness in spaces of life more often positioned beyond it, we can more clearly see the ways life and its value are socially, politically, and morally differentiated. The point is that in attending closely to the intimate and ethical encounters in which ordinariness emerges and is iteratively composed in “intensified zones of being and not being” (Povinelli 2011: 10), introduction  23

we apprehend the varying weights lives are made to bear and the work of bearing that weight. Exploring ways of being and modes of being with others at Walter Reed is thus also an exploration of the forms of life these modes of sociality constitute. It makes sensible the friction and drag that accompany the honing of life into a life of a particular kind.27 This honing happens in public or staged ways, as when a kind of life is written into being or seen and pointed to and made iconically meaningful (through diagnosis, through the discursive and performative sedimentation of social types, and in other ways). But the contours of injured soldiers’ lives are also constituted through intimacies (both less and more publicly staged), through forms of closeness, attachments, and attentions that turn toward daily living and the labors of reproducing social and biological life and the thickness, thinness, and interdependencies of social relations that situate a person in a particular social world, itself made and remade through those relations and situations. Approaching this zone of life through the poetics of the extra/ordinary allows me to do what I think the soldiers and family members who so graciously allowed me into their lives for a while hoped that I would do: convey something of the struggle and pain of their lives without marking them as exceptional and without slotting them into grand narratives of trauma, war, heroism, or national value or placing them in a space of the unimaginable. The people with whom I worked tended to position our conversations and time together against, on the one hand, the kind of talking and time they had to do with psychiatrists and social workers, and, on the other, the kind of performance required in their frequent encounters with journalists. This seemed to me an astute characterization of my fieldwork, and also of what they valued about my project as I had described it to them—it was (I hoped) neither pathologizing nor sensationalizing. When first getting to know soldiers and their families and first talking to them about my project, I often said, “I just want to see what life is like here for you guys.” My approach to both understanding and describing “what life is like” is forever tied to their valuation and appreciation of that task grounded in empathy and friendship and that seemed, amid the intensity of life and the abundance of other narratives, so necessary, so far from simple, and so often starkly unattempted.

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1 the extra /ordinary atmosphere of walter reed

The feeling of ordinariness within Walter Reed was marked by excesses— of social value and symbolic meaning, of pain and uncertainty, of military bureaucracy, of publicity—which distinguished life there from other forms of American life and their unmarked ordinaries by degrees. There soldiers are remaking themselves and the lives they will have, processes that, by their very definition, cannot be completed within the space of Walter Reed in which they are attempted. Marked by excess and aspirational normativity, life at Walter Reed was permeated by confounding contradictions. As they settled into outpatient life at Walter Reed, the heaviness of so much hitting each soldier all at once was matched only by the weight of boredom that, even in the presence of pain and frustration and anger and sadness, was the overriding feeling there. Life was heavy and slow. Soldiers

felt it in the excruciating sluggishness of each day. Hours died impossibly long deaths watching tv, playing video games, sleeping, smoking, nothing. Even the daily activities of therapy appointments and paperwork filing and occasional formation were hemmed in by time that was impossibly hard to kill.1 Waiting in an office or on a line and getting exhausted and waiting until tomorrow; waiting for the doctors to say what to do about a newly infected bone only to have them recommend more antibiotics and more waitand-see; waiting for the Fed Ex delivery of a new car part and then waiting until the shop was open to work on it, only to find out the shop wasn’t available for personal use; waiting for the bus to take everyone out to a fancy dinner, where we would wait until some well-meaning speaker would say something about heroism so we could hurry up and eat our steak and then wait for the bus to bring us all back. While everything changes so quickly at Walter Reed, the affective apprehension of time is marked by boredom like you wouldn’t believe: inescapable, inevitable, and everywhere (on boredom, see Taussig 2004). Life at Walter Reed does not conform to idealized trajectories of rehabilitation, trajectories that govern clinical expectations but aren’t quite transposable from medical textbooks to embodied contingencies (see Messinger 2010; for an interesting comparison see Zaman 2005: 79–86). By American standards, soldiers received remarkable care, had ready access to all the newest war-born innovations of surgery and prosthetics, to medications and intensive rehabilitative therapies that were not subject to the rules, whims, and fees of civilian insurance providers. Even so, the temporality of the body was twisted around like a Möbius strip. For example, Jake went through surgery after surgery to reconstruct his leg, but it only seemed to get worse. After they had done all they could, it still took months for him to convince them to cut the damned thing off so he could walk for more than twenty minutes at a time. The simple telos of a healing body gave way to the material facts of precarious bodies. For Alec, another soldier, the external fixator that was anchored into his tibia and hovered like scaffolding around his reconstructed leg was literally the structure of healing and the site and cause of a bone infection that slowed the pace of his recovery and even threatened the viability of the limb it had been made to re-create. The weakening of regulations and the simultaneous presence and straining of bonds of kin that characterize Walter Reed threatened to thin sol-

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diers’ lives. As the management of their injured bodies came to the fore, the fields of military and thick familial affiliation out of which their lives had been made receded. And still, all of these dimensions of life were targeted for and subject to a chaotic thickening. Bodies were worked on and rebuilt and kin inescapably saturated daily life. Layers of the social skin were sloughed away but never left to rest, callusing and blistering in the intensity and friction of new modes of life and sociality. In place of the formerly reliable contours of a shared world was the ever remote and ever present horizon of an uncertain future that had to be made out of whatever and whoever the present had at hand. The relations of the present made it provisionally livable, and because they felt essential to and in the present, they had to yield to whatever came next. From this in-durable quality of social relations to the material facts of the body, the atmosphere at Walter Reed was characterized by such apparent contradictions, enduring juxtapositions, and hapless inversions that settled into the din of daily life. This is ordinary life—provisional and precarious—at Walter Reed. Uncanny Space of Ordinary Life Initially I came to know soldiers like Jake and Alec within the communal living spaces of the on-post Fisher House. The Fisher House was not only the physical space of our encounters but, in many ways, an allegorical space brimming with the features of the remaking of life after war with which this book is concerned. The Fisher House Foundation is a nonprofit organization started by Zachary and Elizabeth Fisher in 1990. Its mission is to build “comfort houses” attached to Department of Veterans Affairs (va) and military hospitals, initially intended to be used by family members who wanted to be near their soldier or veteran loved ones requiring hospital treatment. The typical case imagined at the time was of an elderly veteran succumbing to the infirmities of age or perhaps a younger soldier being treated for cancer. One story goes that the idea of the foundation came to the Fishers at a fundraising dinner after hearing the story of a veteran’s wife who had great difficulty being with her husband while he was being treated for cancer at a va hospital. As of this writing, the foundation has built sixty-four houses, with six more under construction. Each house functions as its own nonprofit organization, raising its own money and sorting out its own arrangement

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with the commander or administrator of the military or va hospital it is attached to. Though the houses are “professionally furnished and decorated in the tone and style of the local region,”2 they are uncannily similar, each a tactile and visual display of normative American notions of home and family, the importance of which is captured in the ubiquitous Fisher House motto: “A home away from home.” The normative ordinariness designed into these generic homes—their modern arrangements of living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, their tvs and stockpiles of children’s toys, their insinuations of normative social attachments—is intended to surround soldiers and their families in the midst of extraordinary experiences, offering them a strange domestic simulacra: the home away from home, a contradiction in terms that speaks rather literally to the simultaneously home-like and unhomely discomfort of the Unheimlich, the uncanny (Freud [1919] 2003). Every house features a small front portico, with decorations that change with the seasons: a scarecrow in fall; a wreath in winter; perhaps some red, white, and blue bunting for the 4th of July. Every front door opens into an entranceway, at the back of which is a bronze bust of either Zachary or Zachary and Elizabeth Fisher. To the left is the generously sized dining room, to the right the large living room, complete with built-in bookcases stacked with paperbacks and board games that frame (where in keeping with the “tone of the local region”) a fireplace. Above the mantle (or, in warmer climes, in its place) is invariably mounted the same huge photograph of Zachary and Elizabeth Fisher in their twilight years, arm in arm in matching leather bomber jackets, the house’s warm and watchful patriarch and matriarch. From Landstuhl, Germany, to Ft. Hood, Texas, Fisher House managers pose in front of this homey tableau with novelty checks and proud and grateful donors, military and civilian alike (figs. 1.1–1.3). In the back of each house is the kitchen, with an island counter in the middle and lots of storage so that each resident family can have their own cupboard marked with a number corresponding to the number of their bedroom. In newer houses the kitchen opens to a den. The most recently built houses are also wheelchair-accessible. Wherever possible, a backdoor leads to a patio or a yard. The bedrooms line the halls flanking the house and, when there is a second floor, its hallway. Each bedroom has a bed and a chair and a desk and an armoire and its own bathroom. In their regional

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variations, every Fisher House is generically homey, with soft couches and chairs, wooden floors, rugs, and warm neutral colors on the walls and in the patterns of the curtains. There is always a perfect spot for the Christmas tree. Alcohol is never allowed. Smoking is permitted only outside. At Walter Reed there were actually three separate Fisher Houses. I spent most of my time in the newest of them, House III, Building 56 on Walter Reed Army Medical Center maps. House III has mottled grayish-brown tiles in the hallways and a big plush gray rug in the living room. Its granite countertops and stainless steel fridge are decidedly more modern than the folksy oak of House I, the oldest of all the Fisher Houses. Its red brick exterior is surrounded by a well-manicured lawn and modestly landscaped plant beds, often tended to in the spring and fall by groups of volunteers from local businesses or schools. The walls are mauve, and the trim and moldings are wide, white, and plentiful, referencing a kind of American old-money elegance. There are framed pictures of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum and artsy blackand-white photos of unidentifiable architectural elements along with prints of the American flag and monochrome paintings of trees that blend unmemorably and inoffensively into the walls.3 Divided from the kitchen by a breakfast bar is the den, with a huge tv and a big soft red couch, a pair of upholstered chairs, a coffee table, magazine rack, and small computer table with a new computer and a desk chair on wheels. It is here, in the kitchen and the den, next to the laundry room with its stacks of modern white washers and dryers and the storeroom full of food and diapers and T-shirts and teddy bears, that much of the little activities of life continue, where soldiers kill time flopped on the couch watching How It’s Made or World’s Wildest Police Videos, where babies sit in bouncy chairs while people putter with the dishes or show off new wheelchairs or share tidbits of gossip while snacking on Girl Scout cookies or ice cream, where soldiers or their mothers or wives make lunch, a bacon and turkey sandwich, some frozen tater tots, a can of soup, a Red Bull, homemade spaghetti and meat sauce, ground beef and beans and corn tortillas freshly made from Maseca. The Fisher House kitchen is kept fully stocked with canned and dry goods, snacks, fresh fruit, coffee, frozen food, and endless leftovers from lunches and dinners catered for special events or meals delivered by home cooks doing what they can for these soldiers who they feel have done so much for them. The leftover food is packed in Ziploc

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Fig 1.1 Fisher House at the army’s Ft. Hood in Texas.

Fig 1.2 Fisher House at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.

Fig 1.3 Fisher House at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego.

bags for easier storage but is usually thrown away after a day or two to make room for more in the always overflowing double-wide refrigerator. There was a Giant grocery store nearby and a supply of donated gift cards kept in the Fisher House manager’s office behind the storeroom. But with all the catered food and donated meals, special dinners, cafeteria meal cards, and meals eaten at nearby chain restaurants ranging from McDonald’s to Ruby Tuesday’s, there wasn’t too much grocery shopping to be done. Through House III’s back door is a patio of poured concrete and a redbrick retaining wall. Beyond that is a play structure for the kids, the ground below it softened by woodchips, but it was seldom used. The handsome round metal tables and yielding chairs were home to endless hours of cigarettes and chit chat, to mothers who sat and knitted or read magazines with endless cups of coffee while they attempted to give their sons, and perhaps themselves, some time unattached. When the weather was nice, soldiers’ young kids may be out there too, getting hosed off from the heat, set up with some toys or a craft kit on a blanket on the ground, wanting a turn at their father’s remote-control helicopter, whose movements he announced in fluent military speak complete with call signs. The communal space of the patio was also often given over to barbeques, organized by troop booster organizations, who arrived early in the afternoon to set up folding tables, line them with red, white, and blue tablecloths, and arrange coolers full of soda, huge bowls of coleslaw, and gratuitous supplies of hamburgers and hot dogs. Soldiers and their families are often outnumbered by volunteers wielding barbeque tongs and big, well-meaning smiles. This home away from home was possessed of all the comforts of normative middle-class American domesticity. But that was not quite what it was. Its hominess is suffused with outpourings of gratitude and gestures of comfort and special recognition. Home-cooked meals appear on the kitchen counter. A memo appears under your door telling you Miss America will be making a visit. Domesticity here is publicized and sometimes conspicuously staged, as when a documentary film crew appeared to get footage of soldiers and family members doing daily domestic tasks like loading the dishwasher or eating dinner or when photographers assembled soldiers and their families into tableaus of shared leisure time for press releases or news stories. None of this is to say that it did not feel like home, only that it felt like a home of an uncanny kind, its ordinariness tinged with something else. It is a kind of home in which you might pad into the kitchen in your pajamas to fix some frozen French toast sticks 32 

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and find a group of corporate executives or a general and his aides being shown the contents of the refrigerator on a tour of the house, neither of which are actually yours. The Minuscule War Approached from the scale of History, or read in the present through political debate, war is usually a massive thing: historic, monumental, catastrophic. During the time the events in this book unfolded (September 2007 to August 2008), the bigness of the “war on terror” could be measured in many ways: the United States reached the macabre landmark of the four-thousandth service member killed in Iraq, and estimates of civilians killed swelled past 100,000; Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz (2008) estimated the war’s cost at $3 trillion, and the upcoming presidential election and the candidacy of Barack Obama entrenched astoundingly voracious and conspiratorial devotion to apocalyptic discourses of national insecurity that hinged on an imminent and Islamic threat to something described as American values, the real America, or the American way of life.4 Grand patriotic themes, often with a Christian inflection and coded invocations of the war on terror’s caricatured Islamic boogey man, were inescapable at Walter Reed. This bigness seeped into the very fiber of life there; it colored the banners waved by boosters in front of the gates every Friday night, it echoed in the lyrics of songs at uso shows, you could almost taste it in the hamburgers at Support Our Troops barbeques. But despite its ubiquity, this bigness of the “war on terror” was not the scale at which soldiers themselves approached war. It was rather the minuscule and fragmented details of materiality and lived experience that constituted soldiers’ own attention to the things they had done that other people accounted for as the waging of a worthy war. Among injured soldiers at Walter Reed, talk of war rarely took narrative form. Instead of the relative stability and logic of stories, there were descriptions of objects like the CamelBaks and the invariably hot water soldiers would drink from them to quench their desert thirst and keep dehydration at bay, or of an Iraqi man who shat in the street. There were bodily feelings and sense memories, like the heat of the Iraqi sun or the swarm of flies around an mre (meal ready to eat). There were the intricate details of hot metal and sweating skin, the sound of gravel blown up in a mortar attack hitting the tin roof under which soldiers slept, all described without the extra /ordinary atmosphere  33

recourse to a narrative context, never mind notions of nationalism. Even when soldiers talked about things that happened, things they did that resembled the events of more fully fledged war stories, it was often in this same small and fragmented way, contiguous with the labors of life in the moment. When I met James he was a single amputee in his early twenties. His wife, Erin, and their almost one-year-old daughter were living with him at Walter Reed. They moved from the Mologne House into the Fisher House in October, carting their oversized Tupperware bins full of clothes and dvds and things for the baby across two sloping parking lots and into their comparatively spacious new room. I got the gray plastic cart usually used for moving flats of bottled water and donated goods into the Fisher House store room. They loaded it up with the overflow and I helped push it awkwardly across the uneven tile of the hallway floor toward their bedroom. A video game or sweatshirt occasionally tumbled to the ground and was stranded in its wake. One afternoon James sits in the Fisher House den in his lightweight aluminum folding wheelchair. A visiting friend had helped his daughter customize it with black Sharpies, and thick black scribbles, stripes, and triangles wound around its bright magenta frame. His rehabilitation had frustratingly plateaued; his one remaining leg had been extensively reconstructed but caused him constant pain. Making use of his prosthetic leg meant quickly incapacitating his fleshy one, and so the whole exercise, all the surplus pain and effort of walking with his prosthesis, seemed pointless. He’d stopped going to most of his physical therapy appointments. Many months and another unsuccessful surgery to repair his ankle will pass before doctors finally decide to amputate this painstakingly remade leg, but none of us know that yet. For now James tilts his slim and slouchy body back in his chair and balances himself in a wheelie as he tells me about how exactly the doctors reconstructed his leg, explaining that it wouldn’t always be so noticeable that they had remade his shin out of what used to be his calf. That span of flesh had yet to settle into its new home and still defiantly held its convex shape. Amid his pain and boredom and frustration, he often found an easy joy playing with his daughter. But when she developed a habit of crawling out of the kitchen, around the corner, and nimbly up the Fisher House’s carpeted stairs, he was exasperated that he could not climb up the stairs after her and got pissed off when those who could have didn’t. 34 

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James had grown up in the suburban Midwest, a life he loved. He iconoclastically embraced its normative middle-classness and its car-centric spaces, cannily aware that these were not universally appreciated as features of the good life by men in their early twenties like him. He had already bought a house near his parents; he and Erin planned to move in when he left Walter Reed. Though younger than I, he joked I would have to present my partner dressed in Sunday best to get his blessing before I ever got married. None of his eager maturity and mild conservatism seemed ill at ease with his multiplying tattoos, his love of horror movies, his atheism, or his scruffy brown hair that he half ironically molded into a Mohawk in the days before a trip to the barber when it got long enough on top. As the weeks rolled on, we found a shared tendency to smirk and shake our heads at life’s ironies. We’d wait for each other to take smoke breaks together on the patio, punching the kitchen door’s automatic button and propping it open with the doormat so we wouldn’t get locked out while we sat and talked about daily life or his sore stump or how he hated going to special events for soldiers because they made him feel like a “charity case” (see chapter 3). We were sitting there on the patio one night in late October when he began talking about Iraq, about what it was like to be there, about sights and senses that never coalesced into stories. I noticed we were somehow having a conversation about James’s being in Iraq without talking about the war itself. He was describing how hot it was there, how dusty. He said, “Basically, Iraq is an asshole of a place.” As we sat there in the cool, quiet dark, he looked up at the sky and said, “I think that’s the first star I’ve seen here. Over there, in Iraq, you see them all the time. Back home I’d never seen a shooting star, but you see them like every five minutes there.” I asked him, half joking, if he’d had a lot of time to be gazing up at the stars. “Well,” he answered, “you sleep on the ground.” He told me how beautiful the sunrises and sunsets were, how bright and orange. All that beauty in an asshole of a place, a sky that presided over war and outshined the dull and light-polluted one that hovered over us there at Walter Reed, a sky that flaunted its brilliance at sunrise and sunset and all through his sleepless nights with gaudy displays of shooting stars. As he conveyed the irony of Iraq’s beauty, his description verged on poetic. He paused and, after a moment’s poignant silence, said, “I guess that’s what you call a paradox.” And then that moment is over, the skies recede, and James starts asking me some questions about my research. the extra /ordinary atmosphere  35

When the topic of basic training (bt) comes up, James thinks back to his own, four years before: “It’s weird, but I’ve only talked to like three guys out of hundreds who I was with in bt, but when you’re there, you’re closer to them than your parents, than your sister.”5 But he says he can’t really remember anything about it. “So much has happened since then.” These past intensities abide, but they do not cohere into meaningful stories about the past to be told in the present. They do not fall into an orderly line tracing a path from a then to a now. Narrative is not quite the appropriate genre for war in the present moment, it is not the mode to which James turns in order to convey so much that has happened. Our conversation meanders, and I begin talking about a trip I once took to Egypt and the heat wave that pushed temperatures past 120 degrees. It is my only point of reference for oppressive and dusty desert heat. It is also a comparison that might seem wholly unreasonable or inappropriate, but given the way that James has tacked so seamlessly back and forth between the D.C. sky and the Iraqi one, between his once-upon-a-time attachments to the guys from bt and the attachment I might have to my own sister, it seemed to make sense that there would be something comparable about my traveling as a tourist through Egypt one summer and his tour of duty in Iraq. And when I talk about my many discomforts moving through the khan el-kalili market in Cairo with my hair and arms and legs covered, he responds with something else he remembers about Iraq, the place, the war zone but not quite the war, that seems to confound him. “You see all kinds of things in Iraq. It’s a weird place,” he says. “And you see men beating their wives, like kicking them in the face by the side of the road, weird shit. Kids beating up their mothers. Just weird.” But he does not tell a story about these things. Not then, and not in future conversations when he drops in other fragments of experience. The war remains in tiny pieces. It is glimpses of all kinds of things. A man stops and squats and shits in the street. There is no “Once upon a time . . . ​and then . . . ​and then.” Even on the not too frequent occasions when he says something specific about things he did, they are not positioned within the structure of a war story. That is not the kind of sense they make. James does not speak about Iraq as a mapped out war zone or a coherent place of any other kind. He does not imagine what its roadsides might have been like before he arrived, perched on top of an armored U.S. military vehicle looking out from behind a weapon mounted there, or after he is gone. The bits he remembers are not war memories or peace memories or 36 

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emergency memories, they are just the weird shit he recollects. He does not hypothesize about why, even though he is one of the only soldiers with whom I ever “talk politics,” as Erin lamented more than once. So while we do sometimes talk in more abstract terms about bigger war-related things, like the new gi Bill and its impact on military preparedness, these big things do not emerge in relation to his experience of a minuscule war. They do not creep in to his life like memories. He does not look up at the sky and think about his nation’s place in the world or the American dream or any of those big things that stars sometimes evoke. They are not the same kinds of things, those big ideas, not the recollected fragments among which James actually lives. And so, for a moment that night on the patio with James, there it was, Iraq, the hot, weird, asshole of a place with the searingly beautiful skies. There it was, an absence overshadowing the dim twinkle of Washington, D.C., the weird shit that he remembers and that seems to push the intensity of basic training and its hundreds of closer-than-family-members off into some other life. James’s past in Iraq makes itself known in the present through the memory of a shooting star. Iraq becomes a place that is comparable to D.C., a tour downrange becomes comparable to a tourist trip. The smallness of war’s presence allows it to insinuate itself into life at Walter Reed, and this is part of the place’s extra/ordinary atmosphere. Even those somethings that happened in Iraq that ought to be entirely out of place, even in the extra/ordinary space of Walter Reed, in the uncanny domesticity of the Fisher House kitchen, even those bits make their little appearances. They become part of the present as they refuse to coalesce into a war story. Not even the kind of obscene and true war story that the writer and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien describes, stories that do not speak of virtue or rectitude. Even those kinds of true war stories start with a “What happened was” (O’Brien 1990: 77).6 Instead of such a story, here is the appearance of something that happened that takes its place in the flow of daily living: I am sitting on a stool at the Fisher House breakfast bar. Erin putters in the kitchen, keeping an eye on something she is cooking in the oven. She is wiping down the countertops with the house’s endless supply of Clorox disposable wipes, keeping herself busy. Erin is twenty and has thrown herself into her role as mother and wife, even though it was just two years ago that she and James met and fell in love at first sight in a nightclub near the West Coast base where James was stationed. She always seems stylishly put together, her already the extra /ordinary atmosphere  37

straight brown highlighted hair straightened further into obedience with a flat iron, the effect of her tattooed arm softened by her immaculate but unostentatiously fashionable and fitted T-shirts and jeans that show off her curvy figure which, along with her square nose, beauty mark, and round eyes, suggest a kind of everywoman Marilyn Monroe. It is a usual evening in the Fisher House kitchen. Erin moves almost constantly from the sink to the counter to the oven and back. I sit on a stool. James sits in his wheelchair with the slouched posture of a teenager half watching nothing in particular on tv, and we talk offhandedly about how James is about to be taken on his first hunting trip by a small group of volunteers. Erin grew up in the rural Northwest and had been hunting more than once. She declares from the kitchen, with characteristic certainty, that hunting is awful and James won’t be so excited about his trip once he’s seen someone kill “a little Bambi” and skin it. “The first thing I shot was a duck,” she says. James turns away from the tv and looks at Erin: “The first thing I shot was a little girl.” There is a pause just a breath too long to be comic timing, and the sarcastic tone of James’s statement hangs in the air between the three of us, reverberating on some strange frequency, moaning low like a confession but popping quick like a witty retort. “Right, okay, you got a point there when you put it that way,” says Erin. No one is angry or bitter or upset. A joke has been made. Black humor, like the image of diminutive doe-eyed Bambi skinned and bloodied. A point has been made about the ethics of shooting things. A claim has been made about whose knowledge of the horror of inflicting life-threatening pain on living bodies that are iconically innocent is more horrible. Human trumps animal. Girl trumps duck. War trumps hunting. But the point is they are made cards in the same game, comparable species of experience. This is the life of war at Walter Reed, the thread of war violence in the weave of life (Das 2007), the extra/ordinary presence of a minuscule fragment of war that is not out of the ordinary in the uncanny domestic spaces of Walter Reed. Vital Signs Alec is fiercely independent, gregarious, and unflappable. Though the changing state of his legs (now in the external fixation device [ExFix], now in a flexible cast, now their undulating and rugged fleshy topography in full view) suggests their weakness, when he is sitting in his wheelchair his body 38 

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seems thick and strong. He has a broad face, heavy brow, and toothy grin. A picc line (a peripherally inserted central catheter) runs from his heart through a vein and out his bicep, where its plastic port is secured with a band of gauze. The port is visible and accessible just at the end of the sleeves of the T-shirts he wears, sometimes beneath a half-zipped-up hoodie. The slow recession of his close-cropped hair, usually hidden with a baseball cap, seems to simultaneously betray his age and accentuate his dimpled cheeks, giving him the air of a big mischievous kid. His brother and father and an old friend take turns flying out from the Midwest, each staying for as long as their own lives and schedules of irregular employment will allow. For all this coming and going and rearranging of his companions and his body, Alec keeps much of his daily routine stable. He seems unconcerned, even happy, during the in-between times when he is unattended by anyone and spends the night in his room alone, even though it is against the rules: unless you live in the barracks, you may not spend the night without a nonmedical attendant (nma) or Battle Buddy.7 It is hard to say if it is his constitutional nonchalance or his tbi or both that explains his tendency to run out of his medications even though he wears a black nylon fanny pack with zippered pockets brimming with medications. One morning Alec asks me if I’d like to come along with him and his friend Joe to a free buffet in the afternoon. “It’ll be great!” he insists. “Some volunteers will pick us up and we’ll get to ride in a big limo down to some famous seafood restaurant right by the water.” Javier overhears as he passes through the kitchen and gets all excited about the gigantic king crab legs he had when he went with his family a while back. Alec is over by the toaster, successfully persuading me to come while he makes himself an English muffin so he can take some pills before we leave. When the volunteers arrive at the backdoor they introduce themselves as Steven and Frank. They are two white men who look to be in their sixties. Both are dressed in conservative weekend casual: jeans, a dress shirt, and a windbreaker. They look like ceos in after-work uniforms. As it happens, they were local business owners and pillars in the same church who decided one day they ought to use some of their considerable resources to do something to show their gratitude for the troops at Walter Reed. They are accompanied by a man they introduce as Leroy, Steven’s assistant. Leroy is dressed impeccably in leather shoes and a long wool coat. He is black and a bit younger than Steven and Frank. In addition to being Steven’s assistant, he also drives the limo. the extra /ordinary atmosphere  39

All three of them seem annoyed that Alec, now buttering his English muffin, expects them not only to wait but to wait for him to finish eating. They suggest he should really save his appetite for the endless bucket of crab legs. Alec flashes his mischievous smile. He says he can’t take his pain meds on an empty stomach. In their enthusiasm to offer special nourishment to this injured soldier, they have not considered these more routine things that a precarious and war-injured body requires. Alec, still grinning, finishes his English muffin and takes his pills, and then we all go out to the stretch limousine in the small Fisher House parking lot, where we must consider the logistics of arranging six people and a wheelchair inside. Alec cannot climb over anyone; whoever climbs over him and his outstretched and painfully exposed legs must be limber. We stand by the limo talking over the possibilities. Alec decides he will gingerly slide himself in first. I will sit next to him and Joe next to me along the length of the limousine. Steven and Frank will sit perpendicular to us, their backs to Leroy up in the driver’s seat. We will all be careful not to kick Alec’s legs. Alec slides himself into the limo first. Joe folds up the wheelchair to put it in the trunk. It doesn’t fit. We will have to keep it in the back with the rest of us. Joe gives the chair to Leroy. I climb in, then Joe, then Steven, then Frank. Across from us there is room for the chair, and Leroy lifts it and gently puts it inside with strange and awkward care, as if it were a baby giraffe. It takes a long while to arrange us in this way. Throughout the limousine ride, and subsequent jambalaya and giant clam sushi, parts of Alec’s body—not just his legs but also his nerves and veins—are, as usual, unmistakably present. His fanny pack, T-shirt, and basketball shorts are accommodations to their needs. The way we sat together in the limousine was governed, first and foremost, by the way his legs feel and can or can’t be moved and should or shouldn’t be touched. To sit with him is not only to be aware of his legs but to be vigilant about the space around them. Alec ate the English muffin to manage his body’s pain more than its hunger, though given the relation of food to meds—a relation mediated by scheduling, logistics, sleep patterns, and nausea—the management of the body’s “normal” and pathological needs are often of a piece. At Walter Reed eating and moving and drinking and touching warrant careful consideration. It is dangerous to take such things for granted. Toward the end of our meal in the nearly empty restaurant Alec begins to fumble through his fanny pack. From behind the steel bucket on the table that still holds a few of those huge, bright red king crab legs, he says 40 

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he’s having “shooters,” the sharp, intense pains that run suddenly though the nerves in his legs. They come on without warning and are not caused by anything in particular. They are a feature of the current instability of his appendages, a consequence of all the many forces, ballistic and medical, that have pushed themselves onto and into his legs and carved their current configuration inside and out. Alec fingers through his stash of pillboxes, bottles, and blister packs, smiling his way through the pain. “Oh no,” he says, and though he is calm and still smiling, there is the slightest note of panic in his voice. I ask him what it is. He says he’s run out of morphine, forgotten to get his refill. Luckily he has some oxycodone, his backup, and he swallows the pills and orders some ice cream. Then Alec realizes it is time for his antibiotics. They are also not in his fanny pack. He tells Joe he thinks he’s left them at home. There is more of that low-grade panic emerging from his unflappable, solid presence. The antibiotics are why he has the picc line; they are fighting off the bone infection that threatens to require the amputation of one, and perhaps both, of his legs. The antibiotics have been working, but they are dangerous drugs and must be taken according to a precise schedule. Alec announces matter-of-factly that if he left the antibiotics back at the Fisher House, we’ll have to leave right away, that very moment, now. The severity of what he is saying, that his legs hang in the balance, seems at odds with his smile and his steadiness. Our hosts do not move to leave; it seems they might not have gotten Alec’s meaning. Joe thinks the antibiotics might be in the limo; maybe amid all that coordination and confusion, they fell out of Alec’s pack. Steven and Frank ask what they look like. We describe the little plastic ball of yellow liquid. I do not say that I think it looks like a rounded pineapple grenade, which is what I think every time I see it. Steven and Frank seem sure it’s in the limo. They remember seeing it on the seat and wondering what it could be. We are all relieved. But there is still a certain urgency, and Alec eats only a few bites of ice cream—mostly to soothe his stomach as he digests the oxycodone—and when we make our way out of the still-empty restaurant to the black limousine waiting in front, door open, we do not wait to think of logistics again or consult with our hosts. I climb in and scoot along the soft black leather seats; Alec positions himself nearest the door, where the wheelchair had been on the ride down, and as Joe is folding the chair I grab the little yellow ball that we are all happy to see and hand it to Alec. the extra /ordinary atmosphere  41

As Alec attaches it to the port at the end of his picc line, he says he can feel it burning right to his heart, and he traces its course by sweeping his hand across his body from bicep to chest. The liquid is blazing along a custom-built path through his veins and making them sensible. The crisis, the catastrophe that Alec’s precarious body extra/ordinarily verges on, or perhaps is in the middle of, is contained for the moment. As civilians like Steven and Frank do their best to recognize soldiers like Alec, the material facts and flesh of Alec’s body insert themselves into a frame of recognition concerned with a body of a different sort: the less messy body of the purely sacrificial soldier. As is generally the case when the body breaks down through illness or injury, much of daily life becomes subject to the specificity of a body. If personhood can be thought of as complex carnal circuitry, where the inscription of socially legible selfhood is inseparable from facts of matter, then among injured soldiers at Walter Reed that circuitry is driven by the sensations and sensibilities of the body. In the midst of an overabundance of social and semiotic value through which injured soldiers’ bodies are read, it is the sensibility of an injured soldier’s body that governs the banalities that make up most of daily life. The takenfor-granted, unattended, and automatic functioning of bodies requires explicit attention and effort. Walking, for example, is the focus of hours of daily practice, and the usually negligible details of how a knee bends, how a foot hits the floor, where one’s balance is when walking up or down a flight of stairs is explained by physical therapists and concentrated on by soldiers. Certain bodily configurations may make soldiers aware of parts of the body that are usually so ignored they fall asleep without our knowing it. Flesh from the buttocks was sometimes used to reconstruct other parts of the body, in which case sitting is made painfully palpable. This was the case for Matthew, another Fisher House resident, who explained why he was so pleased when cushions finally appeared on the metal patio chairs: the weight of the body bearing down through the pelvis and hips and even the hard dull edges of the bone that pointedly pushed on the diminished muscle, crushing it between the surfaces inside the body and the surfaces outside it. All of this becomes felt, and Matthew is made painfully aware of and must attend to all the little movements, pressures, and pulls that the act of sitting entails. Colostomy bags, catheters, and picc lines for delivering intravenous drugs invert the body’s insides and outsides. Bags house piss and shit outside the body, and one must consciously remember to empty them without 42 

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the familiar feelings of a full bladder or bowels or else their abject contents threaten to reenter the body and infect it. picc lines and their external ports functionally extend the veins outside the body. This whole array of tubes short-circuit the routes of circulation that ingested and expelled fluids must usually take. Nerves unexpectedly announce their presence, the insides of a body are felt, and interior surfaces become apparent. At the end of a stump, bones and nerves that had been cleanly cut and covered in stretched and stitched packets of flesh heal and grow against the wishes and orders of doctors, causing strange sensations and requiring new surgeries. There were so many setbacks and detours that these often characterize the vector of rehabilitation better than any “road to recovery.”8 Through multiple surgeries and various forms of rehabilitation, the very forms of the body are manipulated and remolded, like the part of James’s calf that was removed and placed on his shin, before that too was removed. In a state-of-the-art lab in the hospital, pieces of skull are custom-made out of synthetic materials, replicating the unique curvature of a particular soldier’s head. Special prosthetics are finished by experts who, rumor has it, also work in movie makeup and special effects. Each hair on an arm, the little pale crescent in each nail bed, is painstakingly crafted to make an artificial hand look just like a soldier’s own flesh and bone one. After an amputation special elasticized sleeves called shrinkers must be worn on the residual limb to make the stump conform to an ideal shape so that it will sit comfortably and work well in a socket. New sockets are made and remade as the stump approaches the imagined perfection of a straight and narrow limb with a smoothly rounded edge, or as the soldier and his body disobediently swell.9 All the little shapes of the “natural” unmarked body, the visible and invisible signs of normative contours of human life, from the tiny little anvil-shaped incus bone of the inner ear to the undulating profile of the heel and arch of a foot, must be made, remade, worked on. Phantom limbs invert the order of thinking, doing, and seeing that usually describes simple motions of, say, the hand. In mirror therapy one looks into a mirror held perpendicular to the center of the torso so it transposes the image of the limb that exists into the visual place of the limb that only feels like it exists. This offers a way of tricking the eye and the brain, a kind of biofeedback whereby looks are made to deceive the brain into thinking it has control over something that is not out there. The injured soldier’s body demands his attentive manipulation whether he is walking down a hallway on his way to an office or practicing walking the extra /ordinary atmosphere  43

up and down the stairs with a physical therapist spotting him from behind. The implicitness of the body becomes explicit, and thus the extra/ordinary bodies of soldiers at Walter Reed manifest a certain and previously unimaginable labor. For example, I accompanied Javier, a double amputee also living at the Fisher House, to his daily appointments. It hadn’t been long since he had stopped using his motorized wheelchair nearly all the time and started walking on his prosthetic leg, with the use of a cane, as much as he could. He is not yet well practiced, and throughout the day he must concentrate as we move through the hospital, navigating the long hallways between the rehab rooms and the Soldier and Family Assistance Center (sfac) office, where we wait to talk to a case worker in the waiting room with bowls of leftover Halloween candy and a coterie of rouged and well-dressed women administrators moving back and forth between their desks and in and out of offices. The morning consists of seemingly endless hours of physical and occupational therapy: practicing walking up and down stairs in the back stairwell; being stretched on the beds laid out in the new wide-open physical therapy (pt) area on the top level of the Military Advanced Training Center (matc);10 balancing on the upside-down hemisphere called a turtle; trying to walk with long, even strides measured against markings on the soft running-track floor. All this amid others working with their own therapists, accompanied by their own family members. Each soldier learning to walk and run and jump hurdles on the matc’s brand-new track or practicing their balance and coordination in various exercises with cones and steps and chairs that their therapists, watching and occasionally touching them with precision and care, arrange and position while giving them bits of feedback and encouragement or demonstrating the desired movements. After that, Javier and I go to the matc’s lower level so he can work on upper-body strength at the new weight machines. While he does, we discreetly ignore the small news crew from Erie, New York, and the keen, well-coiffed anchor being given a tour of the new facility by a public affairs officer. For twenty minutes of mirror therapy, Javier sits in a chair with his arm resting outstretched on the table’s surface so it is reflected in a full-length mirror being held by two friendly medical students who chat to each other. He gazes at the mirror without any noticeable effort. As he looks toward where his missing hand would be, the mirror blocks the sight of his prosthetic hand, with its split-hook terminal device. It reflects his arm back at 44 

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him, visually transposing it into the place of the one he is missing. He gazes at the reflection and takes in the illusion that it is actually the presence of his absent hand, and he moves his hand and wrist almost imperceptibly. He tells me that, though he was skeptical about mirror therapy at first, he has since learned how to manipulate his missing hand and can now release his previously painfully clenched phantom fist and even twist his phantom wrist. He uses his extant hand to show me the range of motion he’s gained in his phantom one: “I can move it about this much.” Javier’s body, the parts that we can see and the parts that only he can feel, are configured through all sorts of acts of concentrated looking, from his own gazing into the mirror during mirror therapy to the careful eye of the prosthetist who will create a small prosthetic for his ear, the top of which was blown off in the ied explosion that also took his arm and leg and peppered his pale brown face with bluish bits of shrapnel. The work that it takes for Javier to walk is considerable and spans many objects and actors. There is the effort of his own body and the concentration of his own mind and that of his physical and occupational therapists. But there is also the work of the prosthetists who fit and refit his sockets, of the people whose research went into creating his high-tech C-Leg and its special knee; there is the work of those objects themselves and the way they interact with Javier’s body as he slides his stump in its special sleeve and liner down into the socket, which have been partly formed by the work of surgeons and prosthetists and Javier but that have also developed symbiotically together. When Javier puts his prosthetic on for the day, he pulls up his shorts, slides his stump, encased in a soft liner, into his socket and leans into it, then hops on it to push his stump all the way down; then, with a special valve, he releases any air that might be trapped in the bottom of the socket. At this moment he works sometimes on his body, sometimes on its supplements, and sometimes not quite on his stump and not quite on the prosthetic but on the space where they meet. These little necessary attentions to the body and its insides and edges become part of the extra/ ordinary attention living at Walter Reed requires for injured soldiers. Such attention is exhausting, painful, and hard. But it is common there; it is what you do in a day; it is part of the feeling of ordinariness that provisionally emerges among injured soldiers within this space. Javier, Alec, Jake, and others at Walter Reed do not just have momentary experiences that interrupt the flow of ordinary life with bodily intrusions. The point is not just that they may, from time to time, feel pain or have to the extra /ordinary atmosphere  45

stop and think about walking. Rather it is that the most basic acts of being make explicit and apparent characteristics of the body that are normally negligible. At Walter Reed walking and eating and getting dressed in the morning are obviously corporeal and compel a certain awareness. The body is always making you think. The sudden pains or the twenty minutes of mandated gazing at the reflection of one’s own not quite still hand are not out of the ordinary, not here, in this extra/ordinary place. They are moments of bodily attention grounded in feeling and knowing and thinking about one’s body and its precarious instability. All this is common knowledge, the basis of common sense, for injured soldiers at Walter Reed. In-durable Sociality Within the U.S. military the self-making social attachments at hand for soldiers are, almost exclusively, their fellows on the one hand and their families on the other (Hawkins 2005; MacLeish 2013). Intense and intimate socialities link soldiers not only to each other but also to the particular category of military family life. Military ideas of competency and fitness shot through with heteronormative masculinity inform both the fraternal and familial associations that thicken army life. Kenneth MacLeish’s (2013) description of a military manifest—half roll call, half send-off—condenses this particularly configured array of attachments. He describes “a kind of intimate social alchemy: one moment the man in the acus [army combat uniform] belongs only to the people who have come to see him, to their embraces and smiles and last words, and the next moment he belongs only to the Army” (140). It is largely within these two socialities, sometimes overlapping, sometimes allergically distant, that soldiers make their lives. At Walter Reed these familiar socialities are frayed. While it may be a kind of betwixt-and-between place, a muddled melting point between various elements of military and civilian worlds, life at Walter Reed does not have the unity, the productive and intentional inversion, or the definitive course of a classic liminal space (van Gennep 1960; Turner 1995).11 Given the staggered and twisted temporalities of their bodies and the way they arrive one by one, injured soldiers do not form a clear or enduring cohort. They do not arrive together or leave together. Nor are they formed into units collaboratively working toward a shared goal. Though each injured soldier was technically assigned to one of the three companies of the War46 

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rior Transition Brigade (Able, Battle, or Chosen), these unit affiliations had little effect on or relevance to daily life. Soldiers maintained their identity with the units they had been deployed with and the soldiers they’d been with through all the intensities of that deployment, which now included having almost been killed. But, rarely in uniform and separated from those soldiers not only by space but also by the different ways each was subject to the catastrophic event of their injury, these old unit identities didn’t quite make injured soldiers into parts of a greater whole the way they used to. In fact even though everyone at Walter Reed spent most of his or her time within the post’s gates and in just three or four of its buildings, togetherness was altogether sparse. It bears remembering that life at Walter Reed is not “life in the ward” (Coser 1962), nor is it, in the ways identified by Goffman (1990), quite institutional.12 A pair or triad of soldiers and their families may do things together for a while—a trip to the mall and a dinner or two in the course of a week—but such groupings of soldiers and families are often dispersed by the contingencies of recovery as a soldier moves into different housing, as the state and stamina of his body and mind change, or as he or his family members leave Walter Reed. And alongside that sparse togetherness, when they are not at appointments in the hospital, soldiers at Walter Reed are also very often alone: sleeping, playing video games, watching tv. Even the course of injured soldiers’ care and the activities of their rehabilitation—things that might suggest a single shared experience—are dependent on the specificities of their injuries, their individual signs of vitality and vulnerability, their negotiations with their own array of doctors and rehabilitation specialists. Individuating differences abound. For example, while both Jake and James would eventually have an already reconstructed and rehabilitated leg amputated, their experiences and processes of amputation were quite different. Jake actively lobbied his doctors for the amputation. James did not. With the rest of his body in relatively stable shape, Jake’s progress in that postamputation stage of rehabilitation was fast and relatively steady. James’s rehabilitation was less so; he now had two prosthetic legs, and the nerve and bone growth at the site of the new amputation eventually required further surgery. Both James and Jake were living in the Fisher House at the time of these late amputations, and both moved out shortly after. But Jake moved into Abrams Hall as a so-called single soldier, and James moved with his wife and daughter into an offpost apartment, furnished and paid for by the Bank of America, which had the extra /ordinary atmosphere  47

rented a suite of such apartments for injured soldiers with families. While the starkest facts of James’s and Jake’s rehabilitation at Walter Reed might run parallel, the shapes of their lives there were quite different and often set them apart from one another. What soldiers did have in common were less the details of a case history or the interconnected routines of a life shared in community and more the diffuse experience of piecing together an ordinary life in the midst of Walter Reed’s symbolically saturated space after having been profoundly marked by the violence of war. They had in common the exposure to others’ expectations about who soldiers are and what they have done, expectations that both homogenized and unified them. These diffuse commonalities were incredibly important to soldiers and their families; they were what allowed a contingent sense of ordinariness to emerge at Walter Reed. But together they convey not the picture of a (military) community but the commonness of being (and sometimes an experience of being alone in common) amid the particularities of Walter Reed’s war-torn extra/ordinariness. In this commonness that is not quite community, sociality takes on a quality we might call in-durable: a way of being with others based in part on a common need for endurance but that is not itself enduring; a way of being in common that is based on the hardness (dureté) of life—both its difficulty and its explicit materiality—but that is also conditioned by the temporal limits of that togetherness, the awareness of many finite durations rather than the possibility of a single shared duration (the duration, or even the longue durée).13 Everybody knows that this mode of life will not last, and indeed they hope it will not last long, that its duration will be brief. Part of what makes it endurable is that very knowledge and hope that it will be over soon. The experience of togetherness and of being in common with other soldiers and the knowledge that that commonness will not endure are part of what makes Walter Reed in-durable. Social relationships at Walter Reed acquire an intensity that gives them a condensed and accelerated quality; people become fast friends and, occasionally, fast enemies. Soldiers who have never met may see each other daily in brief increments around the hospital and swap intimate details about their bodies during physical therapy sessions. The empathy with which they can understand each other’s condition seems at times to tie them together like family in a way that echoes the familial love forged in war and the coagulating filial love that, though sometimes disavowed, solidifies the army and its members (MacLeish 2013). Yet, bonded in this way, they may 48 

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know little about the details of each other’s lives. They skip over the incremental steps of getting to know each other in favor of profound identification and affiliation. It is deep friendship missing the superficial layers of acquaintance. In some ways it is like James’s description of the closer-thanfamily attachments to guys in bt that somehow disappear. Except at Walter Reed bt’s regimented, disciplined, controlled togetherness is absent and in its place are uncertainty, boredom, and unpredictability that vary from moment to moment and soldier to soldier. Sitting at a table upstairs at McGinty’s, a big Irish bar that is one of the two in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland, that are always full of soldiers on a Friday night, there are young guys—soldiers cleaned up in new jeans and maybe even a button-down shirt—greeting each other with loud and slightly drunken affection, with a holler and sometimes a handshake and a half hug. One night a small group of soldiers comes into the area near the stage where a few of us are sitting at a high top table nestled in a corner. James waves excitedly to one who squeezes in to greet him and immediately pulls up one leg of his shorts to show off the new Coyote socket system for his prosthetic leg they’d been talking about the day before. They shout above the din of conversation and live music, and James asks about the pros and cons, how easy or hard it is to get on and off, how pliable, how strong. When James turns back to the rest of us at the table, I ask who his friend was. He says he’d given him a ride to the bar once, but he doesn’t know his name. One summer evening Jake and I are sitting in his tricked-out white Honda, windows down, the sound of grindcore pumping through the custom stereo system and reverberating through the leather seats. We are driving across the Mologne House parking lot, taking a shortcut from the Fisher House to his new room at Abrams Hall, which, even the long way, takes less than two minutes. As we cruise slowly past the partition separating the parking lot from the Mologne House’s big automatic glass doors, a burly below-the-knee amputee in shorts and a baseball cap waves to us and we stop. I’ve seen Jake talk to him at the bar, and we all exchange friendly hellos as he leans down to smile at us through the window. It’s a Saturday night, and he asks us sarcastically if we’ve got any “exciting plans.” “Just getting some dinner,” Jake tells him. “We’re gonna eat his mom’s leftovers,” I add. He tells us he might be off to McGinty’s later, so maybe we’ll see him there. We wave good-bye, Jake puts the car into gear, and we slowly pull away. When I ask Jake how he knows the guy, he tells me they have pt the extra /ordinary atmosphere  49

appointments at the same time, that he’s really nice, and that he doesn’t know anything about him. While the compression and intensity of experiences at Walter Reed makes soldiers’ relationships seem more important than anything else ever could be, their acceleration simultaneously gives them an appearance of thinness: a deep familial bond with someone whose name you don’t know. The immediate configurations of social life right now become critically important, even life-sustaining. And yet they are impermanent, not durable. The familial attachments that preceded soldiers’ injuries may also take on this quality; wives and girlfriends may leave, unable or unwilling to navigate the changing configurations of masculinity, sexuality, in/dependence, and affect. The pace of all these intimate relationships is accelerated, and if they end, they often do so quickly and abruptly. After all, in the best of all possible worlds, a soldier will be able to leave Walter Reed and its lifesustaining social configuration behind tomorrow. In the beginning, when Jake and Manny were both living in the Fisher House, they seemed inseparable. Manny is quiet and often seems easily contented. He doesn’t need to talk much and likes to laugh at Jake’s jokes, like when he makes fun of the sound of cars with custom mufflers that buzz like “a bumblebee in a bucket.” He wears baggy T-shirts and sweatshirts and wide-legged fleece sweatpants, in part to accommodate his colostomy bag, in part to camouflage the softness of his body, which, he says, slightly embarrassed as he sits on the big red couch in the den eating a McMuffin, used to be so ripped that he would go clubbing in super tight turtleneck T-shirts. He preempts Jake’s razzing for this, saying he knows it sounds “gay” but that it was actually cool and masculine in a Chicano sort of way. Jake didn’t care about cars until he got to Walter Reed and met Manny. Now they plot their only possible future together: they’ll open a garage in South Carolina and work on cars. When Manny plans to go on leave and visit California with his mother, who speaks only Spanish and who, until he got hurt, was looking after his sister and brother back home, Jake is worried about how he’ll spend his time. He’s worried about getting depressed and tells me that if he stops shaving, I’ll know he’s not doing very well. We decide to take pictures of Manny’s car in the parking lot and send them to him while he’s away. Jake thought it would be fun to do it every day. He gets a paper crown to put on the hood. But we only ever take one picture. There are forest fires raging in the part of California where Manny and his mom are. One afternoon while Manny is away and Jake and I are watching tv, I 50 

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ask him if he’s heard from Manny, if his mom’s house has been touched by the fires, if he’ll be able to get back when he planned. Jake doesn’t know; they have not spoken at all. Even though Jake scoped out a location for their garage on leave one weekend, no one quite thinks their business venture will ever come to pass, but no one ever says that. Not even when neither of them go to a special seminar at Walter Reed for injured soldiers who want to start their own business. They keep each other going just by being side by side and living in each other’s company day after day. Then suddenly, when Jake moves out of the Fisher House and into Abrams Hall, they don’t see or talk to each other for days at a time. It is as though the pace of life is too much, too fast, too soon, and relationships that are pounded out in this rhythm seem thick yet prove brittle. I get used to it myself and am not entirely surprised when, as a bunch of us are talking one night in the Fisher House dining room just before Javier leaves on a trip to welcome his unit home, I am the only one who knows this home is in Oklahoma, even though these soldiers and families have lived together in close quarters for months. This in-durable quality of social attachment at Walter Reed is not often counterbalanced by the more predicable pacing of ordinary life beyond this extra/ordinary zone. Life after Walter Reed cannot depend on going back to a stable configuration of community or family that a soldier had, in part because most have lived a life of relatively mechanical solidarities, as children in their parents’ home and a few short years of army life, which are sometimes not appealing and sometimes not available for them to reenter after Walter Reed. While I and the people with whom I worked refer to the configurations of injured soldiers and their wives or parents or siblings as families, it is important to keep in mind that these families have been largely constituted by the distance and absence typical of army families in the current military era (MacLeish 2013). For example, though Jake and his wife, Tanielle, had been friends since childhood, they’d gotten married only after his injury and had never lived together until they moved into a single room at the Fisher House. James was already facing down deployment when he and Erin met and, months later, married. Another Fisher House couple had been pen pals, meeting face to face and getting engaged only at Walter Reed, after an ied took both legs of the groom-to-be. These configurations are families, to be sure, but they don’t necessarily offer a refuge from the impermanence, instability, or institutionality of Walter Reed that the term might imply. the extra /ordinary atmosphere  51

They are not stable configurations of social attachments apart from the exigencies of medical care to which a soldier can simply return.14 Indeed there is often no place, no home in which these families used to reside and to which they can go back. For soldiers like Alec, Javier, Peter, and Manny, who were usually attended to by a parent or a sibling, there may be a more enduring familial or fraternal past that might fortify their social skin. But such genealogical affiliations do not themselves constitute stable or suitable attachments through which to found a new ordinary. Indeed part of the project of remaking oneself and imagining an ordinary future at Walter Reed involved moving toward a heteronormative family of one’s own, and going back home to live with one’s parents seemed like a relatively hopeless future, even if it was possible. No matter which family configuration soldiers found themselves in at Walter Reed, be it spousal or natal, the facts of those configurations were constantly changing: Peter’s parents both started out at Walter Reed and then took turns alternating weeks so they could keep their jobs, and then in the summer his girlfriend came instead. Manny’s mother didn’t take trips on her own back to California, but after about a year she had to leave for good, and he moved into the barracks. Erin stayed with James at Walter Reed, though there had been a time, in his first months there, when she’d been too overwhelmed and had gone home to the Northwest for a while. This is part of the uncanniness of Walter Reed. It is not home, not a place one settles in. And yet it is a place one gets used to over the months and years of living there because that is something it is; it is a place where one lives for months and years and where one begins, but never accomplishes, the project of making a life tinged with as much ordinariness as it can muster. A Vignette of Thin Life Given the extra/ordinariness that characterizes life at Walter Reed, the form of life that emerges there has a certain thinness born of in-durable sociality and the precariousness of enfleshed social attachments that develop amid fragments of war.15 This form of thin life sustained by Walter Reed’s extra/ordinary atmosphere describes the precarious selfhood soldiers there inhabit, the position from which they weather the processes of self and world making that unfold throughout this book. In describing this form of life as thin and these processes of world making as thinning or thicken52 

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ing, laden with social meaning and forged in flesh, exfoliating, blistering, or fortifying the social skin, I draw on a set of metaphors from the work of Elizabeth Povinelli (2006: 7–8) that hinge her notion of enfleshment: the process through which social relations and discursive formations entail material anchors, like fleshy bodies, which are a “physical mattering forth” of broader political and social ways of knowing about and distinguishing kinds of people and their bodies, but which can never be reduced to discursive formations or ways of knowing. To focus on the body as a nexus of ways of knowing and their material anchors, Povinelli makes use of the notion of social skin: the material, fleshy residue of social relations. As I understand her use, when the body is made whole and its integrity maintained through the necessity of multiple, dense, and broad social affiliations, the social skin is thickened. When the body is made whole and its integrity maintained through the necessity of few attachments to other individuals, the social skin is thinned. I make use of these concepts of thickness and thinness to explore the kinds of social configurations out of which ordinary life is made at Walter Reed, and also the ways that various normative configurations of social attachments are imagined as the things that will make future ordinaries possible. To convey the nature of precariously thin life at Walter Reed, which includes elements of an integrally thin life formed through more secure, heteronormative social attachments, I offer a dense vignette of one precariously thin life, that of Charlie, a young national guardsman from Vermont. Woven through this vignette are the themes to be explored in the pages that follow: the publicity and patriotism that saturates Walter Reed, transformations that are at once about the weight of the body and the social value of personhood brought about by war’s violence, and the intimate social attachments through which a self is remade and which are strained at Walter Reed so there is an ever present possibility of their undoing. Charlie was not one of the people I came to know well; I met with him only twice over the course of a month during a year of fieldwork. The first time was in the breezeway at Mologne House, a covered arcade between the hotel’s lobby and guest rooms that fronted on the large parking lot and was furnished with patio tables and chairs. It was where soldiers, family members, staff, and others at the hotel would go for a cigarette. I asked him for a light and we chatted as we smoked. He gabbed away in a frenetic manner, his train of thought skipping stops and jumping tracks. He commented on this, telling me that he knew he the extra /ordinary atmosphere  53

was “chasing rabbits.” Chasing rabbits or chasing bunnies was a term I heard a few times at Walter Reed used by soldiers who, due to the way their minds had been disordered by force and drugs alike, would veer off topic at odd angles or stop short during the course of a conversation. Giving this disordered thought a name had the effect of drawing attention to it and explaining it for the benefit of the interlocutor, who might otherwise become confused or annoyed. But it also had the effect of rendering this disorderly thought into an almost purposeful, if chaotic, practice, one that unified its practitioners into a cluster of literally like-minded individuals. In this way it was a radical description of what might otherwise be dismissed as insanity or dysfunction. It created social recognition out of a way of being that might easily be abjected and rendered antisocial and below the threshold of actual, thoughtful personhood. Jake also sometimes apologized for chasing bunnies when we were engaged in deep conversation or informal interviews; like Charlie he imagined that this mode of thinking would make it hard for someone like me, who was, it seemed, attempting to make sense of things. But chasing bunnies is sensible in its own way, not in the sense of offering a reason or a cause or a justification for anything, but sensible in the sense of making known, making palpable, the particular disorientation that characterized the present, the way life at Walter Reed was essentially fragmentary. On the one hand, the idea that you could, as Jake would say, “pick up the pieces” into which life had been blown was part of the momentum of the future’s pull there: the fragments could be reassembled. On the other hand, as Jake would say in the same breath, you had to wait before you could even begin, and so the existence of the fragments was part of the inertia of the present, keeping your life here and scattered: the fragments could not be reassembled here or now, but they were collected and lived with. As we talked out there in the breezeway, Charlie proudly told me about how he had been hit by an efp and that the copper they had pulled out of his torso was the biggest piece they had ever taken out of someone who was still alive. He was like a little kid bragging about a new toy. There was no bravado in his story; he was not bragging about surviving, not puffing himself up, or hinting at some kind of magical resilience. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a Ziploc bag, inside of which was that piece of copper they had extracted from his body, about the size of a baseball. He kept it on him so he could show it off. I was thrown by the tone of his presentation and also by the presence of this hunk of metal. It seemed so inert, sterilized 54 

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and then stuffed in mock forensic fashion into a plastic bag, carried around in a pocket, a pocket that was just inches from the place where it had ripped apart flesh and organs, so hot, as it is often said of the efp, that it cauterizes the very wound it makes, a property that is sometimes credited with saving the life of the body it partially eviscerates. It had stopped moving of its own momentum, after the explosive, penetrating course it had taken, thrusting itself into Charlie’s torso. Since it landed there, it had been hitching a ride with Charlie, first inside his body, somewhere amid his organs and beneath his flesh. And then, with a little help from the medics and doctors and their instruments of extraction, it was now moving around inside Charlie’s pocket, between Charlie’s hands and mine. The doctors had killed it, rendered it inert. But Charlie and I, we reanimated it, like a marionette. It nestled comfortably, a dead weight in Charlie’s pocket, living next to the wound in his side and all that active flesh that was coming to life and dying there. It kept company with his catheter and colostomy bag. We finished our cigarettes and I had to run. Charlie told me which room he was in and invited me to stop by anytime. I said I would. Two weeks later I took him up on the offer and knocked on his door in the early evening. Surprised to see me, he told me he hadn’t really expected me to come by, and then invited me in. At this point, in early November 2007, Charlie hadn’t been out of the hospital long and was decidedly unsteady and unwell. In fact it wouldn’t be long before he would be back in the hospital for further surgeries, though there was nothing particularly unusual about that. Like James’s second amputation and Jake’s first, it was just part of the iterative process of healing and injury that played out on the bodies of hundreds of soldiers at Walter Reed. It was the twisted temporality and the rapidly changing contours of the body, Möbius-like in their twisting of interiority and exteriority. On this second night, there in his room, everything about Charlie seemed in tatters, a shambles, a life of fragments. His body was weak, pasty, and unstable in excess of the wound that the copper had inflicted. He was still chasing bunnies. He told me he had a bottle of vodka in the cupboard. He said he wasn’t a drinker but enthusiastically offered it to me, along with some other things he had to eat and drink. I declined, but he kept on. He even offered to give me the bottle. He was being a gracious host, willing to make use of the small kitchenette in his room he knew he was lucky to have. He asked me if I was married. When I said no, he told me that he was, but his wife was away. She had gone for a little “r&r,” and, though it was the extra /ordinary atmosphere  55

hard to piece together what had happened, it was clear that his marriage was not on solid footing. He told me, apropos of nothing, that he was on Levitra because that way he could have sex with his wife, but that it wasn’t really sex, it wasn’t nice, it was just penetration, like some kind of mandatory exercise for his penis and his marriage. He was in no way embarrassed. Affectively off-kilter, he conveyed everything in the same pleasant, mild, unfocused tone. He told me about it just as he told me about the hunk of copper and just as he told me there were weekly poker games at Mologne House, like it was all the same kind of information, like sex, poker, and being penetrated by a searing hot, aerodynamically formed, copper ballistic were all the same kind of event. Each of these was a fragment of his present state of life, the extra/ordinary facts out of which his present was fashioned. A bit of heteronormative family life, though not a whole one. A token of normative masculinity, though it seemed counterfeit. Some gestures of normative sociality—offer your guest a drink, play poker with the boys—but in a scene that wouldn’t allow them constancy. A bit of metal that happened to fragment and save his life and his body, and the fact that all this would change but also always remain true. This fractured present life is not an opposition to life itself: as Veena Das (2007: 5) notes, “Fragments allude to a particular way of inhabiting the world.” Drawing on this insight as well as Benjaminian readings of the fragment, Anand Pandian (2008: esp. 470) has argued that fragments can be very much alive, perhaps precisely because, taken as they are, they need not imply the death of some integral life that was but rather a form of afterlife that is. While soldiers often do hold out hope of reassembling, clinging to the social myth of totality, independence, and wholeness, the fragmentary character of life here and now is a way of being that is saturated by devastation and ruin. Soldiers have moved on from the place of war, but they still live with it, often literally carrying pieces of it with them. Literal fragments that are connected to or the cause of their fragmentary lives and bunny chasing thoughts. Charlie had to drain his catheter, telling me cavalierly of the dangers of leakage and infection, the hazards of piss that gets out and piss that stays in. He went into the bathroom as I sat on the bed. It was covered with stuff. He didn’t close the door, and I heard the sound of urine hitting the water in the bowl. I was a bit ill at ease, thinking of him peeing with the door open, uncomfortable with the thought of sharing the same space with his 56 

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exposed genitals. Then it occurred to me that he wasn’t peeing, not exactly, and that his penis was only tangentially related to the emptying that was going on in there, out of sight but within earshot. The offering of vodka, the talk about sex, and the “peeing” with the door open all came together in a way that suggested to me Charlie’s social existence was just as tattered as his flesh. It seemed that his social skin had been thinned and stretched past the point of tearing. In the absence of not only his wife but—so it seemed—all significant others, he cared for himself, and seemed not to do it particularly well. His body was so thoroughly medicalized that the meaning and use of his penis had been radically altered: sex with his wife was only about the biomechanics of penetration; urination was only the act of necessarily expelling waste fluid from his bladder. The sociality within which he and I interacted seemed awkwardly incomplete. I was in his room, on his bed, he had offered to get me drunk, his wife was away, we talked about his penis, and yet there he was, with the bathroom door open and the sound of his urine splashing into the toilet. The potential of a sexual liaison was clearly written into the script of our interaction. Kind of. As was the medicalization and desexualization of Charlie’s body. Kind of. Some trace of heteronormative sexuality was still there. He was, after all, having some kind of sex with his wife, and the reading of my arrival at his door as some kind of revision of the premise of a stereotypical erotic plot was viable and part of the subtext of our interaction. Yet the social codings of the functioning and effluvia of his penis as sexual or private, the desire or simply feeling that is part of a sexual encounter were nowhere to be found, not in his description of sex with his wife nor in his orientation toward me. The layers of his thin social skin were torn; he was open in such a way as to make the various available socialities untenable. We interacted in a mode that gestured toward abjection. In that way Charlie hovered dangerously close to bare life.16 Charlie seems to take and keep everything he is given. Among the heaps of stuff on his bed and armoire are medical supplies; bandages and ointments and equipment needed to pack up the holes in his body or keep the fluids flowing out of it contained. It is the stuff to patch him together, to fortify the precariousness of his flesh and his life. But there is also an abundant miscellany of the vast economy of patriotism within which he is figured. There are piles of gifted things in his room. It is overflowing with T-shirts and hats and blankets and magazines. He wears a donated hat and a donated shirt that reads “Support our Troops” accompanied by a the extra /ordinary atmosphere  57

yellow ribbon. These things also serve to patch him back together, to make him into something socially legible until he steadies out and arrives back at some new self. But this patch job is tattered too. The statement on his T-shirt cuts across the conventional semiotic logic of Walter Reed. Here “Support our troops” is supposed to be the imperative utterance of a supporter, not a soldier. The yellow ribbon is for others and addressed to others. It is the bumper sticker of the soldier’s wife, mother, father. Of the child of a veteran. Of a booster. And it will have been one of these people, the ones for whom this script is written, who has given Charlie this shirt. But the statement changes. It is offered in a moment of “I support you.” As Charlie wears it, it approaches a plea: “Support me.”17 Even the icon of the yellow ribbon contains an irony that becomes apparent to me as I look at Charlie and his stubbled head, smooth chin, and shockingly boyish face. The bow of the yellow ribbon, the one that was tied around the old oak tree in a grounded display of hope for homecoming—a blazon that marked the location of absence and a beacon that called the absent one home—has been transformed into the loop of a campaign, a sign of support for others rather than a felt absence, a generic and public display of politicized ethics. This is a transformation I imagine the boosters would disavow, but there with almost abject Charlie in his room overflowing with expressions of gratitude laced equally with pride and pity, the excesses of medical technologies that disaggregate him into so many dysfunctional systems, the hollow traces of not quite sexual encounters that mark the unused bed and the undrunk vodka, it is a transformation of meaning that speaks. And in the midst of it all, there is that lump of copper. Charlie no longer keeps it in a bag in his pocket. Now it is in a Lucite case, one that used to hold a baseball. It is kept like a prized possession, like a trophy, in a box. I asked Charlie if I could take a picture of it. I imagined using the picture to wax theoretical about objects, dancing in my text between the actants of Bruno Latour’s (2005) Reassembling the Social and the heroes of Tom Robbins’s (1990) Skinny Legs and All—an unlikely crew of a millenarian spoon, sock, painted stick, conch shell, and can of beans. But when Charlie picked it up and posed with it, holding it up with one hand and pointing at it with the other, pursing his lips and cocking his head, I was caught. I hadn’t wanted to take a picture of him, only of the thing that had been taken out of him. I thought for a moment that maybe I would tell him that. Then

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I felt intensely guilty and immediately complicit in his abjection. Sorry, Charlie, it’s not you I’m interested in. The real protagonist of my story is going to be that ball of copper. I nervously snapped the shot; the flash made a strange shadow in the dark room, almost like it was hovering in the air rather than being cast against a solid surface. Then we went to the cafeteria, where Charlie bought me dinner. On the way over, he kept saying that he really wanted a blt. When they didn’t have one, he was very disappointed. It was the most emotion I’d seen him show. I came across a second picture of Charlie about a year later, while combing the Internet before a presentation I was giving about my work. It’s not that unusual, actually, for me to come across pictures of soldiers I know when searching for images of Walter Reed or doing research about various volunteer organizations, although, as the years pass and more new soldiers move into its beds and rooms, it becomes less common. Though it was not labeled, I recognized both Charlie and the location of the photograph: it is inside the hospital, in a kind of internal atrium off one of the hallways near the oef/oif wards. I recognized the pebbled surface of the planters. I did some more research and figured out this picture was probably taken before I met him rather than during his subsequent surgeries. The two pictures were taken for very different purposes and are not quite comparable, but I can’t help but think that Charlie looked better before, in that sun-dappled hospital bed, than after, in his dim and cluttered hotel room. And then I think that is rather the point of the second image. In it the bed has been adorned with American flags, almost like a presidential limousine. Just as in his room, Charlie’s bed is covered with booster swag. But this time Charlie is tucked in, and the miscellany is laid on top of him. Hovering over him is a member of the organization who donated this stuff. They are called Angels of Mercy. Charlie is reading a copy of Men’s Journal magazine. The image on the cover is a square-jawed man’s man, the actor Aaron Eckhart, a heteronormative Adonis. The cover teases the magazine’s feature articles, including “The Great Debate: Should You Take Testosterone” and “A Man’s Guide to Meat: How to Kill It, Cure It, Cook It and Devour It.” I think of Charlie and his desexed urination and Levitra. I think of the seared meat of his torso and of the ways other soldiers like to metaphorize their body parts at the moment of injury, usually as a ham or hamburger meat. For a reason I cannot discover, Charlie has been pinned

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with a corsage, and a seated woman in what looks like a wedding veil is visible behind him. Masculinity, meat, marriage, and death, all wrapped in an American flag blanket. To Charlie, instead of the gift of release through revelation or death, the Angel of Mercy brings distraction in useless stuff and momentary company, plus perhaps an inadvertent reminder of the disabled, desexualized, abjected reading of his body and the weighty expectation that he will be a rehabilitated man. The older woman ministers to Charlie at his bedside; she packs his body with icons of patriotism and masculinity, quilting together a seamy subjectivity that she foists upon him and that is then documented for posterity. The strange tear in his social skin that characterized my encounter with him—the inability for us to interact completely within a sociality constituted by potential sexuality or the constraints of thicker social obligations or a mode of bare life—is stitched up around him, sealing him in. Plugged into his iv line, tucked into his bed, piled with objects, hovered over, and wheeled about prone, Charlie does what he can, but mostly Charlie is done for. Heavy Atmospherics There are tensions, even apparent contradictions, in these characterizations of the extra/ordinary atmosphere at Walter Reed and the form of life that emerges there: big things and their small appearances; an explicitness and exteriority that appends to things normally implicit and internal; a commonness that is vitally important but does not congeal into a community; a self that threatens not to become in a place where remaking the self, becoming anew, is the only task; a feeling of ordinariness that is too precarious to go unmarked. Such tensions and contradictions are a motif of the history of Walter Reed itself, a place that is simultaneously marginal and central, that is focused on athleticism and virility and life-threatening injury, that brings together publicity and intimacy, a history I elaborate in the following chapter. That this motif of contradictions in suspension is also found at the heart of the extra/ordinary and throughout this book is a reflection of those peculiarities of Walter Reed and characteristics of life there out of which the concept of the extra/ordinary and this book have emerged. Contradictions in suspension are essential to forms of life at Walter Reed, where soldiers and their families confront the impossibility of normative ordinariness now but hang on, of necessity, to the idea that they might 60 

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one day be able to be nothing more than ordinary. Life there is lived in anticipation of the disintegration of whatever rhythm or body one had just settled into. Surprises were so expected you could almost see them coming. Intensity marked no feeling more than boredom. The durability of relationships that usually thicken and stabilize a life, a self, and a social world was no longer reliable, such that, while injured soldiers were in common with each other and while that commonness was essential, they could hardly be said to constitute a community. The pages of the story of life’s most intimate attachments usually neatly written were all cut up and crumpled together. They could not be simply pieced together or smoothed out. And intimate stories could not be rewritten without the stiff prose of History intruding, saturating daily life with legacies of national purpose and worth, those things that are the measure of the body of the war-injured soldier.

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2 a present history of fragments The present . . . ​, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment. . . . ​A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time. —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Concept of History,” Illuminations (1969)

The Messianic Present and the Story of the One-Legged Flier Combing through the New York Times online archives for stories about Walter Reed, I am struck by a headline from March 14, 1945: “One-Legged Flier Tried by Senators” (fig. 2.1). I wonder what this story could possibly be about. I imagine congressmen in some kind of publicity stunt testing an early and ill-fated helicopter with a single skid, nicknamed the One-Legged Flier. I imagine a story of a traitorous World War II amputee hauled before the Senate to account for his disloyalty. But then I imagine I would have read about that somewhere before. I follow the link to an image of the full newspaper page on which the story appeared. The article is both much more and much less than I imagined. It describes an event that is neither momentous nor spectacular, and yet I am

Fig 2.1 “One-Legged Flyer Tried by Senators” appears on the sports page of the New

York Times, March 14, 1945.

deeply struck by its multiple significances. It feels as if the past has anticipated the present, as if 1945 is winking at me. Or as if present and past have collided and left fragments of the same bodies spread throughout time, hot bits of metal still ringing with their coincidence. The story is on the sports page. The “one-legged flier” is Lt. Bert R. Shepard, a pilot and former pow and then a patient at Walter Reed who had been shot down over Germany on his thirty-fourth mission. The Senators are Washington’s American League baseball team. Lieutenant Shepard is trying out for the team. There are no photos. The story is brief, the event unremarkable.1 64 

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My textual, archival encounter brings me into contact with the enduring and iconic figure of the American soldier, a figure that abides at Walter Reed and with whom living soldiers must contend. It is a figure they encounter in intimate and public spaces alike, a figure that sticks to them like an ill-fitting shadow. The story of Lieutenant Shepard is one of normative masculine perseverance and aspiration in the face of profound military trauma. He says of playing baseball, “This is the thing I dreamed about over there [in the German pow camp] for months. . . . ​Sure I’m serious about playing ball, and I believe that I can.” His dreams and aspirations pull him toward a normative future of manly American vigor and success. The story speaks of normative fitness and technologically assisted bodily integrity. After practice Lieutenant Shepard’s stump was “ ‘only a little sore.’ And Shepard had convinced himself that he could get around nimbly enough. . . . ​He is still a patient at Walter Reed Hospital. ‘I can still take a good cut at the ball, throw well and when I get a special leg instead of this temporary one, I’ll do O.K.’ ” His mental fortitude and physical perseverance are complemented by a bit of American mechanical ingenuity—the special leg—to help the selfmotivated man along. And why not? After all, he is contributing to the war effort; an article on the same page proclaims President Roosevelt’s desire for baseball to continue amid the war-time shortages of men and means. Clark Griffith, owner of the Senators, paraphrases: “What the president said shows that baseball has done a good job in the war effort.”2 Condensed in this sports page of March 14, 1945, are many of the most enduring and poignant themes of life at Walter Reed in 2007–8, the time in which the days and nights in this book unfold. Now and then Walter Reed exerts its particular wartime pull. Now and then it is publicly imagined as a space in which “our boys” piece themselves back together again with the help of new technologies and self-making fortitude that hold out the promise of good futures for worthy men.3 But each meaning of Walter Reed is always situated within a broader and often deadly military topography and also within the shifting social poetics (Herzfeld 1997) of military America and the intimacies and imaginaries it shapes and becomes figured through, all of which resonate in various historical timbres and are always more than merely institutional. I think here not of the way in which American History is often written as Military History but of the ways in which, as Lutz (2001: 1) writes, we a present history of fragments  65

might read a “single, deeply entwined but often invisible world of America and its military,” and that at stake in its moments of visibility are foundational issues about the forms of life and social obligation through which the nation imaginatively and materially constitutes itself. The figure of the soldier is thus a live site for the articulation of Americanness, and the lives, sightings, and sitings of actual soldiers unfold in spaces like Walter Reed: fraught with social obligation, normative nationalism, and historical narratives of pride and progress written on gilded parchment with bloodied ink. Needless to say, it can get a little close in there. And there is precisely where we encounter soldiers like Lieutenant Shepard, “still a patient at Walter Reed Hospital.”4 It is within this deep and public history of military America that the iconicity of Walter Reed in 2007–8 must be read. And it is in this saturated space that soldiers encounter others’ expectations of who they are and craft their own aspirations of who they might be, all of which inevitably sits in relation to this history and its normative protagonists. I offer this history of Walter Reed not to describe a coherent genealogy or causal narrative (there is none, or perhaps too many, to be told) but to convey the tenacity of certain binding threads and suggest something of the impossibly cluttered space in which the soldiers with whom I worked struggled to fashion ordinary lives. I found Lieutenant Shepard quite literally in the midst of this tenacious history in his physical place on the page. He is nestled into a corner that is riddled with normative masculinity, national obligation, the sometimes suffering, sometimes fit soldier body, the artistry of appearance, and technophilic and indulgent aspirations for the future, echoed in the talk of today, of high-tech C-Legs and soldier bodies that can be refit so well they can now contribute to the war effort by going back to combat.5 He is framed by advertisements that bespeak normative masculinity, national obligation, and a certain technologically enhanced American aspirationalism. To the right is an ad for Admiration Cigars, that symbol of masculine leisure (fig. 2.2). It includes an image of a young, aproned woman removing a huge, steaming steak from a futuristic-looking countertop oven. The caption reads, “For Your Admiration Tomorrow—Electronic cooking will broil a steak in 2 seconds.” “For Your Admiration Today” is, of course, an Admiration Cigar. Technology, futurity, improvement, and excess, all wrapped in a heteronationally gendered package. 66 

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Tucked below the cigar ad is a small plea from the Red Cross (fig. 2.2): “give more Our Fighting Men Need More give to your red cross.” The call evokes the relationship between individual citizens and collective masculine soldiers. It begs an intimate but intensely mediated kind of encounter. You, in the singular, are implored to give your very own blood to those collective men of war, those men who are ours, who belong to and depend on us. The sense of national obligation is multiplied by each pair of eyes that reads the words. The fighting men are homogenized and carnalized; their collective troop body does war’s deadliest work and needs its most basic bodily supply. Today such calls are for material investments born of civilian blue-bloodedness rather than for actual civilian blood. They are both more vague and more evaluative. The “one-legged flier” article hovers just above an ad for Schoble Hats, dignified and gothic (fig. 2.3). It reminds readers, “Quality in hats, like quality in men, goes deeper than the surface.” It simultaneously suggests the high value of deep masculinity and the inextricable relationship between inside quality and outside appearance (Yeung 2010). It is like the quality of Lieutenant Shepard, who, with all his aspirations and perseverance, will “do O.K.” once he gets his special leg. Virtue, gendered propriety, and a socially sufficient self are materializations of and on the body. The surfaces matter, be they apparel, prosthetic, or flesh. These themes echo in contemporary talk at Walter Reed of the importance of passing and appearance, but also of seeing beyond bodily surfaces. They echo in talk of national moral debts and slogans of support for “the troops.” Lieutenant Shepard’s act, his exercise on the baseball field, echoes in the new models of rehabilitation at Walter Reed, where injured soldiers are treated as “tactical athletes,” and in the public presence of injured soldiers at baseball and football games, once again tying the bodies of injured soldiers to the particularly American masculine fitness of popular national sport and athleticism.6 Now and then these public displays entail cultivated encounters between soldiers and civilians who see them as they are shown to be and are implored to support them. Rather than suggesting that things stay exactly the same from one moment to the next or that the changes that characterize Walter Reed’s history constitute a story of causal development, this fragmented history reveals enduring themes that give Walter Reed a certain timeless coherence, a coherence that is not the simple sum of changes or continuities in its size or institutional function nor simply a consequence of the logistics of a a present history of fragments  67

Fig 2.2 Detail, Admiration Cigar advertisement,

New York Times, March 14, 1945. Fig 2.3 Detail, Schoble Hats advertisement, New

York Times, March 14, 1945.

series of particular wars. It is this constellation that makes Walter Reed sensible as a public site and that charts the deep meanings soldiers there must confront even as the context within which such confrontations unfold is indeed rather different from one war to the next. The names of the men borne by the buildings injured soldiers frequented at Walter Reed—Gen. Creighton Abrams, Gen. Leonard Heaton, Maj. Walter Reed himself—were inconsequential and often unknown to them. But the significance of this place, the narratives of national moral economies, the imbrication of war and progress, the body of the soldier as the embodiment of American reproductive masculinity, the many manifestations of the deadliness of military life, all these confronted soldiers with a muddy symbolism that they did their best to see beyond while living within. This fragmented history, then, tells of the accretion of these layers of meaning as they have flowed through Walter Reed since its very beginning. Because of this I hope not so much to tell a progressive story of Walter Reed as to describe the configuring of its public sensibility, to show some of these things that make it such an impractical and improbable place to make an ordinary life, things that conditioned the particular extra/ordinariness of life there. The Place and Purpose of Walter Reed Walter Reed General Hospital was built in 1908, in part following the urging of the army surgeon general that a new general hospital be built in Washington, D.C., to replace the dilapidated hospital at Washington Barracks. In his 1903 report to the army, the army surgeon general repeat[ed] most earnestly [his] previous recommendation that a general hospital of sufficient size and perfect in every respect be built in the District of Columbia for the following purposes: First. Treatment of cases needing the services of specialists, surgical or other observation, and treatment of officers incapacitated for service prior to their appearance before retiring or examining boards. Second. Training enlisted men of the Hospital Corps in nursing and military duties. Third. Instruction at the Army Medical School in military surgery, hospital administration, Hospital Corps drill, and establishment of field hospitals. a present history of fragments  69

Fourth. To serve as a nucleus around which, in time of war, temporary wards may be erected without delay to any extent and at minimum expense. (Cited in Weed 1923: 273) At the behest of his own doctor, the hospital was named for Maj. Walter Reed, who died on November 23, 1902, following an appendectomy at the outmoded hospital his namesake institution would replace. Major Reed had discovered that mosquitoes, not people, transmitted yellow fever, something considered a significant military as well as civilian victory. Most of the research for this discovery was carried out by Reed and his team on human “volunteers” in U.S.-occupied Cuba.7 Both the fact and the site of the discovery seemed deeply providential. As a friend and fellow doctor noted in a eulogizing letter to the editor of the New York Times, “One among the many reasons given for our interference with Spanish rule in Cuba was our desire to eliminate through modern sanitary measures the perpetual menace to our Southern States by yellow fever. . . . ​Were the discoveries concerning the propagation and spread of yellow fever . . . ​the single advantage from our war with Spain, they would have been cheaply purchased.”8 Thus even before the hospital was built, Reed’s legacy was founded on military deaths, both of those who died fighting in the Spanish American War and of the many researchers and subjects who died of yellow fever in Havana. The memorialization of Reed’s accomplishment also encodes the supremacy of national interest and the necropolitical notion of a war worthwhile for the sake of its bodies, no matter the cost in lives and treasure. Reed’s namesake hospital would again and again become a blazon of national arrangements of worth, flesh, and war and the imbrication of America’s military and civilian bio- and necropolitics. The original hospital was a modest but elegant building in the Federal style, with red brick, a small cupola, and six Ionic columns supporting its small portico, flanked on either side by symmetrical grids of eighteen windows, six long and three high, giving it the imposing, stern quality of a Georgian hospital and the slightly conceited nobility of American NeoClassicism (fig. 2.4). This building still stands on the grounds of what has been called, since 1977, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and though it still faces a small fountain in the middle of a circular drive, it has long since become disoriented from the post’s main entrances and other buildings as the base and the city of Washington have grown in fits and starts around it. 70 

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Fig 2.4 Oldest known photograph of Walter Reed, ca. 1909. Courtesy of Army Medical

Museum Photographs, Otis Historical Archives, amm 484 oha 74, National Museum of Health and Medicine.

Though it had grown to 113 acres by 2007 and was enclosed by a high green metal fence, and though its location was no longer considered remote, the saturation of the National Capital Region by military and security installations and personnel made Walter Reed’s presence something unremarkable. Not only is it a twenty-minute drive from the White House and Congress, but it is no more than ten miles from Ft. McNair, Ft. Myer, and the Pentagon and is within about twenty miles of Ft. Belvoir, Ft. Mead, and Andrews Air Force Base.9 It was indeed well positioned to fulfill its first function: offering the advances of hard-won research to officers, presidents, and even soldiers needing specialized or cutting-edge care. In 2007 the armed private security guards who staff the gates on Georgia Avenue and 16th Street hardly warrant a second thought. And in the post-9/11 ordinary atmosphere of securitization, the sight of armed guards inspecting the underside of commercial delivery trucks while a line of cars extends into a present history of fragments  71

the northbound lanes of 16th Street during the morning rush hour has become familiar.10 Walter Reed is multiply situated as just another node on the pathways of America’s sprawling war geography, but one that becomes, periodically, central—sometimes as a wartime nucleus, sometimes as a metropole to the colonies of smaller far-flung military medical outposts—a site of culture, prestige, and knowledge production and the consumption of vast resources. From the flows of injured and active-duty soldiers to the national capital’s most notable residents and from the trajectories of American military life to the amorphous networks now evoked by “terrorism,” Walter Reed’s location has long been nodal. It contains a dense cluster of people, buildings, and practices through which can be read a cross-section of the American military and governmental life and death. Between 1909, when the hospital opened, and 1917, when the United States entered World War I, Walter Reed General Hospital often appeared in little news wire stories and reports of the United Service like any other node in the vast military infrastructure that spread around the country and beyond. In those early years officers who had been in the Philippines quelling insurrection were moved to Walter Reed as much for command and training duties as for specialized “observation and treatment.”11 As yet untested by fully fledged war, Walter Reed had not yet acquired the significance it later would through contact with the bodies of war-ravaged soldiers. As members of the Medical Corps joined its ranks, Walter Reed’s population and institutional capacity grew steadily to a natural plateau around 1915, when a number of expanded wards and nurses’ quarters were completed (Weed 1923: 277–79). On April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. Within months construction of new buildings to accommodate the massing of troops began at Walter Reed. The number of soldiers treated there more than doubled in 1917, but this was primarily a consequence of the sheer increase in numbers of bodies present to mass for war, rather than an index of the toll that war would inflict on them (303–4).12 By 1918 Walter Reed had acquired an additional twenty-six acres of contiguous land, increasing its size by more than half (281–82). Also that year, when “the overseas cases, with their more complicated problems, had arrived” (303– 4), the hospital fully achieved its fourth and final function: “To serve as a nucleus around which, in time of war, temporary wards may be erected without delay to any extent and at minimum expense” (O’Reilly, cited in Weed 1923: 273). Walter Reed became nucleic indeed, pulling fragile, in72 

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jured, and ailing bodies into its stateside orbit. And again, in 1944, when the United States began its European campaigns of World War II, Walter Reed received eighteen thousand new patients, an increase of 296 percent over the year before (Standlee 2009). As the United States and its military have moved through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the pull of Walter Reed’s nucleic function has waxed and waned as flows of injured soldier bodies rush in at times of war and subside in times of putative peace. In 2008 Walter Reed Army Medical Center comprised seventy-four buildings, only one of which, the Heaton Pavilion, was the hospital. On any given day about fifty-one of the hospital’s 170 inpatients were oef/oif casualties.13 But inpatients were far outnumbered by outpatients, virtually all of them oef/oif casualties. The out­patients lived in the two hundred rooms of the Mologne House hotel and the nineteen rooms of the Fisher House, with the few “single soldiers” occupying some of the five hundred or so rooms of the Abrams Hall barracks. The length of stays varied widely, from a few months to three years or more. There were 4,649 staff, roughly equally divided between military and civilians or contractors.14 Aside from soldiers’ housing, the post included administrative buildings, a few disused gable-front officers’ houses, a gym, an old stone chapel, the National Museum of Health and Medicine, medical research offices, soldier and family support service offices, physical plant management buildings, and a number of fallow red-brick buildings dating back to the hospital’s earliest years. Despite the spans of concrete lots, there was never enough parking. But any seemingly solid facts belie the post’s ever shifting quality, something it shares with countless other U.S. military bases around the country and around the world (Lutz 2009). That its structural nodality is matched by its geographical location in the center of government and military command is part of its original design. It was built in a center and so, not surprisingly, it is consistently reproduced as central. But its iconic significance is an ongoing effect of the particular ways that its place and functions overlap and become publicly produced as meaningful in the shifting contexts of American war. During the American War in Vietnam, the bodies of injured soldiers acquired an unprecedented political ambivalence and they filled its wards before being moved to a singularly unprepared va system. According to one report, there were about seven hundred injured soldiers at Walter Reed in 1969, and despite its cramped conditions it was seen in a positive contrast to the odious conditions of va hospitals.15 But Walter Reed’s relevance to a present history of fragments  73

national conversations about the war usually had nothing to do with the injured soldiers there. It was more likely to be noted as the temporary residence of an ailing Dwight D. Eisenhower or Senator Everett Dirksen (the Republican leader and close colleague of President Johnson) as they weighed in on debates about the course of the war and its waning support.16 At the start of the post-9/11 era, Walter Reed continued to be most often (if not most memorably) mentioned for its non-combat-related functions and until the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it was most notably figured as a site of national anxiety: its metropolitan status and national prestige made it a node in the network-like geography of the “war on terror.” In 2001 it was thought to be the intended endpoint for anthrax spores found in a government mail facility that serviced “Walter Reed and its research laboratory.”17 This put it on the map of that ever extending event, although as evidence increasingly pointed to the wrong kind of suspect subject (a “disturbed” civilian army biochemist rather than a “radicalized Islamic terrorist”), the anthrax scare was made marginal. The following year, preempting the deployment of weaponized smallpox became one of the justifications offered for a preemptive invasion of Iraq, in a distorted echo of the bio-logic that posited the eradication of yellow fever as a justification for U.S. intervention in Spanish-ruled Cuba one hundred years earlier. Public talk about smallpox forged a link between the dangers of the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein (who was said to possess weaponized smallpox) and a global and amorphous network of terrorist cells (who, it was insinuated, might also). So it was fitting that President George W. Bush made his highly anticipated announcement that soldiers and emergency health workers would all be vaccinated against smallpox at Walter Reed, which would also be the first vaccination site. The president was vaccinated there himself, receiving a shot in his left arm. The public was supposed to be reassured about the safety of the vaccine when they were told that an hour later he was able to use that arm to carry his dog back at the White House and was feeling “great” that evening as he watched a movie with his parents.18 The meaning of sparse headlines like “President Is Vaccinated” was apparent to readers at the time.19 After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, as U.S. casualties began to rapidly swell its ranks, Walter Reed was increasingly figured as a site for publicly managing the meaningful bodies of injured soldiers in a familiar echo of its wartime past. Unlike during the Vietnam era, and in part as a response to 74 

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the failures to properly manage injured soldier bodies then, the meaning of Walter Reed now became ever more anchored in ever more sacralized soldier bodies. As injured soldiers continued to be sent back from Iraq and Afghanistan in greater numbers and to stay for long periods of rehabilitation, Walter Reed’s public face increasingly became that of the injured soldier and, for the first time, his family. This was the newest arrangement of its most enduring features. Acute Melancholy and Other Deadlinesses of Military Life As a site for the anxious management of the many kinds of deadliness of military life, Walter Reed was always burdened by the manifold strains that affect American soldiers’ bodies, minds, and social attachments in war and peace alike. In the public archive of these strains, we can read the ways soldierly life and death exceed events of war, the ways military life and death are inextricable from other intimacies, and the ways Walter Reed is made disorientatingly full of all of this. Among the earliest publicly archived deaths at Walter Reed were those that evinced the more diffuse dangers of military life. In 1912 two army airmen died as the result of a plane crash during a training exercise at nearby College Park.20 Following not far on the heels of the very first powered aviation death at Ft. Myer, these two airmen became the fifth and sixth such deaths in the U.S. Army, and the 190th and 191st worldwide.21 Corporal Scott was killed instantly [shortly before 6 o’clock], but Lieut. Rockwell lived until 7:05 o’clock, dying on the operating table at the Walter Reed General Hospital . . . ​where he was hurried after the accident. . . . ​More than 300 men and women witnessed the accident. . . . ​Several officers and a number of enlisted men rushed on the field and pulled the broken wings and heavy engine off the two men’s prostrate forms. It was found that Scott had been instantly killed. His skull was crushed, his left arm broken, and his right leg crushed in two places. Lieut. Rockwell was unconscious from concussion of the brain. Both his legs were broken. Brother officers who witnessed the accident were at a loss to account for it.22 This military fictive kin, these “brother officers,” are witness not only to the loss of life but to the loss of accountableness; they cannot explain these deaths and offer instead an ellipsis in the flow of words that describe the a present history of fragments  75

many details. The article notes that U.S. and foreign service members have borne the brunt of aviation fatalities and gives, at a broader scale, details of the technical banality of military mortality. In this early example Walter Reed is bound to the worst consequences of military preparedness, when technologies of war can be measured in a soldier’s fading pulse. Even when war came in 1917, these inglorious deaths continued, byproducts of the contingencies of military life and logistics. After all, even during war there are many ordinary hazards that can kill you or come dangerously close to it. A contemporary accounting tallied 125,000 deaths of U.S. military personnel during the country’s brief involvement in World War I (Ayres 1919).23 Counted here were more than fifty thousand combat deaths, most in two hundred days of intense fighting, but also about twenty-five thousand deaths from the 1919 influenza pandemic, fifteen thousand from non-flu-related pneumonia, three thousand from meningitis, and 367 non-battle-related losses at sea (119–30). The psychic tolls of war and military life more generally have also always been among those ailments treated and observed there. Following World War I, Lt. Col. Albert G. Love (1931), a somewhat notorious statistician of the Army Medical Corps, included all of this as he tried to calculate the most efficient ways to manage the flows of bodies during wartime.24 In Love’s (1931) rationalized accounting, as in other contemporary institutional postmortems, the various modes of living, suffering, and dying during wartime—from venereal disease and influenza to bullets—are distinguishable but inseparable. Functional prognosis matters more than the meaning or cause of a casualty, and a main concern is identifying those permanently classifiable as “disability cases,” whatever the reason (53). Included equally among “all causes” of disabling affliction are both those whose bodies give way and those deemed “mentally unsound” for whatever reason (53). Caring for those suffering or dying from all these many conditions—some, like tuberculosis, less glorious and equally war-born—was thus a major part of military medicine during World War I. Disturbances other than the hallmarks of war have long been linked to Walter Reed, and “all causes” remain imbricated during times of war and peace. A special to the New York Times of May 23, 1916, offers two striking cases. The headline reads “Army Officer Ends Life: Col. Phillips Shoots Himself after Hurt—Lieutenant Killed by Fall.”

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Colonel John L. Phillips, U.S.A., Medical Corps, formerly in charge of the Walter Reed Army Hospital, committed suicide in a ravine near the hospital today. At the time of his death and since September last, when he accidentally fell down an open elevator shaft in the hospital, a distance of 18 feet, injuring his head, from which he had not recovered, he had been a patient at the institution. He suffered from an acute form of melancholia. As had been his custom since being a patient, he arose early this morning and started for a walk. Between noon and 1 o’clock Thomas Tuthill, an orderly of the hospital, found the body of Colonel Phillips. He had killed himself with a revolver shot. Pinned to the lapel of his coat was a note addressed to his wife and daughter, who live at the hospital officers’ quarters, telling them that he was tired of life and asking their forgiveness. . . . ​ First Lieutenant Luther M. Ferguson, U.S.A., Medical Corps, recently appointed to the surgical staff of the Walter Reed Army General Hospital, was killed there today by being thrown from a horse.25 The circumstances of Colonel Phillips’s melancholia—a mental state vaguely traced to his fall—are reminiscent of current concerns about the links between tbi and suicide. They echo even more loudly in the questions about how a military life transformed by injury, secured within the apparatus of Walter Reed and complete with wife and daughter, is a difficult thing to sustain. In Phillips’s case, falling down an open elevator shaft causes a head injury whose consequences so dull his life that the proximity of his family cannot shore him up. Being with his wife and daughter is not enough to allay the deadening he notes in his final words. If not impossible, it seems irrelevant to separate out the degree to which the impact of his fall or the institutional or intimate experiences of his post-fall self caused Phillips’s melancholia: it is their precise combination that constitutes his death. Then, like a shock to the system, there is Lieutenant Ferguson, who dies that same day at Walter Reed when he is thrown from a horse, as if to remind us that incidental mental strains of military life must always be read alongside the physical ones. The very next day this point becomes even more indelible. An article appears under the headline “War Aviation Chief Is Injured by Fall.” It recounts how one Lieutenant Colonel Reber had been home visiting his son, bedridden with measles. As he reluctantly took his leave, he was overcome a present history of fragments  77

and tumbled down the stairs. “He was picked up unconscious and for a time was believed to be dead” and was taken to Walter Reed to recover. The description of these psychosomatic events calls into question the very distinction between the mental and material strains of military life: Colonel Reber had three broken ribs and had suffered other injuries of a serious character, but it was believed he would recover. At the War Department it was explained that Colonel Reber, who had been under a severe mental strain on account of the illness of his son, and had lost much sleep, had experienced two attacks of vertigo in his office at the War Department this morning, and it was thought that he may have had a third just before the accident. Colonel Reber . . . ​was widely known for his work in aviation, and the unfortunate accident which he suffered today not only greatly shocked, but caused an exceedingly painful impression in army circles.26 In macabre fashion all these incidents condense the privileges and precariousness of military expertise, the way the attachments of military life leak into domestic life, straining soldiers sometimes past the point of breaking. For Reber military life includes the social attachments to all those who feel pain at the news of his accident, the thickening of his social skin through the sociality that ties him to those many others. But this has also pulled him physically away from his immobilized son, away from the ideal enactment of a normative nuclear family, and the result seems to hit him somewhere between the ears. In this way his life is dizzying. His body collapses. In such events Walter Reed can be both cause of and cure for such dangers. For melancholic Colonel Phillips, for example, it offered the prestige of his status “in charge” of the flagship army hospital and the well-appointed home for his wife and daughter; it engineered the convenience of an ele­ vator into whose shaft he falls; it provided care for him once he is injured and grounds for him to walk in his melancholic state, including the ravine in which he shoots himself; it provided the orderly to promptly find his body and the position of significance that allows his death to be described in some detail in the national paper of record. Walter Reed is thus consistently reproduced as a site of the unraveling of a neatly ordered mind amid the dragging weight of military life that endures during war and after. During World War I Walter Reed was designated one of two facilities selected to specialize in amputations, but while early talk of the “recon-

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struction” of men focused on their bodies, war was openly understood to have ravaged the mind as well.27 In addition to the direct mental damage understood to be caused by the forces of war, there was also a concern for the more diffuse mental distress that could arise at Walter Reed: the feeling of incomplete humanity, uselessness, and of a wasting self that World War I Army Surgeon General Merritte W. Ireland referred to as “hospitalization,” another name for the dull and tiresome condition of life to which melancholic Colonel Phillips seems to have succumbed before the war began. In 1918 Ireland said that “in addition to . . . ​shortening the convalescent period,” the new therapeutic technique of rehabilitation “retains or arouses mental activities, preventing ‘hospitalization,’ and enables the patient to be returned to service or civil life with the full realization that he can work in his handicapped state, and with habits of industry much encouraged, if not firmly formed.”28 As a special site of reconstruction during and after the war, Walter Reed thus became a place where the minds, bodies, and life conditions of injured soldiers would be remade in a model of regular productivity rather than succumbing to an invalidating transformation (see Linker 2011). As one headline had it, “Work Must Be Thorough: Mental and Manual Activity to Be Required to Fit Patients for Civil Pursuits.”29 Various new spaces and techniques of reconstruction recognized the way institutional life might exacerbate the fragile condition of soldiers’ bodies, and also the ways their bodies were sensitive to social and family life, something evidenced by Colonel Reber’s overwhelmed tumble down the stairs as he was pulled by military work from the bedside of his ailing son. Reconstruction thus worked both on soldiers’ bodies and against the potentially untenable thinning or thickening of soldiers’ social skin by cultivating carefully selected practices of ordinary life within the deadening space of the hospital. In 1918 a Red Cross reconstruction facility was built at Walter Reed. Part of its recuperative aim was to make life feel ordinary and enable the necessary mental and social activities “to help sick soldiers and sailors back to health and happy usefulness.” The building had a “broad screened in porch provid[ing] the fresh air cure and a place for smokers with all sorts of games available on easily moved tables.” The need for such ordinary embellishments even made headlines, as in the Washington Post: “Reed Hospital Lacks Vases: Donors of Flowers for Wounded Men Urged to Supply

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Them.” In the words of a hospital welfare worker, “Flowers sent to soldier patients at Walter Reed Hospital help the men toward convalescence.”30 This therapeutic ordinariness could also expose the intimate attachments of kinship caught in the precarious process of postwar reconstruction. For example, in addition to its breezy porch, the new Red Cross building also included “twelve comfortable bedrooms which are for the accommodation of relatives summoned to the hospital by news that their men in uniform may not be able to ‘carry on’ much longer. They are thus enabled to spend their entire time within call of the bedside, and do not have to conceal their grief or anxiety among strangers in a hotel.”31 Here, in addition to being a place of diligent reconstruction, Walter Reed is again fleshed out by soldiers’ vulnerability and family tragedy inflicted by military life that simultaneously offers a sequestering embrace not only to soldiers but also to their anxious kin. As new wars brought new techniques, the inextricability of the military and intimate dimensions of injured soldiers’ conditions and of the mental and corporeal facets of life continued to be a central feature of life at Walter Reed. During World War II the public was given another glimpse inside the specialized spaces of Walter Reed, whose mandate is “to save lives and salvage human bodies,” as one New York Times story put it (fig. 2.5).32 In addition to physical injuries and salvaged bodies, readers were told about the third of patients who were “mental or nervous cases.” Many had been shipped from battlefronts halfway around the world, “minds vague and bruised from what they have seen.” Others had yet to see combat, “constitutional psychopathic cases who, occupying ‘obscure little grooves’ in civil life, got by quite nicely. It was only when thrown up against the routines and rigors of Army life that their minds slipped.”33 In such ways Walter Reed has been a place weighted down with questions of mentality and worth as they relate to the destruction of life that is the essence of war and simultaneously to those other “routines and rigors” of military life. These questions lead to others that reveal the ways that the military, as an institution that exists for the purposes of sovereign violence, realigns rights over life and death and addresses the limits of self-sovereignty. How, for example, are intention, capacity, and culpability to be discerned in this situation where army life can drive you mad, or redistribute control over your own body? Some thirty years after those battle-bruised minds had passed through its wards, Lt. William Calley was sent to Walter Reed for examination by 80 

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Fig 2.5 Photograph accompanying “Hospital Sets Pace in Soldier Salvage. Walter Reed

Center Making Record in Handling Wounded and Mentally Upset. New Methods Are Used. X-Rays, Plasma, Plastic Surgery Highly Developed—Patients Eager to Resume Battle,” New York Times, April 15, 1943.

a sanity board after being court-marshaled for the massacre of civilians at My Lai during the American war in Vietnam. The board was convened after his psychiatrist testified he might have been “deranged” by secondhand marijuana smoke as he helped slaughter over three hundred unarmed Vietnamese villagers on the orders of his commanding officer. The board at Walter Reed, which included psychiatrists who had served in Vietnam, found that he “had been suffering no more battle strain than were any of his soldiers,” and he was found guilty.34 In 2009 Maj. Nadal Hasan, an army psychiatrist from Virginia who had worked at Walter Reed, killed thirteen soldiers and shot thirty-one more before he was shot and partially paralyzed by police at Ft. Hood in Texas, shortly before his anticipated deployment to Afghanistan. In the story about Hasan that emerged, Walter Reed figured as the place of his “radicalization,” where, during his time a present history of fragments  81

treating soldiers there, he made contact with a “radical cleric,” began reacting against perceived Islamophobia in the army, and became disturbed by what he was hearing from the soldiers he was treating upon their return from Iraq and Afghanistan. It was also where his colleagues began to doubt his sanity.35 In all of these ways, again and again, Walter Reed has been a public part of the painful, grievable, and mystifying mortality at the heart of the U.S. military. Its publicity has displayed the ways military life can pull soldiers apart, stretched between the social attachments that ground them in a shared world, tugging them into the solitude of a lonely ravine, drawing them from kin, or suspending them in a simulacrum of ordinary domestic life. Just as the life of a soldier at Walter Reed is sometimes dangerously thin, so is the fleshed-out soldier at Walter Reed sometimes thick and overfull of meaning. Patriotic Bodies Dramatizing National Feelings On May 12, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson went to Walter Reed to visit with soldiers injured in Vietnam. At the time officers and enlisted men were kept on separate wards, and Johnson toured them both. The New York Times reported, “At times Mr. Johnson seemed so affected by the sights and odors in the wards that he was reduced to murmuring almost inaudibly ‘Your country is grateful to you.’ ”36 It is as if, in the presence of the bodies of injured soldiers amid the hallowed and haunted halls of Walter Reed, Johnson’s senses become so saturated and suffused with the effects of war and the remnants of spent “human material” that all he can manage is to mutter under his breath, or breathlessly, that familiar platitude of the sacrificial economy of war.37 This is one cluster of national feelings attached to Walter Reed and its injured soldier bodies, which circulates for public consumption during times of war. Each national war drama unfolds with its own historical specificity, but all are recognizable as part of a modern genre of American wartime gothic. From era to era the structure of feeling (Williams 1978) changes, as does the configuration of bodies in each scene. But still Walter Reed reliably telegraphs a morally weighted affective economy of war to a broad American public through the public figuring of injured soldier bodies. Like the scene of Johnson’s breathless murmurs, these public renderings are often operatic: multisensory and full of feeling. They allego82 

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rize or otherwise display in condensed form both grand themes of national mythos and the personal scale at which a shared wartime condition is affectively routed and relayed. In these displays Walter Reed becomes a place where the moral economy of war can jump scales, from individual bodies to the nation at large, from the meaning and value of wars of nations to the qualities of an individual soldier’s body and life. During World War II, when President Harry Truman and his family attended a religious service at the Walter Reed chapel, the Washington Post reported this as an attempt by the first family “to worship as any other American” without presidential “pomp and ceremony.” But the story also dramatized various national wartime orientations toward injured soldiers, with the president performing a triple relationship to them. He is the commander in chief, “pausing at the close of the services for an impromptu ceremony” with red-robed convalescents and touring the wards “shaking hands with each man and offering words of encouragement.” He is a brother in arms, visiting his own former World War I commander, General Pershing, in “the old soldier’s” Walter Reed suite. And he is an “ordinary American,” worshiping God with his family and supporting our boys with a calm, avuncular smile. As opposed to the breathless Johnson and the anxi­ eties of Vietnam, Truman’s contact with those boys of World War II figures a collective American good life within a warm military fraternity that seems to stretch pastorally through the generations, offering a soothing respite once the violence of war is left behind.38 Just as injured soldiers at Walter Reed can be recruited to such public wartime intimacies, so they are also recruited for more passionate expressions of national wartime feeling. Throughout World War II newspapers told stories about injured soldiers at Walter Reed, like those of the “onelegged flyer,” that offered moments of hope, cheer, or heroic recognition. The Washington Post especially was brimming with stories about soldiers at Walter Reed and the special events that filled the place, from the “gi Oscars,” where prizes, voted on by U.S. service members stationed around the world, were awarded to showbiz notables, to a 1942 visit from the comedienne Sheila Barrett, which had all the “soldier-boys” in the highest spirits, to the story of twenty convalescing injured veterans flown home to see their families for Christmas in 1946.39 In this era it was as if such lighthearted stories were ballast against the darker news of death and struggle that also unfolded there and with which Americans were well and personally acquainted. a present history of fragments  83

During the Korean War, that war whose significance seemed “swallowed up even as it unfolded” (Young 2010: 115), Truman wheeled a Walter Reed soldier onto a stage during an inside-the-beltway uso fundraiser. The New York Times called it the “emotional highlight” of the night. The soldier, twenty-five-year-old Anthony J. Troilo, had “lost both feet from frostbite when he was captured by Communists and forced to march without shoes for many days in subzero cold.” When the president put him on display, the audience “honored Troilo with a stirring chorus of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ ”40 As in countless other such stagings, it is the arrangement and presence of the injured soldier’s body (rather than the full personhood of a particular soldier) that provokes such stirring public emotions, even in the midst of a war that was more acquiesced to than rallied behind. Such theatricality leaves little room for the complex and fleshy experiences of actual injured soldiers, though this is not to say that such public acts are entirely anemic. Far from it; the iconicity of these material and sensuous arrangements of injured soldiers points broadly and deeply to national feelings and is full of historical resonances. These dramas are deep; they can stir passions and resonate profoundly with personal and social investments in a particular moral politics of war. But they are never precisely about twenty-five-year-old Anthony J. Troilo. They are never precisely about those soldiers whose bodies leave President Johnson breathless. Walter Reed as a national stage iconizes these particular soldiers; encounters with them are exemplary and allegorical, unfolding in a register of citizen, soldier, and nation. They are embodied, but not exactly personal. The awarding of the Purple Heart is an enactment of this. The award itself is an iconic token of gratitude offered in recognition for a soldier’s blood sacrifice in defense of the nation.41 When the act of awarding it is publicized, it can be an occasion to render a soldier exemplary, to have one soldier stand in metonymically for the whole. In such acts a soldier is transformed into the soldier. But the mimetic magic of this transformation is built on its own kind of sacrifice. The particularities of each soldier’s particular life and suffering must be made to disappear. On February 6, 1951, the first ribbons for service in the Korean War were presented by the secretary of the army and the army chief of staff at Walter Reed. Not only was this the right setting for such a significant act of official recognition, but the image of such notable people reaching over the soldier tangled up in his cords and medical contraptions was itself a kind of motif that continued to appear in public images of Walter Reed (figs. 2.6–2.9). 84 

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On March 29, 1951, a variation on the motif shows the wives of the French president and French ambassador to the United States visiting a wounded soldier at Walter Reed under the headline “Distinguished Visitors Call on Wounded Veterans.” On July 25, 1953, there is a small story about Waclaw Jackiewicz, a Polish immigrant to the United States who joined the army shortly after coming to the country and then lost both eyes and hands in Korea. He was sworn in as a U.S. citizen while recuperating at Walter Reed.42 The context was rather different during the Vietnam War, when, in place of the Korean War’s apathy, there was widespread and public denigration of injured soldiers, whose lives were often presented as ruined beyond all hope, becoming the embodied evidence of a worthless war.43 But still, in those embittered years Purple Hearts were doled out at Walter Reed, though they were less often noted, and, when they were, the tone was absent the patriotic thrall that characterized previous eras. A Washington Post story from the summer of 1966 described one soldier who received his medal at a ceremony that combined the army’s 193rd birthday with the awarding of thirteen Purple Hearts: “Pvt. Walker is a medal winner, but it cost him a leg in Vietnam mortar blast” (fig. 2.8).44 This version of the Walter Reed patient is both familiar and different, an alteration of a familiar figure signaling both historical continuity and rupture. The photo accompanying the article captures the familiar gesture of an officer bending down to pin the Purple Heart on the chest of a soldier laid low by his wounds. But that image is now upstaged by a pair of other soldiers who sit unenthusiastically in wheelchairs, their profiles looming large in the foreground, one gazing elsewhere, the other visible as little more than a truncated leg and head swathed in bandages. Unlike Lieutenant Shepard, the one-legged flyer, the story of these soldiers is not framed by cultural ephemera that echo the values of American aspirationalism, masculinity, and the mutually obligated bodies of civilians and soldiers. Instead they share a page with gaudy ads that signal a new era of cheap commodities, underwritten by credit rather than quality: Rodman’s Discount Drugs screams out “15%–50% off every item—every day!”; S. L. Klein fills a quarter page announcing its “lowest price ever on this Nylon broadloom”: “Just say ‘charge it’ with your S. Klein charge account!” Thirty years later anti–Iraq War protests around the country were as large as those protesting the Vietnam War, yet the conventional attitude toward soldiers in this era has been formed in response to that era’s cynicism a present history of fragments  85

Fig 2.6 “Presenting First Korean Service Ribbon,” New York Times, March 30, 1951.

Fig 2.7 “Distinguished Visitors Call on Wounded Veterans,” New York Times, February

7, 1951.

Fig 2.8 The familiar gestures of a medal ceremony backgrounded to injury during the

Vietnam War. “Pvt. Walker Is a Medal Winner,” Washington Post, June 15, 1966.

and its fallout. Even those opposed to the post-9/11 military interventions often take pains to insist they are not antisoldier, articulating an antiwar politics through a militarized logic, in slogans like “Love the warrior, hate the war.” So, with the body of the injured soldier newly sanctified, made newly worthy after his ordeal, the earlier iconic images of Walter Reed visitors are uncannily restaged, with a newly politicized meaning (fig. 2.9). Though their meaning accrues from the significance of past figurings of injured soldiers and the long history of Walter Reed, they are also definitive of a contemporary moment, far from the “impromptu ceremony” following the Truman family’s trip to Sunday service at Walter Reed, which led one private to say, “What a surprise that was—I almost dropped over!” before “hobbling from the chapel” after his encounter with the president. Today these special events are carefully orchestrated. On the last Friday of every month during my fieldwork, a more standard Purple Heart ceremony was held in Walter Reed’s Heaton Pavilion. Certain soldiers, emblematic, exceptional, and notable, are put on stage 88 

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Fig 2.9 Familiar gestures once again in the foreground, as President George W. Bush

gives a Purple Heart to Sgt. Kyle Stipp at Walter Reed on December 22, 2008. Courtesy of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

and spoken about in a register of patriotic moral debt. Some of these ceremonies rise to the level of national attention. For example, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, whose mythic story of injury and rescue was itself a dramatization of national gendered war anxieties that played out in the green and black of night vision and pixilated video giving way to blonde hair and a bright white smile, was awarded her Purple Heart at Walter Reed in 2003, making national news (figs. 2.10–2.11).45 At the holidays Daniel was told he would get his Purple Heart at a special ceremony. Daniel, his wife, Sam, and Sam’s sister, Vanessa, were all living in one room at the Fisher House with Daniel and Sam’s infant son, Little J. They were each asked to provide their Social Security numbers and other personal information in advance and were told to arrive at a room in the hospital around 10 a.m. on the day of the ceremony. When the day came, they arrived as instructed. The room had been draped in thick, dark curtains. (One soldier later suggested they might be a present history of fragments  89

Fig 2.10 Video

footage of the extraction of Pfc. Jessica Lynch from Iraq on April 1, 2003.

Fig 2.11 Jessica Lynch

receiving a Purple Heart at Walter Reed, July 23, 2003.

bulletproof.) In addition to a number of security guards, there was another soldier who would also be getting his Purple Heart. He was accompanied by his father. Sam guessed he had severe head trauma, maybe tbi. He didn’t seem to know what was going on and just kept talking about how he really needed to go to the bathroom. After waiting in that room for hours, Sam tried to go to the computer lab to check her email and MySpace page. Two security guards put their hands on her shoulders and said, “You need to go back inside.” At 3 p.m. their previously unannounced conferrer of Purple Hearts arrived, official photographers and entourage with him, turning the small and isolated room into a profoundly public space, its claustrophobic closeness all of a sudden turned inside out. As they had already begun to suspect, it was President George W. Bush. A rare self-identified Democrat (the fact that she was a Democrat was no rarer than the fact that she so openly identified with a political party at all), Sam held back the vitriol she had heaved upon him in conversations with me and dutifully shook his hand. She even let him hold her son. The president pinned the other soldier and thanked him for his service and sacrifice. Sam was sure he’d responded by saying something about needing to pee. Perhaps it is needless to say that the captioned photographs of this event that circulated in the media afterward captured none of these things—not the hours of waiting, nor the indignities Sam felt at the hands of the security guards and the president, nor the confused anxiety of the other soldier. The photos showed Daniel, back straight and smiling, shaking the president’s hand. In the captions that accompany those pictures, Daniel is described as an exemplary soldier. He stands for all the rest. During the Vietnam War there was regular news coverage of Eisenhower’s frequent visits to Walter Reed for his increasingly failing health. And while these stories detailed his treatment, they didn’t mention the warinjured soldiers who surrounded him on neighboring wards. But in 2010, when nbc, cnn, and other news outlets reported on Senator Bob Dole’s in-patient treatment at Walter Reed, the story was invariably also about his special vet-to-vet relationship with wounded soldiers there. A short video on CNN.com ends with Dole flanked by wounded soldiers and family members arranged in rows, as if for a class photo. He sweeps his hand from side to side, gesturing at his new injured friends, and says, “This is what America’s all about right here” (Wool 2009b; figs. 2.12–2.13). a present history of fragments  91

Fig 2.12 and Fig 2.13 “This is what America’s all about,” says Bob Dole

of injured soldiers undergoing rehabilitation at Walter Reed in 2010.

Fig 2.14 Images of mold in the walls of injured soldier housing at Walter Reed helped catalyze a scandal in 2007. Courtesy of Getty Images.

Since 2007 such visual arrangements of injured soldier bodies have had additional significance, refracted as they are through what came to be known as the Walter Reed scandal. In early 2007 the Washington Post ­published a series of investigative articles that touched it off. With evoc­ ative photographs from the late Michel duCille, the journalists Anne Hull and Dana Priest described in often touching descriptive prose the frustrations that soldiers suffered due to an impenetrable bureaucracy, apparent lack of institutional coordination, and occasionally outright neglect. What many people most remember about the series, however, is mildew (fig. 2.14). One of the images accompanying the series and its online supplement was of Spc. Jeremy Duncan in his room in Building 18, a small apartment building the military rented across the street from Walter Reed that was used to house the ballooning numbers of outpatient soldiers. While many of these conditions had already been publicly documented years before, the widespread circulation of images of injured soldiers—images in which the bodies and surroundings of these freighted icons looked wrong—helped give the series the force it had.46

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Building 18 was swiftly closed. The on-post hotel, the Mologne House, was devoted to housing injured soldiers and their family members. Every room got a new Mac computer and a big, wall-mounted flat-screen tv. President Bush formed a committee to investigate. Based on their quick work (Dole and Shalala 2007), a new system for managing injured soldiers was created. This included creating the Wounded Warrior Brigades, military units with the same command structure as any other to which injured soldiers can be attached and in which their “mission is to heal.”47 A more diffuse effect of the scandal was to cement the tie between Walter Reed and injured soldiers returning from war in a newly politicized context permeated by a rhetoric of patriotic sacrifice that flattens all U.S. wars into one ineluctably heroic and whiggish history and yet is bound to the historically specific looming specter of Vietnam veterans abandoned to fetid va facilities.48 Walter Reed as an Uncanny Constellation of Nows and Thens In all these examples, and hundreds more that linger in the archives, Walter Reed is a site of national affective ties, a place from which emotions emanate that can bind Americans to each other and to their president in collective experiences routed through soldier bodies. The body of the injured soldier at Walter Reed stands in for all soldiers and for the particular Americanness that they, collectively and ideally, are seen to embody. This is a site in which the nation is metonymized and the public selectively recognizes the violence fundamental to its existence. It is a place in which great dreams of self-improvement and actualization through Americanization come true, even for Waclaw Jackiewicz, the Polish veteran of the U.S. Army, treated at Walter Reed and sworn in as a U.S. citizen in an age of communist paranoia, even if at the cost of lost sight and limbs. It is a site of powerful acts, a place where notable people perform certain kinds of national magic, binding a nation to war through public intimacies. It is a public theater in which notions of national masculinity, patriotism, and moral debt are dramatized with each flash bulb, sound bite, and stroke of the pen. In some ways Walter Reed is always the same. Fragmented moments repeat resonant meanings: Walter Reed as rallying cry for the civic obligation to publicly recognize, honor, and repay moralized military debts; Walter Reed and its bristling meanings of patriotism and national anxiety and pride; Walter Reed and its nucleic function amid the swarms of injured 94 

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soldier bodies; Walter Reed’s laboratories, so central to medical research for American ways of life and health and war; Walter Reed as the site at which the mortal consequences of the technologies of war are felt in the soldier’s fading pulse; Walter Reed as a Gordian knot of heteronormative masculinities, American patriotism, fitness, and messianic faith in technology. But each incarnation is also unique, a tableau vivant of the same old ghosts posed in a scene that can describe only a present moment. These repetitions register in that uncanny feeling I have in recognizing them as they wink at me from the archive. In 2005 Walter Reed Army Medical Center was slated to close as part of a Base Realignment and Closure project. In the summer of 2011 most of its medical services and all of its patients were moved to Bethesda Naval Hospital, a five-minute drive north, and the rest of its functions were sent elsewhere. Its 113 acres and seventy-four buildings were divested. But its closure was a material technicality; even this did not mark a meaningful end or evolution in this fragmented history. Bethesda Naval Hospital was rechristened the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. So Walter Reed lives on. It is written about in newspapers in the same way it always has been, full of soldiers, visited by presidents, still a short drive from the White House. Though the old Red Cross building has now been left behind, the relocation does not obscure the constellation of experiences and meanings that have been the most significant substance of Walter Reed since the beginning of the twentieth century. Things do change, of course, but as they always have: not leaving a lesser past in their wake but making of themselves a new iteration of those most durable meanings that give coherence to such a historically diffuse and enduring subject as the warinjured soldier.

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3 the economy of patriotism

On the Ironies of Moral Debt On an unseasonably hot and humid day in October 2007, there is a uso show in the old Red Cross building, the one that once offered homey distractions for injured soldiers and rooms for their desperate families on grief’s tenterhooks. The show features Gary Sinise’s Lt. Dan Band, named for the Vietnam veteran double amputee character Sinise played in the film Forrest Gump (Zemeckis 1994). In the building’s entranceway are folding tables covered with white paper gift bags overflowing with colored tissue paper. There must be more than a hundred of them. Behind the table is a middle-aged woman with blonde hair and enthusiastic, kind eyes who encourages everyone to take one. Inside each bag, nestled in the festive tissue

paper, is a boxed picnic dinner: a ham or turkey sandwich, a container of pasta or potato salad, a bag of chips, some cookies, a can of soda, a plastic fork, a paper napkin. Each of these items will have been assembled and nestled into each carefully arranged bag by a volunteer like the woman behind the table. Others, mostly women like her, buzz around the entranceway making sure each soldier has filled out a raffle ticket for later in the evening. Some wear shirts bearing the name and logo of their organization. Some mill around the edges of the main hall. They move slowly and with purpose along the walls, whose institutional cream-colored paint is warmed by old honeycolored wood trim. These volunteers survey the space as the rows of folding chairs slowly fill up. The crowd includes a few soldiers who are still inpatients and whose hospital gowns seem out of place amid the polo shirts of the volunteers, the plain or patterned T-shirts and blouses of family members (mostly wives), the graphic T-shirts, many donated by volunteer organizations and featuring their logo, of the injured outpatient soldiers, and a smattering of acus on those soldiers at Walter Reed because they work there. At one end of the hall a concert stage has been erected. A huge uso banner hangs as a backdrop, white letters flanked by stars on a patch of blue framed in red. The stage is set with all the rigging of a rock show. Five large colored spotlights hang from a scaffold. There is a full drum kit, huge amplifiers, and massive speakers. Microphones are arranged on stands for the dozen musicians who will soon fill the hall with the booming sounds of crowd-pleasing covers of American rock and country classics. Though the hall is big, grand even, with its high ceiling and wrap-around mezzanine, the stage seems almost comically elaborate. A man takes the stage, our emcee. He is a uso organizer in his sixties wearing a button-down shirt that looks as if it were made out of a single American flag. A blue field of stars rest on the right side of his chest and flows along his right arm. Red and white stripes wrap around the rest of him. He greets the quiet and slightly distracted room with good humor and moves along to the first order of business: a long list of enthusiastic thank yous to those who contributed “big chunks of change” to fund the event, from celebrities to local businesses. After the thank yous, he draws modest hoots and hollers from the crowd by welcoming the Right Guard Body Spray Girl to the stage. The actress, recently featured in a series of mildly salacious cologne ads, will help draw 98 

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winning raffle tickets. He begins to introduce her copresenter, and suddenly he is choking back tears. He announces “the first man to be shot down over Vietnam,” whose body, he tells us, was paraded through the streets of North Vietnam strapped to the top of a Viet Cong tank and who spent the rest of the war “in the Hanoi Hilton having the hell beaten out of him.” There is enthusiastic applause as a white man with graying hair walks onto the stage, his body and gait betraying no trace of this history. He stands at the foot of the stage with the Right Guard Body Spray Girl, and they get on with drawing raffle tickets, reciting names to a subdued but not entirely attentive crowd. Injured soldiers make their way up to the stage one at a time to scattered applause and collect their prize. There are autographed box sets of the first season of Gary Sinise’s tv show csi ny, two Halo 3 Special Edition Xbox 360 video game consoles, and ten laptop computers. After one soldier wins two laptops, he walks up to the stage to give back the second, a good deed that elicits thunderous applause. When the raffle drawing is over, the emcee explains that, by way of introduction to Sinise and the Lt. Dan Band, we are going to watch a clip from Forrest Gump. Volunteers wheel in a tv set, and we watch as Lieutenant Dan gets his legs blown off and, firing his pistol all the while, is carried to safety by Forrest Gump in the middle of a cinematic war scene. Then there is a famous Job-like sequence in which Lieutenant Dan, now a longhaired amputee making a rough living on the sea, sits in his ship’s crow’s nest during a roiling storm and shakes his fist at the sky, defiantly scoffing at the worst events God can muster. The epic fiction on the screen seems dwarfed by the arrangement of this uso event, both the stadium-worthy stage that rises behind the old tv and its tinny speakers, and the room full of flesh and blood that sits before it, all these lives gathered by violence into a place full of waiting. It is very much in the arrangement of this event, and of this kind of event, that the relationship between these things gets constituted: the triumphal American war story; the flag-draped distractions from the violence of war; the ordinary effects of war’s violence that must register in bodies before they can be made into the living proof of those triumphal American war stories, which bind those bodies to nothing more than the nation. It is a compelling kind of circuit. Eventually Gary Sinise bounds through a side door, smiling warmly, waving and shaking hands with members of the crowd, bass guitar strapped to his back. There are more thank yous, more introductions, more celebrities. The band begins the main event with a set of expertly rendered the economy of patriotism  99

American rock classics. The crowd remains subdued, though some cautiously mouth the words to “Sweet Home Alabama.” The mood changes dramatically when the band plays an original, written by one member after a uso show in Korea. It’s called “A Letter Home.” The stage lights are dimmed and the singer sits under a spotlight with her acoustic guitar. “I’d give my life for yours,” she sings, her voice full of emotion. She becomes teary at the refrain: “I am your son, I am your daughter / My love is pure, I stand for honor.” In the song these words echo from beyond the grave. The eponymous letter home is written by a soldier who is then killed. When the song is over, the singer is not the only one blinking back tears. I look over at Jake and Vanessa. Jake’s mouth is tense and his eyes are moist. Vanessa smiles and wipes her eyes, a little embarrassed but resigned to her emotions. The rest of the set is brimming with patriotism. The finale is a cover of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American (Where At Least I Know I’m Free).” It brings most enthusiastically to their feet, and many sing along, though there are others, soldiers and family members, who stay seated, arms folded, looking thoroughly uninspired. At the end Sinise says a few words about how “the Hollywood atmosphere” can make it seem like people don’t care, “but they do: they don’t take your sacrifices for granted.” “God bless America,” he says, and the show is over.

at the same time that they might be an intrusion or a distraction, events of this kind were a fundamental part of Walter Reed’s extra/ordinariness, both its routine and its markedness. They could be large or small, announced or unannounced, broadcast to the nation or confined to the walls of one room. What unites them is the encounter at their center: an exchange between soldiers and strangers who come to see and meet and touch them in order to offer them thanks. Whatever their type or intention, sometimes as if a reflex, sometimes as if a rallying cry, sometimes as if a devotional prayer, people thanked soldiers for the sacrifice of their service. “God bless America.” “They don’t take your sacrifices for granted.” The frame here is familiar. Within it are the figures of the soldier and the citizen. Between them is the gratitude of a nation for which the soldier has fought and willingly subjected himself to the productive destruction of sacrificial violence. But the simplicity of this arrangement is deceptive. The closer you look, the less coherent the picture and the more cracked

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the frame becomes, fractured by the live forces and feelings and flesh that it cannot contain. I approach these encounters by considering the unruly economy of patriotism they enact, a moral, material, and affective field of exchange between soldiers and others that draws on the iconic figure of the soldier. It is a field of exchange in which value is jacked up, broken down, and inconstant, as are the relationships of obligation that acts of giving, getting, and owing might otherwise entail. The sacrifice of the soldier is a font of value and virtue here, confounding distinctions between relative, fungible goods and absolute qualities and goodness that are supposed to keep worth and worthiness separate in liberal modes of reckoning (Lambek 2008: 135). Here the logics of sacrifice, commodity, and gift run uncomfortably together (MacLeish 2013: 188). The violence and killing that are central to war are essential to this economy, and yet they find an uneasy and obscure place within it. The sacrificial value of the injured soldier’s body is insisted upon and then heaped back on him, often to disorienting effect. Sometimes that value is also extracted, accruing to the figure of the soldier, to the imaginary of patriotism that sustains it, or in the form of cultural capital or political cachet to those public figures who leverage comfort with and closeness to U.S. military violence into the gendered form of authority and legitimacy that the political scientist Aaron Belkin (2011) describes as “military masculinity.” For all its dysfunction, this field of exchange seemed impossible for injured soldiers and civilians to escape. It formed the terrain of even the most casual encounters, its presence palpable even in the absence of explicit and conventionalized invocations like those that governed the uso concert. The practices of recognition at play in this field are hardly new. The political imperative to transform wartime exposures of American soldiers into worthy investments in national or even human interest and improvement is an iteration of a founding myth of modern warfare: wars can be just—that is, justifiable within liberal valuations of life and death—because war waged by liberal democracies is understood to be “vital,” organized and fought in “the name of life necessity” (Foucault 1990: 137) or, more recently, humanity itself (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010). The suffering of the soldier can be claimed and made worthy in the name of that greater good, its value bound to the very premise that makes modern war permissible, linking the worth of war and the worthiness of the injured soldier body in

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a kind of mutually sustaining circuit of justness (though the suffering of the civilian can sometimes pose a thornier problem).1 Along with the historical constancy of such liberal logics, there is also a great deal of variation. For example, the worth of war violence has appeared more and less self-evident from one national moment to the next, amid the ambivalence of World War I, the righteous enthusiasm of World War II, the exhausted neglect of Korea, or the tumult of Vietnam. Those national moods are also inseparable from the immediacy with which the material and mortal efforts and risks of war are broadly felt, making the post-9/11 wars somewhat unique in that they have been waged without conscription by a smaller than ever percentage of the population and financed by national debt to such a degree that, for the first time in the modern era, taxes were cut while wartime spending ballooned.2 Many commentators have contended that all this led to a “disconnect” or “gap” between military and civilian life, smoothing the way for the wars to proceed with relatively little public friction and a good deal of public apathy.3 But in a nation haunted by its own shameful and guilty stories of civilian and institutional mistreatment and neglect of Vietnam veterans (draftees and volunteers alike), this also seems to have anxiously narrowed and intensified the form that civilian recognition of soldier suffering is supposed to take in the post-9/11 era. The unique and sacrificial value of the soldier is now all the more fervently insisted upon and repeatedly called forth, as if any alternative were unthinkable, treasonous, or perhaps immoral.4 Entering this field of exchange ethnographically, I want to snag the smooth production of sacrificial value on soldiers’ own unsteady understandings of what has happened, understandings that move away from sacrifice and value and instead hover between notions of work, duty, accident, expectation, and worthiness and the edges of regret. The Claim of Sacrifice James was initially one of the few soldiers who actively avoided encounters with volunteers, vips, and boosters. Soon after he and Erin moved into the Fisher House I began to notice his regular absence at special events. He skipped the Lt. Dan Band uso show and a dinner and raffle draw put on by Soldiers’ Angels in the Mologne House dining hall to ensure that every newly arrived soldier got a new laptop. He would often slip out or into his room when he noticed the arrival of some set of vips whom the Fisher 102 

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House residents had been notified about in one of the endless stream of sternly worded memos that the house manager would write and slip under the bedroom doors and which most people ignored. One night, before I left for a free dinner that James was adamant he didn’t want to attend, I asked him why he never came, why he avoided encounters with visitors and volunteers even though this meant forgoing free stuff and an otherwise welcome distraction from the boredom of life at Walter Reed. “It makes me feel like a charity case,” he said. I asked him to elaborate, but he couldn’t find a satisfactory way to describe the feeling or to pinpoint what it was about all these things offered in a spirit of grateful repayment that made them seem like charity. He knew, he said, that wasn’t folks’ intention, but that was the feeling it left him with nonetheless. He explained that he experienced even the simplest things as a kind of overpayment. As an example, he said one of the reasons he didn’t like going to the mall was because people would hold the door open for him. Within the economy of patriotism, a field of exchange that James’s body could not quite get outside of, common courtesies like holding a door open for a guy in a wheelchair are understood to be the acts of grateful citizens honoring a soldier who has given so much. “They don’t owe me anything,” James explained. “Respect, maybe, but that’s it.” The framing of soldiers’ wartime acts of killing and dying as sacrifice is enduring and well documented and was certainly not newly minted in the contemporary United States. Beyond the context of war, sacrifice has also long been a source of fascination for anthropologists and others interested in elaborating the hazy cluster of religious, juridical, and moral-economic issues within which it is often framed. Most relevant among these is the way that, in crisscrossing the material and the moral, sacrifice raises questions of both virtue and value, kinds of worth that liberal thought suggests ought to be incommensurable, the former supposedly a question of moral absolutes and the latter supposedly a function of fungible equivalencies (Lambek 2008: esp. 248–50). At Walter Reed sacrifice invoked precisely these questions, but unlike in most anthropological, ethnological, or philosophical accounts, it did not appear as an act or an accomplishment. Instead sacrifice was a claim, a claim that people other than injured soldiers made about, and on, the past acts of violence legible on soldiers’ bodies. Claims about the sacrifice of injured soldiers were claims about the relation between value and virtue in the contemporary context of U.S. war, about who was worthy of what and the economy of patriotism  103

why. As they were made, these claims transformed soldiers into subjects and objects of sacrifice. In 2007 Michael Chertoff, then secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, offered a particularly rich example when he presided over a ceremony at Walter Reed for injured soldiers who were becoming U.S. citizens: “You put your life, and your safety on the line for millions of Americans that you’ve never even met, and you’ve proven yourself willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice for this country. On behalf of the President, and a grateful nation, once again, I thank you deeply for your sacrifice.”5 In Chertoff’s remarks, sacrifice is the measure of patriotism. The soldier’s sacrifice is proof of a devotion to the United States that his noncitizenship puts in doubt. Patriotism here is a devotion to the nation above and beyond citizenship, a devotion to the United States that exceeds being American and is proved by the mortification of the body for the nation and beyond the state. The deadly risk of soldiering is rendered sacred. The nation is grateful and offers thanks and citizenship in return. But that blood sacrifice is also something that these injured soldiers are said to have paid rather than offered or committed. Indeed, in public speeches of this kind, there is often an elision of “paying the ultimate price” and “making the ultimate sacrifice” as if the two were the same. But sacrifice and payment entail rather different flows of value and relationships of exchange, obligation, and faith. My point is not that Chertoff gets it wrong but rather he gets it just right. There is a confusion and incommensurability within these sentiments about injured soldiers’ sacrifice. Rather than an act in which a spiraling violent cycle of the gift (e.g., Girard 1979, 1989) or unwieldy excesses of value (Bataille 1991) are laid to rest, the claim of sacrifice initiates an ongoing cycle, a type of looping and unstable circuit of exchange motivated by gratitude, debt, and the tricks and rubs of recognition. As opposed to the classic modes of sacrifice long theorized in anthropology, where, in the purest form, no return is expected (Hubert and Mauss 1981: 100), the picture here is closer to Nietzsche’s (1998) discussion of the twisted roots of Christian morality in the self-sacrifice of God. The thing about the crucifixion, he tells us, is not that Jesus died for our sins, becoming the victim of sacrifice that we might be purified, but rather that he created an unpayable, almost unimaginable debt, a debt that Christians would be forever bound to owe (60–64; see also MacLeish 2013: 188). Overdetermined and continually swallowed up by the muddled frame of sacrifice, encounters

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between injured soldiers and grateful strangers enact a fractured iteration of this Nietzschean cycle. Crucially these claims of sacrifice can be made and have their effects regardless of how well they describe the array of intentions and affective relations that were animated in a particular act of the violent and nonaccidental destruction of valuable matter, an act such claims nominate as sacrifice. In making these sacrificial claims on and about soldiers’ bodies and intentions, civilians produce national virtues and debts and route the meaning of Americanness through the body of the injured soldier. But such claims, like Chertoff’s, are marked by a double instability. First, as Cher­ toff’s remarks show us, the claims themselves muddle ideas of value and virtue, ultimacy and fungible exchange, in ways that produce unruly forms of worth, obligation, and debt. The worth of the soldier’s injured body is said to be ultimate and sacralized, yet it requires and receives compensation. Its virtue must be proved by its compensable value, which is itself measured by its virtue. And perhaps more significant than these closed circuits of worth and worthiness that keep claims of sacrifice coming, soldiers’ own accounts trouble the very logic of sacrifice itself. The soldiers I worked with insisted that they had not sacrificed themselves. This was not false modesty or an expression of the unselfconsciousness essential to certain American ideals of heroism (Emerson 1857: 221– 40). Sacrifice was just a poor description. In an echo of American soldierly sentiments from the Korean War (Young 2010), some soldiers said it had all seemed more like police work than war. Police work here takes statesanctioned violence out of the sanctified and nationally valued context of war and posits it as a job, albeit of a strange life-and-death sort. At war and at home soldiers talk about what they do as “a job” or “work” more often than anything else. This is woven into the institutional structure of the military itself. A soldier is never just a soldier; he has a military occupational specialty (mos), which can be anything from infantryman to financial management technician. The army glosses moss as “army jobs,” and it is these jobs that constitute the work of soldiering. Catherine Lutz (2001: 81) has noted that throughout the twentieth century, U.S. military recruitment “had to deal, above all, not with fluctuating levels of patriotism but with the health of the civilian job market.” Despite what others might say, despite the heroism and sacrifice that others might attach even to “a job,” soldiers were adamant that their jobs were not about the nation or sacrifice

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or heroism. But crucially there were also times when this insistence on war as ordinary work rubbed up against something else, addressed more to virtue than the pragmatism of employment, but did not cede to it. A second reason sacrifice seemed to injured soldiers a poor characterization of what they had done was that there was no thing, no singular sacrificial act in which they decided to surrender their bodies for a greater good. Consider the practicalities: nearly all the soldiers I knew at Walter Reed had been blown up by ieds; they had been riding in a vehicle that detonated a bomb. There was usually no moment of truth, no last breath before charging over the trenches, no split-second decision to shield a buddy from a bullet or grenade blast. There was only the life-and-death work of soldiering, which had come to feel ordinary and was then exploded in an extraordinary moment that, in its own way, was also just part of the job. Like Curt Lemon in Tim O’Brien’s (1990: 89) The Things They Carried, who one second is walking in the Vietnamese jungle and the next is hanging in pieces from the trees, there is no sacrifice, only jobs and injuries, an ever present danger that occasionally comes screaming to the surface and then recedes once again to its tense omnipresence. There was no personal decision to step on or ride over the ieds soldiers didn’t know were there; there was not even a decisive willingness to do so. This situation of will, one that follows the logic of injury much more closely than the logic of self-sacrifice, is not mitigated by the fact that these soldiers had enlisted. Soldiers didn’t offer sacrifice for the nation as a reason to enlist, and both soldiers and family members reflected in retrospect that the likelihood of grievous injury was as absent from the recruiting office as it remained from their own minds. As has nearly always been the case in modern U.S. warfare, the things soldiers did during their time in Iraq didn’t seem particularly connected to the national ideals they were supposed to be serving or sacrificing for. The “ultimate” value and virtue of patriotic sacrifice began to dissolve when soldiers talked, in their not quite narrative ways, about the actual activities that composed their time in Iraq, the many things that are collectively given the obfuscating name of “war”: riding around in armored vehicles; busting down doors and clearing out rooms; pointing a vehicle-mounted .50 caliber machine gun at a crowd and occasionally shooting at figures that looked out of place in a place you’d never been; huffing “dusters”— cans of compressed air that you buy from the px meant for blowing the sand out of your computer—because you’re bored; and lighting up a whole group of civilians who were firing guns into the air in celebration and then 106 

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driving on and not filing a report to save your commanding officer the grief he’d get from cnn. These were things that happened, things out of which the extra/ordinariness of war had emerged, and that were sucked out of the room the minute someone said “Thank you.” Beyond all of these things—things that were but ought not to be invoked in expressions of gratitude, things that lingered in the trace of their absence—there was also the problem of too many bodies and relations between them that might be the subject of the sacrifice about which someone was making a claim in an offer of thanks. There isn’t just the soldier and the things he had done, though that would have been complicated enough. There is a soldier and his buddies, his limbs, his memories, his parents, his girlfriend, his wife, his child born in his absence. Perhaps most absent of all there is an Iraqi whose home is destroyed, who is afraid, who is taken care of, who is dead, or disappeared. The subjects and objects and acts of sacrifice that produce these national debts of gratitude remain unspecified. These were necessary omissions, implicit and necessary fictions that supported expressions of thanks and the claim of sacrifice. Gratitude depended on them. And even these erasures could not always sustain the necessary relation of gratitude and debt in the face of things whose weighty presence warped and splintered the structure of patriotic sacrificial exchange. As James, initially so reluctant to participate in such exchanges, increasingly did things that made such encounters unavoidable, like going out for drinks or a movie in nearby Silver Spring, he remained ambivalent about attending the regular Friday steak dinners for soldiers and families, Support Our Troops barbeques, or fundraisers for Fisher House or other organizations. But he also had to weigh such ambivalence against other things, like boredom, and the current and future comforts of his life with Erin and their daughter. Given how much gossip-fueled drama there was in the Fisher House and how antagonistic James’s relationship with the house manager had become by midsummer, I was not entirely surprised when James and Erin moved, with a number of other families, into one of fifteen plush, fully furnished apartments rented for them by the Bank of America.6 The apartments were in a towering new, gated condominium complex in Silver Spring. The couches were leather, the coffee table glass, the wallto-wall carpeting was soft and high pile. There were sliding glass doors off the eat-in area between the living room and the kitchen that led—past a threshold low enough to roll over in a wheelchair with a bit of effort and momentum—to a small balcony that, from its great height, looked down the economy of patriotism  107

on a sizable playground with slides and climbing structures and benches. There was even a shoppette in the building’s basement and a veritable sea of parking out of which the complex’s buildings rose like some modern monolith. Toward the end of my fieldwork, James and I sit waiting in that great expanse of parking lot. It is late at night, and, though he has been using his prosthetics, his legs are too painful to walk on. Erin has gone to get his wheelchair from the apartment, and he sits on the edge of the leather seat of the luxury suv with the door open as I stand outside. He has just returned from a special water sporting trip for injured soldiers and their families. He tells me that the bus in which they’d traveled had a helicopter escort; the highways were cleared of traffic, and at every police and fire station they passed, service members were lined up to salute them as they drove by. I ask James how he felt about all that fanfare, given that “charity case” feeling he’s reiterated over the past months. In response he tells me a story about something he said to the head of the family with whom he and Erin had been staying during the trip. He and this man were sitting in a hot tub drinking beer after dinner. “I said to him, ‘You’re a carpenter, right? Well, imagine that you went out to a job and built some cabinets and all of a sudden on your way home, everyone is lining up and waving flags and saluting,’ and, I mean, that’s really what it’s like.” James finds himself hailed as a self-sacrificing hero, someone who suffers on behalf of others, others who, in their turn, try to recognize and repay this impossible debt. But in a Nietzschean twist, in their claim of grateful repayment, they become the creditors. James is compelled to take what he is gratefully offered, offerings he feels he doesn’t and won’t ever deserve. He might well be offered things he wants or needs or that he might just like to have, but this is not the same as being owed. Parts of the trip had been thoroughly enjoyable, like riding in a squad car to a bar where the local cops hung out, sirens wailing. James joked that he’d only ever left a bar that way. So amid his discomfort was also an enjoyment, sometimes an almost carefree pleasure. It is nice to be treated this way and to forget all the things that are memorialized in and on your body. In the intense vulnerability of Walter Reed, where everything about life and being alive and being seen to live is so undecided, others’ expectations can be powerfully compelling, solidly grounded as they are in foundational

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notions of patriotism and the schematic valuing of violence that allows or justifies or sometimes requires soldiers to kill and be killed. James’s insistence on the analogy of carpentry and soldiering also indexes the experience of ordinary work and the economy within which something like the labor of carpentry might be evaluated. In that economy there is no patriotic blood sacrifice, no ultimacy. In fact James had explicitly ridiculed the notion that his time in the army constituted service to the nation on behalf of some ultimate good. One evening, sitting around in the Fisher House den watching tv with a few soldiers and their wives and babies, Sam was telling me that her favorite of many jobs she’d had was working at St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, because, even though she didn’t do anything special there, just office work, she felt she was really helping people. This, she said, was much better than working at McDonald’s, where “you only help McDonald’s people get rich.” In a loud voice of mock self-righteousness, James chimed in, “Well I was spreading freedom and democracy—and liberation!” Everyone laughed, and Erin made a peace sign and dopily moaned, “I’m spreading peace and love.” James’s discomfort with expressions of gratitude and attempts at the repayment of debt continued even as he began to do things and go places that made such encounters more frequent. There was no getting around them in the spaces of ordinary life just beyond the gates of Walter Reed. During the weekends, one of the only places injured soldiers would go on their own to drink and hang out was McGinty’s Irish Pub in the revitalized and pedestrian-friendly shopping area in Silver Spring. On a Saturday night the upstairs bar was full of young injured soldiers from Walter Reed and their wives, girlfriends, or visiting friends. It was as though the particular extra/ordinariness of Walter Reed, where having been blown up put a person in common rather than set that person apart, was transported to this other place in the midst of a more generic ordinary. Bartenders joked with soldiers as if they were regulars, even if it was their first time there. Soldiers wouldn’t get carded, despite the distinct possibility that they, or their date, might be under twenty-one, and could rack up Buds and sweet Cherry Bomb shooters for their dates on their tabs. But its proximity to Walter Reed and the regular presence of injured soldiers meant McGinty’s was not beyond the reach of debts of gratitude. One summer night James and I stand smoking near McGinty’s small patio that spreads across the sidewalk, his two prosthetic legs protruding

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from his khaki-colored cargo shorts. They catch the eye of a middle-aged man, slightly drunk and ambling along with a few friends. He stops and turns to us, ribbing James by asking, “What happened to your feet?” James replies with one word and a slightly smug smile: “Bomb.” The man, still standing there in front of us, unignorably close although he ignores me entirely, nods slowly with sincerity and says, “I believe it. Thanks, thank you for what you do.” Then he moves along and rejoins his waiting friends. We go back to our cigarettes and conversation, but whatever ease or unselfconsciousness or ordinary sense of being in common James might have had upstairs at McGinty’s has been perforated by that sentiment and its implicit fictions. An encounter that begins with a recognition of the glinting traces of horrible violence and pain, traces that James makes more present with his one chosen word, bomb, are unspoken and perhaps unspeakable within this frame of gratitude. Instead they are spoken as a conspicuous vagueness: “Thanks, thank you for what you do.” Like countless other exchanges, this is simultaneously an encounter with an actual soldier and with the figure of the soldier and his generic heroism rooted in generically worthy experiences full of acts of violence about which one need not think too hard. In such a passing encounter it is hard to see much specificity in the recognition implied by “Thank you for what you do.” When he is interpolated as a figure with only generic content, the acts of violence that involve James become inscrutable, even though it is the specific presence of his absent legs that provoked this man’s sentiment. This paradox of such grateful encounters is part of what makes them so uncomfortable. And although James becomes habituated to their ubiquity, there remains something troubling about being nominated as a willing sacrificial victim on behalf of the nation and being thanked for it. The exchanges involved in these grateful encounters are hopelessly lopsided. In place of the social logics of exchange that can make or thicken social selves, there is a flattened figure, an unpayable debt of gratitude that hasn’t been incurred, and an expression of sentiments that have little to do with the unspoken and unqueried tasks of war or acts of violence that had seemed more like the workplace injuries of a life-or-death job than patriotic sacrifices. Peter was a good-looking nineteen-year-old, though he occasionally insisted he had lost too much weight since it had happened. So he ate a lot, mostly cereal. He was eating a bowl of cereal at the counter in the Fisher House kitchen when the man from the va walked in with suited entourage 110 

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in tow. Until then it had been a pretty boring day. Peter and I had been killing time in the kitchen, chatting with Alec. The unique topography of Alec’s leg was on display within the cage of its ExFix; its shades of pink and red and the tell-tale grid pattern of a skin graft, like someone squeezing it too tight with a hairnet, evidenced not only injury but multiple surgeries and lingering infection. Peter’s wrist was still bandaged from the surgery to set its broken bones. His leg was still healing from amputation surgery, so he wasn’t yet using his prosthetic. The man from the va and his entourage were led into the kitchen by the Fisher House manager, who was giving them the standard tour. As usual, she stopped and opened the gleaming, stainless-steel refrigerator doors, explaining the system by which we differentiated the donated food from the food individual families bought for themselves. The group nodded a tad too earnestly in appreciation. The man from the va came over to the counter where Peter, Alec, and I sat. He asked Peter if he could ask him some questions. Peter agreed. Even though Peter hadn’t been at Walter Reed long, he recognized this as an ordinary task, taking a break from his cereal so that some guy in a suit could ask him questions in front of a group of onlookers. The man briefly introduced himself, saying that he was from a large midwestern va hospital, and then quickly asked, “Where you from, and where were you hurt?” Peter replied, “Iraq.” The rest of the group, now clearly constituting an audience, stood back by the refrigerator and watched. The man tried to elicit some elaboration: “And?” There was a silence that details of Peter’s injury or recovery were expected to fill. Instead Peter raised the remaining stump of his leg—his residual limb—and pointed to it with his milky spoon, giving a quick definitive nod of his head and saying nothing. The man from the va tried again, asking, “But how are you doing?” Peter’s response was as sarcastic as it was brief: “I’m fine.” The man from the va finally seemed to take the hint. He tried to close the awkward interaction, smiling politely and saying, “Well, you’re fighting for our freedom, so thank you for your service.” But before he could move on to Alec, Peter jumped in: “And your job.” He said, “If we didn’t get blown up, you wouldn’t have a job.” A nervous laughter rippled through the group of onlookers in the pause that followed. The man from the va replied, “Well, yes, we prefer if you didn’t get blown up.” He quickly turned to Alec, shaking his hand, asking him the same questions, and listening to his more accommodating answers. “I’m not actually a solider,” Alec joked. “I just followed the free food in here.” the economy of patriotism  111

While visits from celebrities and vips were ubiquitous at Walter Reed, such blatant calling out of the problem of gratitude and imputation of sacrifice was by no means typical. In this context, behaving like Peter wasn’t just rude; it could get him labeled as crazy, as unable to deal with his ptsd, as ungrateful or unpatriotic, which was perhaps worse since, although soldiers disavowed any special patriotism, to be labeled by others as unpatriotic called into question one’s loyalty and devotion to one’s fellow soldiers, not just the country, and that cut soldiers to the quick. Behaving as Peter did would also wear on a soldier’s connections to the vast network of ­resources—from free dinners to free laptops to free houses—which folks like the man from the va were part of. While it is exceptional, this interaction encapsulates the tropes and traps of sacrifice and gratitude within which Peter and his comrades were entangled. And though the man from the va didn’t explicitly refer to Peter’s “sacrifice,” the frame of sacrifice is so ubiquitous as to make service virtually synonymous with sacrifice at Walter Reed. The very present absence of Peter’s leg, the small American flags stuck in his wheelchair (part of what he referred to as his “crazy vet” look), the man from the va who made this pilgrimage to see and touch and thank the soldiers who have given or lost or had taken from them bits of their bodies, minds, and selves—all of this is articulated in claims about soldiers as sacrificial victims. In this context sacrifice is tangled up with relations of debt, but it is the debtors, that is, the volunteers, visitors, and war and troop boosters, who insist on this debt. It is they who insist that they owe things to soldiers. It is they who claim that soldiers have sacrificed on their behalf, and they do their best to pay the unpayable debt of sacrifice.7 The soldier is rendered a sacrificial victim not because of some essential quality he has or because of the circumstances through which his body has been dismembered. He is rendered sacrificial because others claim his pain, his death, his loss in their own name. He is their sacrificial victim; there is little he can do to be otherwise. Yet, in making that claim, the grateful elide that same violence, the same pain and death and loss, on which is it based. Gratitude sanitizes the gory implications of sacrifice, leaving in its stead a clean picture of patriotism. The visceral pinkness of raw flesh is displaced by the glossy thickness of blue blood. During the encounter with the man from the va, the gesture of Peter’s amputated leg is not enough to make this absurdity clear. When his gesture is met with thanks for his service on behalf of the ideal 112 

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of freedom, Peter insists on reinserting his suffering into the exchange in a way that breaches the safe, hygienic frames of both abstract patriotic gratitude (“You’re fighting for our freedom, so thank you for your service”) and the depoliticizing frame of employment (“If we didn’t get blown up, you wouldn’t have a job”). Soldiers’ work is violent and deadly. In gratitude, civilians shake hands, make signs, and knit blankets; they give away laptops and build houses; they arrange dinners and trips to Disneyland. Their insistence on soldiers’ extraordinariness ironically ignores those violent extras that always append soldiers’ ordinaries. To Peter, in that moment in the Fisher House kitchen, it seems ridiculous, so into the generalizing expression of gratitude he inserts the ugly facts of his particular body in pain. Thanks a Lot: The Problems of Gratitude and Its Stuff It is hard to convey the unimaginable abundance of ever-present stuff and the way it washes over soldiers at Walter Reed, though I am reminded of it every time I look at the paper and see a photo of a rehabilitating soldier wearing a T-shirt donated from the support organization whose logo it bears. In the first months of my fieldwork I volunteered at the Fisher House, and the first task I was given there (as it had been when I volunteered in 2006 at the Fisher House at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany) was to reorganize the storage room, which was then overflowing with donated goods, excess office supplies, and Fisher House promotional material. There were boxes of “medi teddys” (small stuffed teddy bears dressed in hospital scrubs to comfort children); piles of handmade quilts in red, white, and blue motifs; T-shirts from various support organizations printed with their logos and slogans; hand-knit hats, cd players, backpacks, and blankets. Most were tagged with little notes from women somewhere in the country, never from urban centers, conveying their gratitude, support, and Christian prayers to soldiers they constructed as heroes fighting for their freedom. During my time there these donations came in an endless stream and went, for the most part, unused, what Kenneth MacLeish (2013: 200) calls “dead-end commodities” in the war economy. The notes attached to the bundles of quilts and boxes of hand-knit hats never made it to the soldiers for whom they were intended. The packages arrived in the mail and were whisked into the storage room, where I was the only one to read their messages. Reluctant to throw the notes away, feeling it disrespectful, I tucked them into newly organized bins in which the economy of patriotism  113

they would sit until the decision was almost invariably made to pass these things along to the giveaway table in the Mologne House lobby. There was plenty in the storeroom that people did use, however: baby formula and diapers, toothpaste, socks, occasionally a board game. There was food in the storeroom too; we all enjoyed the seemingly endless supply of Girl Scout cookies and bottled water. But the objects that most clearly exuded others’ expressions of patriotic gratitude, the painstakingly crafted red, white, and blue lap blankets and the saddle bags made of down-homey denim that could be Velcroed onto crutches, these things languished in their boxes and bins. When we needed to make room for a new shipment of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury books or Fisher House swag used during the Combined Federal Campaigns,8 or when I expressed frustration about the amount of useless stuff taking up space in the storeroom, soldiers and their wives, most of whom had stayed at the Mologne House before moving to the Fisher House, would suggest that I should just take it all there since it would be gone before I walked back out the door. Admittedly generalizing, Erin once called the people at the Mologne House “vultures” and described them hovering around waiting to descend on the next shipment of three-hundred-piece America-themed puzzles or homemade wooly hats—a greedy and insatiable consumption. It didn’t seem to matter that these items were donated, and in many cases especially created, to be used and eaten and worn by those “vultures.” Nor did it seem to matter that the only alternative was to throw these things in the overflowing Dumpster whose top often yawned open in the Fisher House parking lot. I don’t mean to belittle these offerings or the intentions behind them; instead, following Peter and others, I suggest that there is something troubling about being unwillingly positioned so centrally within these abundantly productive circuits of gratitude. Part of the problem is that within the rehabilitative project of Walter Reed, soldiers’ attempts to frame their past, present, and future selves as ordinary are foiled by these ubiquitous declarations of their exceptionality, efforts at grateful repayment, and claims about their sacrifice—claims that they are called upon to validate, a validation that invalidates their sense of an ordinary self, an ordinary self that is already compromised by experiences of pain and precariousness that mark it as something more, a pain and precariousness that generic, patriotic, soldierly heroism leaves no room to suffer.

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Amid all this stuff there was a rather fine, not especially fixed line between greedily taking and graciously receiving. And while that line was recognized in approbations about carrion consumption, a given person was not always on one side or the other. For example, about nine months after his encounter with the man from the va, I asked Peter to tell me what he thought about all the volunteers and vips. “Well, it’s good,” he said. “They’re wanting to help, but you’re gonna get exploited here, that’s just how it is. So I just take whatever I can get, and do whatever there is to do.” Some people were greedy, sure, but he distinguished greed from the kind of mutual exploitation in which he understood himself to be participating. While Peter reconciled himself to the kinds of encounters in which he had been a reluctant and sometimes belligerent participant months earlier, his new participation did not necessarily entail taking on the role of the compliant, patriotic subject of sacrifice. It was much more pragmatic. He would spend more than two years at Walter Reed, during which he took whatever he could get and did whatever there was to do. Peter even rode in a Wounded Warrior bike race in New York, one of a wide variety of “feel good” public events organized for soldiers that are tinged with inspiration, aspiration, and normative notions of masculine fitness, wrapped in an energizing and patriotic package. He explained that he’d participated because it was something to do, not because he wanted to set himself a physical challenge to meet and, in so doing, prove his ability and potential as a still virile young man, even if he was missing a leg and couldn’t hear much out of one ear. He didn’t train for it, and when, in the middle of the race, he broke his specially adapted bike by riding it in the wrong gear and couldn’t finish, he really didn’t care. This new stance about sacrifice, gratitude, and its stuff had gotten Peter, among other things, a Sony PlayStation game console, a laptop computer, and a mountain bike. He enumerated these while he stood eating a SpongeBob SquarePants icecream pop in the Fisher House kitchen. The next morning he was going to be taken fishing. The Rule of Work, the Goodness of War, and the Edges of Regret Though the profound connection between soldiers who fight together, the responsibility they feel for each other, and the thick sociality such martial labors entail give their job a special purpose, for the soldiers I worked with

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being in the military is still more often seen as a job rather than a patriotic obligation; this is its ordinary frame.9 The injured soldier was working (intensely, dangerously) for pay, fulfilling his (ordinary life-and-death) contract, and now he is missing a leg. Given their explanations of soldiering as work, it is worth challenging part of Barbara Ehrenreich’s (1998) account of the “sacralization of war.” She rightly points out that “warriors do not come automatically to a transcendent, or religious, sense of their occupation, any more than do professional chefs or athletes” (159). But she also suggests that it is the warriors themselves who affect this transcendence and that this transcendence brings soldiers to a pseudo-religious and deeply patriotic valuing of their work.10 Certainly this isn’t quite the case for James, who feels like a carpenter and is troubled when he is treated otherwise, or for Peter, whose favorite things about army life were getting shit-faced in Germany with the guys in his unit, blowing things up, and not living with his parents. This was as true of their time in war as it was of their time before that in other kinds of training and duty, when soldiers get up in the morning and “go to work.” For the soldiers I knew, serving one’s country was more like a perk of the job, a welcome side effect of the decision to join the military, not the reason for it. The reasons were sometimes more pragmatic and nearly always less transparent. Some, like Peter, joined at seventeen through the Delayed Entry Program (dep) to earn money for school or to buy time before they sorted out what to do next. Some, like Alec, had gone to college for a year or two before deciding that it was too expensive, too soon, or too pointless, and saw a contract with the military as the best possible alternative. For others, like Manny, it was the best way to secure financial solvency (and citizenship) for oneself and one’s family, which is so hard to come by in America’s economic margins. It was usually a complex and sometimes contradictory combination of many motivations, circumstances, and apparent possibilities and impossibilities; it was all of the ordinary uncertainties that contribute to any decision to commit oneself to a thing for a time. The decision to enlist in the military is also, in important ways, different from, say, the decision to go to college. It entails a fundamental refiguring of your rights over your body; it exposes you to acute and endemic forms of violence; it makes you killable; it places you within a separate legal regime and reconstitutes you (in post-9/11 America more than ever before) within a state of exception (MacLeish 2013). But not all of these extraordinary facts (not even most 116 

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of them) were especially present in the minds of the soldiers with whom I worked when they enlisted. What were present were those more ordinary facts, things to do with money, education, and making a life in the future that was better, or at least more stable, than the one they or their families had.11 It is precisely in this way that the decision to join was not extraordinary. Whatever the reasons for joining that had found a place in soldiers’ personal accounts at the time I encountered them, these reasons and the act of enlistment to which they led were always necessarily situated in the rest of their lives. Though it might seem rather obvious to say that a major decision like enlistment is made, and must be understood, in the fullness of the life of which it is a part, within the frame of patriotic sacrifice injured soldiers’ lives get configured in just such isolation, as if a soldier’s life is devoted to a single, moral purpose perched clearly at the top of an orderly hierarchy of values, a life and devotion that culminate in a worthy and willing act of sacrifice. This telos is one of those fictions necessary to transform certain violences into sacrifices, part of the imperfect magic of the economy of patriotism. In James’s life, or in Jake’s, that moral hierarchy is more like a pile of pickup sticks; at every decision it trembles with contradictions, intentions, and accidents. Of all the guys I knew at Walter Reed, Jake flirted most with and seemed to desire most that fictional clarity of moral purpose and its hierarchy of values. He often described both his time in the army and all the more “ordinary” decisions and struggles in his life as underwritten by his abiding desire to do good, to be the kind of man who was good because he would act to thwart the “triumph of evil,” no matter how small or large the scale.12 It was one reason he enlisted, as was a certain stagnation in his life at the time, as were his father’s past service and his familiarity with military life. But although Jake often framed his time in Iraq in terms of duty and principle, it was not a necessarily or exclusively patriotic duty or a principle based on national belonging or obligation or love (see Anderson [1983] 2006: 144). It was the same kind of principled living that meant he never carried cash and always offered to buy panhandlers food or drink, as he explained walking out of a 7-Eleven and handing a homeless person a donut and bottle of water. This was also the reason he had decided to marry his wife, Tanielle. Tanielle and Jake had been friends since back when he was a rail-thin teenager in a heavy metal band. They started dating after he joined the the economy of patriotism  117

army, not too long before his deployment to Iraq, and, as was often the case with predeployment romances, things had gotten very serious very quickly. Then, when he was in Iraq, on a day that turned out to be the ninth before he was blown up by an ied, Jake got a call from Tanielle. He told me about it one afternoon outside a grocery store in Silver Spring. Tanielle is back in North Carolina, where she’s been put on bed rest until the birth of their second child. Jake has just driven me and Sam and her sister Vanessa up to the mall so they can buy a new car seat for Little J with a donated gift card. It is early evening, and the day is taking its toll on Jake. He wants to pick up a dvd box set of a tv show that his dad told him about, but he can’t remember what it’s called. He is a little frustrated since he knows he should have written it down, as he must write down everything that he wants to remember, his concussed brain no longer reliably up to the task. As we walk slowly up and down the brightly lit aisles, he is in pain, stepping gingerly and leaning heavily on his cane, and he jokes that one of the good things about being with Tanielle while she is pregnant is that she can’t walk fast either. The pain becomes too much for him, and when Sam and Vanessa go on to the grocery store, Jake and I sit on a bench outside and smoke while he rests his leg. This is when he tells me about the phone call. He says that nine days before he got blown up, Tanielle told him she was pregnant the first time. She said that she had been raped by an acquaintance when they were out drinking one night. Jake told me he didn’t believe she’d been raped. If she had, he was sure she wouldn’t have continued hanging out with the guy, even spending time with his family. He figured she’d just been cheating on him and was trying to make an excuse. Whatever had happened, he decided to raise the baby as his own. He explained to me that it was the right thing to do, the thing a good man should do, the way his father raised him. After he ended up at Walter Reed he and Tanielle had gotten married as soon as they could, configuring them, and soon their son, as the right kind of family. It was a principled decision, and one he remains proud of, even though it is one he also sometimes regrets. As we sit there outside the supermarket, afternoon slipping slowly into evening, Jake talks about the things that have come to constitute his life: the frustratingly slow pace of rehabilitation, not only the pain he feels when he walks but the forgetting that is so hard to manage, and the challenges of making a marriage happen amid the extra/ordinary space of Walter Reed. I crack a sarcastic joke, suggesting that all that interminable 118 

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struggle and pain are somehow “fightin’ the war on terror,” evoking the way these experiences are publicly swept away in a tide of pat and poorly reasoned patriotic fervor. To him, my joke raises questions of worthiness, and though I have not mentioned regret, Jake volunteers that he doesn’t regret a thing, that he’d do it all again, even if he knew how it ended, even if he knew he’d be blown up. “But,” he says, “the only thing I wouldn’t do is get married.” His sense of serious purpose and quiet masculine duty tinged with righteousness cuts across his response to my quip about his war-torn life and explanation about marrying Tanielle. He presents the decision to be a husband and a father and the decision to be a soldier in a time of war as decisions of the same, or at least a comparable, kind. But there is also room for difference: while Jake sometimes regrets the principled decision to marry Tanielle and raise her son as his own, in this moment he pushes his decision to join the army and the things he did in it beyond regret. It is not exactly that such acts are inherently unregrettable. Rather, at least for now and for Jake, the stakes of regret are too high. In the words that I offered Jake, the words that he enthusiastically affirmed, “other choices are all but unthinkable.” The durability of his desire to do right, to not let evil triumph, did not lead to infallible decisions; his certainty about the right thing to do bowed against the edges of regret. In the case of his family, he allows regret to break his moral certainty, but the potential for regret in the context of war is even more deeply dangerous. When, late in the summer, Jake heard that his old unit was being redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan, the so-called good war, he told me he’d heard it was so much better there than in Iraq because in Afghanistan “you don’t have people jumping all over you every time you pull your trigger. They don’t make you feel like a criminal for doing your job.” He said with frustration that he couldn’t count how many times he’d been hauled into the Tactical Command Center to account for pulled triggers. We sat on the patio furniture in the covered breezeway of Mologne House, and he offered me these scenes, alternating between his own exasperated voice and that of an outraged superior shouting at him by his last name: Smith! How come you opened fire on those people?! Because they were firing at us. Was there no other option? They were trying to kill us! the economy of patriotism  119

Is there a possibility that you could have hit someone you weren’t supposed to? Huuu, yeah! But I didn’t hit anyone who I shouldn’t have. How many rounds did you fire? I wasn’t counting! Smith! How come your unit is always opening fire?! He said, “I told my guys, ‘If you need to shoot, fucking shoot.’ Too many young guys are getting killed or hurt because they’re afraid to pull the trigger. In Afghanistan, they leave you alone and let you do your job.” There is a certain irony underlying Jake’s frustration. The righteousness of the war in Afghanistan, its value, its worthiness, is the very thing that makes the antipolitical and demoralized job of soldiering more seamless. Its worthiness seems to be measured in the ease with which soldiers can do the most deadly parts of their work. The difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is one of moral value, of good men and bad guys. Jake’s experience of that moral difference makes it recede right out of the frame. The point is, or becomes, that in Afghanistan you can shoot people without counting bullets. You, and your good men, can be left alone to do your jobs. The first night I visit Jake in his new room at Abrams Hall, I sit in the nursing chair they’d gotten for Tanielle as he putters in the small kitchenette with its sink, small fridge, and two-burner cooktop. The room seems to be made of a million shades of gray—the walls, the linoleum tiles, the laminate countertop, the computer desk, the small, wall-mounted collapsible table, the chair that will remain piled high with his clothes until they process his work order and fix the broken rod in his closet. His bed is tucked into a small alcove just big enough to fit it and a footlocker. On the wall above the footlocker is a huge flat-screen tv like the ones put in every room of Mologne House following the Washington Post scandal. Above the head of the bed Jake has tacked up a green sheet printed with a staggered array of little gray tanks and the word army. When I ask him why, despite the abundance of tvs, none of the soldiers at Walter Reed seem to watch the news, a stark contrast from Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, where I had done preliminary fieldwork in 2006, he says that it would make him want to go back. “To finish the job?” I ask, taking up a common refrain of justifications for staying in Iraq that

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have been circulating in the news as well as at various events for Walter Reed soldiers. “Yeah” he says, “I don’t like to start something I can’t finish.” When I tell him I wouldn’t say he started it, he says, “I was over there for nine months. I hope I started something.” In light of the centrality of killing to Jake’s job and his frustrations in the face of the disorganized frictions that sometimes stopped him and his men from killing and sometimes put them in a position in which they were more likely to be killed, the “something” that Jake hopes he started feels profoundly sinister. Starting something is not a neutral term. The thing is usually trouble; starting something means picking a fight. When Jake talks of starting something, his voice is low and strong and clipped. The image that comes to my mind is of kicking a hornets’ nest. Jake’s commitment to his men, to his job, is not, or at least not here in his room with its rainbow of institutional grays and leaky shower in the newly built wheelchair-accessible bathroom, a commitment to the highest ideals of the nation. Nor is it a commitment to that more general principle of goodness that has guided his other decisions, like marrying Tanielle, a principle that has proved fallible, whose fruits have proved regrettable. Starting something sits at the edge where principled striving for goodness meets the rationalized violence of vengeful rage (see Žižek 2008). In this characterization Jake is not fighting for. He is fighting. It is a matter of life and death that he is able to do it well; it matters much less whether he is able to do it with righteous purpose. While claims of patriotic sacrifice may sometimes be vital fictions or soothing alibis, while they can be persuasive and comforting to soldiers and civilians, they can also be of ironically little help as soldiers like Jake struggle to think through who they are and what they have done and the kinds of experiences that may make good decisions regrettable, whether they are decisions about pulling the trigger of a gun or about getting married, each of which, different though they may be, emerge in their own time as ordinary decisions made in the course of daily life. The grand notions of patriotism and sacrifice that soldiers encounter feel all-encompassing, and they are of little use when Jake is trying to figure out if he should get a divorce. A frame of patriotic sacrifice excludes too much if one is coming, or failing, to find terms to capture the ordinary deadliness of war and its violence too dire to regret, all of which can feel both ordinary and too overwhelmingly important and present to rationalize away.

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This is not to say that a sense of the goodness of war isn’t sometimes also helpful to injured soldiers in accounting for their experiences. Indeed this may be one of the differences between the guilt or shame of some Vietnam veterans (and veterans of the current wars who see them as unjustified; see Gutmann and Lutz 2010) and soldiers like Jake, who is, for the time being, not troubled in the same way. But this justification, this justness of war, is not only, or even primarily, helpful as part of a purely moral accounting. For Jake justness has more practical implications. It is one of the reasons that “working conditions” would be better in Afghanistan and the work of killing others would be smoother. Jake imagined there’d be less accountability in Afghanistan because “bad guys” were there. It might be a better job, but better in a way that bears little resemblance to the goodness Jake strove for. It was good in a way that wasn’t about morality but about satisfaction and ease. When I first met Kevin, the only soldier injured in Afghanistan whom I got to know at Walter Reed, we sat in the den while he and James played a Tiger Woods golf game on the Nintendo Xbox they’d hooked up to the huge tv. He was in rough shape. Not only were both his above-the-knee amputations relatively new, his stumps in their most unruly and sensitive phase, but his girlfriend had just left him and he was disconcertingly depressed, which was not helped by his drinking or by the medications that made it difficult for him to concentrate or even stay awake. He tells me that, before she’d left, he’d taken his girlfriend shopping at Nordstrom, the glamorous, high-end department store. A man had started talking to him about what he imagined Kevin was going through, telling Kevin how he must feel. The man assumed Kevin had been hurt in Iraq and said he couldn’t imagine that Kevin didn’t regret it all. Kevin had just ignored him, hoping he’d take the hint and walk away, which, eventually, he did. But he tells James and me that the whole time he was thinking, “First of all, I wasn’t in Iraq, I was in Afghanistan. I was fighting guys who were Taliban, who actually attacked us. I don’t give a shit about Iraq. And whatever, if I were in Iraq, I’d hate those guys too.” It strikes me as a remarkable statement. He evokes patriotic duty and the goodness of “the good war” as an alibi against regret: “I was fighting guys who were Taliban, who actually attacked us.” But he is quick, perhaps especially so in James’s presence, to dismiss the necessity of that goodness and hint at the rule of work, that ordinary work of soldiers at war. He knows he could hate people he doesn’t give a shit about, and that is a kind of alibi too, in the sense that it means regret can not be on the scene. 122 

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In the context of war, regret makes you feel like a criminal, and it may cost young guys their lives. The muddy waters of good acts and doing the right thing make way for a working rule: “If you need to shoot, fucking shoot.” Regret exists in a province of values carefully weighed against each other, in a space of choice and alternatives. It is a feeling born of moral contemplation. If reflecting on killing is, in some sense, about recognizing the possibility of regret and deciding that, on balance, some act of destruction was worthy and worth it, to regret it is to open it back up, to make memorable and present what has been decided and put away, to make its violence unjustified, punishable, criminal. While Jake remains committed to the idea of acting for the greater good, it is his marriage, not his war experience, that has taught him that even principled acts can be regrettable. Kevin fortifies himself against a stranger’s imposition of regret with recourse to justified violence, but that is just a “first of all.” What comes next is a dismissal of justification altogether in favor of obligatory hate.13 For Kevin and Jake experiences in war (that extend to current experiences of their bodies) cannot be settled by the metrics of justice or the value of sacrifice. Their understandings of this violence withdraw from the edges of regret that exert pressure on other principled acts. For both Kevin and Jake war’s violence becomes something that happened as part of a job, a duty that was not about ideals of patriotism but life-or-death obligations of hatred, violence, and fraternal care. The goodness of Afghanistan lubricates a trigger pulled by a soldier who doesn’t give a shit either way. It is not about sacrifice and therefore about value and the measuring of moral worth, which, though unretractable, can be regrettable (see Lambek 2008: 150). It is about the necessities of the work of war and the all-but-unthinkableness of regret. Regular Steaks for Heroes Every Friday night a chartered bus came to Mologne House to pick up soldiers and their families and drive them downtown for a fancy steak dinner. Every Friday night, when the bus came back, there was a group of people waiting by the front gates, holding big homemade signs that said things like “God Bless Our Troops. Defenders of American Freedom. American Heroes” and “Straight Girls 0 Men in Uniform” and shouting tributes like “We love our soldiers!” Though these two events had unrelated beginnings, they became entangled with each other: the sign holders, Freepers, they called themselves, for their the economy of patriotism  123

website freerepublic.com, waiting for the returning bus, taking ­pictures of it, without fail, every Friday, which they featured in their weekly online Freep accounts; the bus driver inside turning on the lights while the evening’s coordinator directs soldiers and families to the waiting throng he describes as “the good guys.” In one way these events epitomized the economy of patriotism and the production of injured soldiers’ extraordinary value that required the worth of each soldier’s life be generically warbound. But the deeper stories of these two events demonstrate that claims of extraordinary soldierly value get tangled up with the normative value of ordinary life not only for injured soldiers but also for those who claim soldiers’ lives as extraordinary. Contradictory as it might seem, volunteers, including many involved in this Friday night spectacle, sometimes aspired to offer soldiers and their families a taste of normalcy, of unmarked ordinariness in the midst of all their insistence on its opposite. But in the way these two Friday night events came to be about the extraordinary value of injured soldiers’ lives, we see how insatiable the economy of patriotism is in this American moment, how it consumes other logics, ways of reckoning, and more modest intentions. Sometimes the organizers of events for soldiers at Walter Reed would talk about wanting to give these guys a chance to do something normal, generally unaware of the tension between this goal and their doting attentions and expressions of indebtedness, ignoring the essentially excessive quality that their attempts to offer an ordinary experience entailed. One Friday night Ned, the founder of the Friday night steak dinners, explained their origin to me. A while back he owned a steak house in downtown D.C. It had a bar up front and a dining room in the back. Ned didn’t have any family in the military and wasn’t a veteran himself, but he thought he should do something for the guys at Walter Reed, concerned not so much that they might want to feel appreciated but that they must be bored being at the hospital all the time. His intention was to invite some injured soldiers out for dinner, give them a chance to “get out” and “just have a good time.” He said at first it was a bit weird. No one talked to anyone; everyone just went straight back to the dining room and ate their steak. But eventually, after a few soldiers came a few weeks in a row, they started saying “Hi” to the regulars at the bar, then they started to drink and chat with them, and then they were all regulars, just a bunch of guys, getting out, having a regular old good time.

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Ned lost the lease on his restaurant, but he vowed to continue the dinners. He set up a foundation to raise money and got in touch with places that might be willing to donate space and give injured soldiers and their families a free steak dinner or to charge only a nominal fee that his organization could cover. That’s how we found ourselves that night at the Republican Club of Capitol Hill, surrounded by white linens and jacketed servers and fine steaks. Without having been to the “regular” dinners at Ned’s old steak house, it’s hard to know how regular they were, in what ways they might, for example, have resembled a night at McGinty’s. But the story of his Friday night steak dinners touches on the essential ambivalence of soldier encounters. As a private citizen, he felt that he ought to do something for soldiers because they were soldiers, because they were hurt, because he was concerned about the quality of lives cooped up in a hospital with no good times or relaxation or regular stuff. What he wanted to do was give them a taste of a future, or perhaps past, ordinary, to thicken up their social skin with a bit of barroom fraternity. But in order to sustain his gift, he had to call on others to feel as he felt, as citizens should feel toward “their” soldiers, which meant making way for claims of sacrifice. And so it was that on another night I found myself sitting next to a soldier from Kentucky in a Soldiers Angels’ T-shirt and a baseball cap in the private room at Bobby Van’s who found the filet mignon on the porcelain plate between his wine and water glasses so small he said he wouldn’t even call it a real steak and so rare it might as well have still been mooing. Week after week there were jokes about steaks so raw they could walk off the plate, and week after week most folks would eat them, not wanting to appear difficult or ungrateful. At Bobby Van’s the soldier from Kentucky ate his steak and politely applauded when a special guest, Rebecca Pepin, a tv reporter and newly minted U.S. citizen, made a speech about sacrifice and called the injured soldiers present “living heroes” before handing out copies of her coffee-table book Faces of Freedom: Profiles of America’s Fallen Heroes: Iraq and Afghanistan. In some ways the Friday night Freep that greeted the bus driving us back from the steak dinners was a very different kind of event. With its slogans and banners and flags and shouts and general spectacularness, it was not intended to make soldiers feel “regular,” as Ned had wanted to when he first invited them to his steakhouse. But the tension between ordinary appreciation and an extraordinary debt of gratitude still adhered in the Freep,

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in part because the Freepers, like Ned, recognized the essential value of unmarked American ordinariness to the lives of soldiers at Walter Reed, even in the midst of their intentionally polemical patriotism. Butelle, one of Freep’s main organizers, explained their history to me as he stood in the church parking lot across from Walter Reed’s main 16th Street gate, assembling the huge sign they called the moab (Mother of All Banners). He said they started when some Freepers caught wind of the silent vigils that Code Pink was holding in that spot every Friday night. Code Pink is an organization of leftist women activists very involved in antiwar politics in D.C. and well known for their theatrical tactics. Butelle and other Freepers were horrified by what they considered to be the unAmericanness of Code Pink’s message (he cited signs that read “Maimed for a Lie” and “Support Our Troops, Bring Them Home”) and also by the fact that the group had chosen Walter Reed as the place to proclaim it. This, they felt, constituted a political exploitation of the soldiers who were rehabilitating inside. When he’d finished telling me the full story of the Friday night Freeps, a story as much about the clash between two outspoken activist groups as anything else, I ask Butelle what being out there every Friday night meant to him personally. He says, “For me initially it was . . . ​you know . . . ​I think the guys ought to be able to come and heal unmolested. To be left alone, you know. People come and go, the street’s vacant, other than the traffic, and just go in there and convalesce and heal and, and recover from their injuries. And not to have to put up with leftist antiwar jackasses on the street corner getting, you know, making it worse, and you know, hurting their morale.” Rather than beginning with an invocation of debt, sacrifice, or the public significance of Walter Reed and its soldiers, Butelle describes the anonymous liberty of empty space. It is this space that seems to be important to healing. Rather than start with brave heroes who have earned our gratitude or support, he talks about “guys” and “their injuries” who “ought to be able to come and heal unmolested.” Butelle was a veteran himself; he was wearing a hat that commemorated his service in the air force, and he brought the fact of militarized life into his comments by dropping in little bits of its specialized register, words like convalesce and morale. But he rooted his motivation, the personal significance of his weekly trek into the city, in a guy’s right to be left alone, to not have his physical injuries compounded by the presence of others who had (as he frames it) bad things to say about what he had done. 126 

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But then, in his next breath, he draws on the idealized patriotism of soldiers, on their exemplary, generic beliefs, and on their special connection to the citizens they were so nobly defending: “And so come out here and counter, and you know, let the American troops know, these guys know that they [Code Pink] do not speak for the majority of Americans, that they really are appreciated and we believe in what, that they believe in what they’re doing and we believe in what they believe in, you know, for all the same reasons.” In the space he clears, the therapeutic vacancy he wants to maintain, Butelle inserts a message, spoken by “the majority Americans,” addressed to “the American troops.” But he falters; the tension is already there; his message was addressed to the American troops who were also just guys, both iconic and “regular.” The message is that they are appreciated, and it is also a message about a cycle of shared faith: “We believe in what . . .” It seemed as though he might say that we believe in what the troops do or maybe what the troops believe in. But he hesitates, and then repairs. He begins his cycle not with Americans but with American troops: “They believe in what they’re doing and we believe in what they believe in, you know, for all the same reasons.” He constructs two kinds of Americans—citizens on the one hand, soldiers on the other—and then ties them together, rooting them both in common values, giving them a generic, American correspondence and patriotic value, to be expressed in the space of encounter, no longer vacant, which he creates every Friday night. Toward the end of his response, he returned to these same contradictions and correspondences, the vacant space for regular guys, filled with a patriotic message, the identity between citizens and soldiers: “But for me it was really to get ’em [Code Pink] away. You know you guys are protecting us in the war against terror or any other kind of issues that threaten American national security and we got your back, you know, we got your back and we’re gonna protect the gates of the hospital for you guys.” The relationship he invokes in this third moment wasn’t so much a common cycle of faith but a fair exchange: You protect us; we protect you. But then, in the shorted circuit of the economy of patriotism, it doesn’t end there. Gratitude once again keeps things going in unpredictable directions. “ ’Cause they come out and they’re walking the streets you know, ’cause you got the outpatients over at Mologne House and anybody who can come out and, like I was saying before, we’ve had guys you know in the mechanical wheelchairs coming over here, like, thanking us.” These guys, in their the economy of patriotism  127

iconic bodies, express gratitude for appreciation. As another Freeper put it, “Soldiers come by and they say ‘Thank you,’ and you say ‘Oh no, thank you,’ and you kind of get into a competition: ‘Thank you.’ ‘Thank you!’ ” Gratitude for appreciation for service for ideals in a space where soldiers are just guys who ought to be left alone unmolested. At the end of that night, I go across the street to give my card to another Freeper I’d spoken with. With a quiet and concerned tone, he asks me what the feeling is among the guys inside. I say, “Most of them just want to get on with it, just get on with their lives.” He tells me hopefully that some guys had come out and told him that they wanted to go back, to be redeployed. Though I knew there were all kinds of complicated reasons for that, reasons that had nothing to do with “the war on terror” or patriotic duty or freedom or America and much to do with the genealogical pulls of military life, all I say is that I’d heard that too. There was a brief pause. Then he says, “I know it’s not for national security or anything. They’re fighting for each other.” The Costs of Too Much Gratitude In a moment of contact between a civilian and an injured soldier, people may do their best to participate in a coherent exchange, to repay debts they claim exist, to be grateful, to give back for a pound of flesh taken. But when we look more closely, we see that the exchange is not so smooth, that the circuit gets shorted in all kinds of ways. Rather than simply trading in patriotism, this economy is ragged and produces icons, frictions, and anxi­eties rather than clear value or relations of exchange. What emerges is never a settled account or a shining beacon of extraordinary national valor. What is obscured includes the configurations of state violence that underwrite cleaner pictures of patriotism and frameworks of sacrifice and value. It isn’t quite fitting to say the soldiers I knew had done anything on behalf of America or its values or its people. They weren’t owed gratitude, just compensation. Their base pay and its various supplements, like danger pay, extra money for dependents, the regionally determined Cost of Living Adjustment, and tricare (the health insurance that was free for them and heavily subsidized for their dependents), were certainly their due. They were entitled to their payments from the Traumatic Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance (tsgli) of about $50,000 per limb lost. These things were compensation. Beyond that, “respect, maybe” for the hard and dan128 

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gerous work, including killing, they compliantly did. But neither sacrifice nor gratitude was part of the equation. No one needed to be grateful to them for extraordinary patriotic sacrifice; according to soldiers’ accounts, they had done nothing to incur such debt. As suggested by the title of David Finkel’s (2013) wrenching account of veterans and families, “Thank you for your service” ironically points to the mess of life that soldiers inherit after war, the mess they receive in return for their service. But, often regardless of participants’ intentions, encounters between soldiers and others slide into the register of national sacrifice and tropes of heroism. National narratives seem to seep out of every corner of Walter Reed’s saturated space. While supporters may conceive of themselves as offering soldiers and families a private space of social intimacy, the apparent extraordinariness of what soldiers have done and who they are supposed to be intrudes in a handshake. Even when he wishes it were, a soldier’s work is not allowed to be the same as a carpenter’s; the violence that is its most fundamental characteristic is framed and reframed again and again, continually calling forth some kind of accounting or justification. In the broken circuit of the economy of patriotism it is accounted for and paid for and silenced and counterbalanced by mounds of indistinguishable redwhite-and-blueness. But in the end none of these frames can hold; the mimetic magic of the exemplary soldier is fleeting; the conversation at the bar as a regular among regulars is interrupted by another’s loaded utterance: “Thank you for what you do.” As soldierly life is essentially constituted by the production of exposure and vulnerability, tinged with killability and outside the protections of citizenship at the same time as it is rendered sacred and elevated above the status of citizen (MacLeish 2013: 12), the special value of war-injured soldier bodies at Walter Reed emerges through a moral economy that posits injured soldierly flesh as no longer killable but newly productive of especially worthy life in the national imaginary.14 The ambivalent and exceptional conditions of war and soldiering allow claims about soldiers’ sacrifice to be made. The act of making those claims works to erase those very conditions. Notions of sovereignty, exception, and sacrifice are mobilized to fit soldierly acts of life and death into a reducible relationship between citizens and the state, one that leaves no messy remainder. But the transaction is never so clean, and soldiers don’t have the luxury of imagining otherwise.

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4 on movement

Violent Transformations and the Analytics of Movement For soldiers the emergence of new ordinaries marked by war’s violence was contingent, always unfinished, and essentially bound the feelingful matter of being in the world. Ordinaries emerged as they became perceptible, and they became perceptible as they emerged. That is, as soldiers encountered multiple expectations of who and how they were and would be after combat, they became attuned to the world in a way that made it, and them, sensibly register as something other than what had been before.1 These ways of being that soldiers settled into or became habituated to, these situated and sensate strands of new ordinariness were variously comforting, necessary, or ineluctable, and they were often at odds with the unmarked,

normative ordinary of the good life that loomed on the horizon of the future. Exploring how this new ordinariness—these feelings of and for the present—became sensible is one way of pushing past distinctions between experiences of transformation said to reside in the body and those said to reside in the mind, a distinction usually made by differentiating visible from invisible kinds of markedness.2 In doing this I link the experiences of injured soldiers at Walter Reed to the experiences of other soldiers after war and consider multiple experiences of transformation. This approach to a world-altering violence and the experience of postcombat transformation is also an attempt to trouble the hegemony of ptsd, the most widely recognized articulation of such transformations among returning American soldiers. ptsd often stands synecdochically for a vast and subtle array of transformations I describe here, sucking experience into a singularity through what Kenneth MacLeish (2010) has described as its “black hole effect.” Homecoming trouble and postcombat transformation have become tethered to, if not enveloped by, ptsd. While much of the visibility of ptsd is due to well-meaning efforts to get help for soldiers who struggle with life after war, the ubiquity of the label has an effect that reaches beyond those who receive the diagnosis or even those whose experiences are characteristic of its symptoms. My aim here is not precisely a critique of ptsd itself, and I largely leave aside the diagnostic practices and politics that surround it.3 Rather, through the analytics of movement— that is, a mode of parsing these experiences of transformation that begins with and works through the specificities of enfleshed bodies as they move through space—I offer a different and more encompassing way of thinking about postcombat transformations, homecoming trouble, and the state of being posttraumatic. It is one that does not begin with pathology or diagnosis but rather the experience of being disoriented and the vertiginous and not always successful process of becoming reoriented that is occasioned by transformations residing in a sensate moving soldier acting in a here and now that is itself transformed by the violence of a there and then. This approach derives some of its effectiveness from the array of different forms of markedness I present here, from soldiers like Kevin, who is a double abovethe-knee amputee, to soldiers I knew outside of Walter Reed, like Sophia, whose body isn’t marked at all. Each story in this chapter explores different aspects of combat-connected transformations, transformations that become apparent in moments of social, visual, and physical contact as bodies move through space. Movement 132 

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here is an attempt to capture carnal and emplaced experience, flesh and the socially emplotted ways it is seen and felt, proprioception and those other senses of sight, sound, touch, and taste through which a body and a space enact a meaningful, sensible articulation. The emphasis on sensible transformation enables an exploration of the plurality of ordinaries, and it is a way of including as ordinary, or as habituated experience, ways of being in the world that get short shrift when they are pathologized in discourses of ptsd. Using movement as a lens for looking at the transformations that result from soldiers’ time in Iraq and Afghanistan, I bring together experiences that might otherwise be kept apart as either physical or psychological and as either normal or pathological.4 Movement helps make apparent the ways of being and feeling in the world that become ordinary for soldiers, as well as the ways that war-borne ordinaries abide, even as other unmarked ordinaries—aspirational ordinaries of a future that could somehow leave the present behind—beckon. I understand the analytics of movement not as an approach to knowing how postcombat soldiers are but as a mode of thinking about how they be and become. I am drawing on a set of approaches to encountering and making and being in the world that, in various ways, highlight the contingent and emergent ethical worlding that happens through the little actions and movements that constitute peculiar rhythms of an ordinary present in a particularly situated moment (Stewart 2007). My aim is to focus on the modes of tactility and distracted attention though which the familiar and habitual become familiar and habitual (Benjamin 1969: 7; Taussig 1991: 149) and to not think or stabilize “the being who encounters” prior to the encounter itself (Ahmed 2000: 7). The analytics of movement grounds itself in a close attention to the way experience is made matter-ful in soldier bodies as they (are seen to) move through and act in and on spaces. It is a way of thinking phenomenologically and ontologically about what it is to be in the midst of this world so overdetermined by a biopolitical event of soldierhood. In this context I distinguish this approach from the dominating frame of ptsd. In its current scientific iterations in the United States, ptsd is increasingly figured as a neurological malfunction, likely located in either the amygdala or the hippocampus, created by a potentially adaptive reaction to an event that is, by its traumatic nature, inassimilable by the brain’s usual mechanisms of perception and apprehension. (For reviews of the research literature see Karl et al. 2006; Woon and Hedges 2009, 2008; Woon, Sood, and Hedges 2010. For concise critiques of the epistemology of this science, on movement  133

see Leys 2000: 254–64; Young 2002.)5 Even as its utility, parameters, and existence are debated (see Rosen and Frueh 2007), ptsd is also understood to be treatable, potentially preventable, and perhaps curable, all with recourse to increasingly neurological means, what Young and Breslau (2007: 231) characterize as “the passionate interest in discovering [ptsd’s] biological markers.”6 The particular form of ptsd and its colonization of modes of thinking about the experiences of American soldiers after combat dramatically narrows the field of intelligible experiences. It limits the temporalities of transformation and, if accidentally and even ironically, effaces a complex emergent way of being in the world with an increasingly mechanistic biochemical body and brain and a set of pathologized behaviors. While explanations offered within a ptsd frame have important effects all their own, I suggest an analytics of movement as a way of attending to some of what such a frame excludes. Marking Mobile Bodies and the Spatial Contingency of “Normal” Bounded by gates, the space of Walter Reed is marked off from the city and world around it. What constitutes ordinariness within those gates is, in some ways, very explicitly related to movement. Not only is it normal to see wheelchairs and people with prosthetic limbs, but it is also normal to be twenty-three years old and missing a leg.7 The ordinariness of these facts is challenged by encounters with others who insist they are extraordinary, but in their absence, going from place to place in a wheelchair, on crutches, on wobbly new legs is unmarked and unremarkable. In this way, at Walter Reed, normalcy—those expectations that characterize life within a particular ordinary—often addresses itself to how people move and what their movement looks like. Many of the activities there are concerned with the intricacies of movement. For those who have lost legs, the activity of putting one foot in front of the other becomes a site of intense focus and attention. The activities of physical therapy, of stretching, walking, balancing, running, jumping, all use movement to train movement. And the evaluation of movement through space is one of the main ways rehabilitation is measured. The question of how, and how well, one walks is a powerful index of progress toward recovery, a state that entails the normative appearance of bodies in motion drawn from an ideal elsewhere ordinary.

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While they operate on minuscule movements understood to be somehow incorrect, it is the wobbliness of movement, the common experience of instability, that gives these practices a ground on which to establish themselves. This common experience of labored movement characterizes the space of and movement within Walter Reed, even in sites of normative bodily discipline like the various rehabilitation labs and physical therapy rooms. Outside the gates of Walter Reed, however, things are different. What counts as ordinary movement looks different as bodies in motion are read according to different visual and semantic fields of reference. Sometimes this means that injured soldiers become exposed to unexpected encounters with grateful civilians or to experiences that emphasize the simultaneous excesses and absences of their marked bodies. Sometimes moving through unmarked spaces made apparent and available for comment the marked ordinariness that injured soldiers shared at Walter Reed, those ways of being in common that were the basis of in-durable but important sociality and brittle but necessary social attachments. So such movement was also about the proximity of multiple, conditional, and contradictory ordinaries and what it might mean and look like and feel like to “pass” in them. While the question of movement and marked bodies is one that, in other contexts, has been productively addressed in the critical language of stigma (Goffman 1986) and disability (e.g., Clare 2003; Langan 2013; Porter 1997; Smith 2006), the exceptional value of soldier bodies (and the fact that soldier bodies at or near Walter Reed were so clearly legible as such) complicates this situation. In fact the soldiers I worked with did not identify themselves as members of a community of people with disabilities or even as disabled, a term with a hard-won political flavor in the United States (see Shapiro 1994). There were instances in which they joked about the condition of their bodies and their limitations in ways that played on the worst of ableist stereotypes, and while they recognized themselves as potentially subject to such stereotypes, they disavowed the social category of disability and, as recently injured soldiers in post-9/11 America, it was not a social category that was generally applied to them. So while my thinking about bodies in motion as social matter is certainly indebted to critical disability studies, I do not describe the soldiers I worked with as soldiers with disabilities, with all the political, personal, and historical meanings that such a naming would entail.

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One night, bored with watching tv and playing video games, James, Kevin, and I decided to go somewhere for dinner and a few drinks. Tired of the usual spots in Silver Spring, we tried to think of other possibilities. A certain degree of class comfort guided these exercises: we wanted something cheap and familiar.8 I suggested we flip a coin. James and Kevin both laughed, but that’s what we did. Heads. We’d go to Chili’s. James was using his two prosthetic legs; Kevin wasn’t and was using his manual wheelchair. The three of us piled into the luxury suv James had recently bought Erin, paid for with the trade-in of his own car and the second tsgli payment of $50,000 he received following the recent amputation of his second leg. James expertly folded Kevin’s chair, placed it in the ample trunk, and off we went, with James at the wheel. Driving north on Georgia Avenue, Kevin mused, “I wonder if when people see you driving this thing, they think you’re just some spoiled rich kid.” The three of us laughed at the ironies that were, from our position, obvious. Though James had been much smarter with his money than many of his comrades, he was hardly rich. He did not want to rely, nor could he have relied, on his middle-class parents for financial support like a spoiled rich kid. And he had, in as literal a sense as possible, paid a leg for this car.9 The joke was funny because, through the visual frame Kevin conjured up—peering into the window of this shining new $70,000 luxury crossover vehicle—James might well be drawn into the ordinariness out there in contemporary America where the car can be read as a “synecdoche of capitalism” (Jain 2006b: 61), something that seemed so distinct from ordinariness at Walter Reed. From the shoulders up, he was more Jimmy Stewart than gi Joe. Handsome, slender, and white, with a face that certainly looked no older than his twenty-four years, James could pass for a “spoiled rich kid” to anyone looking through the window. They wouldn’t see the tattoos covering his arms, some of which referenced his injuries and some of which had been marked by them, and they wouldn’t see the two stretches of plastic and titanium between his sneakers and his shorts. Kevin and James thought more about who James might be as projected through the window. Maybe people would think he had borrowed his parents’ car. Playing on the passionate “automotive emotions” central to the aesthetic and kinesthetic experience of the car in contemporary America (Sheller 2004), Kevin and James conjured a protected world of classed privilege that might be bitterly envied. And so beyond its ironic contrast with what we know about James, the joke works in this moment because 136 

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it evokes the way class and desire might be read in “ordinary” life as James is driving a brand-new suv up a relatively impoverished and racialized stretch of Washington, D.C. The most fundamental premise of the joke, then, plays on the movement of bodies and their extensions (cars and prostheses and tattoos) through differently normalized spaces. It makes apparent the distinction between the extra/ordinary space in which James and Kevin are living and the ordinary out there through which they now move. It is a joke about the ill fit of these two ordinaries, physically differentiated by the gates of Walter Reed and that are, in that moment, coming into contact through movement. Among other residents of Walter Reed, the image of James driving that stylish suv would be understood very differently, even by those who didn’t know him and couldn’t see any more than his Jimmy Stewart profile. Inside Walter Reed there was a sense of that depoliticizing postmodern automobility that emphasizes recognition and affiliation through the aesthetic accoutrements of “subculture” (Gartman 2004: 141). The parking lots at Walter Reed were peppered with luxury and specially modified cars.10 Many soldiers were or became interested in cars and bought them, worked on them, prized them, talked about them, and spent their salaries and tsgli money on them. Cars belonging to soldiers might be marked as such; most soldiers had handicapped parking passes (though they usually didn’t display them while at Walter Reed), and many sported license plates with an iconic image of the Purple Heart, indicating the owner was a recipient of the medal.11 But inside Walter Reed even cars without the special plates were usually assumed to belong to soldiers, especially if they were tricked out with body kits, specialty window tinting, or decals. Reading those cars as belonging to soldiers entailed a particular “schema of vision” (see Taussig 1991: 147), a particularly educated eye that relied not on the more obvious icons of the handicapped symbol or the Purple Heart but on an everyday knowledge gained by presence in a place, derived from common sensuousness rather than common sense (Lingis 1986: 91). Given the strange and excessive economy of the military, and of Walter Reed in particular, the meaning of these cars is not quite the same as in a broader public where they can easily be read as signs of luxury. This military economy is flush with base pay and supplements for dependents, housing, and potential and actual injury; it is depleted by need, family, and the gratification of consumer desires; it unfolds within a limited range of places to spend; and it is constrained by powerful social and cultural forces on movement  137

insinuating acceptable and unacceptable expenditures that come from the relative closeness and normativity of a military community. Within such an economy a Hummer or a modified Mazda doesn’t signal discretionary income or conspicuous consumption. Or rather it does, but in a way that is particular to this economy and common to many of even its least solvent members. Thus at Walter Reed the cost or quality of the car wasn’t read as a cue to the class of the driver in the same way it might be on Georgia Avenue. James driving this suv inside Walter Reed is read by the people there as congruent with his belonging to a contingent of young, wounded, male soldiers who spend newly gotten money on cars that fit within a particular aesthetic spectrum of luxury. Outside he and his (wife’s) car are a marked image, coded by class and targeted for envy. Kevin’s joke would not have made sense within the space of Walter Reed, which is why he didn’t make it there. But driving through the gates and out onto Georgia Avenue, moving into a different spatial and social field, spurs Kevin to postulate a different reader, a different inhabitant and interpreter. We laughed at Kevin’s joke because we thought he was right: to someone driving up Georgia Avenue, James would be a spoiled rich kid. We appreciated the ordinary public he invoked, a public whose eyes were not educated in the same way, not accustomed to the light of the army’s ordinary. This visual differentiation of various ordinaries also applied to the bodies of soldiers themselves. Seemingly simple acts of walking along a city street make apparent certain contingencies of the aesthetics and affects of class, gender, patriotism, and politics and ideals of bodily form, mastery, and control. They make available for analysis the complex syntagmatic relationships through which marked bodily forms are produced as such. Whereas the appearance of soldiers with amputated limbs and their movement were common within Walter Reed, these same soldiers moving through other spaces were cause for comment. In a way these soldiers and their visible prosthetics walking through the ordinary of streets beyond Walter Reed function like an image out of place that “signals a ‘more’ postulating the existence of an elsewhere, beyond the conventional logic of that place” (Massumi 2003: 31). Visibly injured soldiers’ moving bodies postulate a “more” that speaks of the social division of the labor of war and its violent effects, an ordinary of war and its material legacies that, in the contemporary United States, are often out of sight.

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As was the choice of many soldiers, James’s prostheses were almost always visible.12 Walking with him made apparent aspects of the world that I would otherwise ignore: every change in the grade underfoot, every crack or bump in the sidewalk. Such otherwise negligible topographies demanded concentration. And the particular markedness of his body was legible as that of a soldier, indelibly transforming him into a public figure in the presence of others within or near Walter Reed. As James moved through the public spaces of Washington, D.C., it wasn’t uncommon for people to speak to him and occasionally to touch him. These kinds of encounters changed not only the spaces he chose to inhabit but his sense of being in an unmarked ordinary world he used to inhabit, a world in which his body and its meanings were newly marked as extraordinary. One night, as James, Erin, and I walk from dinner to a movie theater, a man walking quickly toward us extends his hand as he approaches James. Without hesitation, as their paths cross, James takes the man’s hand, and there is a single firm shake. The man says, “Thank you,” and they both keep walking, having hardly stopped at all, their courses altered almost imperceptibly. When a small child stares at him transfixed and slightly scared in the elevator at a movie theater in D.C., James leans toward her and gives her a stern warning: “Eat your vegetables.” He likes to say this to children who stare at him. He thinks it’s funny. I think it’s upsetting, because in addition to his paternal pseudo–object lesson (Eat your vegetables. Be healthy. Have legs.) it calls to mind the long-legged tailor with giant scissors in the nineteenth-century Struwwelpeter stories who snips off the thumbs of children who suck them. Either way, a proposition about James’s monstrousness is contained in his utterance; it concedes that there is something about him that the child is right to be afraid of. Such encounters expose something of the limits of self-constitution and perhaps even the risk of being “sealed into crushing object-hood” by the gaze of an other, even a child (Fanon [1967] 1991: 109).13 These incidents speak to what happens to the reading of James’s presence, the meaning with which his appearance is imbued, as he moves outside the gates of Walter Reed. His body is not read as disabled in the same way other, non-normatively configured, bodies might be (Clare 2003; Davis 1995: 11–14; Udegbe 2007). Nor is his social class or cultivation remarkable in the way it would otherwise be were his thin frame and heavily tattooed arms still adjoined to legs of his own flesh and blood. In this

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particular location, because of his normative masculinity, his youth, and the physical transformation of his body and its means of movement, James is interpolated as a soldier who has (in the problematic language of public commemoration) sacrificed and is worthy of comment, recognition, and gratitude. Here James is not a stranger. He is a public figure, a national and nationalist archetype. He can be touched, grasped. James’s experience of moving is thus not only marked by new mechanics; it is an experience of being overdetermined, a certain weakening of the always contingent ability to feel self-contained and private, to pass or to pass unnoticed. He is arrested, if only momentarily, by the figure posited by passing others. The signification of his prostheses overwrites the signification of other aspects of his body, like his many tattoos, that used to lend themselves to another reading. His legs carry him into public space and into a public figure that he has little choice but to inhabit. He responds to the question asked. He shakes the hand that reaches toward him. The handshake recalls that touch, always an act of reaching toward, “enables the creation of worlds. . . . ​To touch is to engage in the potential of an individuation” (Manning 2007: xv). In these ways James’s experience of himself in these public spaces has been radically altered, and there is an unbreakable continuity between the variety of ways he has been, and continues to be, altered by his experiences in Iraq. His ordinary life is marked by all of these. His physical transformation is not separable, perhaps not different from the range of other transformations these moments of movement bring to the surface. Movement thus brings into view the variety of transformations such moments show and make. It draws our attention to the corporeal aspects of ontology and the kinesthetics of intersubjectivity. But these stories are not narrative physics equations; they tell of more than mass and velocity. This is because movement is always a social accomplishment, with all that that entails. It is never just the movement of an object or a body or a hybrid actant; it is a dynamic interaction of socialized material. And, as Michele de Certeau (2002) and Walter Benjamin (1969) have each evocatively described, the spaces through which we move are always far from empty. The spatial is always the sociospatial (Urry 1999; see also Low 2003; Low and Lawrence-Zúniga 2003; Wacquant 2008); being in a place is always to be in a particular historical situation. So the spaces of Walter Reed and of the D.C. street are spaces of certain kinds, semiotically full in ways that preceded, antecede, and are altered by movement through them. 140 

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Moving into view is central to this dynamic; moving and seeing are imbricated. As Alphonso Lingis (1986: 92–93) notes, sensibility is incorporation; “the visible things . . . ​are ‘encrusted in our flesh.’ ” This process is always also concerned with the contingencies of space and movement (91–96; Merleau-Ponty 2002: 98–147). To be in the field of the visual is to be in a spatial relation with visible things, to be “in contiguity and proximity” (Lingis 1986: 96). Lingis writes, “I find myself in the midst of them, in the midst of the visible, myself something visible. I become something seen” (96, my emphasis). As James learns new movements and his transforming body moves into new spaces, he moves into view, becoming something seen. Such an approach suggests that practical experiences of movement and the encounters they compose are not separable from intersubjective and emergent experiences of self or sensuous experiences of one’s body and world. To ask what it means that James has no legs—how we understand his condition, how we make sense of it—is to attempt to force the real into the realm of the symbolic. These are not questions that I know how to answer. They are not even questions I fully know how to ask. Rather I ask, What is it for James to have no legs? How is it for James to be without legs? The answers are addressed to the fragility of human experience and the exposure, vulnerability, and porosity of the self, qualities that body forth in moving encounters. Re-visioning Space and Being “Posttraumatic” The experience of moving through space had also been forever changed for those soldiers with whom I worked who hadn’t been physically injured in ways that were readily visible. Their experiences of moving through space, including their practices of seeing, were also fraught, their sense of ordinariness also now altered. Their movements, if not the still image of their bodies, were sometimes marked as jumpy or too tightly coordinated, and their experiences of seemingly disattended tasks of negotiating public space were transformed by combat. I sit with Sophia in a coffee shop in a subway station in Manhattan. We had met once before at a press conference about the new gi Bill on Capitol Hill, where I had approached her to ask if she’d be willing to arrange an interview with me. Worried she might not remember what I look like, I arrive at our meeting a few minutes early. I thought I would get a coffee and sit within view of the door, looking anthropological with my notebook on movement  141

and audio recorder laid out on the table so that she might recognize me. But after I get my coffee and double back to the seating area, I see her already there, at a small metal table set with two chairs. She sits in the chair facing the door, sipping a hot chocolate. We settle in, and I pull out my notebook and turn on my recorder. I ask her to tell me about herself. She starts with the past and pieces together a story about what she was like: born in Puerto Rico but equally American, one of four siblings, a tomboy, a churchgoer who tricked her mother into signing the forms that allowed her to join the military in 1999 at the age of seventeen so she could pay for college. She had been concerned about her younger siblings and knew their mother couldn’t afford to help all of them with school fees. Enlistment had been an obvious option: that recruiter was always hanging out in the lunch room of her public school, there was that recruitment office on the way home, and all those posters in the subway. She figured she’d get herself a desk job, not that it mattered so much then, back when, as she said, “it was Clinton time, there was no war, no signs, no, no signs of nothing. I was like, ‘There ain’t gonna be no war,’ but little did I know.” For about three hours we talk about her joining the military, about being a woman in the military, and about her experiences in a combat hospital in Iraq, an mos for which she had been given two weeks of mobilization training and for which she had been selected in part because she was such a quick study. As we begin to speak about her time in Iraq, as we move inexorably toward the present, we also begin to speak about coming back from war and about the inevitable strains of reentry, the atmospheric burn that makes painfully apparent expectations about a then and there of life at war and a here and now of life at peace, a feeling that makes apparent certain irrevocable transformations. Sophia gestures at this difference when she tells me about demobilization. “You know, they check you out quickly, they don’t talk about it, they do it not individually, they do it everybody, as a group, as a unit, you know, and be like, ‘This is what happens. This is how it is. Now remember how you were.’ ” I am incredulous and blurt out, “Remember how you were?!” Sophia confirms: “ ‘Remember how you were and act, just, you know, be like that. Remember that.’ And you’re like ‘Uhhh, what?’ like, ‘How was I again?’ ” Part of what makes it so impossible to “be like that” is the stubborn visceral fact of being somehow something else, an irrepressible difference. 142 

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Sophia can easily remember what she used to do, the things she used to care about, how she used to spend her time, but her transformed mode of being in the world does not allow her to “be like that” or even to remember with all her body and might what being like that really was like. She says, “It changes you, it changes the way you see people. When you come back everything, everyone is a suspect. Anything and everything, everyone is dangerous, everything looks dangerous.” She laughs. Sophia’s twinning of being and seeing—“Everyone is dangerous, everything looks dangerous”—is a sort of cipher encoding the complex relationship between seeing and being and inferring the key to its understanding. In her own way she points to the intimacy between becoming, becoming visible, and coming to see that Lingis (1986: 92–93) theorizes. She sees and feels the world as it is, and the world is as she sees and feels it. It cannot be otherwise. She feels that this world is a different one from the one she knew before Iraq, but also that it is she, and her vision, that have changed: “It changes you, it changes the way you see.” Iraq has educated her eye in a way that allows her to see danger and to know that it is there. The world and the people in it are full of potential danger because now she knows how to see. We discuss this experience of seeing things differently. Sophia laughs a lot as she speaks, a little self-conscious about the experiences she relays. “Before I would have just walked in and, umm, sit down. Usually, now, like even though it’s been a few years and I know how to live in the normal life, with no guns, no nothing, I still look in and see, what’s my surroundings, see my potential, what, see that there’s an exit over there, see if something happens over there, where can I go. [ . . . ​] “I don’t sit first [she is laughing], I like go right, I look right, I look left, so I mean I don’t know if you were here when I did that.” “No,” I say. “Okay because when I literally walk in I stop over here and I look to my left and I do that everywhere I go. The same thing when I’m in the train. [ . . . ​] How many people are there, if I have to run, where do I go? You know if it’s faster the other way or the other way, where the poles are, so I know how to, you know, so that’s how usually that’s how I . . . you know you walk into a place you want to know which other exits, how . . .” She pauses. “How you would move through?” I offer, hinting at the arc of possibility that is part of her experience, hinting at the ifs that her experience proliferates: if there was a bomb, if there was a gunman, if there was, as they say in military parlance, contact. on movement  143

Sophia moves from telling me how she envisions space to showing me. As we sit facing each other, she facing the door, she demonstrates the breadth of her peripheral vision by telling me which tables she can see, inviting me to test my own vision, to look at the space and revise my view of it, to see with her eyes, which I can never do. “And,” she adds, “maybe you notice, I’m not looking at you, I’m looking at whoever’s moving, whoever’s moving too fast. I’m like looking, looking.” As she repeats the word looking she demonstrates, exaggerating the darting movement of her eyes, showing me how they see and also making me see them.14 “So, you know, I don’t know,” she says. “I get used to it. Yeah.” I ask her if this new way of being bothers her. She says that it’s “unconscious” and that it actually makes her “feel comfortable in a place.” She goes on: “I don’t count how many people go in and out, but, like, for example, I remember the last person who walked in. You know, not to, to say but, like, for example: a black female with short hair walked in with a jacket. That was like a minute ago. You know the other guy, he put some headphones on and he, he got out. So it’s like, I’m aware of who’s in and out. So I would be able to notice if somebody walked in and out twice, I’d be like, ‘Why?’ That’s the first thing: ‘Why are you walking in again?’ You know, so. It’s something that keeps me, my heart pumpin’ slower, not like du-du-du dudu-du. Not like everything is dangerous.” Here Sophia articulates a complex of seeing, looking, and feeling that characterizes her changed experience of being in the world. Though she is reflectively aware of this change and has no trouble identifying it and linking it to her experiences in Iraq, she also explains that it is “unconscious,” habitual; it is the way she feels comfortable, the way she has become, part of her tactile everydayness (Taussig 1991), her new ordinary way of encountering the world. Her particular vision gives her the abstract feeling of comfort and changes the feeling of her heart in her chest—it steadies her sense of herself in her body. And her newly educated eye, which allows her to see that “everything is dangerous,” also allows her to feel comfortable and “not like everything is dangerous.” This apparent incommensurability—that everything is dangerous and that she likes to feel it is not—points to the clash between ordinaries. There is the ordinary of being in supposedly safe spaces (like a coffee shop in New York) and the ordinary of being in supposedly unsafe spaces (like a combat hospital in Iraq). The incommensurability also points to the way that her new practice of seeing, her new vision of the world, keeps these two apparently incommensurate 144 

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ordinaries suspended together in a way that plays out in her feeling of herself as she moves through space. The taken-for-grantedness of safety is gone, and she must work to achieve the feeling of safety by recognizing potential danger. When our interview is over, Sophia and I walk together to the subway platform to wait for our respective trains. It is a relatively crowded afternoon, and, leading the way, I come to a stop in the middle of the widest part of the platform. Normally, when waiting for the subway I lean against a beam and look down the tracks or pace near the platform edge. But after our talk about Sophia’s experience moving and watching others move through space, after her small attempt to educate my eye, I think she might rather be in the middle, able to see on all sides, the main entrances to the platform easily visible. I am wrong. She fidgets a little and then asks if we can wait by the stairs; she can see better that way and will be “more comfortable.” In my attempt to see the space as she does, I haven’t noticed that in the widest part of the platform there is one staircase directly in front of her and one directly behind. From this vantage she can’t see all the points of entry or exit at the same time; only by turning her back on one is the other visible. In our interview, and again on the platform, she describes and demonstrates her experience of being back in “the normal life, with no guns, no nothing” in corporeal terms: sights, sounds, heart rate, and overall discomfort. She describes, and then on the platform enacts, the transformed way she senses and moves through space. She attributes a part of this transformation to her intense physical training, like the thirty pounds of muscle she packed onto her slight five-foot-two-inch frame. But she roots the balance of it in the visceral intensity of her experience downrange. It is not simply that Sophia has learned new skills of moving and seeing: she has undergone a deep ontological transformation. She explains her experience of reintegrating into “the normal life” as one of reconciling her transformed embodiment and experience of space with the incommensurate and socially reproduced hegemonic facts of space and comportment in the “normal” world. The normative experiences of a past there and a present here collide, and it is through her vision of the world that she navigates this collision. This collision becomes her new ordinary; she feels it in her body, in the growth and loss of muscle and the exertions of the heart. Unlike a more proxemic analysis, which might focus on military versus civilian ways of navigating space, a kind of cross-cultural misnavigation on movement  145

or the resonances of a misplaced discipline (Foucault 1995; Hall 1969), Sophia’s elaboration invokes an extracurricular transformation of her own body and also of her sensation of the world around her. Feeling, seeing, moving, being are all inseparable aspects of her transformed experience of the world. Even tactical practices of navigating space that can be linked directly to military training, like her mapping of exit routes, cannot be boiled down to discipline. The body on which disciplinary power acts cannot be separated from the seeing person who moves. Veterans render these normatively disattended activities of negotiating social space as tactical navigations. Sometimes it is training that introduces these particular disciplines of vision and movement. But I tell these stories not simply to highlight soldiers’ ability to move in such specialized ways. I tell them to describe soldiers’ experience of movement as suffused with their experiences of war zones, the way their experience of being and moving in one place has changed their experience of being and moving anyplace, including when they are not soldiers anymore. Movement here is not simply a question of physics. It is a worlding, with all that entails (Stewart 2007, 2010). It is a becoming and a making (Manning 2007). While it may be training or experience that disciplined these soldier bodies, it makes little sense to say simply that these techniques are “internalized.” The moving, seeing being experiences a disciplined exterior space as much as if not more than a disciplined feeling of its own body. Thus space itself is transformed, and not only is there a continuity of practices of moving and seeing that inhere in a particular soldier, but there is also a contiguity of space established between the there of war and the here of home. As the soldier marches from Tal Afar to D.C., so the distance between Tal Afar and D.C. is foreshortened. After 9/11 Gavin served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba, and I met him through some work I was doing with ivaw. Since he’d gotten out of the marines his life had been ungrounded, maybe even unhinged. He’d been homeless for a while and had tried to slit his wrists on the floor of a bus station, though without a sharp enough instrument he didn’t get very far. His new involvement with ivaw and the focus and fellowship he found there was, I have no doubt, lifesaving. After we’d known each other for a few months, Gavin suggested I might like to come with him to the local va hospital, where he wanted to get tested for depleted uranium poisoning.15 The hospital was about a fifteen-

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minute walk from the house where he was staying in D.C., and the route took us down small side streets and across some stretches of industrial landscape, all of which was made innocuous, even pleasant, by the warm summer sun. As we walked, we talked about Gavin’s frustrations related to getting tested for du poisoning and about how (and if) there was some way I could help him. We chatted about his recent trip home and his distress at the casual and disinterested way his more or less estranged family had treated him. We both seemed to attend more to the conversation than to our route; Gavin was angry and frustrated, and I was cautiously quizzical. We come to a large thoroughfare that has no traffic lights or pedestrian crossings. This is the usual route Gavin takes to the va, and clearly he knows it well. He has crossed this road at this spot many times in the four months he has been living in D.C. We stop at the curb. There aren’t any cars coming, but I wait for him to cross. Instead we just stand there, waiting, for nothing. I step forward. He immediately holds me back, stopping me from moving. Then he looks both ways (still no traffic) and escorts me across. Once we are on the other side, he jokes that people say he has a “mom arm.” He demonstrates by stretching his arm out in front of me across my body, stopping me in my tracks. He says he’s so cautious with traffic that he hates anyone who drives. I ask him to elaborate: “So, just then, I’m going to cross the street and you’re gonna stop me. What does that bring up for you? What’s in your head?” “Well,” he explains, “it’s that you’re going to get hit unless I’m there to provide, you know, extra security.” Since Afghanistan he needs to think about things like that, “extra security” to cross a city street. And not just streets but crowds too; he looks at them differently than he did before. “So things look different than they did before Afghanistan?” I ask. The answer is so obvious he is almost annoyed: “Of course. Everything is different.” He initially offers me an explanation of his actions that has been constructed by other people and that makes no reference to his experiences in the military or in Iraq or Afghanistan: people tell him he has a “mom arm.” But when I ask him to articulate his own experience in that moment, when he touches me to make me still as we stand together on the verge of movement, he invokes his military experience in the need to “provide extra security.” As he elaborates, it becomes clear that it is not military training that has caused him to move this way, like an unconscious muscle memory,

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a body acting on its own. Rather, like Sophia, Gavin brings together seeing and being in his explanation of movement. I ask him about appearances; he answers with essence. “Everything is different.” To him crossing a road is no longer the relatively simple task that it is to most of us; it is a potentially fatal act requiring special tactical support. The road is not simply part of a city’s infrastructure, not just a pathway; it is a site of extreme danger that requires special expertise to navigate. This is not the same as the regular appreciation of the danger of crossing a road inculcated in children by their mothers, as the “mom arm” diagnosis implies. There is no such cuteness for Gavin. His actions are not born of cautionary tales; they are born of visceral experience. The road is dangerous. He is different. These are not separable facts. One does not precede or cause the other. Everything is different. Later, as we are sitting in the va cafeteria, a worker changing the bag in the garbage can attached to our booth slams the lid. Gavin jumps in his seat, his eyes lose focus, and then he stares sharply at the table with his head down. For a second his face displays an intense anger, both wild and concentrated. In clinical terms, this experience would be called an exaggerated startle response. It takes a conscious and concerted effort for him to refocus and return to our interaction, to reengage with a shared present. The implications of that sound, of the reverberations of that slight impact through his seat are, to him, potentially grave. Because of his experiences, because of what he has seen and felt and done, Gavin knows that the material world is a tentative place. Like Sophia, he knows that bodies in motion can explode, that bodily integrity is not sacred. Gavin’s experiences in Afghanistan have transformed his experience of space, altering the limits of what is possible in it. Given what he knows and feels to be true, his response is not exaggerated at all. Like Sophia, Gavin’s lived, felt, experience of the world around him has been transformed. Though he more clearly attributes this to a change in the world rather than to his coming to understand its true nature, his and Sophia’s experiences are more similar than different. For both of them a new experiential knowledge about the vulnerability of solid objects, like bodies, cars, and buildings, has transformed their experience of seeing, feeling, and moving in the world.16 Common tropes used to describe the unsettling and disturbed experiences of returned veterans—“In his own head, he’s still in the jungle” or “She brought Iraq back with her”—might

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be seen as recognition of these kinds of transformations. But whereas these interpretations attempt to reinforce a model of distinct spaces—a certain geographical mapping of the possible—the materiality of soldiers’ experiences erodes that geography. Such comments also suggest an impenetrable boundary between the inside of a person and the outside of the world. But sensing bodies in motion belie these boundaries. These spaces and their contents bleed into each other. These “posttraumatic” movements are not the same as disciplinary effects (Foucault 1995), historical techniques of the self (Foucault 1988: 16–59), or professional ways of seeing (Goodwin and Goodwin 1992). Training is obviously important, but, both for those who are physically marked and those who aren’t, these different experiences of moving through space are explained as affects accreted from being in Iraq or Afghanistan. While there may have been an ontological before and after separated by basic training (which was rarely talked about at Walter Reed) or mobilization training (also hardly mentioned), there is clearly a before and after oriented around being downrange. We might characterize this shift as what Erin Manning (2007: xxi, 105) calls ontogenetic rather than ontological: a shift in the ways and selves bodies become and the worlds they make. Movement makes this shift apparent, emphasizing its materiality, corporeality, and sensuousness. But, following James, Sophia, and Gavin, we must also remain attentive to the sensibility of this ontogenesis, what it looks like and how it is seen, and remember that the form of being that emerges in movement is not only a self but also the world it inhabits. The (Dis)Placement of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Most, though not all, of the soldiers in these stories have been diagnosed with ptsd. I have avoided discursively marking them in this way or reinscribing their diagnosis in this text; instead I have attempted to describe soldiers’ variegated and tactile ontological transformations without dependence on the ptsd framework. The place I wish to give ptsd is a marginal one, within but not central to the experiences I have elaborated. Though soldiers engage with ptsd in a variety of clinical and intimate settings, if taken in isolation the diagnosis is of limited use in understanding the ramifying transformations that are at the heart of the particular vertiginous state of life within which these soldiers find themselves (Hautzinger

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and Scandlyn 2013). By engaging with the hegemony and the troubled history of ptsd at this place in the text, I hope to make clear its limits and to demonstrate some of the implications of its continued hegemony. Though connected to psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and even actuarial attempts to understand the nature of trauma and traumatic memory (Leys 2000; Young 1995a, 1995b), ptsd itself was created specifically to address the cluster of symptoms occurring in U.S. veterans returning from Vietnam that echoed the psychic suffering of soldiers of previous generations, especially the shell-shocked soldiers of World War I (Scott 1990; Young 1995a). The clinical diagnosis of ptsd was crafted for the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The dsm-iii was published in 1980 and represented an extreme shift toward scientifically verifiable, universal, and standard diagnoses and away from the clinically derived and qualitatively differentiated observations that underpinned previous editions (Beutler and Malik 2002; Gonçalves et al. 2002; Kirk and Kutchins 1992; Young 1995a: 94–107). As Allan Young (1995a: 106) notes, this shift “gave primacy to scientific truth over clinical reality, to noncontingent and generalizable forms of knowledge over local knowledge.” For ptsd this shift led to a growing focus on biological markers and treatments and an entrenchment of ptsd’s status as a single, coherent, verifiable, and discrete disorder. Consequently the most urgent aim of contemporary ptsd research is to help combat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this work focuses on brain imaging and the manipulation of brain chemistry.17 In part because of increased rates of diagnosis and the considerable public and private resources devoted to ptsd research and publicity, the constancy of ptsd in contemporary news stories about the effects of war on returning soldiers makes it the key concept for rendering soldiers’ personal transformations wrought by “combat trauma.” The pervading sense that war changes those who fight it has thus become rooted in an idea of transformation through trauma. In the context of U.S. military engagement, ptsd is the most legible form.18 Through this framing, unruly and unsteady reconfigurations of life and world are read through an understanding of trauma and traumatic transformation that posits clear breaks between the past of the war zone and the present of home and relies on binary dichotomies between pathologically injured minds and brains and symptomatic people, and “normal” people 150 

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who act in the world as if they had never been to war. But the ordinary experience of the posttraumatic soldier—those so diagnosed and those not— is not one easily captured by the symptomatology of ptsd in the dsm,19 the radically biologizing explanations of much current ptsd research, or the pathologizing monster-out-of-place soldier figure of many ptsd-tinged news stories about soldiers’ rocky homecomings. The state and character of being posttraumatic that I have described exceeds the limits of each of these variations on the inescapable ptsd theme. It is an emergent way of being in a world. It is the dangerous spaces through which soldiers move, the markedness that their bodies acquire in normative public space, the world that they can see with their new vision, feel with their new senses, which is simultaneously perceived, sensed, made, and responded to. The axis along which soldiers identify the transformations in their lives is sensuous, tactile, material, and affective rather than strictly behavioral or biomedical, and it may go beyond or not register within such a frame. Given the current parameters of psychiatric intervention, this discrepancy between ptsd and the experiences it names may not be surprising. But it is worth demonstrating, and perhaps insisting, that experience exceeds these parameters. For example, one afternoon while he was playing cards, the sound of a siren ringtone caused James to start and become panicked and angry. A ptsd frame would point to the observed fact of his disorderliness. His behavior would be pathologized as exaggerated, abnormal, an evident symptom of the disorder. But thinking through the analytics of movement, considering James—emplaced and embodied with his own ordinary modes of tactility, optical unconsciousness, ontogenesis, sensuous apprehension, and the worlds that his being makes sensible—it is on James’s own sense of this sound that I focus, on his experience of what happens in that moment and the worlds that collide and echo in it. At the time, his reaction led us to a conversation about what it sounded like in his quarters in Iraq, where the computerized voice of a woman, not a wailing siren, warned of incoming mortars. The big booms and pings and pops of various munitions became so normal that these sounds stopped signaling danger. But the sound of shrapnel, a sound James described as like gravel raining on a tin roof—that was scary. Then he described the scariest sound of all: the unbearably loud screaming of a tiny mortar that made a hole in the ground no bigger than an orange. Sound, size, and danger don’t correlate anymore. Loud and scary and harmless is not better than quieter and negligible and on movement  151

potentially devastating. James’s reaction to the siren ringtone may be untenable; it is disturbing to him and to those around him. But it is also sensible, born not out of a particular traumatic event or remembered sound but out of his tactile knowledge of the world. Furthermore I would cluster alongside this new way of hearing the variety of other sensuous transformations that a ptsd frame would not include. Because of his experiences, James no longer eats outside, but again this is not because of a particular traumatic event or association, not because eating outside triggers ptsd’s symptomatic states of arousal (though that is not to say it couldn’t). James doesn’t eat outside because he had to eat outside so much when he was in Iraq that the experience of eating outside is no longer connected to the great American barbeque or romantic Italian al fresco or any other pleasurable archetype. For James the experience of eating outside had been sensuously colonized by the taste of mres, the feel of the blazing heat of the Iraqi sun, and the inescapable presence of desert bugs. Because of this, he told me, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich eaten indoors now tastes better than prime rib eaten outdoors. Anticipating my incredulity, he insisted the sandwich actually tastes better, not that eating inside is metaphorically a sweeter or more delectable experience. This fact is part of his transformed self, a self that experiences a transformed world, a transformed world that is remade in the play of air on his tongue and skin and field of vision. Within the ptsd frame this aspect of James’s transformation would likely be separate from others, like the fact that the sound of a siren ringtone sends him into a state of panic and anger. The latter behavior is pathologized; the former sensibility is not.20 But the full array of transformations encompasses his transformed body, his transformed experience of objectification in the eyes of various others, the many facets of his transformed experience of movement through space, his knowledge about the violability of human life and human bodies, his recognition of the unimaginable as an imminent reality. This is not to say ptsd is irrelevant to an account of soldiers’ experiences. Given the record numbers of soldiers diagnosed with ptsd and its prevalence in public narratives about returning soldiers, it is a seminal part of these experiences (see Finley 2011). It does, however, raise the important question of what is to become of those experiences and those soldiers not diagnostically legible and disarticulated from those that are.

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ptsd treats ways of being in the world as symptoms, sequestering certain behaviors and assuming that their meaning can be understood apart from other, nonpathologized behaviors that are equally part of being posttraumatic, part of extra/ordinary afterwar living. It offers an explanation of being that is increasingly limited to certain visible surfaces of the brain. It effects a nominalization, transforming an ontogenetic self from -ing to thing (Taylor 2005: 745). Through the orthogonal arraignment of stories here, I suggest that ptsd can only be read as a facet of the polyhedral transformation that is under way. From the broader perspective of the analytics of movement, we can see this transformation marking all aspects of soldiers’ lives, infusing their ordinary sense of being in the world and linking, for example, the dimensions of corporeality, family, masculinity, sensuality, the material world, and one’s perception of it with a single, piercing thread. Being after Combat The experiences of transformation I have written about here are clearly about bodies, but never as simple or inert stuff nor as merely a metaphorical ground for more weighty concerns.21 They are about the ways that meaning is made by bodies seeing and being seen, but they are about many other things too. Rather than ask the allegorical questions of what these bodies mean, I have attempted to convey something of this distracted and collective experience of the tactile eye (Taussig 1991), this strange new ordinary that emerges for soldiers after combat and that lingers, haunting the possibility of any and every ordinary to come. I recall Sophia’s eyes darting back and forth for my eyes to follow and my own inability to see and know the space as she did. I recall James’s hand rising almost automatically to meet the outstretched stranger’s. As I move and move with and am moved by James, Gavin, Sophia, and others, I recall the feelings in my body, the feelings they recounted and displayed with me, and my own affective responses. I recall being touched and stilled, being on the verge of movement, moving together, and their own feelings of anticipation and action in the pit of a stomach, the racing of a heart and pounding of a chest, the burning of a muscle, the tightness of panicked attention felt somewhere behind the ears. These things are literal and meaningful, and, though I bring to their distractedness my own concentration, allegory does not get us very far.

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Pointing to this dissembling effect of allegory recalls the history of ptsd. Young (1995a) reminds us that trauma, a term originally reserved for physical wounds, was extended to psychological and emotional states not by analogy (“My psyche has been wounded as if it were my body”) but by bioscientific investigations into (and reifications of) the connections between bodily and cognitive or emotive responses to physically traumatic events. As I have noted, this biological lineage is alive and well in current psychological understandings of ptsd. While ptsd can be an important signifier for soldiers and veterans, sometimes precisely because of its medicalization (Finley 2008), the popularity of the diagnosis and its annexation by ideas of transformation that are contained by the organicity of the person is problematic. Ironically it is predicated on the inextricability of psyche and soma, while overdetermining and narrowing the field of intelligibility within which the altered experience of being after combat registers. Here, I have attempted not a reinstatement of analogy (trauma as an “as if”) but a thoroughgoing phenomenology that refuses easy distinctions between the social, biological, affective, ethical, cultural, and historical. As a point of ethnographic intervention, the analytics of movement thus opens to us the intimate corporeality of the ordinary, the radical intersub­ jectivity of interaction, and the affects of disciplined bodies moving through disciplined social space. What’s more, as the im/possibilities of linguistically communicating pain and suffering have long been of concern to those writing about experiences of violence (Daniel 1996; Das 1997; Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997; Scarry 1987), movement offers a point of entry into the way such experiences perdure that need not begin with the impossibility of discourse. In the context of experiences of violence, an analytics of movement offers a way to plumb experiences of transformation without subjecting the corporeal to the symbolic and that, in a gesture fundamental to anthropological understanding, leaves these subjective experiences more rather than less intact. My aim in bringing together stories that might seem to be of very different sorts is to show their continuity and place them all under the rubric of transformations wrought by the multiple violences of military action and current American modes of war making. Perhaps it is because I am not a clinician or bureaucrat that I have the luxury of refusing the tightly diagnostic categories that give rise to discreet and cannibalizing phenomena such as ptsd. But given the ways that such clinical practices ramify, fragmenting experiences, carving limbs and lobes from whole and wholly en154 

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fleshed people, I wonder if this mode of analysis ought to be such a luxury. As Butler (2009: 1) reminds us in laying out the foundations of a nonviolent critique of war based on questions of recognition and the possibilities of grief, frames of recognition and modes of apprehension matter; such things are “politically saturated. They are themselves operations of power,” and they delimit “the ‘being’ of life itself.” And as Das (2007: 210) notes of the importance of anthropological modes of addressing trauma in another context, “there is also the matter of too much being at stake in speaking carelessly or without tact on these matters.” Without undermining the clinical utility of ptsd, then, we might recalibrate the modes of attention and perception we bring to even the most mundane scenes of life after war, relying less on a lens of pathology, becoming sensitive to more than the grossest colors of trauma and attuned to the fuller range of transformations that disorient and reorient soldiers who inhabit a world suffused with the visceral knowledge of combat.

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5 intimate attachments and the securing of life

The Intimate Attachments of Life Across the multiple parts of this final chapter, I focus on the intimate work of making life in the present that might sustain life in the future. This work comprises a specific but messy field of intersecting tensions. We could name this field “personhood” or “gender” or “disability” or “sexuality” or “sociality” or “the body” or “life,” though none of these features encompasses the other, as naming the field would imply. Intimacy, however, is a helpful name for the connective tissue through which this field is coordinated and given body and shape. This chapter follows this fascia as it loops around and slides into the variously named features of this fleshy social field.

To be clear, by intimacy I invoke a live political relation between bodies whose animating force is the field of sexuality (Berlant 2000; Berlant and Warner 1998; Povinelli 2006).1 Within the liberal regime of personhood that describes the aspirationally ordinary life that is pulling things along here, the social and political sexualization of bodies and their relations is essential to the making of proper (or pathological) forms of social life. A problem of intimacy is thus a problem of the attachments that make and sustain forms of life, and being attached and being intimate have multiple implications in this rehabilitative context, as various kinds of attachments enable, constrain, and threaten modes of life in the making. In this space attachments engage Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2006: 3) endlessly productive question: “Which forms of intimate dependency count as freedom and which count as undue social constraint?” The weight of this question becomes especially clear as debility entails new forms of dependency that put personhood at stake (Kleinman 2010; Livingston 2005), and raises specters of abandonment, isolation, and solitude, social conditions that, in profoundly precarious situations, appear ready to fulminate to the point of death (e.g., Biehl 2005). Questions of intimacy thus attend to the sexualized, person-making, and gendering arrangement of bodies, desires, touch, dependency, and care. They are also politically and philosophically deep questions of the contours of human life, life that is always bios and zoē and always spans multiple bodies and takes form across their attachments, proximities, withdrawals, and relative isolations. The way intimacy is tangled around contradictions of heteronational ideals of independence is particularly evident in this context, where, on the one hand, an individual who can maintain his own body is valued as a full and wholly vital person who has escaped the pathologized dependencies of disability—dependencies that bump a person down a notch or two on a normative hierarchy of animacy (Chen 2012); on the other hand, it is precisely within the dependencies that constitute conjugal couplehood that proper personhood and life are supposed to be secured for the future. In other words, although at Walter Reed a proper body was supposed to be a self-sufficient one, one that could sleep and wake, walk and eat, live and breathe on its own, it was paradoxically in those attachments and dependencies between soldiers and properly arrayed significant others that such self-sufficiency could be made to appear.2 All these articulations of intimacy cut across each other such that, for example, masculinizing sexuality registered as the opposite of solitude, and the intimate attachments of con158 

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jugal couplehood were held to like lifelines, even when they also imperiled a life or knocked a body to the ground. Because injured soldiers at Walter Reed are negotiating new configurations of family and fraternity, configurations that are, and are about, and are occasioned by new bodily forms, in thinking about intimacy it is all the more difficult and all the less useful to separate questions of the social form of a life from questions of the fleshy life forms that hold its shape. Something I understand as essentially important in the experience of making life at Walter Reed is damaged if we insist on distinguishing the danger of or to a social form of life from the danger of or to a body or particular arrangement of flesh. I am working against such separation in my thinking and writing about the enfleshment of life, arraignments of life, configurations of bodies, the dependencies and attachments between them, and the kinds of touch, desire, aloneness, withdrawal, and presence that make up and undo both life and the deadly hazards encountered at its loose ends. This is also a more general attempt to blur the lines and vectors of causation between biological life and death and social life and death, which are often seen as separate but straightforwardly comorbid conditions. I am suggesting that we cannot even think about one without also thinking about the other because the thresholds of social death (radical isolation or the undoing of all intimacy) and biological life (which is never sustained in isolation from others [Hird 2009], which is always “more than one but less than two” [Haraway 2008: 131]) necessarily run together. And I am entreating us to remember that, even when we find it useful to distinguish them, this robust relationship between social decay and biological vitality is not always singular or straightforward, and its direction is not always the same. Threats to Life, Part I: Solitude Is Deadly In other spaces of military life, soldiers are thickly constituted through their multiple attachments to (specific, involuntary groupings of) other soldiers and yet are also thinly constituted through the normative love of husband and wife that is cultivated and tensely abides in the midst of army life (MacLeish 2013: 134–78). Walter Reed’s in-durable sociality makes the usual thickness of military life recede into the past, and while injured soldiers and their families imagined a future where self and life were secured within “that thinnest embrace of the conjugal couple” (Povinelli 2006: 46), the extra/ordinary present at Walter Reed was often inhospitable to the arraignments such life requires. intimate attachments  159

During deployment death can be waiting on the other end of the doorbell or the telephone, as wives attest (see MacLeish 2013: 96); at Walter Reed the nearness of death takes many new forms, from the unstable bodies and looming infections that keep soldiers’ futures unknowable to the usually quiet knowledge that these men are intimately familiar with both killing and dying. In the impossibly clear light and anemic tones of life after the haze and frenetic quality of war, living with those experiences threatens to seal a soldier in on himself in a way that echoes the profound doubt and the limits of communication and recognition that may characterize the expression of pain (Daniel 1996; Scarry 1987), though it also may not see (Livingston 2012: 120–21). Again and again the guys at Walter Reed would say how stupid it was to talk to psychiatrists who couldn’t understand anything because they hadn’t been there. Without swapping war stories, the knowledge of mutual understanding was always in the air, and it was important to them to be around others who understood their condition through a hard-won empathy. The weight of not only their past but their present and remote future seemed incommunicable in any familiar genre, but also seemed more than what could be borne alone. In the privacy of sleep it would wreak havoc, causing nightmares so bad that if soldiers couldn’t take their sleep meds for one reason or another, they would rather stay up all night. Because of concerns about suicide and the mixing of meds and alcohol, if their nma went on leave, soldiers were not supposed to spend the night alone, and spending too much time alone was widely understood to be a sign that one might be at risk of hurting oneself or someone else. Amid emergent arraignments of flesh and sociality, solitude was sometimes posited as a limit of life. Yet it was also an undeniable feature of life at Walter Reed, and not only did concerns about solitude sometimes help bolster life, but solitude itself could have a life-preserving effect. alec, and the specter of dying alone Alec had been an army medic when he was blown up outside Fallujah in 2007, about six months before I met him. The ied explosion had pinned him under the vehicle he’d been in. Both his legs had been shattered, and his back, arm, and jaw broken. He seemed to get better, well enough to take leave back home in the Midwest, but his bone infection flared up while he was away and put him in the hospital. Though he was nearly ten years older than most of them, he sometimes got advice from the other guys at Fisher House about the 160 

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pros and cons of amputation. Sitting in the den, just off the kitchen, on bar stools or in their wheelchairs, they explored the pragmatic facts of their injuries. Was it better to have two more or less useless legs or no legs and a pair of prosthetics? How much difference would an above- versus belowthe-knee amputation make? They took into consideration the different kinds of physical pain each option represented. They considered the different tolls that each form of mobility would take on their bodies over time, considerations that drew on the few examples of more seasoned amputees they saw around them, including the emcee of the Friday night steak dinners and one of the prosthetists who worked in the hospital’s lab. Often Alec’s younger brother, Steve, a trained chef who worked as a roofer, stayed with him as his nma. But Steve had to get back to work and his own life from time to time, so their father, kind and quiet, would fill in when he could. Though it was against the rules, there were often days and nights when neither Steve nor their father, who also worked as a roofer and had medical problems of his own, dating back to an accident on the job, could be there. Then Alec would break the rules and fend for himself, eating a lot of cereal and sometimes forgetting to get to the pharmacy in time to refill his prescriptions. For his bone infection he took iv antibiotics that he hooked up to his picc line—those little yellow balls that reminded me of rounded pineapple grenades. They were so strong, he said, that when they injected them without the picc line at the hospital in the Midwest, the nurses had to use a different vein every time because the drugs just ate them up. The fanny pack he carried with him was full of innumerable other prescriptions, hard for anyone to keep track of really, and, like most guys at Walter Reed, he took sleeping pills every night. He told me once about a dream he had. He’d called it a dream, but it wasn’t quite; it was the first thing he remembers after being taken out of Iraq. He’d woken up in the hospital. It was nighttime and dark. He saw his legs suspended in the air in front of him. He quickly realized what had happened: he’d been captured by Iraqis and they were going to cut him up and sell off his body parts. He panicked. His only thought was of escape. He scanned the room, trying to think of a way out, to make a plan. Just as he started moving, struggling against the traction apparatus with his broken back, just as he was about to rise up out of bed and make a break for freedom, a nurse came in and managed to explain to him where he was. She saved his life, he said. He was sure that if he had managed to get out of bed he would have crashed to the floor and died. intimate attachments  161

It was during one of the in-between nma times, his solitary cereal days, when I came into the Fisher House around 9:00 a.m. and Erin told me they’d had to call for an ambulance an hour earlier. They’d found Alec nearly unconscious in his bed. She and some other Fisher House family members had been in the kitchen. As she was making breakfast she became aware of an alarm clock that wasn’t being shut off. She followed the sound to Alec’s door and knocked, but there was no answer. She knocked harder and harder and kept banging until she realized someone was going to have to go inside. Most people knew how to break in to a Fisher House room with a credit card or go in through the window of the first-floor rooms like Alec’s. But instead Erin got the Fisher House manager to come with her master key, even though people avoided the manager as much as possible and even though she was the last person anyone wanted involved in anything other than business as usual. Erin told me she had done that because she was afraid to go into the room alone. She expected Alec to be dead. The others who had been around that morning thought the same thing. And it was the first thing that occurred to me too, as Erin was describing the blaring alarm clock that had been the only response from behind Alec’s door as she pounded on it. The manager went in and tried to rouse him, but he wouldn’t wake and wouldn’t move. Finally, Erin said, he opened his eyes a bit, but couldn’t quite keep them open. That is when they called for an ambulance that came and took him to the hospital. Throughout the morning we tried to piece together what had happened. His room was a mess; there was dirty laundry strewn about the floor. He was without an nma. Some said maybe he’d seemed withdrawn recently, maybe spending too much time in his room. A consensus emerged: it had been a suicide attempt.3 But Alec was back at the Fisher House before lunch. If anyone at the hospital had thought it was a suicide attempt, he’d still be there, possibly on the locked psych ward and probably for a few days at least. When I asked him what happened, if he was okay, he told me, in his gregarious and exaggerated way, that it was no big deal. He said he’d just taken his sleep meds too late at night; it was nothing but a schedule snafu. He smiled and rolled his eyes as he told me, a caricatured dismissal of my concern. Alec often mixed sarcasm with sincerity; his quick wit was sometimes deadpan, sometimes over the top. It left me unable to fully characterize what happened, unable to know whether I should read his dismissal of my concern at face value or as a wink. But he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and it seemed like it might be hazardous to pry. 162 

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The inaccessible truth of Alec’s overdose aside, both that event and his waking dream testify to the dangers of being alone at Walter Reed. In the gossipy hours before he returned from the hospital, it was largely out of solitude that we fashioned the suicide theory; in retrospect, it seemed to some that he had been too much by himself. It was in no small part because he’d spent the night alone that Erin imagined him dead in his bed, so far gone from the blaring alarm. In the nearness of death that characterizes extra/ordinary life at Walter Reed, it can be aloneness that brings death closest, and this deathly potential is both about a precarious body left unattended and a precarious life unmoored from attachments that might secure it. These forms of precariousness are linked, and the link is generally apprehended at Walter Reed. This made it reasonable to think Alec might be dead in his room, and it is part of why soldiers are not allowed to spend the night alone, why they are supposed to have a Battle Buddy stay with them if their nma cannot, substituting a familiar kind of military fraternity for the future-oriented attachments of family and temporarily fashioning a different configuration of obligated bodies to ward off death that was understood to be more possible for a soldier alone at night. Though it is a heightened example, Alec’s dream also speaks to the dangerous aloneness of nighttime. In his dream his life was gruesomely threatened, his knowledge of the previously unimaginable horrors of war lending themselves to a new and, to him, entirely plausible scenario of organ theft. And because he is alone in his hospital bed, the movements he makes threaten to end his life given the fragile state of his body. Amid this combination of the nearness of death and the precariousness of biological life, Alec requires company for survival. Company is a biosocial relation. It can be too hard to weave the frayed edges of sustainable life back together on one’s own. People do it, of course, even those single soldiers who avoid injuries that require long rehabilitation in the presence of others. As suicide rates among active-duty soldiers and young veterans climb higher than ever before it seems that life can be unsustainable, but also that seemingly unsustainable life remains for many.4 daniel and the specter of death with others Daniel was not often around. When he was, he sometimes smiled in a shy and polite way and never said much. When Sam, his wife, managed to get him parked on the couch in the den, he sat silently, maybe scowling a little, maybe just sitting. Sometimes he smiled at their son, Little J, who, even intimate attachments  163

though he wasn’t yet a year old, looked just like Daniel and had his same charming smile. Daniel’s leg had been badly damaged in an ied blast. Soon after he arrived at the Fisher House, it became clear that it wasn’t going to get any better. He used crutches to get around, and, despite the diagnosis from his doctors, Sam’s gentle counsel, and advice from other soldiers in the house, he didn’t want his leg amputated. Instead he followed the advice of his parents: to pray and trust that the Lord would heal him. I know all this because Sam told me. When Daniel wasn’t in his room, it was clear that he didn’t want to talk to me, or to anyone else for that matter. Even in the company of others, he often managed to be alone. At one point at the Fisher House we tried to get into the habit of making communal dinners, using recipes from a few of the soldiers’ moms. We did Filipino one night, Mexican another. Daniel never wanted to join us, and no friendly invitation or wafting aroma of empanadas could coax him out of his room. Even though it was against the rules, Sam often shuttled food to him, shuffling down the hall with a plate of chicken nuggets or a grilled cheese sandwich with mayonnaise, the way she’d taught herself to make it. Daniel’s preference for being alone was cause for concern. Other guys in the house tried to get him to hang out in the parking lot and work on their cars, something he loved to do before he was hurt. But even this passion and these gestures of fraternal attachment could hardly pull him into shared space. The day they managed to convince him to go to the mall and buy a gps, it was big news in the house. When he got back we tried not to make a big deal about it, afraid we’d scare him off. No one needed to explain the nature of this concern to anyone else. The deathly quality of solitude was common sense, though the imagined manifestations of death were sometimes different for Alec than for Daniel because of the intimate attachments Daniel had and the bodies of significant others who surrounded him; his wife, their son, and Sam’s sister, Vanessa, all of whom shared one room with him. When guys tried to coax Daniel out to the parking lot, it was a way to thicken his life by making it more collective, more shared, a prophylactic sociality that might prevent the kind of solitude that threatened Alec’s life when he was alone at night. In a different concatenation of death and solitude, Sam and Vanessa wouldn’t leave Little J alone with Daniel. His responsiveness to the pull of the intimate attachments that bound him was unreliable, insensitive to the very obligations that were working to secure his life. If something happened, we all imagined Daniel might let it. He might let Little J fall, let him choke, let him die. 164 

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In the way that it entailed deeply altered and unfamiliar socialities, such solitude was also read as a sign of unpredictability. No matter how he tried, Daniel couldn’t sever the ties by which he was linked to those around him, especially his wife, son, and sister-in-law. But his attempts to shake them off made those ties, the very ones sustaining his social and biological life, seem hazardous (a hazard that was the inverse of Alec’s aloneness). They became the sites of mutual vulnerability, and as he attempted to gouge out the anchors that held them fast, the diffuse concern about unpredictable, maybe even violent social contact proved well founded. Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury cartoonist, comes by one night to sign copies of his books The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time. He had donated the proceeds from both books to the Fisher House Foundation. He sets up at one of the big round wooden tables in the dining room, and some of us putter around eating Chinese food off paper plates and chatting. Some vips have come along. There is a visiting general who “coins” a couple of guys, palming his personal medallions and stealthily sliding them into soldiers’ hands as he firmly grips and shakes them. It seems like there are two nights happening simultaneously: in the dining room is a low-key performance of patriotism and gratitude; in the rest of the house the ordinary reconstitution of precarious lives goes on. Vanessa is telling me that the night before, they had left Little J alone in the room with Daniel while she and Sam were hanging out in the den. Little J was asleep, and Daniel said he felt up to it. He’d seemed a little better lately. It all seemed okay. She’d gone in to check on them. As soon as she opened the door, Daniel jerked back, pulling a pillow away from Little J’s head. Vanessa screamed at him, demanding to know what he was doing. He said he was just trying to make Little J more comfortable. Vanessa said that was bullshit: he was trying to smother him with a pillow. It was obvious. Vanessa was sure that if she hadn’t gone to check on them, Little J would be dead. She’d taken Little J out of the room. She’d told Sam. She was furious. But they didn’t know what else to do. The consequences of reporting it to an mp (military police officer) or his co (commanding officer) would probably make things worse rather than better, they reasoned. But they wouldn’t leave Little J alone with Daniel anymore. As I listen to Vanessa, back in the dining room that other night continues. Trudeau signs books and talks to soldiers and families. The general and his aides hover. intimate attachments  165

Then there is a ruckus outside, some shouting, but not enough to disrupt the casual occasion in the dining room, with its uncanny hominess and almost cozy feeling. It seems to be coming from the parking lot. It is followed by a silence. The assistant manager (who is well liked and very friendly with most of the Fisher House residents) goes out the side door to check. He doesn’t come back right away. A few minutes later I follow him and find him standing next to Sam, who is leaning on their car, her eyes red and still dripping with tears. Daniel had tried to leave, to get into their rental car and take off. Sam had tried to stop him. In his condition, with his useless leg, his medications, and in his wild state, it was hard to imagine how he could survive any length of time behind the wheel. But she’d kept that to herself. Instead she’d reminded Daniel of a more neutral fact: soldiers aren’t allowed to drive the cars rented for their families by the Yellow Ribbon Fund. He insisted he needed to leave. She blocked his way, stood in front of him and insisted he could not drive the car. That’s when he lifted up one of the crutches he’d already tossed in the trunk and, with all his might, swung it at her, hitting her square on the side of the head. Then, dropping that crutch on the ground and leaving the other sticking out of the trunk, he’d taken off limping painfully into the contained darkness of Walter Reed. The side of Sam’s face was red. She said her ear hurt and pulled back her hair for me to take a look. It had taken the brunt of the blow and was already severely swollen. She said she couldn’t hear too well. She was hurt and angry and worried about Daniel. But despite her tears, she was also calm, letting the events unfold, not fighting them, not even especially shocked at them. We knew Daniel wouldn’t get far. She could have her ear looked at in the hospital. Vanessa was there to take care of Little J. It was almost as if things weren’t so different than they had been before, when violence—particularly violence that takes intimates as its object—registered in the present only as a concern about what might happen tomorrow or the day after or sometime in the unknowable future. I went inside and helped clean up the leftover sesame string beans as the book-signing wound down undisturbed. During the night they found Daniel. He hadn’t even made it to the front gate. They put him on the locked psych ward for three days. When we had passed the ward on the hospital tour, our tour guide, Colonel Collins, had said, “War is trauma. Some of the people [mental health workers] taking care of them wouldn’t have performed as well.” On the second day Sam

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reluctantly went to visit Daniel, but only because she needed the car keys. He said he had them and would give them only to her. Now that he was locked away, in an enforced solitude, an isolation of someone else’s design, he used the little leverage he had left to pull her to him. He told her it was horrible in there, that he didn’t belong there. He also told her that he didn’t have the keys, that he threw them into the grass that night. He didn’t seem entirely sure why. Daniel is made to talk to a psychiatrist, and Sam goes with him a couple of times. Later she explains to me what his desperate need for solitude was about. He told her that the whole time he’d been at Walter Reed, ever since he’d left Iraq, when he looked into anyone’s face he knew they were trying to kill him. This was why he stayed in their room. This was why he never went to the mall. This was what he saw when he looked at Little J. Every face was deadly. In a disturbing twist on Levinasian ethics, where the face of the other is an injunction against murderous violence (Butler 2004: 27–32; Levinas 1985: 87), for Daniel, the face-to-face encounter was a moment of kill or be killed. Every face was a face of death. That night he’d tried to take off in a desperate attempt to save himself. But also to save those whose faces he couldn’t help but see, those most intimate to him. Solitude had seemed like the only possible continuation of life, the only way to avoid death. But faced with the decayed sociality of the psych ward—those dangerously thin lives that seemed to have come unmoored from even the battered anchors he still had—he did his best to be with others, getting Sam to come to him. He did his best to feel the tug of intimate dependency as one of desire rather than niggling vulnerability. He wasn’t particularly good at this, but after he got out of the psych ward things were a bit better. Eventually he stopped going to the psychiatrists, complaining that all they wanted to talk about was Iraq, but he kept taking his new meds. His need for solitude was less overwhelming, his enfleshed life not quite properly made but more securely attached, less death-bound. Though he still rarely spent time with other soldiers, now it wasn’t because their faces were a threat to his life. It was, at least in part, because he felt guilty that he wasn’t as badly injured as some of them were and was worried that they’d think he didn’t have a right to be there; in place of a need to sever the intimate attachments that were maintaining his life, there was fear that the varied attachments available to him might be untenable, his flesh somehow the wrong kind to be stabilized by them.

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This story of Daniel, the way death mediated his relationship to his wife and baby son and the way solitude was both a sign of potential death and also an unsustainable refuge from it, is exceptional. It describes a rare instance in which the proximities of death confronted a soldier with the choice between a social death of radical solitude and a biological death of sociality and attachment, making any mode of life all but unthinkable. But as an exceptional case it speaks to, and even demonstrates, the habits and tacit understandings of certain social regularities at Walter Reed. Though people at Walter Reed hardly ever do what he did, Daniel’s solitude was readily legible to those around him as a sign of deadly danger. His explanation that everyone around him—even his baby boy—was trying to kill him was instantly comprehensible, even to Sam, and no one I spoke with ever called it into question. Daniel tried to retreat into solitude because otherwise he would kill or be killed. Though his solitude seemed deathly to others, to Daniel it had seemed the only sanctuary from death. Although (despite the overabundance of media coverage) it is exceedingly rare that such potential death should become actual, families at Walter Reed nonetheless live with such possibilities as extra/ordinary facts of life. In the face of Daniel’s life-threatening solitude, Sam did what she could to help him stay alive, tending to the strained attachments that bound them to each other, bringing him food, pulling him gently so that even when he refused, he might still feel the line linking him to life, even if that life line had also been implicated in deadly forms of isolation. Though she often left him alone, Sam did not abandon him altogether to the structures of the military and its various zones of isolation, both locked and unlocked. Her continued presence, her refusal to grant him the social death he first wanted and then, on the psych ward, feared, might be thought of as a wifely prerogative, an example of good old American standby-your-man-ness, or as the distorted response of a battered woman. But none of those frames allows for the complexity of Sam’s mode of living and her connection to Daniel. Nor are such frames up to the task of conveying Daniel’s own desiccated enfleshment and profound vulnerability. Both before and after that night, Sam left Daniel alone, sometimes in acquiescence to his wishes, sometimes in ignorance of them, sometimes despite them, sometimes out of love, sometimes out of anger, sometimes simply because she had something else, something better or more necessary to do. Sometimes she dragged him out, for all the same reasons. She was always both

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attached to him and self-possessed, and she understood the fully biosocial affects of her decisions to leave him alone and to be with him. Months later Sam told me that she had forbidden Daniel to trade his rifle (which he’d had before his service) for his cousin’s two pistols when he was on leave in Alabama. She’d said, “What if late at night I’m coming out of the bathroom and you wake up and you think you’re in Iraq. Or what if you lose it with Little J? You could shoot us, and then we’ll be in the paper just like everybody else.” She said it as a matter of fact, because that’s what it was, something so seemingly ordinary that it seemed to happen to “everybody else.”5 Managing this deadliness was part of making life together and continued to be, even after the depths of Daniel’s solitude receded. In this sense what Daniel might “lose” late at night or alone with Little J is more than that interior quality we tend to reflexively call “self-control.” What is lost here, even if just for a moment, is his attachment to his wife, to his son, that secures Daniel’s life within the intimate relations of a normative domestic present, a present where his own body, his life, is obligated to others through relations of heteronormative love and not through deadly imperatives and intimacies of war. Threats to Life, Part II: Intimacy, Kin, and the Conjugal Couple In a particular amplification of the more broadly discernible “dilemma of disabled masculinity” (Shuttleworth, Wedgwood, and Wilson 2012), enfleshments of self-sufficiency for male war amputees in the United States have always been tightly bound to normative configurations of heteronational masculinity and shaped by liberal ideals of self-sufficiency and independence, both of which have been central to rehabilitation in the context of the U.S. military (Linker 2011) and to the problematic of disability and personhood in the United States more broadly (Davis 2002). In the early twentieth century this masculinizing, person-habilitating self-sufficiency and independence seems to have been especially vested in ideals of productive able-bodiedness that could easily appear contained within each individuated and working injured soldier body (Linker 2011; see also Jain 1999). But in the post-9/11 era conjugal couplehood is positioned as the keystone of sufficient forms of life. This means, among other things, that self-sufficiency and independence very explicitly entail a properly intimate attachment between two bodies. It also means that while the entailments of

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independence and self-sufficiency are certainly not exclusively sexual, they are explicitly sexual and are supposed to be secured for the future by the enduring embrace of the conjugal couple (see Wool 2015).6 At Walter Reed the pull of this social form was sometimes explicit and sometimes more subtle: the matc included a family room with a small kitchen, table, and chairs where soldiers and their families could practice cooking and eating together as part of occupational therapy; the rules of the nma program reinforced heteronational family configurations and foregrounded these as the primary social mode, displacing the thick homosociality of active-duty military life. Stories about seeing wives or girlfriends for the first time after injury often included descriptions of soldiers’ sexual desire for them; the nickname “Walter Breed” played on the heterosexuality that pervaded the place and on the future possibility of a normative nuclear family, both anchored in conjugal couplehood. In these and many other ways the relation between the extra/ordinary present at Walter Reed and the aspirational future that pulled it along was woven out of the sexualized and gendered attachments of heteronational intimacy understood to reliably fashion a well-founded self. Sexuality—inextricable from bodily touch and from the live political relation of intimacy—is thus deeply woven into the negotiations around remaking self and flesh in relation to significant others. It was pervasive, and both soldiers and their wives or girlfriends read the absence of sex as a sign that other modes of caring touch were fraying the very intimate attachments that made such caring touch possible in the first place. This centrality of an ideal form of sex (i.e., the conjugal) to a form of rehabilitated life (i.e., the normative ordinary) is a feature of a much broader liberal configuration of intimacy that links sexual touch with the possibilities of a kind of love (i.e., true) that can fortify life by founding selves fully and truly in enduring sexualized pairs, as Povinelli (2006) has highlighted. In other words, the “intimate event” of true love cements conjugal couplehood, which is a reliably stable seat of full liberal humanity, even while it remains a moving target (175–236).7 Within the ambit of this “empire of love” (Povinelli 2006) there also are countless intimacies that are made pathological because they bind together the wrong kinds or number of people, or because they are promiscuous and do not bind people enough, or because they bind people but are not properly intimate. There are attachments too multiple and thick, not yielding enough to the conjugal couple, to found proper selves. And there are pairs that may conjugate two people, in the sense of yoking them together, but 170 

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may not be sexualized and are thus beyond the pale of conjugal couplehood and its proper self. While there is something about the fraternity of military life that tends to resemble the former, the latter describes the problem of having an nma who is not your conjugal partner. Though it also describes the problem of having an nma who is your conjugal partner, because the forms of touch that constitute being an nma often work against the forms of touch that constitute the intimate relations of the conjugal pair. So perhaps what it describes most of all is the tyranny or difficulty or cruelty (in Berlant’s [2011] sense) of founding a normatively ordinary and properly intimate life and subjecthood within this empire of love when your body requires too many forms of care and touch and attention. Part of the force of conjugal couplehood here comes from the fact that it is also a properly gendering configuration of bodies. The normative forms of masculinity that are so important to the arrangement of ordinary life after Walter Reed are not properties of a body alone. In addition to generally being iterative and performative and discursively made manifest (Butler 1993), they are specifically inseparable from the sexualized social form of couplehood. In this situation where the masculinity of a body is so open to question—where it constitutes a dilemma—masculinity is most securely refashioned not through the work of or on a body alone but through the attachments and forms of touch that make up the conjugal couple. Awash in the peculiar masculinity of the military, various vernaculars of sexuality, like dick jokes and rumors of promiscuity, slid by at Walter Reed without any special comment. But in the context of their reconfigured bodies and the relationships (especially) with wives and mothers that help sustain and are mediated through them, masculinity was made a more or less explicit site of life-making intervention and was inextricable from normalizing forms of sexual touch and pleasure and the reproductive future-making capacities of the body.8 I understand this as part of the reason there are so many prescriptions for and uses of erectile dysfunction drugs among young married soldiers at Walter Reed. The story of Charlie, injured by an efp, which I recounted in chapter 1, is a good example of the rush to prop up heteronormatively attached masculine life in this way. Such explicitly sexual medical work surfaced incidentally, as when Carl, a recently married double amputee on his way out of Walter Reed in my first month there, sat on the counter in the Fisher House kitchen, his two prosthetic legs dangling in front of the cupboard below, and described his frustration that, so close to leaving, he’d developed a nagging infection in one of his intimate attachments  171

stumps. Then, just when he was thinking, “What the fuck can go wrong now?,” he started pissing blood. This was attributed to an interaction between the various drugs he was on. He specified that while they’d switched his antidepressant from Prozac to Zoloft, they kept him on Viagra. He was still pissing blood. That drugs like Cialis, Levitra, and Viagra are used as a kind of prosthetic masculinity points to the fact that masculinity was central to rehabilitated forms of life at Walter Reed, and more specifically to the form of heteronormative sexual intercourse, that very specific bodily practice, which was central to the normative forms of reproductive masculinity that were so key to the remaking of men at Walter Reed. This ideal masculinity can’t be understood as a property of a body; it is an emergent quality of a specific arrangement of multiple bodies governed by political feelings (Cvetkovich 2012) like sexual desire and always also public structures of sex and intimacy (Berlant 2000; Berlant and Warner 1998). But, and here’s the rub, the bodies and relations that are the social and material stuff of these arrangements that the emergence of masculinity entails, are the very stuff that is so unsteady, in flux, and precarious at Walter Reed. Soldiers there often inhabit a space between a mode of living embedded in obligations of kin (and, to a lesser degree, other thickening affiliations) and one embedded in the carnality of the conjugal couple, especially as they reorient themselves to new possibilities of living in the midst of new forms of dependency that tie them to parents, siblings, and partners. While soldiers might find or consolidate love into conjugal couplehood at Walter Reed, they might also feel their relationships with wives and girlfriends transformed as the strains and mess of what gets named caregiving gets in the way of previous modes of sexual contact at the heart of the selffounding intimate event. Sometimes the transformation of this kind of intimate touch would contribute to the end of attachment. But attachments were never clear-cut, and with the looming deadliness of solitude, such self-constituting attachments were worked on in myriad ways, from talk therapy to erectile dysfunction drugs to time spent living apart.

tisha was a midwestern mother of a soldier who lost both legs and who, like Daniel, seemed to be too much by himself. She told me she was surprised that any wives or girlfriends managed to stick around, guessing that it must be harder for them than for mothers. She explained that when 172 

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her son got angry at her, she pushed back and put him in his place. Evoking the undoable nature of blood ties in normative American reckonings of kinship (Schneider 1980), Tisha felt the density and depth of their attachment was enough to absorb whatever pounding it might take. But in young wives she recognized that “thinnest embrace of the conjugal couple” (Povinelli 2006: 46) and wondered what it could be that sustained such a configuration of life. Tisha’s concern about the thinness of conjugal couplehood also hints at the ways that other modes of military family life can be broad and thick and hard to shake, as MacLeish (2013: 144–45, 149–55, 160–65) has shown. Vanessa told me a story about talking to her father on the phone on 9/11. He was an army recruiter and she was in high school in Georgia, at one of the few nonmilitary schools she and Sam attended growing up as army brats. When news of the planes hitting the Twin Towers filtered through the school that morning, she got a call from her father, who was in an airport. She screamed at him over the telephone to get out of his uniform, worried that if the United States were under attack, he would be a target or perhaps be called on or expected to do something dangerous. To calm her he said he would get off the phone, go into a bathroom, change into civilian clothes, and call her back. The other kids in school were worried for her and her father because he might be deployed, but they didn’t understand why she had yelled at him to change out of his uniform. She lamented the fact that she’d been at a regular public school that day. She knew that if she’d been at a military school, this form of family concern would be shared. This concern was embedded in things that would have been common knowledge, or a common sense, which would have been shared among members of the extensive military family but which were insensible to those around her that day. She said, “I could tell you then that we were going to war. Some people would be heading off in twenty-four hours, and everyone else would be going within six weeks.” On that day when the whole nation was supposed to have been brought together as if by a shared family tragedy, she felt herself carved away from the wholeness of that imagined community by her military attachments, which bound her to the specific exposures of her father’s body and the bodies of all soldiers. Her experience of 9/11 was one in which, as the daughter of an nco (noncommissioned officer), she felt the breadth and thickness of attachments that separated her from unrelated civilians and an uncommonness intimate attachments  173

that made those attachments harder to bear. This feeling of knowing things that only some similar others do is one experience of this genealogical side of military life. It pulls soldiers and officers and their families together into a common lot and into the service of war. These diffuse connections that subject people to all the things it means to be military—even if they’re not service member themselves—are part of what make military life deeply, thickly social, part of what gives “army family” a cast of kin, or more than kin (MacLeish 2013: 155). As James put it to me, the guys he served with in Iraq, “they’re closer than your wife.” The conjugal couple exists within this set of broader intimacies even as it poses a threat to them, and the significance of the dyad of the soldier and his wife is just as important as the tension between the exclusive intimacy of that dyad and the army’s diffuse homosociality and organizationally enforced interconnectedness (MacLeish 2013: 134–79). It is not a coincidence that James describes his relationship with the guys from his unit, guys with whom he is not in regular contact, specifically as “closer than your wife.” Despite the army’s recruitment campaigns based on ideas of self-sufficiency and individual performance, excellence, and technical skill (nicely condensed in its former slogan, “Army of One”), being alone is not part of a “healthy” military life. In these ways, before soldiers get to Walter Reed, their modes of living are marked by a simultaneous emphasis on autological selfhood (Povinelli 2006) and collective affiliation, both of which are forged through heteronational and fraternal love within and sometimes against military familial attachments. As soldiers engage in projects of remaking themselves at Walter Reed, they do so in the shadow of these forms of sociality, love, and attachment and in the presence of ideals of conjugal couplehood that become more vitally important than ever. But at Walter Reed the intimacy of the conjugal couple can become deformed by other kinds of touch, making strange previously familiar modes of intimacy. Wives may sometimes become like mothers or nurses or roommates or “just friends,” deadening the sexuality so fundamental to soldiers’ possible and properly configured future selves. But wives may simultaneously represent new families, sustaining obligations to take the place of those military ones that will be lost on entry to civilian life. Take, for example, three moments from Erin and James’s time at Walter Reed. Though I didn’t know them then, Erin told me about the months she and James spent in the hospital and then at Mologne House, before they secured their room in the Fisher House. On different occasions she and 174 

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James each told me about the first time they saw each other after his injury. In both versions of the story James was in pain and heavily medicated. And in both versions the first thing he wanted to do when he saw Erin was have sex. He tried to convince her to close the door and get into the hospital bed with him. James told me the story with a certain amount of pride, as though it were evidence that an essential part of him had weathered combat unscathed, despite being blown up. It was a common enough story at Walter Reed and one that I think speaks to more than just lust accrued through separation or the hormones of young men. Having sex with your wife is also an expression and enactment of your status as a heteronormatively constructed liberal individual. While James’s desire may have been about lust, it was also about being a husband and all the dimensions of past and future livelihood that represented. But Erin had been confused by his entreaties, concerned about the fragile condition of his body, which had been both shocking and disgusting to her. Though she kept those feelings to herself, she resisted, offering instead other forms of obligated and caring touch. Erin told me there were periods in the beginning, just after he became an outpatient, when James wouldn’t get out of bed for days on end, not eating, not getting up to go to the bathroom, and hardly talking at all. She took over the basic maintenance of his body as best she could—changing his catheter, keeping his wounds clean—but her touch of his exposed body was changing from an enactment of “true love” to an obligatory kind of care opposed to conjugal couplehood: she was becoming “like a nurse.” She said that when she couldn’t take it anymore, when she had reached the limit of her capacity for this obligation to maintain nothing but James’s life, she went to the bathroom, got a cup of water and a toothbrush, and brought them to him in bed. She demanded that he brush his teeth or she would stop kissing him. She offered this as an ultimatum, a final choice between a mode of caring touch that might still be tinged with unfree obligation but that at least held the promise of conjugal couplehood or, on the other hand, a kind of abandonment compelled by obligated and desexualized flesh that therefore had nothing to promise for the future. By her account, pointing to the precariousness of their relationship as husband and wife in this way, imperiling their sexual contact, was effective. In her narrative this was a kind of turning point in his rehabilitation. The last resort was to their conjugal couplehood, and it was from that preserve, in Erin’s telling, that James reemerged as a more viable person. Their sexual contact remained intimate attachments  175

an essential anchor of their attachment to each other, an attachment that also allowed James to be more securely nestled within thicker obligations of kin. He took on the role of financial provider, buying a suburban home for their imagined life after Walter Reed, paying for Erin’s car, and advising Erin’s mother and her boyfriend on household finances when they found themselves unemployed. But this multifaceted and foundational attachment—one that was ever present but also always in flux—brought risks too. When I knew them, their relationship seemed the strongest of any of couple at Walter Reed, but there had been a time when Erin left to go home for a while because the strain of the situation and James’s depression and anger had been too much for her to bear. Even later, after they had moved out of the Fisher House and into the Bank of America apartment in Silver Spring, I recall a particular moment in which the potential devastation of Erin’s connection to James—the vulnerability of life-making attachments—became crushingly apparent. In their apartment with some other couples one night, the conversation turns from a discussion about how frustrating it is to have to wait to get meds at the hospital pharmacy to the urgency of injured soldiers’ medical needs. As an example, Erin begins to describe what James was like when he was an inpatient, that period when he’d so wanted to have sex with her in his hospital bed and about which their feelings and memories are so different. James is sitting on the floor with its plush wall-to-wall carpet. He has taken off both of his prostheses and one of his snugly fit liners, which sits on the coffee table. Though not uncommon, this is a posture of both comfort and exposure, a physical arrangement of James’s limbs that acquiesces to injury and to certain queer mobilities (like scooting across the floor) rather than aspiring to normative ones (be they “passing” with prosthetic limbs or zipping with athletic agility in a lightweight titanium wheelchair). So it is especially painful when, referring to the large, padded, high-backed wheelchair with a head rest that is sometimes used for soldiers in the earliest days after their arrival at Walter Reed, when they have the least bodily strength or control and require the most physical support, Erin says James had been “just sitting there in his retard chair.” From his position on the floor, James says, “Thanks a lot,” his tone sarcastic but tinged with real hurt and anger. “Sorry, but seriously,” Erin replies, and gives a ghoulish description of James in his hospital room, overmedicated and drooling. James just turns, silent and hurt and sad and put in his place, and stares down the hall. 176 

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I think about how James had been proud of himself when he told me about wanting to have sex with Erin that day in the hospital, but when Erin told me about it, she’d been almost disturbed. In light of these other moments, this one seems to be the very definition of vulnerability as Butler (2004: 20, 22) has described it: because we are socially and physically constituted through attachments, because it is these “ties or bonds that compose us,” they may be our undoing; they may cause life, never limited to but always rendered in the fleshy and intimate orientations of our bodies, to decompose. It is this vulnerability that soldiers and their most significant others must navigate in rehabilitating life. This is the promise, possibility, and risk that their attachments bring, as these same attachments ward off solitude, calibrate the flesh, and gesture toward a viable future of properly autological, sexualized, and gendered selfhood. Especially given the threats of solitude described earlier, these attachments may manifest as the line between life and death. But they can also become untenable. Soldiers must then work on them, sever them, replace them, thin them, or otherwise alter them so as to make current life possible and future life imaginable.

when i first met him, Jake had been looking forward to his life with Tanielle, their almost two-year-old son, and their second child, a daughter, who was on the way. Imagining life as a good and responsible father, full of wisdom like his own father was, and a stable provider for his family were some of the principal things that drew Jake through his protracted time at Walter Reed. But while he was oriented toward that future ordinary life, actually having it was impossible at Walter Reed; even though they depended on each other, the two ordinaries were incommensurate. There were seemingly innumerable obstacles to living even a tightly circumscribed version of that normative future within the gates of Walter Reed. One night when we were out to dinner with Manny and his mom, Jake got a phone call. It was Tanielle, who had gone home for a prenatal checkup. All of a sudden his face changed; he anxiously chewed his lip, and his eyes betrayed the trace of tears. “What bad news?” he asked. It turned out that Tanielle’s doctor had prescribed bed rest until the baby was born: two months. She wouldn’t be able to come back and be with him at Walter Reed. Jake’s mother, who had moved to Virginia to be close to him, could spend some nights with him at Fisher House, but he’d have to sleep at her house more often. He was supposed to spend the night at intimate attachments  177

Walter Reed, but he wasn’t supposed to spend the night alone. But maybe staying at his mother’s was better anyway, he reasoned, since the new orthopedic mattresses someone had donated to the Fisher House were killing his back. On the other hand, he couldn’t take his sleep meds when he stayed in Virginia and still get up early enough to get back to Walter Reed in time for appointments or formation. And without his meds, he’d have nightmares, which would mean he’d have to stay up all night to keep them at bay. Earlier he and Tanielle had managed a complicated schedule: she would drive up and down, leaving their son with her mother, and Jake sometimes drove down to see her there. But the back-and-forth proved to be too much for her. And after she was put on bed rest, it proved to be too much for Jake. After driving down and back, six hours each way, a few weekends in a row he’d had to pull over to the side of the road and sleep in his car so he didn’t fall asleep at the wheel and crash. Even later, in the times they did manage to be together at Walter Reed after their daughter was born and when Tanielle would leave both kids with her mother, she and Jake fought all the time. Never even having lived in the same house before his deployment, they could hardly stand living in the one room they shared at the Fisher House. It became an open secret that their son was not biologically Jake’s, and Tanielle would occasionally impugn his status as a “real” father, which cut Jake to the quick.9 Deciding that he would be a father to the boy who, Jake was sure, was the product of Tanielle’s infidelity had been a self-constituting act for Jake. Following through on his decision, that promissory act of a good man, by marrying Tanielle and insisting on his commitment to her and fortifying it by fathering a child with her, even as she eroded their attachment in word and deed—this was the same kind of self constituting act. Now, though, in the midst of Walter Reed’s precariousness, the stakes seemed even higher. Husband and father were the attachments out of which he’d wanted to fashion his life before. Now they gestured toward the possibility that he still could. After his injury this sense of masculinizing duty became even more important to Jake. He was concerned that he’d gotten selfish during his rehabilitation. Doing things for others, subordinating himself to the obligations he had, being depended on, these became central to his thinking about the kind of person he wanted to be. Being a good father and husband was part of that. But the dynamics of dependency and obligation were anything but straightforward. One night at the mall before their daughter was born 178 

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Tanielle told me that she hadn’t wanted to get pregnant again, but after Jake had gotten hurt and told her he wanted them to have a child together, she didn’t think she could refuse him. Having a child together was another step toward a future ordinary that pulled Jake on, a configuration of familial attachments from which Tanielle was not then willing to extricate herself, although they didn’t seem entered into through the proper relations of love. And yet, despite her ambivalences, Tanielle was jealous of Jake when she was away. She seemed to suspect he was always betraying her in one way or another. As some sort of retaliation, she told her mother malicious lies about Jake, and her mother started trying to keep their son, and then their daughter, away from him. People said Tanielle was bleeding his bank account, that she bought full-priced designer purses and burned through $10,000 in a matter of months. But through all of this, being a good father, a good husband, and a good man by caring and providing for those who depended on him, or who might, he hoped, in the future, remained central to Jake’s sense of who he was and to the ordinary life he wanted to have. It was during one particularly bad patch with Tanielle, when their attachments were fraying to the very core, that Jake said, “You have to wait around before you can even begin picking up the pieces.” He experienced the frustration of seeing the future domestic life toward which he had oriented himself shatter around him and being unable, given the contingencies of life at Walter Reed, to hold it together or pick up the pieces. He seemed impatient, unwilling to bide his time in the present and wait for a future to come. And yet it is that same imagined life that he wanted to reassemble, those same pieces that he wanted to pick up eventually, once he’d done his waiting. So despite his frustration and exhaustion and sense of the current impossibility of being there, as Tanielle’s “bad news” pushed him to the verge of tears, he maintained his attachments and felt them pull him toward the future. As things continued to fall apart, the likelihood of ever assembling those fragments into the life he wanted seemed more and more remote, but Jake refused to give up on the possibility, to stop imagining that increasingly unlikely future. Then one night, in the midst of a fight, Tanielle hit him in the face. It seemed like the last straw. Jake kicked her out and moved into the barracks with the other single soldiers. He got his mother to call a divorce lawyer. But even though he told me again and again that he felt so much more like himself without Tanielle there, their attachment retained a profound importance. Without Tanielle, Jake felt more like himself, but severing his intimate attachments  179

attachment to her entirely would challenge all those good decisions he had made about remaining with her that were also self-founding acts through which he constituted himself as a good, dependable, and properly enfleshed man. When a volunteer suggested that they might be able to get Homes for Our Troops to build Jake a house, he couldn’t imagine that they would do it for him if he weren’t still with Tanielle, though we both knew unmarried soldiers enrolled in the program. When another volunteer suggested that going to the media with his story might help his case, he planned to go with Tanielle and to grin and bear the face of the happy couple. Jake’s experience shows in a particularly pronounced way how the projects of being and of being intimately attached were always intertwined and how they depended on dependencies that made an unmarked future ordinary seem possible. There were other ambitions that he had—opening the garage with Manny, playing drums again with his metal band—and these were also part of his imagined future and also coded with a familiar masculinity. But in relation to their loss, intimate attachments, like Jake’s to Tanielle, distinguish themselves from other, fraternal connections as key to the possibilities of life. Such attachments are not only helpful and normative but also formative. In the context of Walter Reed this is sometimes literally the case. At Walter Reed biological life is sustained through many modes of contact: through necessary medical care, through rehabilitative therapy, and also through intimate touch that keeps wounds clean and dry and feeds the possibilities of an ordinary life that makes visible or imaginable a future. Ways of being are also always ways of being intimate with. Being without, losing constitutive attachments that forge a person through modes of intimate touch, suggests the imminent possibility of not being at all, the possibility that the future ordinary pulling soldiers on might fail to materialize. Being at Walter Reed, finding a mode of extra/ordinary life sustained by attachments that pull soldiers toward an unmarked ordinary elsewhere, is always marked by the precariousness of life and the distance between the configuration of attachments and dependencies now and in the hoped-for autological body to come. This tension between the simultaneous awareness of current and future ordinaries occasioned certain frustrating incommensurabilities, as when James was ordered by his co to go to credit counseling after he bought Erin that sleek new suv. There are notorious problems, especially among new, young soldiers who are making a decent wage for the first time in their 180 

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lives and who, in the relatively closed economy of military life, have few personal expenses and little experience managing their finances (having never had any to speak of) and who, so the stories go, spend all their money on video games and car modifications or whose wives drain their bank accounts buying purses and jewelry.10 But James had been careful with his money. He had even made investments in the stock market that were doing pretty well. He had bought the suv for Erin following the amputation of his second leg with the money from his second tsgli payment and a trade-in of his own car, which he could no longer drive. When he told me about being ordered to credit counseling by his co, a woman with whom he had often butted heads during the time he had more or less given up on rehab and had stopped going to his appointments, he focused his frustration on her personally, saying that she didn’t know anything about him or his finances. When he went to the credit counselor, armed with bank statements and credit card bills proving his solvency, the counselor said no one should have sent him there in the first place, that his finances were impeccable. James said his co was just a “dumb bitch,” and he was going to try to get switched to someone else. Calling your co a dumb bitch and casually asking, and reasonably expecting, to be transferred to someone else’s command testified to the peculiar flexibility and certain softness of the military structure at Walter Reed. Despite his documented fiscal responsibility, James still had to go to the counselor when his co ordered him there. But James blamed this woman for inflicting the humiliating experience of credit counseling on him and indicting his ability to responsibly take care of himself and his family. In doing so he also impugned the structure of the army and its infringements on the self-sovereignty he found in the configuration of dependencies that constituted his family. “The army sucks,” James said, after recounting his visit with the credit counselor. He said he would never reenlist precisely because of bullshit like this. The combination of fraternal devotion to and disgruntled resentment of the army is a feature of army life in general (Hawkins 2005). At Walter Reed it is more easily overlaid with individuating layers. James wasn’t just being slotted into the category of feckless e4;11 now, as the impingements of military life gave way to the dependencies of couplehood, he could more easily be personally rather than just categorically offended. As he attempts to make an ordinary future civilian self, James weaves solvency into new forms of properly masculine life. James is upset when intimate attachments  181

Erin tells us one night over dinner that her mother is about to lose her job because the day care she works for is closing. This means she will have to support her children and stepchildren (totaling five), as well as her grandchildren (two more), who live with her but over whom she does not have legal guardianship, with welfare payments and food stamps and minimal contributions from her ailing live-in boyfriend. James makes a plan to call the boyfriend and talk to him man to man about what they should do. He suggests that he might offer to help out with some money. At the age of twenty-four, James is positioning himself as a kind of fiduciary patriarch, the guy who swings into action to shore up the family within and beyond his own domestic unit. Though the boyfriend is unable to work and his principal contribution to the household is his meager disability payments and though it is Erin’s mother who is the household’s main earner and she who is facing down unemployment, James will speak to the boyfriend. Solving a family crisis like this becomes man’s work. The masculinizing skills James had as a gunner in Iraq are gone. As he moves away from a form of life and livelihood made possible by the particularities of the army, he gravitates toward the pull of these other masculinizing responsibilities that produce a thickening abundance of kin. No wonder, then, that his co’s suspicion of his spending was so infuriating to him; it touched the pulse that animates his imaginable future. Though in different ways, James and Jake both confront Walter Reed’s buffeting of the fullness of normative masculine autological citizenship founded on the conjugal couplehood that fortifies life in such a deeply heteronational context. Peter’s experience represents another way such intimate attachments are necessary but are also the sites of strife, the way such attachments can make the future imaginable but can also make the present hard. Reconfiguring Dependencies It is undeniably true that when parents or siblings rather than wives or girlfriends respond to the pull of obligations and leave family at home to come care for soldiers at Walter Reed, many of the logistics of life there are equally eased. It is helpful to have someone to assist with getting around, making food, taking meds, filling out paperwork. But when intimate attachments extend beyond conjugal couplehood, especially in the case of soldiers’ parents, the mutual obligations of kin sit uneasily with soldiers’ attempts to constitute themselves as self-sovereign and properly rehabilitated. Such kin 182 

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may try to minimize those obligations, giving soldiers space to be in excess of their roles, especially as sons. But those roles, and the obligations they entail, are also crucial to the rehabilitation of an enfleshed self. They may be vital in the present and imagined as part of the future, and they may also suggest a form of life that is not squarely the one desired, even if, in a given case, it is better supported than that thin life of couplehood. Peter had joined the army at seventeen, mostly, he said, because he didn’t want to keep living as his parents’ son—having a curfew, walking the dogs, keeping an eye on his little sister when he’d rather be out with a girl or blowing stuff up in the backyard. He described army life as the perfect release from all of that, talking about the camaraderie and wild drunken nights out with his unit when they were stationed in Germany. When I asked him, “What about the whole patriotism thing?,” he said infantry life is really about “the lifestyle, the buddies, the pussy, the adventure.” But alas, it was his parents who stayed with him after he arrived at Walter Reed. At the Fisher House for the first week or so both his mother and father were sharing his room; they then alternated two-week stints, each taking turns with him and back home with their daughter, passing like ships in the night. In his first weeks out of the hospital, Peter was overwhelmed by bitter anger. He would just sit there in the living room sometimes, furious scowl on his face, staring through everyone and responding to nothing. Jake told me he recognized the feeling. “We’ve all been through it,” he said. For Peter “it” was focused on his parents more than anything else. One night as Jake and I sit on a couch in the living room, we hear Peter shouting at his parents as he mounts the stairs with an unfamiliar prosthetic leg, vertigo from a blown-out eardrum and incus, and fresh stitches from surgery to set his fractured arm. His parents stand anxiously below. “Don’t treat me like a child!” he screams. His mother gently pleads, “But you have a suture, you need to be careful.” He yells out that in Iraq he had dragged himself and his equipment, a total of three hundred pounds, out of harm’s way with only one good arm. Now they think he can’t walk up the stairs. Peter’s admonition that he not be treated like a child indexes much more than a temporal line between adulthood and infancy. Being treated like a child, even by his parents, means, among other things, obviating the masculinizing forms of self-sufficiency and self-sovereignty that Peter had sought and found in the army, a self-sovereignty that is paradoxically intimate attachments  183

proved in the very same condition of his body that now makes it subject to his parents’ presence and the care of their touch as they try to keep his flesh safe and clean and intact.12 Offered out of parental love and wellfounded concern, their interventions into his physical precariousness subjected him to unchosen dependencies that cannot sustain the life he feels his body requires. As work on disability and masculinity has noted (Shakespeare 1999; Shuttleworth 2004; Shuttleworth et al. 2012; Tepper 1999), because of its attendant reconfigurations of self-control, dependence, and independence, disability presents a fundamental challenge to the kind of heteronormative masculinity that is so central to the projects of self- and future-making under way at Walter Reed. It is true that Peter needs help, or at least that there are basic things like making food, keeping his room in order, and getting around that would, for the time being, be exceedingly difficult without it. But it is not merely this, not merely the straightforward facts of his body and its limits, that frustrates him and fuels his anger. To be treated like a child in this way is to be treated as an insufficient and incomplete actor in the world. As Peter becomes bound to his parents, his life beyond them begins to seem unsustainable. This infantilization is largely due to the fact that the thin conjugation of his life is not properly intimate. To fashion a proper self, Peter forges a profoundly and specifically heterosexualized body, one opposed to life made with his parents and strikingly unchildlike. He locks himself in the bathroom, where he spends hours on the phone negotiating his relationships with two girlfriends. Not easily given to coquetry, I was none the less stunned by one of the first conversations I had with him, in which he regaled me, well within earshot of his mother, with stories of drunken sexual conquest when he was stationed in Germany before heading off to Iraq. He described how easy it was to pick up German girls in bars, how “easy” they were, how he and his friends drank so much they passed out and had to help each other home. He hinted that he could hook me up with some friends from his infantry division who might be coming through the D.C. area, assuring me that they were young, fit, and oversexed. When one of his girlfriends came to visit along with his extended family one weekend, she sat in his lap on the couch in the den, the two of them occasionally lapsing into sloppy make-out sessions for all to see, waylaying family sightseeing plans. When that relationship ended and he was reconciling with his other girlfriend, Sharon, a high school se-

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nior and catalogue model, he again spent hours locked in the bathroom on the phone attempting to win back her trust. Eventually he did. Sharon was by all accounts an insatiable drama queen. She and Peter fought almost incessantly, and her gossiping and erratic behavior didn’t put her in good graces with the other wives and girlfriends. They thought she was gossipy and crazy. She refused to talk to me, to even be introduced to me when we were face to face. The first time she saw me at the house, on a summer Sunday afternoon when I planned to hang out with Peter for the day, she stormed off and started calling his cell phone over and over. He ignored her calls, not wanting to deal with her, but also in full awareness, even enjoyment of the drama that would ensue. After a while she started calling and texting other Fisher House wives and girlfriends, saying that Peter had brought some girl home from a bar. She wouldn’t be convinced otherwise, even when others explained that it was essentially my job to hang out with soldiers and that I also spent time with wives, girlfriends, and other family members, both with and without soldiers around.13 Even amid their fighting and the complicated negotiations Peter had to go through to make plans to hang out with anyone else, he worked hard to keep the relationship going until long after I had left the field, sometimes by appeasing her and sometimes by egging her on. When he told me he’d broken one of his prosthetics by throwing it across the room at her, I insisted he elaborate, concerned about the level of violence between them and telling him that throwing things at her was the same as hitting her, that both were abuse. He said that he’d actually thrown it at the wall, not at her. When I suggested that was still not okay, he said, “That’s not abuse. Abuse is when you push the thing I’m leaning on out from under me,” which he said Sharon had done at least once. By summer she’d finished high school and moved into the Fisher House, taking over as nma from his parents. But keeping her there wasn’t some cold calculation on Peter’s part, and it was about much more than merely not being around his parents. Peter wasn’t opting for unfettered independence and the freedom of adulthood made possible by being yoked to a girlfriend rather than a mother or father: the strictures Sharon placed on him, and to which he submitted himself so that she would stay, were in many ways tighter than his parents’. While he could not be radically independent and self-determining with Sharon, radical independence and selfdetermination were not really the point: there are always dependencies; it

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is how they are distributed across various kinds of attachments that matters. Being with Sharon made more readily inhabitable the form of life that he was rehabilitating toward. The implications of the dependencies that he and his parents faced were very different from those he and Sharon faced. Just as military life is characterized by an emphasis on self-sufficiency and on intimate obligation, and to get a sense of that life it is necessary to note the tension between them, so is it misleading to see Peter’s rehabilitation as moving from dependence on his parents to independence with Sharon: the autological ideal is always based on the dependencies out of which properly enfleshed, properly sexualized, properly gendered, properly “independent” liberal individuals are made within the attachments of the conjugal couple. Peter trades in the explicit and literal infantilization of his body through the attachment to his parents for the sexual potency and potential of selffounding conjugal couplehood that his attachment to Sharon makes possible. But even these mutual dependencies and the modes of touch that might mark autological freedom elsewhere are complicated by the situation of life at Walter Reed and the truncated array of modes of living available there. Peter moves in the direction of an ordinary future through sexualizing attachments, even when that means exposing his body to violence with Sharon rather than to the protective interventions of his parents. Taken together, Peter’s frustration with his parents and his frequent and flamboyant orientation to heteronormative sexuality suggest something of the complicated way in which ideas of independence, adulthood, sexuality, and gender saturate soldiers’ flesh in the kinds of touch, exposure, and dependence out of which their future lives are supposed to be secured. Being No Less of a Person In the very moment I was first drafting this chapter in the summer of 2010, holed up at my desk in Santa Fe, the New York Times provided a public example of the stakes of intimate attachment at Walter Reed.14 No fewer than five people I’d just met contacted me to tell me about it. It was the Fourth of July cover story about Spc. Brendan Marrocco, who was rehabilitating at Walter Reed with his brother nma and who was the first surviving quadruple amputee of either oef or oif. Beneath the huge, above-the-fold color image of Marrocco’s body in midmovement on a physical therapy bed, three of his residual limbs and one prosthetic visible, the paper offered this fragment as a headline: “No Less of a Person.” 186 

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This plea for his full measure of personhood is in large part an artifact of the intimate attachments that have themselves been forged by the condition and conditioning of Marrocco’s body. We are told his injuries have brought his estranged parents back together as friends and have changed his brother’s life for the better. In the article these ties compose an essential frame for appreciating the normative fullness of his personhood despite the truncated form of his body.15 We are also told of his fiancée, whom he met after arriving at Walter Reed. But their relationship, described in the familiar narrative of self-founding love (Povinelli 2006: 175–92), has been on and off, the ordinary future of the conjugal couple delayed just a bit longer. According to the logic of the article, the attachments between Marrocco and his family seem to have ensured that he is “no less of a person,” but he is not yet one whose life is full, or fully his own, and his personhood is not allowed to go without saying. Though it is not triumphant, this story about Specialist Marrocco offers a narrative of recovery, a thickening of social life, a repair of sufficient selfhood through the rebuilding of a heteronational body. Lizette Alvarez, the story’s author, describes Marrocco’s dramatic impending double arm transplant (which he would eventually receive in 2013); though this will “set back his progress so he will likely return to Walter Reed for further therapy,” it is figured as just a bump in a road that leads in one clear direction. The story ends with mention of the fundraisers (including Gary Sinise’s Lt. Dan Band) that are supporting him and hopefully will build him a house near his family in Long Island that he will share with his fiancée. Conjuring their heteronational future, the article ends with imagined scenes of couplehood to come: they will be married at the World War II monument in D.C., and they will live in that house and have children. “Specialist Marrocco wanted a girl, if only so he could answer the door when a date arrived and say the words, ‘You should see what happened to the other guy,’ ” turning his potentially “unmanly” body into a symbol of paternal protection and masculinizing violence. Mixed in with the impossible pace of recovery as it unfolds in the thickening and thinning of bodies at Walter Reed is the strengthening and fraying of those attachments that make social life possible, imaginable, or not. The care demanded by certain attachments strains them. The dependencies they entail can prop life up as much as they can hold it back. In the strange middle ground between the thick genealogy of military life and the narrower dependencies of civilian ordinaries, soldiers never reimagine intimate attachments  187

or remake themselves alone; the sexualized masculinity of fatherhood and couplehood always looms on the horizon. Though rarely discussed explicitly, the sexual dimension of men’s rehabilitation has long been at issue after war, even though the project of remaking men was once more focused on enabling their bodies for wage work than for couplehood (Linker 2011). For example, the historian David Serlin (2006: 171) cites a 1957 ucla rehabilitation manual that addresses the following questions in the context of male amputees: “Will he be acceptable to wife or sweetheart? Can he live a normal sex-life?” In the aftermath of World War II the va explored artificial insemination as a way to help injured soldiers complete their nuclear families (Gurtler 2013). In the post-9/11 context, which is so profoundly heteronational, being made a person after war has become a foundationally sexual and heteronormative practice. It is this kind of life that militates against the dangers of solitude and seems to make future life imaginable. But at Walter Reed these lives are not actually livable; the configurations of bodies and space don’t allow for them, and the intimacy with death and uncertainty of bodily forms that marks this space have no part in the autological selfhood such lives gravitate toward. Even the attachments that fortify the social skin at Walter Reed are peculiar and brittle. The relationships between soldiers and families, soldiers and other soldiers, soldiers and volunteers are fashioned not out of the enduring temporality of social relations but out of their in-durability, the condensed intensity of rehabilitation’s unpredictable coming back to life. The experience of coming to life isn’t the experience of traveling the “road to recovery”; it is the experience of bumps in the road, of literal and metaphorical hits, of bodies, people, and relationships that are supposed to stabilize life but that won’t behave. Coming to life and staying alive constitute the activities of daily living as much as getting dressed and going to the bathroom, and, like such “ordinary” activities, these other, more expansive efforts span multiple bodies. Charlie, Alec, Daniel, James, Jake, and Peter and their wives, brothers, and parents are engaged in this mode of precarious living. In different ways they show the limits of life at Walter Reed and the possibilities and impossibilities of life beyond it in some kind of ordinary space they can only and always imagine.

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conclusion

For the soldiers in this book, this moment of afterwar life is essentially and profoundly precarious. It is a moment of living in which attachments and vulnerabilities to others are powerfully felt and the world and one’s fleshy presence in it are marked by instabilities wrought by the incommensurability of being publicly bound to war while moving toward an anonymous American good life to come. The process of rehabilitation is, in part, an attempt to fix this: to repair and stabilize life and bodies and to regularize them in their appearance in contact with the world. In considering the plays of attachment and exposure that compose and decompose the lives of these injured soldiers, I have moved from the exceptional worth vested in them as national symbols to the questions of life thrown open by the capturing of such worthy life in forms of flesh that are set up in opposition to it. I have traced the shimmering of ordinariness across this unsteady ground: the in-durable socialities of life in common at Walter Reed that help sustain it and do not last, the various forms of excess that spring up around and mark injured soldier bodies and the worlds they make as they move, the modes of being with others that might make living on all the more or less possible. Ordinariness has been emergent, and not more than that, throughout. Life in this mode is awake to the knowledge of its markedness, confronted as it is by new arrays of possibilities and limits, and the expectations that return again and again to the tension between the heteronationally reproductive capacity of soldier bodies and the leaky violence of war. The hope of a future unmarked by this—a passable and fixed future of heteronormative

domesticity—exerts a draw that is both powerful and somewhat cruel. As soldiers become habituated to their precariousness, to the instability of life in this vertiginous present, this zone of life offers a kind of comfort in commonness that the future good life never will. By looking closely at soldiers’ encounters with grateful strangers and intimate kin, in spaces inside and outside the gates of Walter Reed, we see how this habituation happens in such an exposed and nationally significant site, giving life an uncanny feeling of familiarity that makes the present easier to bear while also gesturing toward a redemptive form of life that can’t be grasped in the present. The question of how precisely life continues after violence has concerned many anthropologists. Some have turned to transcendence, even to the metaphor of the phoenix, as a vital figure of culture and meaning, of recognition and political actualization, that can rise from the ashes of a destroyed world (Nordstrom 1997; Scheper-Hughes 2008). A recent account of American soldiers’ experiences of antiwar epiphany in the post9/11 era charted a similar course of personal and political redemption, a transcendent awakening provoked by war’s violence (Gutmann and Lutz 2010). So, even though ethnographic attention to violence has been folded into anthropological understandings of everyday life, the general trend across anthropology has been to consider experiences of violence in terms of the production of social, cultural, and political meanings that are more than the sum of these everyday parts (e.g., Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004). Our disciplinary attention to violence, across all its chronicities, from emergencies to the day-to-day, has thus been overwhelmingly concerned with the ways violence might contain the possibility of a better, less painful, less precarious, and more equal world to come (Biehl and Locke 2010). The broad anthropology of violence has thus offered a comforting and hopeful message of liberal political action and also a good answer to the despairing or sometimes indignant question often asked after reading or hearing ethnographies of suffering in classrooms and conference salons: “What are we supposed to do?” But as political interventions based on transcendent logics and politics of recognition and commensuration fail to make the worlds and communities they hope for (Povinelli 2001), and as their failures increasingly seem like functions of their own hopeful logics (e.g., Feldman and Ticktin 2010; Ferguson 1990; Povinelli 2011), some anthropologists have turned away from the liberal political promise (see Wool and Livingston n.d.). Such a turn blurs distinctions between violence and care and leads to produc190 

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tive and disturbing questions about the most seemingly obvious of liberal moral choices, like that between life and death, inducing in us what Lisa Stevenson (2014: 172) has called the “terror of being on the wrong side of the (bio)politics of life.” This is not a turning away from ethical questions or a suggestion that spaces of violence are culturally inevitable or natural; far from it (e.g., Dave 2012). This is a shift in focus, a shift away from imagining how cultural or political forms of meaning and recognition might allow the life of a community to transcend violence—a shift away, in other words, from hypothetical spaces of hope—and toward a set of more imminent concerns that remain purposely mired in the intractable difficulties of a zone of life that is itself formed of the successes and failures and incidental affects of political, social, and historical interventions that sought to transcend, alter, equalize, remap, and justify a given state and quality of targeted forms of life (e.g., Garcia 2010; Livingston 2012; Povinelli 2011). Theoretically and analytically this book has tried to address two key questions of this shift: What is the weight of life in such a collateral space, and how is it sustained? One answer is the one Veena Das (2007: 7) found through her long engagement with the aftermath of world-shattering violence in India, where “life was recovered not through some grand gestures in the realm of the transcendent but through a descent into the ordinary.” In the case of injured soldiers at Walter Reed, ordinariness is indeed a space for life, but the descent into it is thwarted by others’ gestures toward the transcendent realm of sacrifice, and recovery is placed in abeyance by the impossibility of a purely ordinary present. Though remaking a normative body capacitated for “ordinary” life is the central task at Walter Reed, the outcome is not quite the recovery of a life that was.1 Even after moving on from the saturated space of Walter Reed—and also for many who were not so shattered that they needed to pass through it—there remains a complicating difference that brings us back to the comforting distinction between America’s safe homeland and its distant warfronts overseas. Unlike the families in Delhi and women in Sultanpuri with whom Das has worked, these soldiers will not live ordinary lives in a common social space of devastation. They will not be surrounded by others with whom they share an experience of fragmentation. The ordinary they have to descend into is one in which their new knowledge of the world in fragments, the ordinariness that emerges in the living of war-torn lives, is un­acceptable and ought to be put in its place, over there. So while in conclusion  191

working​ethnographically against easy ruptures of past and present that arise from common tropes of haunting traumas, I might say, as Das (2007: 216) does, “I found that the making of the self was located, not in the shadow of some ghostly past, but in the context of making the everyday inhabitable,” I would also say that the descent into the ordinary that moved life into the future proceeded like Zeno’s paradox: always moving closer without hope of finally reaching the destination. This difference between what injured soldiers know about the world and what most American civilians know about the world is often at the center of their encounters with each other. Out of these different knowledges about the world emerge utterances of gratitude and neat pathologies of trauma. I am reminded of many soldiers’ insistence that there was no point in talking to psychiatrists who hadn’t been in combat. Perhaps because the mode within which we interacted was different, more “everyday,” or perhaps because I did not ask them about their experiences in war or their injuries until they brought them up, it was possible for them to reflexively tell me and show me about this basic ontological problem, this fact that they know certain things about the world that others’ experiences do not admit. But, of course, I can only know and write about this knowledge, grasping at the periphery of its experiential core. I cannot have this knowledge or live in it. That I live an ordinary life, as much as anyone can, puts me in a distant relationship to the extra/ordinary lives and pain of the soldiers I worked with. I am in the courtyard of the Abrams Hall barracks, sitting in the sun on the edge of a planter while I wait in line to collect Fisher House mail from the kiosk that is open only four hours a day. My body feels heavy and warm, and I do not care about the Helleresque encounter I am about to have with the soldier who will try not to give me the mail. I am being indulgent, fed up with the tight control I have been exerting over my body because I am nervous about doing fieldwork and because I am afraid that people will think I am undisciplined or disrespectful. I become aware of someone ahead of me in line. A soldier. She is with her mother, who hovers anxiously around her. She is standing, her feet planted, though the rest of her can’t quite keep still. She is very, very pale. Her eyes don’t focus. She is not well. Her mother wants to take her back to her room, to get the mail another day, but she is insistent that it be done now. 192 

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For the first time I can remember, I feel that I owe it to this person to stand up. I feel that it is disrespectful and lazy of me not to. I have taken the ease of my body for granted, and I am embarrassed. I feel attached to her and obliged to recognize that attachment and the way we diffusely constitute each other through it. I do not know her or what happened to her. I do not feel I owe her a silent ovation for her sacrifice nor a debt of gratitude. I do not know if her condition was brought about by combat. I feel I am obliged to be present in my own discomfort and the sense of guilt that the presence of her injured body has occasioned in me. I do not want to exploit the privileges that reside in my body and have brought us to this place where I can sit alone in the sun and feel a sense of transgressive self-satisfaction while she teeters on the brink of collapse in the presence of her mother. Each of these feelings is occasioned by my understanding of the particular difference between her and me, by my thinking she may have passed through the world-shattering violence of war or that, even if in some other way, her exposure to military service has contributed to her precariousness and simultaneously stabilized her body in this present state, and my knowledge that none of these things is true, or will likely ever be true, for me. My discomfort is not at all about some sense that her pain is borne on my behalf or that, if not for her decision to join, I could have somehow found myself in her place. These are the jacked-up logics of sacrificial exchange. My discomfort is about a certain relation of identity and difference, an uncanny relation between the sensations of my own body and the political frames of recognition that inexorably capture hers. And so, in this book, while soldiers’ lives move slowly away from the proclamations of sacrificial heroism and toward the enactment of social intimacies that might let them inhabit a configuration of flesh that feels comfortably whole, independent, and depended on, they don’t become properly ordinary. There is always something extra, and even as life stabilizes, it stabilizes in an extra/ordinary register. In thinking through these soldiers’ lives I have sought to challenge the notion of the ordinary, a seemingly small and taken-for-granted notion that is called into question by the intense and publicized experiences of the soldiers I came to know. The significance of this exploration extends well beyond Walter Reed and beyond the lives of soldiers. But I hope that the more specific implications of this exploration are also clear: that we should be wary of even the most well-intentioned diagnoses of returning soldiers as patriotic heroes, victims of trauma, subjects of inspirational striving, or conclusion  193

objects of intimate danger; that the deadlinesses of military life are multiple; that it is only through a particularly privileged position of civilian safety that we are able to make claims about the appropriateness or veracity of soldiers’ knowledge about the world; and that, when we attend to all of this, we see that there is no such thing as generic shrapnel.

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notes

Preface 1 Jennifer Terry (2009) helpfully elaborates some of the historical and biopolitical coordinates of this position by thinking through the example of Claudia Carrenon, a Mexican-born member of the U.S. National Guard who sustained a traumatic brain injury in Iraq after enlisting in 2000 in the hopes of achieving U.S. citizenship. 2 Dawn Halfaker is featured in the hbo documentary produced by James Gandolfini, Alive Day (Alpert and Goosenberg 2007). Her comments powerfully convey her unresolved struggles around the possibilities of motherhood that, I think, might form an important point of departure for an exploration of these experiences. 3 See, for example, Kirby Dick’s Oscar-nominated documentary The Invisible War (2012). The problematization of military sexual trauma relies on a gendered distinction of male service members raping and sexually assaulting female service members. On male-male rape in the military and the ways this violent configuration of gendered bodies is understood to occupy an exceptional place in the military, see Belkin 2008. 4 “Patterns in Conflict: Civilians Are Now the Target,” unicef, accessed August 1, 2010, http://www.unicef.org/graca/patterns.htm.

Introduction 1 All names are pseudonyms. Where it did not compromise the significance of events, I have changed other details, such as soldiers’ home states. 2 The principal off-post housing facility that had been used for “single soldiers” was the notoriously fetid Building 18, across the street from Walter Reed’s main gate, which the military rented for this purpose. It had been closed following the

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Washington Post’s mortifying exposé that broke in February 2007, eight months prior to my arrival. This still being in the midst of the event of injury can be interestingly considered alongside the narrative accounts Gay Becker (1999) collected, in which an array of Americans strive for a continuity of before and after following major life-changing events. Becker notes that disruption is both an inherent part of contemporary American life, and anathema to the American cultural imaginary of a smooth and ever-evolving life course. While injured soldiers in the midst of disruption do not (or perhaps not yet) piece together life-course narratives in which the disruption of injury, and perhaps of war more generally, can be emplotted, the way future life is hinged to normative family life suggests the pull of that American cultural imaginary is very present indeed. As Becker also points out, the place of embodied distress in the redemptive story of putting a disrupted life back on track is an uncomfortable one. But facts and forms of distress are particularly central to injured soldiers’ present and future selves, especially in the unshakable and necessary form of biological enfranchisement through which they receive disability payments and health care, among other things. This friction would be an interesting one to trace as fewer and fewer soldiers face the event of injury and more and more of them face the task of forging life distant from and marked by that event. I take the term enfleshment from Elizabeth Povinelli’s Empire of Love (2006). I find this term particularly helpful not only because it acknowledges the discursive formation of bodies and processes through which they are subjectivated but also because it points to the ways that worlds, and the many scales of relations (of intimacy, violence, governance, and affection) that compose them actually register in the condition and quality of the flesh itself. I intend this “something” that is happening in Stewart’s (2007: esp. 51–52) sense. See, for example, Biehl 2005; Das 2007; Garcia 2010; Livingston 2012; Povinelli 2006, 2011. I take my use of the term afterwar from Lori Grinker’s (2005) remarkable project of the same name, which documents a century of global war though evocative and often counterintuitive photographs of those it has marked. This deserves both emphasis and explanation: had I arrived at Walter Reed less than a year earlier, before the state-of-the-art rehabilitation facility that opened its doors in my first month there and before the Washington Post exposé and the shuttering of Building 18 and the changes to spaces and policies that shaped daily life, I would have known a significantly different Walter Reed, with its own rhythms and aesthetic, spatial, and social arraignments. Had I arrived a year after I did, I would have encountered a very different Fisher House, where only soldiers and families that included children were allowed, where only disposable plates and utensils were used, and where the comings and goings of families were recorded in a notebook kept on the kitchen counter. Had I arrived two years later, those strange measures would have been little more than a rumor. The course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the shifting nature of exposures and injuries they entail, and the medical responses they spur also shift rapidly and lead to dramatic changes in life

notes to introduction

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at Walter Reed. I was at Walter Reed after the Iraq “surge” and before the drawdown of troops there, at a time when Afghanistan was only beginning to once again compete for attention and resources with Iraq in the U.S. political landscape. For example, a colleague who visited Walter Reed after President Obama’s Afghan “surge” in 2011 noted that there were dramatically more soldiers and dramatically more multiple amputations than there had been in 2007 and that off-post housing was again needed to accommodate this increase. Much of this housing was in the “bad” and racialized neighborhood that abutted the post’s eastern edge, and as soldiers and their family members spent more time in it, their sense of the atmosphere of Walter Reed became tinged with dissatisfaction and disgust and was articulated in stigmatizing talk about race that worked its way into conversation within the gates, something that was notably absent during my fieldwork. This shifting terrain can be stabilized in a historical account, but should not be, I would argue, in an ethnographic one. “Tactical athlete” is the term physical and occupational therapists use to describe soldiers in the rehabilitation program at Walter Reed. See Messinger 2009 and Linker 2011 for further discussion. “No Less of a Person” was the headline of the July 4, 2010, New York Times cover story about the quadruple amputee and Walter Reed patient Spc. Brendan Marrocco that I discuss in chapter 5. The attention to dead and suffering bodies that are foundational to nationalism and sovereignty are an important dimension of this work (e.g., Casper and Moore 2009; Castronovo 2001; Das 2007: esp. 18–37; Mbembe 2003; Ticktin 2006; Verdery 1999). As many of these works also insist, the making of national bodies is racializing as well as gendering (and, as Breckenridge and Vogler [2001] add, abelizing). I give race a tangential position here, as explained in the preface, and I hope it does not impoverish my analysis too much. Perhaps an effect of his emphasis on language, Anderson’s ([1983] 2006: 7, 9) treatment of both corporeal bodies and gender is remarkably thin and unelaborated in his seminal work on nationalism, this despite his oft-cited recognition of the fraternity of nationalism, the significance to his argument of notions like naturalization, innateness, and nativity, race, or stock, and the fact that he concludes the introduction to Imagined Communities with soldierly deaths and begins its first substantive chapter with the monument to the (missing) dead body of the soldier (who, it goes without saying in his opening passages, is male). I am surprised that, although his denotation of nationalism as a “fraternity” of “horizontal comradeship” is generically rather than specifically male (he writes that this fraternity “makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people” to die for “such limited imaginings”; 7, 9, my emphasis), it is cited as the main example of his attention to the gendering of nationalism (see Hatem 2000: 33; Mayer 1999: 6). For a preliminary and wide-ranging international exploration of the long-standing connection between masculinities, militaries, identity, and the state, see Higate 2003. While violence within modern democracies is always supposed to be aberrant, this American shiftiness is doubtless colored by the fact that the understanding of the United States as a country that has not fought a war within its borders since the

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nineteenth century meets with no friction, despite periodic militarized actions within the United States throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from crackdowns on labor unions, to the organized state violence in response to civil rights unrest and antiwar action, to the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, to the recent and repeated deployment of National Guard forces in response to protests against police killings of unarmed black men, to name just a few glaring examples. It is also a nation that has been overwhelmingly constituted both economically and geopolitically through its military since World War II. “Army of One” was the official U.S. Army recruiting slogan throughout the first part of its post-9/11 life, from 2001 to 2006. Recently politicians in England and Canada—which, like the United States, do not have compulsory service, but which, unlike the United States, do have considerable remnants of Keynesian welfare provisions, including universal health care for citizens—have compared their countries unfavorably to the United States on the topic of the treatment of injured soldiers, pointing to the special dispensations made to injured American soldiers as the right way to value soldiers’ service and sacrifice. Two things that such comparisons obscure is that in the absence of public health services, without the valorization and special worth of American soldier bodies, many would likely find themselves without access to comprehensive medical care or other basic services (as certainly was the case after World War I), and that the specially compensable nature of soldierly injury in the United States has come at the exclusion (and perhaps the expense) of more universal forms of public care (see Skocpol 1995). A 2010 study of amputations among soldiers at Walter Reed and Brooke Army Medical Center found that while more than four hundred soldiers had “delayed” (i.e., more than four months after initial injury) major amputations, only twentytwo of them were “elective” like Jake’s, in that “limb salvage was medically feasible and initially successful” in the eyes of clinicians (Helgeson et al. 2010). Recent reports suggest that such amputations became more common, constituting about 5 percent of amputations in 2008 and 15 percent in 2010 (Stinner et al. 2010). Walter Reed figures from Walter Reed Army Medical Center 2008. Casualty figures compiled from icasualties.org, accessed May 10, 2014 (30,941 oif wounded between May 2003 and December 2008), and the Congressional Research Service’s recent report on oef casualties (2,631 oef wounded between 2001 and 2008; Chesser 2011). “Global War on Terrorism by Reason,” accessed May 10, 2015, https://web.archive .org/web/20110602035015/http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/CASUALTY /gwot_reason.pdf. The first figure is calculated from data in Research Directorate 2008. Percentages for general population and army population, respectively, are white 79.6 percent, 70.6 percent; Hispanic 15.8 percent, 9.9 percent; black 12.9 percent, 16.8 percent. General population numbers are from U.S. Census, “People QuickFacts,” accessed October 1, 2010, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html; army numbers are from Research Directorate 2008.

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19 According to Department of Defense (DoD) categories and statistics, whites make up about 70 percent of active duty forces and suffer about 77 percent of the deaths; for blacks the rough numbers are 16 percent of the force and 8.5 percent of the deaths, Hispanics are about 10 percent of the force and roughly the same percentage of deaths (Research Directorate 2008). 20 The year 2005 is an exception. This was also the only year since 1999 that the army did not meet its overall recruiting goals (U.S. Army Recruiting Command Public Affairs Division 2007). 21 For some readers there will be a notable absence in this book of explicit discussion of class and race. My attention to the sociological categories of class and race is implicit in my attention to the lives I describe here. By unraveling some demographic statistics, I attempt to complicate a number of conventional assumptions about race and the U.S. military, especially the idea that it is “majority minority.” It is not. But more generally my attention to categories of race and class reflects the ways they did their work in daily life at Walter Reed in 2007–8; they became relevant in particular moments of interaction and were not made the explicit focus of elaboration or orientation. 22 The characterizations I give are culled from the soldiers I knew at Walter Reed, but one can hear and see the same details in many contemporary accounts. Among the nonfiction material that conveys this ordinariness, I find the films The War Tapes (Scranton 2007) and Restrepo (Hetherington and Junger 2010) and the books Generation Kill (Wright 2005) and The Forever War (Filkins 2009) perhaps the most effective. Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians (Hedges and Al-Arian 2009) and the recordings of Iraq Veterans Against the War’s Winter Soldier event (which I attended during my fieldwork), which are available in various forms online, including the websites Youtube.com and Blip.tv, are valuable sources of first-person accounts that, in their horrifying abundance of examples of war’s violence, convey something of its deadly routine. The neh-funded Project Homecoming in both its print (Carroll 2006) and film (Robbins 2007) versions offers soldiers’ creative writing about their experiences and is also a rich and powerful resource for grappling with these experiences. 23 In this canonical sense the everyday is inextricable from a particular reading of modernity that locates it in the industrializing West beginning in the late nineteenth century and that assumes the qualities of newness, acceleration of change, and the impingement of machineries and technologies (especially of production) into areas formerly removed from them (see Highmore 2001). This is juxtaposed to a space of everyday life, which ought to be a kind of sanctuary, a space of authentic human connection that is slow, gentle, quiet, pleasant, and homely but, in the modern era, is ruptured by incursions of disciplinary techniques (de Certeau 2002) and infused with the pace of work life (Lefebvre 1991: 29–42). 24 This insistence mobilizes the same universalizing “politics of life” Didier Fassin (2007a) has critically described in the context of humanitarianism. See Kleinman (2000) for an approach to the less radical and more familiar violences of everyday

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life. Though a central interlocutor in much of this scholarship, Veena Das’s (2007) insistence on ordinariness departs from such universalist moral projects. 25 This approach to ordinariness is deeply informed by my reading of Kathleen Stewart’s (2007) project in Ordinary Affects and Veena Das’s (2007) work Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Though life at Walter Reed is characterized by legacies and the occasional presence of physical violence, ongoing experiences of intense physical pain, institutionalized dependence on drugs and alcohol, trauma, and gripping feelings of boredom and powerlessness, my ability to take this turn should also be understood within the differences in the circumstances of life at Walter Reed and life in (for example) an impoverished Brazilian shantytown. I have no doubt that these different positions in the triage of social suffering allow me to make certain analytical moves. 26 That this is pragmatically true is a relatively uncontroversial claim supported by abundant social evidence of inequality. But I follow others in arguing the unequal valuing of lives is also a juridical as well as social fact, that it is an integral part of contemporary structures and logics of law and governance, including in the United States and other contemporary liberal democracies (see Berlant 2002; Brown 1995; Davis 2002; Fassin 2007a, 2009; Povinelli 2006, 2011). 27 On human kinds, see Hacking 1986.

1. The Extra/ordinary Atmosphere 1 In most military contexts formation is like a roll call, where members of a unit present themselves for inspection and instruction. At Walter Reed, following the Washington Post scandal, formation was still held in the gym and was required three or four mornings per week, but disciplinary rules about presentation (not only standing at attention but the wearing and maintenance of a regulation uniform and haircut) and attendance were not strictly enforced, and more than one soldier described it as a “bitch session” at which soldiers would complain about various institutional frustrations. 2 Fisher House, “Houses,” accessed May 26, 2015, http://www.fisherhouse.org /programs/houses/. 3 The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, a converted aircraft carrier docked off Manhattan in the Hudson River, was another of Zachary Fisher’s initiatives. 4 This scale was certainly not inevitable, and it is certainly not a simple reflection of the numbers of troops deployed or the amount of money spent. For example, President Obama’s framing of these same wars has been intentionally less grandiose, and he has also explicitly refused to take up the reified discourse of the “war on terror” (Scott Wilson and Al Kamen, “ ‘Global War on Terror’ Is Given New Name,” Washington Post, March 25, 2009, accessed March 17, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/24/AR​ 2009032402818.html), contributing to its mortal atrophy not so that he might rebrand the same amorphous object as the Bush administration tried to do (George Lakoff, “War on Terror, Rest in Peace,” Alternet.org, July 31, 2005, 200 

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5 6

7

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accessed April 30, 2007, http://www.alternet.org/story/23810/; Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, “Washington Recasts Terror War as ‘Struggle,’ ” New York Times, July 27, 2005, accessed May 7, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/26/world /americas/26iht-terror.html) but so that it might be disaggregated into variously articulated parts. His December 1, 2009, West Point address, with its emphasis on Pakistan, is a good example (“Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” White House, December 1, 2009, accessed October 4, 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office /remarks-president-address-nation-way-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan). James doesn’t have a sister but knows I do. I understood him to be offering me this as a specific and personal point of reference. I am not disagreeing with O’Brien’s (1990) description of a true war story nor suggesting that there is something inherently different about a war story from Iraq and a war story from Vietnam. My point is that what James has, what he tells, are not (perhaps not yet) war stories at all. They are much more like something else O’Brien describes, namely the jumbled bits of memory that abide in a space aside from the “and then afterward, when you go to tell about it” (78). When O’Brien tells his “What happened was” version of the death of a guy in his unit in Vietnam, he also offers his own recollected fragments of the same event: a sound, a smell, a configuration of light and shadow. For more on the nma program, see Wool and Messinger 2012. Battle Buddy is a term used widely throughout the army and has overlapping official and colloquial meanings. In the context of the army’s predeployment mental health resiliency training, Battle Buddies are a pair of soldiers who, among other things, monitor each other for signs of ptsd or suicide risk, and it is part of every soldier’s job. There it is a specification and elaboration of the concept of Battle Buddies as soldiers who go through combat (and training) “shoulder to shoulder” and help keep each other alive and soldiering. As an official program, Battle Buddies builds on the Buddy Team Assignment Program that the army implemented in 2000 to reduce attrition (Ramsberger, Mills, and Legree 2002). The use of the term in the context of Walter Reed seems to build on the mental health resiliency training meaning, though, while the term was used in official Walter Reed memos specifying that soldiers were not to spend the night alone, there didn’t seem to be any official Battle Buddy program, and it was up to individual soldiers to arrange for someone to stay with them. While soldiers would sometimes use the term in a generic way to describe the guys in their combat units, they did not use the term to describe the guys with whom they spent time at Walter Reed. Seth Messinger (2010) helpfully outlines the tensions between these experiences of time and the more teleological models of rehabilitation employed by clinicians at Walter Reed. Though improvements in the manufacture of sockets make them very customizable, accommodating an array of residual limb shapes, this seems to have impacted decisions about where on a limb to amputate (clinical preference used to be for a high, clean, uniform cut) more than decisions about how to condition it afterward.

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10 Because many of the activities of physical therapy look like the activities of regular pt (including variations on running laps and strength training), there is a way in which pt at Walter Reed is physical therapy and vice versa. This, along with the fact that injured soldiers at Walter Reed are still active-duty military members whose “mission is to heal” and the general acceptance of the opacity of acronyms, means that, in some ways, pt means the same thing it did before an injury. pt is thus an interesting example of how life at Walter Reed is simultaneously like and not like military life in other sites. 11 For an elaboration of the ways military homecoming is precisely not a classic rite of passage, though basic training may well be, see True 2010. 12 I note again here that mine is not an institutional or hospital ethnography, nor is it addressed to the epistemologies or cosmologies of medicine and healing that are worked out on injured soldiers’ bodies. (For a very helpful overview of hospital ethnographies, see Zaman 2005: 12–18.) This is because I asked different questions and carried out a different kind of fieldwork (not in the hospital itself). It also derives from some significant differences of life at Walter Reed that set it apart from settings that might seem similar. The soldiers I worked with may have more in common with each other than most hospital patients, seeing as how they were all in the military and the contexts of their injuries are very similar, if not identical. They pass through Walter Reed in a staggered way that resembles other contexts of rehabilitation (Leavitt 1992; Zaman 2005) but is significantly protracted, lasting months or years rather than weeks. I would also note that this staggered quality and transience is, I think, part of what has made biomedical practices within the hospital more ripe for ethnographic insight than the lives of patients themselves, who in general don’t constitute a coherent community of practice within a space that lends itself to ethnographic fieldwork (see, e.g., Mol 2002; Saunders 2008). Julie Livingston (2012) offers a superlative example of a clinic-based ethnography that makes equal space for the worlds of practitioners and patients within the space of the clinic. Emily Martin (1994) offers a multisited approach that includes patients beyond the clinic. The uncanny homeliness of Walter Reed, including cohabitation with family members, the abundance of creature comforts, and personal freedom, also makes it very different from other spaces in which people might live for a long while for medical reasons or while they are in some way suffering (see, e.g., Biehl 2005; Hammond 2004: 56–77; Johnson 1998; Sassen 1999; Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant 2002). The visibility, publicity, and valorization of Walter Reed as a space of life also makes it remarkably different from those other contexts of the institution, hospital, asylum, camp, or detention center. 13 The inspiration for thinking of this sociality in terms of these French and English cognates comes from my slightly ironic rethinking of the Paul Eluard quotation that is the epigraph of Michael Lambek’s (2002: x) The Weight of the Past: “le dur désir de durer,” which loses something in the usual English translation “the hard desire to endure.”

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14 On the incorporation of family members and familial feeling into the clinical logic of care, see Wool and Messinger 2012. 15 Precariousness, in the sense that I use it in this book, comes from Butler’s (2004) use of the term in her collection of essays Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. In the collection’s final essay, “Precarious Life,” Butler works through the meaning of precariousness drawn from Levinas’s essay “Peace and Proximity.” Here precariousness is the condition of potentially not being, the imminent possibility of the end of life. Precariousness becomes apparent in the ethical moment of coming face to face, the Levinasian encounter. It is in relation to this precariousness that ethics resides because to recognize the precariousness of the other is to recognize the injurability, vulnerability, and potential death of the other and to be addressed, to be called to act in response to it. In this way the concept of precariousness begins with the violence of bodily exposure and injurability and potential death and the social attachments that are necessary to maintain bodily life, but then extends to the social attachments that are necessary to constitute a self and that may also be the site of the undoing of a self. Precariousness is thus a bodily, social, and ethical fragility predicated on (what Butler precisely calls) vulnerability, which is that openness (and subjection) to intimacy that makes possible both grief and desire (esp. 19–31, 131–34). In thinking about life away from bare life (and perhaps away from Levinas), I would like to think of precariousness not only as the imminent possibility of the not being of death but also as the imminent possibility of becoming very thoroughly unhinged. 16 I am aware of a kind of pun here: under other circumstances, his physical proximity to me, Zoë, as I sat on his bed might have been threatening to me and to my bodily sovereignty. Here, it is rather his proximity to bare life, to zoē, that is threatening to him and his bodily sovereignty. 17 I am grateful to Ken MacLeish for pointing out that at Ft. Hood, soldiers’ own cars might bear a yellow ribbon bumper sticker too. I think the visual grammar of Walter Reed might be different than in military communities, in part because of how such spaces may link those symbols into a more public structure of community (where “support the troops” might be read as “support the community”), rather than into the more individuating structure of injury, biography, and the remaking of life (where “support the troops” is the mark of others who have come to support a soldier and his family).

2. A Present History of Fragments 1 “One-Legged Flier Tried by Senators,” New York Times, March 14, 1945. It is unremarkable in the context of baseball during World War II, when “fit” men had enlisted or been drafted and only men classified as a4 (unfit for duty) could stay home to play ball. By 1943, two years before the “one-legged flier,” the St. Louis Browns already had a one-armed pitcher named Pete Grey. 2 “Roosevelt Wants Baseball to Go On,” New York Times, March 14, 1945.

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3 This seems to have worked out for Shepard: in 1947 the Washington Post reported he was being released from Walter Reed and was off to the St. Louis Brown’s training camp in Miami to try out as pitcher: “Shepard Due to Get Real Trial as Pitcher at Browns’ Camp,” Washington Post, February 12, 1947. 4 “One-Legged Flier Tried by Senators.” 5 Though many did not know his name, the legend of David Rozelle of the 3rd Armed Calvary Regiment who returned to Iraq with a prosthetic leg in 2005 circulated widely at Walter Reed. The 3rd acr museum at Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas, has a life-size diorama devoted to him, complete with postinjury pictures of Rozelle in action, a mannequin wearing his combat uniform, and one of Rozelle’s own prosthetic feet. 6 David Serlin (2006: 173) elaborates this in the image of an Iraq veteran and amputee, Michael McNaughton, jogging on his high-tech running blades alongside President George W. Bush in a 2004 photo op. 7 “Yellow Fever Mosquitoes,” New York Times, January 13, 1901; see also Pierce and Writer 2005. 8 A. C. Abbott, “The Late Major Walter Reed,” New York Times, December 7, 1902. 9 Ft. McNair is just six miles south, nestled on the southern edge of D.C. where the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers come together. It was included in L’Enfant’s original plan for the capital. In that earlier incarnation as Ft. Washington it housed the dilapidated hospital in which Maj. Walter Reed died. It is currently the home of the National Defense University. Ft. Myer is less than ten miles south, originally built on land confiscated by the government from Robert E. Lee in 1861. It was the site of the first military test flight, piloted by Orville Wright, as well as the second, during which Wright’s passenger became the first person to die in a powered aviation accident (“Fort Myer History,” jbm-hh, accessed May 28, 2015, http:// www.jbmhh.army.mil/WEB/JBMHH/AboutJBMHH/FortMyerHistory.html). Nine miles due south, the Pentagon, at 3,705,793 square feet, was constructed in sixteen months during 1941–43 to be a command hub for the U.S. military during World War II; it remains the Department of Defense’s center of operations (“Facts,” Pentagon Tours, accessed May 28, 2015, http://pentagontours.osd.mil/facts.jsp). Twenty-five miles away in Virginia is Ft. Belvoir, which traces its history back to the beginning of the Colonial period and which took over many of Walter Reed’s administrative functions in 2011. Ft. Belvoir currently counts among its military and government tenants “two Army major command headquarters, as well as 10 different Army major commands, 19 different agencies of the Department of Army, eight elements of the U.S. Army Reserve and the Army National Guard, and 26 DoD agencies. Also located here are a U.S. Navy construction battalion, a Marine Corps detachment, a U.S. Air Force activity, and an agency from the Department of the Treasury” (“Directory of Tenant Organizations,” Fort Belvoir, accessed September 13, 2010, http://www.belvoir.army.mil/tenant.asp). Ft. Mead is twenty miles northeast. It was created to accommodate massing troops of World War I and now houses the National Security Administration, which is involved in post-9/11 “warrantless wiretapping” of both U.S. and foreign citizens (http://www.ftmeade 204 

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11

12 13 14 15

16

17

18 19 20

.army.mil/pages/history/history.html, accessed September 13, 2010). Twenty miles northwest is Andrews Air Force Base, home of Air Force One, named for Lt. Gen. Frank M. Andrews, who helped found the air force and died in a plane crash in 1943, the day after the base was named for him (“Joint Base Andrews History,” Joint Base Andrews, September 21, 2012, http://www.andrews.af.mil/library /factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=4479). For an exploration of the leaking of military visual and affective cultures of fear into civilian space during the cold war and the conditions of possibility this created for the aesthetics and affects of security and fear in public space in the America of the “war on terror” era, see Masco 2008. Among the earliest examples of specialized medical treatment for officers is the report of an army captain, J. W. Wilen, being sent from a military hospital in Arkansas all the way to Walter Reed, presumably for services not available elsewhere: “Capt. J. W. Wilen, Thirteenth Cavalry, relieved treatment Army Navy General Hospital, Hot Springs, Ark.; to Walter Reed General Hospital, District of Columbia, for observation and treatment” (United Service, New York Times, December 1, 1912). An illustrative example of Walter Reed’s nodality can be found in a United Service report of the parlaying movement of officers who relieve each other at various posts across the country, eventually enabling one Capt. H. H. Johnson to report for duty at Walter Reed (United Service, New York Times, January 31, 1912). In the nineteen months of U.S. involvement in World War I, the number of army personnel increased twentyfold, from 200,000 to 4 million (Ayres 1919: 16). Walter Reed Army Medical Center 2008. Walter Reed Army Medical Center 2008. “Wounded Unembittered by War Critics,” New York Times, November 15, 1969; Sandra Blakeslee, “Crippled Veterans Find Hospitals Crowded and Attitudes at Home Ambiguous,” New York Times, April 3, 1970. Dwight D. Eisenhower spent much of the last five years of his life at Walter Reed being treated for numerous heart attacks, bronchitis, arthritis, gastrointestinal problems, gallbladder surgery, and pneumonia, all of which was reported in wire stories that quoted the daily updates from his doctors (e.g., “Eisenhower Doing So Well Bulletins Are Halted,” New York Times, November 27, 1965; “Eisenhower Sitting Up,” New York Times, December 18, 1966; “Eisenhower Sitting Up,” New York Times, June 29, 1968). On Dirksen, see Joseph Loftus, “Dirksen Breaks His Right Hip in a Fall at Hospital in Capital,” New York Times, May 11, 1966; “Dirksen Opposes Bid to Expand c.i.a. Unit,” New York Times, May 21 1966. Todd Purdum and David Rosenbaum, “Chief of c.d.c. Says Anthrax Is Likely in Additional Mail,” New York Times, October 17, 2001; David Stout, “Chasing Bioterror around the Beltway,” New York Times, October 31, 2001. Jill Lawrence, “President Feeling ‘Great’ after Receiving Inoculation,” USA Today, December 23, 2002. “President Vaccinated,” New York Times, December 22, 2002; Lawrence, “President Feeling ‘Great’ after Receiving Inoculation.” “Two Drop to Death in College Park Aero,” Washington Post, September 29, 1912.

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21 “Two Army Airmen Die,” New York Times, September 29, 1912. 22 “Two Army Airmen Die.” 23 The American death rates—two out of every one hundred soldiers deployed— paled in comparison to those of other countries involved. Ayres (1919: 130) calculated that “Russian battle deaths were 34 times as heavy as those of the United States, those of Germany 32 times as great, the French 28 times, and the British 18 times as large.” Fifty thousand U.S. deaths is indeed shocking. But it bears remembering that, in total, 7 million soldiers were killed in battle alone in the four years of World War I. Such numbers are so hard to fathom they convey their significance poorly. 24 His 1931 treatise includes data dating back to 1818. He also used his meticulous calculating approach as part of the U.S. Army’s eugenics programs (e.g., Love and Davenport 1920; see also Lawrie 2013). 25 “Army Officer Ends Life,” New York Times, May 23, 1916. 26 “War Aviation Chief Is Injured by Fall,” New York Times, March 24, 1916. 27 “14 Hospitals Chosen for War’s Disabled,” New York Times, April 1, 1918; “Army School for Nurses,” New York Times, July 6, 1918. 28 Quoted in “14 Hospitals Chosen for War’s Disabled.” 29 “14 Hospitals Chosen for War’s Disabled.” 30 “Reed Hospital Lacks Vases,” Washington Post, December 29, 1918. 31 “More Rest Houses for Sick Soldiers,” New York Times, July 14, 1918. 32 “Hospital Sets Pace in Soldier Salvage,” New York Times, April 15, 1943. 33 “Hospital Sets Pace in Soldier Salvage.” 34 “Calley Trial Recessed for Psychiatric Test,” New York Times, January 19, 1971; “Sanity Unit Finds Calley ‘Normal,’ ” New York Times, February 17, 1971. 35 Media coverage and online chatter quickly suggested that Hasan found his service in the U.S. Army was incompatible with his Islamic faith but could not get out of the service contract that had paid for his medical training. This, combined with the fact that he was heard to shout “God is great” in Arabic before shooting, led many to consider his act part of the loosely coordinated Islamic terrorist war against the United States in particular and the Christian West in general, despite the fact that his rampage seems to have been entirely unaided and that some of his superiors at Walter Reed suggested that he might be going through a psychotic break. See Wool 2009a for a parsing of some of this chatter. It was at Walter Reed that Hasan was in email contact with an American ex-pat named Anwar al Awlaki, who since then became the first U.S. citizen officially approved for targeted killing by the United States. It was at Walter Reed, said his family members, that he felt the Islamophobic repulsion of his fellow officers. And it was there that he gave an unsolicited presentation discussing issues of being Muslim in the U.S. military, a presentation of which much was made in the aftermath of the Ft. Hood shootings (e.g., Lieberman and Collins 2011; Eli Saslow et al., “In Aftermath of Fort Hood, Community Haunted by Clues That Went Unheeded,” Washington Post, December 31, 2009, accessed January 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn /content/gallery/2009/11/10/GA2009111000920.html?sid=ST2009123002982). 206 

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36 “Johnson Visits Soldiers Wounded in Vietnam,” New York Times, May 13, 1966. 37 “Human material” comes from Charles Mayo’s 1917 American Medical Association inaugural speech: “It has been cheaper for [the great] industries to let Europe pay the cost of bringing individuals to maturity and to replace the injured and lost with new human material than to go to the trouble and expense of providing suitable means for protecting the lives and limbs of employees. Today we are face to face with the truth that we must arise to upbuild our own people. . . . ​We hear on every hand of projects and efforts for the conservation of human life, a movement which is the outcome not of any philanthropy or sentiment but of necessity. Men can no longer be replaced with the old time ease, and their individual value to the community has increased accordingly” (Mayo 1918). 38 “Truman Thrills Veterans at Services in Reed Chapel,” Washington Post, April 23, 1945. 39 “atc to Fly 20 Wounded Veterans Home,” Washington Post, December 19, 1946; “ ‘gi Oscars’ to Be Awarded at Walter Reed Ceremony,” Washington Post, June 10, 1945; “Walter Reed Convalescents Enjoy a Show,” Washington Post, June 23, 1942. 40 “v.i.p.s in Capitol ‘Act’ in u.s.o. Show,” New York Times, January 26, 1951. 41 In 2008 there was a debate about whether or not soldiers diagnosed with serviceconnected ptsd should be eligible for the Purple Heart. The debate raised the question of whether or not ptsd was a “real injury.” The decision was that ptsd sufferers were not eligible for the Purple Heart not because ptsd wasn’t a real injury but, in part, because the rules of the award say a soldier’s blood must be shed to be eligible. Another reason given was the enemy must have intended to inflict the injury, which was judged not to be the case with ptsd. There is currently a new question of whether sufferers of tbi should be eligible. See Jeff Schogol, “Pentagon: No Purple Heart for ptsd,” Stars and Stripes, January 16, 2009. 42 “Alien Veteran a Citizen,” New York Times, July 25, 1953. 43 The figure of the neglected, harassed, or unrequited Vietnam veteran has become a prominent presence in discussions of how returning soldiers ought to be treated by both the government and the civilian public. The story of the spat-upon Vietnam vet is invoked as a cautionary tale. Lembcke (2000) argues it is important we recognize such tales as apocryphal, disseminated as part of a political strategy by Nixon and then again by George H. W. Bush in the run-up to the Gulf War, and Greene (1989) shows a wide array of homecoming experiences, including parades and handshakes. I would suggest that the veracity of these stories doesn’t much impact their effect. In that way they function a bit like rumor. 44 “Pvt. Walker Is a Medal Winner,” Washington Post, June 15, 1966. 45 For an analysis of the events surrounding Lynch’s story, including her later renunciation of the propagandistic means to which she felt her image had been used and the gendered national politics of visibility and invisibility therein, see Casper and Moore 2009: 133–55. 46 Mark Benjamin, “Behind the Walls of Ward 54,” Salon.com, February 18, 2005, accessed December 10, 2008, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/18/wal​ ter_reed/index.html. Michel duCille’s photographs were part of the Pulitzer award

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citation the reporting team received. The photographs can be found at “2008: Public Service,” Pulitzer Prizes, accessed June 10, 2010, http://www.pulitzer.org /archives/7824#. 47 These are better known as Warrior Transition Units and have been implemented across the army. They have recently come under public scrutiny for their nearly wholesale failure. This is not entirely surprising, governed as they are by the same catch-22 military logic that led to the problems at Walter Reed they were supposed to solve. 48 In the later years of Vietnam, Walter Reed was occasionally held up as an implicit or explicit contrast to the spaces of conflict or neglect in which Vietnam veterans were and often still are figured. A 1970 article about the overcrowding, understaffing, and neglect at va hospitals notes, “Many veterans say that the time spent in the military hospital can be helpful to a wounded man, surrounded as he is by friends in similar straits.” It recounts a story from Walter Reed’s officers’ amputee ward to illustrate (Sandra Blakeslee, “Crippled Veterans Find Hospitals Crowded and Attitudes at Home Ambiguous,” New York Times, April 3, 1970). One reason for this is that Walter Reed is a military hospital, not a va hospital. During the Vietnam era, stays at military hospitals were relatively short since they were not (as they had been during previous wars) responsible for rehabilitation. This became the function of the va system, which was overcrowded and underresourced and had to requisition nursing homes and other facilities to manage the numbers of veterans requiring their services. The relationship between the military medical system and the va continues to be structurally problematic. The most recent issue being dealt with is “continuity of care” as veterans transition from one facility to the other, encountering not only new doctors and care providers, but new regulations, forms, and institutional protocols, sometimes requiring new examinations and diagnoses to continue treatment that is already under way.

3. The Economy of Patriotism 1 This self-sustaining justification became particularly explicit in the middle of the Iraq War, as hawkish political rhetoric suggested that the deaths of American soldiers were in themselves a justification for continuing the war. For example, in his July 4, 2006, speech delivered at Ft. Bragg, President Bush declared, “I’m going to make you this promise: I’m not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain, by pulling out before the job is done” (Christine Hauser, “Bush Thanks Troops for Service in Iraq,” New York Times, July 4, 2006). In 2009 former vice president Dick Cheney responded to the Obama administration’s scheduled draw-down of troops in Iraq in a radio interview: “At some point they have to stand on their own, but I would not want to see the U.S. waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point” (see Joseph Webber, “Cheney Fears Iraq Withdrawal Will ‘Waste’ U.S. Sacrifices,” Washington Times, June 29, 2009). The statement incited a flurry of commentary. 208 

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2 See Bank, Stark, and Thorndike 2008: esp. 153, 167; Ronald Brownstein, “Bush Breaks with 140 Years of History in Plan for Wartime Tax Cut,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 2003. 3 See Philip Ewing, “Defense Leaders Fear Military-Civilian ‘Disconnect,’ ” Politico​ .com, February 20, 2011, accessed July 4, 2014, http://www.politico.com/news​ /stories/0211/49838.html; Mark Thompson, “An Army Apart: The Widening Military-Civilian Gap,” Time, November 21, 2011; see also Taylor et al. 2011. 4 This insistence crosses the left-right political spectrum, with slogans like “Love the warrior, hate the war” appearing on bumper stickers as an antiwar alternative to the more ubiquitous “Support the troops.” 5 “Remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff at a Military Naturalization Ceremony,” accessed July 10, 2009, http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/speeches​ /sp_1173794158326.shtm. 6 The house manager was new and not well liked, nor did she seem to want to be, as she preferred to run the house like an extended-stay hotel. She commanded little respect from James, who was almost entirely dismissive of her authority. His belligerence was further inflamed when she took away the coffee table in the den, required everyone to use paper plates because she could not consistently ensure that people didn’t leave dirty dishes out overnight, and had a number of volunteers keep a public log of everyone’s comings and goings. 7 See also Kenneth MacLeish’s (2013: 185–200) elaboration of this same material and moral economy. 8 This is the time of year when organizations can solicit donations from federal employees. During these weeks the Fisher House puts up signs along the post fence and takes soldiers out to fundraising events to give talks. 9 This remains true during war itself, and it is important to remember that esprit de corps is not the same as national fraternité. I have found no better expression of this than in the words of Spc. Sterling Jones, part of the unit featured in the documentary Restrepo (Hetherington and Junger 2010), which are included in Tim Hetherington’s (2010) book of the same experiences, Infidel. Jones says, I can speak for my platoon and my platoon only . . . ​but those guys didn’t join because they were really patriotic. Everybody’s got their own reason, and very few of them are patriotic. Now, do you feel a sense of pride about the flag you wear on your shoulder? Sure. But I’m not doing this for the recognition from my country. I couldn’t give a shit what anybody thinks, except for those guys to my left and my right. . . . ​Those guys are what it’s about, and I can’t stress that enough. In the end, you don’t have anything else. Your momma ain’t there, your wife ain’t there, your sisters, your brothers your cousins. . . . ​ So you become a bond. . . . ​You make a conscious decision to say, “I’m willing to die for this guy.” And that’s a hell of a statement for a guy you’ve known two years. . . . ​That’s the attitude and that’s the pride. But patriotism doesn’t really exist—not amongst us. I think patriotism came from the 9/11 incident, where people went, “We’re America, we’re going to stand strong and we’re

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going to be patriotic.” And for thirty-five seconds, people forgot that they didn’t like spics or niggers or white people or whoever the fuck they don’t like. They forgot for a little bit and went “We gotta go against this.” In the end, really patriotic beliefs are almost hatred. You talk to people about Muslims and they’ll tell you they hate fucking Muslims. Why? Because some Muslims crashed planes into our building? They just lumped everybody together. . . . ​ So the patriotic sense seems like it’s been fabricated for the American people: “be patriotic because we need to band together to destroy something else.” But here, everybody has their own individual reasons why they’re here, why we do what we do.” (Hetherington 2010: 200–201) 10 She writes, “The passions of war were, in effect, diffusing downward from the elite to the average soldier and citizen. In the new era [especially after the nineteenth century], the sacralization of war would depend less on established religions like Christianity, and more on the new ‘religion’ of nationalism” (Ehrenreich 1998: 176). 11 This point was recently captured by the journalist Jennifer Percy (2014: 7–9), who enumerates all the circumstances from which war was salvation for Special Ops soldier Caleb Daniels. These range from domestic abuse to the hazardous labor available in a limited rural job market. 12 Jake’s personal motto was “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing,” a saying he’d learned from his father. 13 Though this need not be the case in all wars or for all soldiers, it has certainly been illustrated time and again by the stories of American soldiers fighting in Iraq. When talking about the question of hate, racism, and dehumanization with a member of ivaw, he put it to me this way: “Think of a soldier who gets as many hours of training on Iraqi culture as you can imagine, forty hours, sixty hours, and then you send him over and after a month of living with the awareness that all the white guys are safe and all the brown guys might not be, what do you think? That training can’t hold.” 14 Small wonder that both Agamben (1998, 2005) and Butler (2004, 2009) explore the character of sovereignty and life in the modern state by thinking through the conditions of post-9/11 soldiering: acts of petty sovereignty that reinsert sovereign power into the space of governmentality but are predicated simultaneously on the impunity with which the solider can kill, but also the impunity with which he can be killed, all within the legal state of exception that grants him these powers and precariousness under the laws of war that (to complicate things even further) often do not, and cannot, by design, apply in the “war on terror.”

4. On Movement 1 The term combat has a specific meaning in the context of the U.S. military: it refers to kinetic enemy contact. The specificity of this meaning is important bureaucratically, since it makes one eligible for certain commendations, badges, awards, and

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compensation, but it is also made meaningful by those who distinguish experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan along the combat-noncombat axis. I use the term here in the more general sense of military service in an active war zone or zone of occupation, where killing and being killed are pervasive and realistic possibilities. My decision to use this term is essentially a compromise intended to facilitate my writing and your reading, but it is one with which I am not entirely satisfied. 2 This distinction is also sometimes reproduced in studies of (and social organizing around) marked ways of being in the world where those that appear clearly on the body (i.e., conditions usually encompassed by the term disability) are disarticulated from those that do not (conditions usually encompassed by the terms developmental disability, cognitive disability, and mental illness or madness). Sensory impairments, especially deafness, are often situated in a category all their own (e.g., Davis 2002; Lewis 2006). 3 Allan Young’s (1995a) Harmony of Illusions is the seminal book dealing with these dimensions of ptsd. Erin Finley’s (2011) Fields of Combat offers a very rich ethnographic account of many of these issues as they play out in the lives of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan seeking treatment at a Texas va clinic. 4 tbi occupies an interesting position on the hyphenated Cartesian continuum: it is caused by gross bodily damage (usually concussive force that often leaves no outward physical marking), but its expression, in things like outbursts of uncontrollable anger, memory loss, and nonlinear thought, is tied up with the mental half of the dualism. 5 This strategic description of ptsd, given here for the benefit of the reader, lends it much more coherence than it has in practice. For example, though the thrust of much current ptsd research focuses on the brain and its malfunctions, the new dsm-5 definition of ptsd includes (in addition to existing criteria a–g) the new h criterion: “The disturbance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., medication or alcohol) or a general medical condition (e.g., traumatic brain injury, coma)” (American Psychiatric Association 2013). For a historical critique of the incoherence in the trauma concept, see Leys 2000. For a historical account of the concept with a focus on its growing moral force, see Fassin and Rechtman 2009: 14–93. For the specific and definitive genealogy of ptsd, see Young 1997, and see Scott 1990 for a brief account of the disciplinary politics of its birth. For recent examples of military medicinal research that seems especially passionate about rendering ptsd in biological terms, see Brenner et al. 2009; Killion et al. 2009; van Boven et al. 2009; see also Dieperink et al. 2005. 6 I elaborate these current meanings of ptsd in the section of this chapter titled “The (Dis)Placement of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” 7 This syntagmatic, relational property of “normal” is also at the heart of stigma (Coleman [1986] 2013; Goffman 1986). What I describe here certainly relates to, and my analysis is indebted to, such powerful sociological concepts. But given the particular national frame and value attached to the bodies of these injured soldiers, the ways civilians, through claims of sacrifice, ground the value of war in these injured soldier bodies, and my emphasis on the emergence of soldiers’ transformed

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modes of being in and apprehending a transformed world, I do not find the notion of stigma, especially its connection to shame and discredit, the most well suited for this context, though it might well have been during Vietnam. Incidentally these places—the kind you find in strip malls across the country—are often also large and wheelchair-accessible. The opportunity for jokes offered by the actualization of the expression “I paid an arm and a leg” was well used at Walter Reed. These modifications were of the souped-up rather than the disability-accommodation variety. If possible, injured soldiers at Walter Reed preferred not to have accommodations like hand gears in their cars, and some of the cars—being especially small and low or big and high—had always been impractical on many counts. MacLeish (2010) notes the sensibility of cars in a more “ordinary” U.S. military context. Some states also offer Purple Heart license plates to the surviving spouses of service members killed in action. Soldiers at Walter Reed typically chose to expose their prostheses. For an elaboration, see Messinger 2009. But there was a tension between this exposure and ideals of passing that was also important. There was a Korean War vet and double amputee involved in booster events, and Jake saw his ability to pass as a nonamputee inspiring. When I went shopping with Javier and his brother in preparation for their visit to Oklahoma, where Javier would get together with the members of his unit who had just returned from their deployment, he wanted to get long pants and long-sleeved shirts to cover his prosthetic leg and arm. It is worth remembering that this objectifying encounter is not an end, and the rest of Fanon’s ([1967] 1991) essay The Fact of Blackness is structured by various attempts to respond to and against such objectifying moments. Sophia seems almost to be quoting Lingis (1986: 92): “My eye as a seeing power does not double up, and superimpose upon itself on my eye as a visible thing, but the visible field doubles up to inscribe itself upon that one chunk of itself which is my eye, making itself a vision on that visible. The visible organizes itself into a view, inscribes all of the visible, or some synopsis of it, on one of the visibles—my eye.” Depleted uranium (du) is used in some forms of heavy military armor and artillery. The use of du is controversial internationally, and a number of countries and ngos have condemned its use. The issue of du poisoning in the U.S. military is also controversial, and it has been linked in some quarters to Gulf War Syndrome. For more details on the international debate, see the un secretary general’s July 2008 report, Effects of the Use of Armaments and Ammunitions Containing Depleted Uranium, and its addendum (United Nations 2008a, 2008b). On other altered modes of seeing space, see Mitchell 2001. For example, see Duke-unc 2009; Georgopoulos et al. 2010; Karl and Werner 2010; Koenigs and Grafman 2009; Miller et al. 2001; Mulvaney, McLean, and De Leeuw 2010; Yehuda and LeDoux 2007; and the website of the Northern California Institute for Research and Education—The Veterans Health Research Institute, accessed August 1, 2010, http://www.ncire.org/.

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18 Recently, the concept of moral injury has been proffered as an alternative or supplement to ptsd as a way of grasping those more psychic aspects of transformation that, proponents say, escape the current biopsychological iteration of ptsd. The diagnosis of tbi is also becoming more widely recognized and in some social contexts may offer an alternative frame for understanding transformations that used to be read through the lens of ptsd. 19 Trauma theory offers a related but different explanation of the workings of trauma. Yet, with its own diagnostic tendencies and emphasis on rupture, it is apart from the project of ontological description I pursue here (see, e.g., Caruth 1996; for a critique, see Leys 2000: 266–97). 20 It is entirely possible that James’s eating inside could be pathologized (even though he says it is not about avoiding a trigger), but even if it were, understanding this as “avoidance behavior” offers no way of figuring the transformed experience of taste on which he is so insistent. 21 For critiques of such metaphorical thinking on the prostheticized or disabled body, see Clare 2001; Jain 1999; Smith and Morra 2006; Sobchack 2006.

5. Intimate Attachments 1 I mean sexuality in the Foucauldian sense (Foucault 1978), the sense that figures it as a kind of maneuverable keystone of the arraignment of biopower that is heir to post-Enlightenment science and governance. Sexuality in this sense is irreducible to questions of gender or categories of identity that we tend to denote when we use the term sexuality in our everyday lives, though these are very important among the many ways it “penetrates the body” (107). On the necessity of attending to hetero/homosexuality as an organizing principle of modern Western cultural forms, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1990) seminal Epistemology of the Closet. 2 Far from being limited to the case of injured soldiers, the paradox of self-sufficiency is an essential condition of liberal personhood, part of its very constitution (see Davis 2002). This paradox is also entrenched in (not solved by) the humanist embrace of a language of alternating or mutual dependence, so long as the dependable things remain singular liberal persons fully contained by the boundary of their skin (e.g., Kittay 1999; see also Cohen 2008). 3 A press release about the army’s 2010 suicide prevention report (Chiarelli 2010) parsed the “typical” suicide this way: “a 23-year-old, Caucasian, junior-enlisted male. Most suicides are committed using firearms and often involve drugs or alcohol. Perhaps surprisingly, the risk decreases for soldiers who are married or have one or more deployments. That might be because soldiers who chose to remain in service following combat deployments are more resilient to stress.” Katherine McIntire Peters, “Army Suicide Report Raises Concerns about Drug Abuse,” Government Executive, July 29, 2010, accessed July 29, 2010, http://www.govexec.com/ story_page.cfm?articleid=45792&oref=todaysnews. 4 Though suicide rates in the military were historically lower than in the nonmilitary population, the marine and army rates respectively reached more than double

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and just under double the civilian population rates in 2009 (“Suicide Rate of Young Veterans Soars,” cbs News, January 11, 2010, accessed June 29, 2010, http:// www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/11/national/main6083072.shtml; see also Chiarelli 2010; Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury and the Department of Veterans Affairs 2010; Jamie Tarabay, “Suicide Rivals the Battlefield in Toll on U.S. Military,” Morning Edition, June 17, 2010, npr, accessed March 21, 2011, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story​ .php?storyId=127860466). Rates seem to have declined somewhat in 2013, though only among active-duty soldiers. They remain historically high among reserves and nonactive national guard (Gregg Zoroya, “Suicides in the Army Declined Sharply in 2013,” Stars and Stripes, January 31, 2014, accessed April 23, 2014, http://www .stripes.com/news/us/suicides-in-the-army-declined-sharply-in-2013-1.265075). A 2012 va report looking at historical data noted that suicide rates among veterans have remained relatively stable for the past twelve years: eighteen to twenty-two veterans, most over the age of fifty, commit suicide every day (Petzel 2012). 5 Given the overabundance of media coverage of soldier violence, it is important to say that, while it seems like this happens to everyone else, it does not. There are serious problems of domestic violence in military communities, but such problems go in many directions and need to be understood in context. When they are not, it is easy to caricature soldiers and veterans as abusive monsters whose morality has been trained out of them. Conveying how a sense of the inevitability of soldier violence after war is folded into military communities, MacLeish (2013: 225) quotes the response of a Ft. Hood resident to the news that a soldier was shooting other soldiers: “I expected it some day. I’m not shocked. We’re not invincible, and our soldiers need help without stigma.” The case of Maj. Nadal Hasan turned out to be complicated by post-9/11 stories of “Islamic terrorism” and “radicalization,” but at the time the straightforward story of the soldier who snapped seemed obvious and available. 6 In the contemporary United States, a foundationally heteronational liberal democracy (Canaday 2009; Duggan 2002), the intimate relation of the conjugal couple is understood to secure proper personhood (Povinelli 2006: esp. 188–90). As a “key transfer point of liberalism” (17), the conjugal couple—the sexually desirable form of life that forcefully structures the intimacies I outline in this chapter—is thus not simply a new way of describing the same old compulsory heterosexuality. It is a site through which discourses and practices of normative selfhood and enfleshment migrate and reside and calibrate the social skin to regimes of intimate touch. Conjugal couplehood shapes and is shaped by the capacious field of sexuality, “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, and administration and a population” (Foucault 1978: 103)—including both sexual practices, like sodomy, that do not rely on a specific combination of genders or genitals, and gendered orientations of sexual desire, such as heterosexuality and homosexuality, which do. Furthermore, in and through its formation of sexuality, conjugal couplehood also shapes and registers overlap214 

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ping or transecting or nested biopolitical channels of personhood, including race (the major example being Loving v. Virginia) and cognitive capacity, the latter sometimes in terms of age (as in age of marital consent, based on ideas of development), sometimes in terms of mental illness (as in fitness of a party for contractual agreement), and sometimes in terms of disability (as in those stripped of or denied access to sexual and other rights of self-determination). This connection between conjugal couplehood and personhood by way of disability echoes an argument long made by disability rights activists: that the denial of disabled sexuality is a denial of disabled humanity and a violation of the human rights of people with disabilities. The theoretical elaboration of this point brings together the basic Foucauldian insight that “modern” subjectivation requires the sexualization and gendering of the subject with the insight from critical disability studies that human disability is often positioned at the seeming limit of biological animacy: “a radical lack of subjectivity, of capacity for judgment, in American terms, a ‘vegetable’ ” (Chen 2012: 36), beyond the pale of the human in part because of the denial of sexuality and sexual rights, including, particularly in cases of cognitive or developmental disability, the right of sexual consent and marital consent. 7 It is also true more generally that sexual contact can be a mode of touch and a social relation of bodies that enables life beyond the flesh through the flesh within morbid conditions of precariousness. For example, even amid the unrequited sociality of those abandoned by state and family to wait for death in the infirmary at Vita in Brazil, recounted by Joao Biehl (2005: 109, 114–15), sexual contact can be more than merely fleshy, and can—even in the midst of abuse, even when claims about it are contested—do something other than alienate a person from a world: it can be intimate. Especially for Catarina, who, like others, is abandoned to Vita by both state and family, those attachments can be made out of sex and the carnal obligations sex can entail as a mode of touch that once promised and failed, but might promise again, to secure a body within a family, sometimes through love and sometimes through knots of abuse (97–98, 113–16). The precarious attachments woven out of this thread of sexuality at Vita can be easy to overlook in Biehl’s breathtaking text, in part because of the untamed and difficult-to-decipher forms of sexual exposure there—from nudity (250–51) to masturbation (80) to sexual abuse (116–18). Such exposures destabilize the normative relationship between sex, intimacy, willfulness, and selfhood that adheres across ideals of the person as an individual. I do not think this is a reading that Biehl intends. Because as he (ambivalently) decides to name the existence of those at Vita “ex-human,” it becomes tempting to read over the flickering presence of intimacies that make the human in abject zones of life. I do not mean to suggest that intimacy mitigates acts of state and familial abandonment, only that it is part of what makes “ex-human” life possible and also that being abandoned does not necessarily mean being in total solitude. If abandonment were such a straightforward condition, it would not be such a protracted and multiply devastating one. And if the situations in which a form of sociality was death-bound were always bad and those in which it was part of a flourishing were separable and always good, rather than crisscrossing and

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nested within each other, we might easily embrace a hopeful politics of life and be done with it. Here I evoke Lee Edelman’s (2004) description of reproductive futurism in the contemporary United States. While their son’s paternity was gossiped about (Jake told me about it, but others also shared this secret with me) and Tanielle herself made these kinds of not-sosubtle remarks about it, the possibility that he might have been conceived through rape rather than “cheating” was not among the rumors, and I suspect that most people were unaware of it. A woman with whom I worked at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center had been previously employed as a financial counselor for American soldiers in Germany. Her husband was an mp, she came from a military family, and she was hardly naïve to military life, but nonetheless she was shocked at how financially illiterate the soldiers she saw were. For example, many of them had never had a bank account and had no idea how to write a check. His pay grade was enlisted grade 4. Army pay grades are e1–9, warrant officer (w) 1–5, and officer (o) 1–10. In conversation, enlisted soldiers are generally referred to by pay grade (e.g., “He’s an e4”), which correlates with rank (e.g., specialist). On infantilization and disability more generally, see Kumari Campbell 2008: 152–54; Thomas 2007: 88. This situation, and a not dissimilar problem with Jake’s wife, Tanielle, caused serious problems during my fieldwork. Sharon refused to go somewhere if I was there and would do her best to stop Peter from going too. For a period during the middle of my fieldwork, Jake stopped returning my calls and emails, and though he initially tried to make other excuses (largely, I think, to spare both of us the indignity), he eventually confirmed the rumor others had passed on to me; Tanielle had forbidden him to speak with me because she thought we were having an affair. While it is easy to assume (especially given the foundational importance of Margaret Mead’s work) that being a woman would give me unproblematic special access to “women’s worlds” at Walter Reed, situations like these shouldn’t be thrown out as exceptional. Lizette Alvarez, “Iraq Veteran Lost His Arms and Legs to a Bomb,” New York Times, July 4, 2010. The continuation of his other normative desires and affects—like eating pizza and cracking jokes—is the other principal way this full personhood is conveyed.

Conclusion 1 By pointing to Hispano practices of mourning and the insistence on the simultaneous repetition and singularity of death in that context, Angela Garcia (2010: 72–74) also helpfully relativizes this work of repair that Das (2007) finds in India.

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index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Af­ghan­i­stan: compared to Iraq as a place of military employment, 119–20, 122; the Tactical Command Center management in, 119–20 Alec: the familial and friendship bonds of, 39, 52, 161; and the fight toward a heteronormative life, 52, 164; his initial postinjury awakening, 161; his personality, 38–39, 162; his problematic ExFix, 26, 38–39, 111; his reasons for enlistment, 116; the injuries of, 39, 160; the management demands of his medications and antibiotics, 39–42, 161; the pragmatic management of his injuries and recovery by, 160–61; the restaurant outing, 39–40; the suicide scare provoked by, 161–63; visceral combat knowledge as a lingering influence on, 161, 163 amputations: the antibiotics designed to prevent the need for, 41; bone infections leading to, 41; the commonality of among ied and efp blast victims, 17, 19; Daniel’s re­sis­tance to a recommended leg amputation, 164; elective, 2, 18, 26, 47, 198n15; following the failure of corrective surgeries, 34, 47; limb salvage to avoid, 198n15; multiple as a commonality among injured soldiers at Walter Reed, 17, 196–97n8; phantom limbs, 43, 44–45; as pragmatic issues for injured soldiers, 160–61; the prosthetic technologies used following, 43, 201–2n9; surgeries to facilitate nerve and bone growth following, 47; tsgli coverage of, 136, 181; Walter Reed General Hospital as a designated center for, 78

amputees: the case of Brendan Marrocco, 186–87, 197n9; the case of Carl, 171–72; the case of Jake, 2–3, 17–18, 47, 55; the case of James, 34, 47, 55, 136; the case of Javier, 44; the case of Kevin, 122, 132; the case of Peter, 111, 112–13; the decisions of regarding exposure of their prostheses, 212n12; the depiction of Michael McNaughton running with President Bush, 204n6; the different social readings of inside versus outside Walter Reed, 138, 208n48, 212n12; the return of to heteronormativity as a national concern, 12, 169, 186–88; the return of World War II veterans to professional baseball, 63–65, 203n1, 204n3; the return to combat duty by David Rozelle, 204n5 Andrews Air Force Base, 71, 204–5n9 antibiotics, picc lines, and medications, 26, 39–43, 122, 161, 166, 211n5 antiwar politics: antiwar epiphanies within the context of, 190; Code Pink, 126–27; Iraq Veterans Against the War (ivaw), 146, 199n22, 210n13; as opposition to war not to soldiers, 88, 126, 197–98n12, 209n4 autological self-­making, 13, 174, 177, 180, 182, 186, 188 Bank of America, 47, 107, 176 baseball, 64–67, 203nn1–2 basic training (bt), 36, 37, 149, 202n11 Battle Buddy, 39, 163, 201n7 Becker, Gay, 196n3

body: the attentiveness demanded by the injured, 42–46; conjugal intimacy and the healing of the injured, 157–59, 164, 170–78, 184, 186–88, 213n1; “conservation of human life” movements, 12, 207n37; the demands of military life on the soldier, 16, 67, 77–78, 80, 203n15; enlistment as a change in self-­ sovereignty over one’s, 13, 67, 116–17; the fiction of the sacrificial soldier versus the reality of the injured, 3, 42, 59–60, 101, 103–7, 112–13, 123; the focus of ptsd on the biochemical elements of the, 133–34, 154; the injured as a point of personal conflict between dependence and in­de­pen­dence, 158–59, 163–64, 169–72, 183–84, 186; the injured soldier as a reminder of war and violence, 12–13, 61, 67, 82–86, 88, 94, 139–40; the injured soldier as a symbol representing sacrifice, 82–94, 103–7, 112, 123–29, 211–12n7; the injured soldier as the first impetus for rehabilitation science, 11–13; the injured soldier body as different from the disabled body, 16–17, 135, 139, 196n3; liberal ethics concerning the injured soldier, 9, 13–14, 16, 87–88, 102, 198n14; the management of body configuration by injured soldiers, 2, 18, 44; Mayo’s concept of “human material,” 82, 207n37; medical inputs to reconstruct the injured soldier, 7, 26, 42–47, 55–57; the meta­ phorizing of their injured bodies by soldiers, 59; movement and the transformed soldier, 8, 45–46, 132–35, 138–48, 151–52, 153–55, 189; the need for ordinariness of the injured, 5, 131–32, 180, 188, 189–90, 191; phantom limbs, 43, 44–45; the precariousness and instability of the injured, 21, 26, 39–46, 54–55, 108, 160–63, 176, 188, 193; productivity as a primary goal of remaking the injured soldier, 12–13, 15–17, 65–67, 188, 204n5; the remaking of personhood following injury to the, 6, 13, 26–27, 52–53, 59–60, 66–67, 186–87; the reproductive capacity of the male as a focus of rehabilitation, 10, 14, 24, 69, 171–72, 188; the reversal of the internal and external functions of the injured, 42–43, 50, 56–57; social skin, sociality, and the rehabilitating, 46–48, 52–53, 196nn3–4, 202n12; the soldier as a symbol of national virility, 3, 10–11, 13–14, 69–70, 99, 173, 197n10; visible versus invisible impairments to the human, 211n2, 211n4. See also amputations; prostheses Bonus March (1932), 15 boosters, 32, 33, 58, 59, 102, 112, 212n12 234 

index

boredom: as characteristic of outpatient life at Walter Reed, 7–8, 21, 25–26, 34, 49, 61, 107, 200n25; civilian efforts to relieve injured soldiers’, 124–26; war zone, 18, 106. See also intensity; pain Bush, President George W., 74, 91, 94, 200–201n4, 207n43, 208–9nn1–2; and pro-­war photo publicity, 89, 204n6 Calley, Lt. William, 80–81, 206n34 Carl, 171–72 cars: as functional tools for injured soldiers, 136–38; purchases of and modifications to by injured soldiers, 50, 164, 180–81, 212n10; Yellow Ribbon Fund rental, 166 Charlie: on “chasing rabbits,” 53–54; and the fight for heteronormativity, 55–57, 59; his injuries, 54–55; his precarious life at Walter Reed, 55–60; his souvenir efp, 54–55, 58–59; the objectification of by patriotic well-­wishers, 59–60 “chasing rabbits,” 53–54 Chertoff, Secretary Michael, 104–5, 209n5 citizen: the citizen-­soldier as a basis for defining personhood, 14–16, 100, 129; the connections of the to the soldier, 67, 85, 101–2, 126–27, 197–98n12, 210n10; as an equal to or interchangeable with the soldier, 15–16; grants of citizenship to wounded soldiers, 85, 104, 116 civilians: the divergence between soldiers and, 102, 192, 194; fear of soldiers among, 9–10, 214n5; normative civilian life as a goal of injured soldiers, 7, 17, 174, 181, 187–88; the personal, patriotic interactions of with soldiers, 42, 103, 113, 125, 128, 135; war-­related deaths among foreign, 33, 81, 106–7, 199n22 combat: as a basis for visceral knowledge, 8, 141–46, 151–55, 190; Battle Buddies, 201n7; injuries from as the cause of individual medical evacuations, 19; the military definition of, 210–11n1; ptsd as a means of addressing the psychological effects of, 134, 150; the return to by severely injured soldiers, 66, 204n5; World War I deaths among Americans, 76 Combined Federal Campaigns, 114, 209n8 community: the absence of a sense of at Walter Reed, 6, 202n12; commonality as a substitute for at Walter Reed, 48–51, 60–61, 137–38, 160–61 compensation: the Bonus March (1932) by World War I veterans for, 15; combat as a special categorization of military, 210–11n1; the differ-

entiation of military benefits from other kinds of, 15–16, 105; as an encouragement for social “de­pen­dency,” 15; as something reasonably owed to an injured soldier, 128 conjugal couplehood: the case of Brendan Marrocco, 186–87; the case of Charlie, 55–57, 59; the case of Daniel with his wife Sam, 163–69; the case of Jake, 2–3, 51, 117–19, 121, 177–80, 216n9; the case of James with his wife Erin, 37, 174–77, 182; the case of Peter, 182–86, 216n13; the challenges to injured soldiers in sustaining, 172–73, 182, 184; the complexities of an overlap of caregiving functions with, 171–72, 174; as the context within which personhood and a future are re-­established, 158–59, 169–73, 214–15n6; the crucial role of sexual intimacy to maintaining, 170–71; heteronormative masculinity as crucial to, 46, 52, 169, 175; as the key to future life for injured soldiers, 169, 188. See also heteronational ideal; solitude Cuba, 70, 74, 146 Daniel: the antisocial behavior of, 163–67; the awarding of the Purple Heart to, 89–91; the conjugal couplehood of with his wife Sam, 163–69; the injuries of, 164; the presence of family members near, 163–66, 169, 188; solitude as self-­protection to, 167–68; visceral combat knowledge as a lingering influence on, 167–68 Das, Veena: on addressing trauma, 56, 155; on the importance of ordinariness in recovering from violence, 5, 191, 192, 199–200nn24–25 death: conjugal couplehood as a shield against biosocial, 158–59, 163–65, 168–69, 177; in the context of military life and employment, 80, 105–6, 110, 116, 160; in the contexts of combat and war zones, 121–23; death rates (by country) during World War I, 206n23; the heritage of underlying Walter Reed, 1–2, 70, 72, 75–76, 77–78; the looming threat of at the Vita infirmary (Brazil), 215–16n7; the looming threat of to Daniel, 163–69; military made sacrificial by modern patriotism, 112; the politicization of through patriotism, 101, 129, 197n10, 208n1; the psychological closeness of to the residents of Walter Reed, 4, 23, 160, 188, 203n15; solitude as a forewarning of possible, 39, 158, 160–64, 172, 201n7; the statistical likelihood of combat-­ related, 19, 199n19; statistics of combat and noncombat military during World War I, 76. See also killing and being killed; solitude deployment: injuries following first, 17; marriages by soldiers immediately preceding, 51, 117–18,

178; the potential of for triggering mental instability in fragile individuals, 81–82; predeployment Battle Buddies, 201n7; redeployment, 119, 128, 204n5; as a source of familial stress, 160, 173; suicide risk and, 201n7, 213n3; unit identity retention by injured soldiers, 47, 212n12 disability: American debates concerning, 12, 15, 16, 206nn27–29; the category of and soldiers’ disavowal of it, 135; the dilemma of disabled masculinity as a primary concern at Walter Reed, 8, 11–13, 17, 69, 95, 169, 172; the functional prog­nosis of, 76, 211n2; the injured soldier body as different from the disabled body, 16–17, 135, 139; as an invalidation of personhood, 17, 60, 135, 158, 169, 184, 214–15n6, 216n12; the unequal valuing of disabled lives, 16 diseases: influenza, 76; meningitis, 76; smallpox, 74; venereal disease, 76; weaponized, 74; among World War I military personnel, 76; yellow fever, 70, 74, 204n7 disorientation, 4, 22, 54, 75, 101, 132, 155 donations: by Angels of Mercy, 59; by Bank of America, 47, 107, 176; Combined Federal Campaigns, 114, 209n8; “dead-­end commodities,” 113; financial, 165; of food and meals, 111, 124–25; gift cards, 32, 118; of gifts and goods, 34, 57–58, 79, 98, 113–14, 178; housing, 47, 107, 176, 180 draft and military conscription, 102 economy of patriotism: the affective quality of the, 82, 123–24; the discomforting effects of the on injured soldiers, 35, 103–10, 121–22, 128–29; versus the economy of obligation, 15–16; the elements of the, 8, 101; “feel good” events for injured soldiers, 29, 94, 115, 123–24, 165; the incorrect assumptions underlying the, 104–7, 111–13, 115–17, 123–29, 193–94, 208–9n1, 209–10n9; the materialistic quality of the, 57, 101, 113–14; the Nietz­schean quality of the, 104–5, 108; as a recognition of violence, 8, 99–113, 101, 122, 128–29; Walter Reed as an iconic location in the, 82–83. See also patriotism; sacrifice; violence Eisenhower, President Dwight D., 74, 91, 205n16 enfleshment, 3, 53, 159, 168, 169, 196n4, 214–15n6 enlistment: as a desire for employment rather than for self-­sacrifice, 105–6, 116–17, 142; pay grades, 216n11; typical circumstances, 17, 18; typical motives for, 116–17. See also recruitment entitlements, compensations, and benefits, 10, 14–15, 128; as a means of transforming injured soldiers into workers, 15–16; tricare, 128;

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entitlements, compensations, and benefits (continued) tsgli (Traumatic Ser­vicemembers’ Group Life Insurance), 128, 136, 137, 181 ethics. See moral economy events: booster, 212n12; as civilian offerings of normality to injured soldiers, 124–25; “feel good” public for injured soldiers, 29, 94, 115, 123–24; fundraising on behalf of soldiers, 209n8; Garry Trudeau’s visit to Fisher House, 114, 165; Gary Sinise’s Lt. Dan Band uso concert, 97–100; impromptu at Walter Reed, 83–84, 88; Purple Heart ceremonies, 85, 88–91; soldiers’ responses to special, 35, 102, 212n12; special at Walter Reed, 83, 88, 98–100; uso shows, 33, 84, 97–101, 102 explosives: Charlie’s souvenir efp (explosively formed projectile), 54–55, 58–59; efp injuries, 54–55; ied (improvised explosive device) injuries, 2, 19, 45, 51, 106, 160, 164; and shrapnel, 20, 45, 151; the types used against American troops in Iraq, 17, 19 extra/ordinariness. See ordinariness family: as a consideration at military enlistment, 106, 116–17, 128–29; the inclusion of in social events for soldiers, 32, 97, 107, 108, 123–25, 165; the involvement of in the patients’ fight toward future ordinariness, 8–9, 24, 26–27, 46–48, 51–52, 60–61, 128–29, 174; media stagings and interruptions to domestic life at Fisher House, 32, 110–11; military family life, 46, 51, 77–78, 80, 173–74; as part of the resident population of Walter Reed, 1–2, 24, 51–53, 75, 107–8, 196–97n8, 202n12, 203n14; the presence of a patient’s at Fisher House, 1–2, 27–29, 52, 111, 196–97n8; the presence of a patient’s at Mologne House, 94; the presence of with soldiers in the matc, 44, 170; the reconfiguring of heteronormative masculinity in preparation for domestic life, 6–7, 11–13, 52, 159–60, 169–70, 177–78, 181–82, 187–88, 196n3; the Soldier and Family Assistance Center (sfac) at Walter Reed, 44; a soldier’s injuries as a divisive threat to his connections with, 2–3, 23, 50, 55–56, 147, 153, 166, 168, 174; as a threat of infantilizing injured soldiers, 182–84, 186; the transient socialities between groupings of, 47–48, 51, 162–63, 188 Fisher House: the communal spaces of, 27, 34, 109–11; donated items available at each, 29, 32, 111, 113–14; events available to residents of, 39–41, 102, 107, 115, 165, 209n8; Fisher House 236 

index

Foundation, 27–28, 30–31, 113, 165, 200n2; managers at, 28, 32, 102–3, 107, 111, 166; the presence of patients’ families and friends in, 2, 34, 51–52, 89, 163–64, 174, 177–78, 183–86; the purpose and functions of, 1, 27–28; the residents of (2007–8), 17, 34, 42, 44, 47–48, 163–64, 171–72; sociality at a, 27, 34, 37, 39–40, 50–51, 107, 160–64; the tours of by visiting officials, 102–3, 111–13; the typical floor plan and appointments of a, 28–29, 32, 178; at Walter Reed, 29, 34, 73, 114, 176, 192, 196–97n8 Forrest Gump (1994), 97, 99 Foucault, Michel, and Foucauldian theory, 213n1, 214–15n6 fraternal attachment: as a feature of military life, 36, 46, 83, 115, 170–71, 174, 181, 209–10n9; impromptu but temporary friendships at Walter Reed, 1, 48–51, 164, 174, 180; the nma and Battle Buddy, 52, 163, 171. See also sociality freedom: personal and intimate de­pen­dency, 158, 185–86; warfare to protect and promote, 18–19, 111–13, 123, 125, 128 Freepers, 123, 126–28 friends and friendships: among patients at Walter Reed, 24, 48–50, 208n48; hometown friends who become the spouses of patients, 51, 117–19, 174, 184–86; short-­term visits of hometown friends with patients, 34, 39, 109 Ft. Belvoir, 71, 204–5n9 Ft. Bragg, 9, 208n1 Ft. Hood (Texas), 28, 30, 81, 203n17, 204n5, 206n35, 214n5 Ft. McNair, 71, 204–5n9 Ft. Mead, 71, 204–5n9 Ft. Myer, 71, 75, 204–5n9 fundraisers, 27, 84, 107, 187, 209n8 future: conjugal couplehood as a bridge to the, 166, 169–71, 174–75, 177–80, 186–88; economic stability as a reason for enlistment, 117; expressions of patriotic gratitude as negations of the possibility for ordinariness, 114; the heteronormative family as a primary goal for injured soldiers, 52, 107, 177–82; ordinariness as a goal for injured soldiers, 7, 9, 131–33, 157, 196n3; the remaking of a patient’s personhood for life in the, 13, 52, 54, 65–66, 158, 180–84; solitude as a threat to the possibility of having a, 163, 188; the uncertainty of the for patients at Walter Reed, 27, 50–51, 159–60, 177, 180, 189–90, 192 Gavin: the absence of familial support for, 146, 147; his work with ivaw, 146; the military

ser­vice of, 146; the personal transformations caused by his experiences in Af­ghan­is­ tan, 146–49; the possible depleted uranium poisoning of, 146–47; visceral combat knowledge as a lingering influence on, 147–48, 149 Germany: Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, 28, 113; Peter’s army time in, 116, 183–84 gi Bill, 16, 37 gifts and gifting: “dead-­end commodities,” 113; at events for injured soldiers, 97–98, 99, 115; as a means of showing civilian gratitude, 57, 102, 112, 113–14 Global War on Terror (gwot), 19, 205n10, 210n14 grief, 80, 97, 155, 203n15, 216n1 Hasan, Maj. Nadal, 81–82, 206n35, 214n5 heteronational ideal: the American emphasis on masculine self-­sufficiency, 169–70, 174, 187–88; American media promotion of a, 66; the American soldier as a symbol of heteronormative masculinity, 10–11, 13–14, 95; the entanglement of a with ideas concerning intimacy, 158–59, 170, 182, 189, 214–15n6. See also conjugal couplehood; sexuality homecoming: pro-­war publicity depictions of, 207n43; the symbolism of the yellow ribbon, 58; trouble, 132, 151, 202n11 human life, 7, 12, 16, 43, 152, 158, 207n37, 215–16n7 humor and jokes: the “Bambi” exchange of black humor between James and Erin, 38; in response to expressions of patriotic gratitude, 111; “spoiled rich kid” cars, 136–38 in-­durable sociality, 27, 46–53, 135, 159, 188, 189. See also ordinariness injuries: the commonality of multiple surgical reconstructions to correct, 26, 34, 47, 55, 59, 111; complications arising from amputation, 43, 47; complications to through bone infections, 26, 41, 160–61; gwot statistics about, 18–19; infections as a commonplace threat following, 111, 160, 171–72; the potential for infection presented by colostomy bags, catheters, and picc lines, 42–43, 56. See also amputations; body instability. See precariousness intensity: the accelerating influence of on sociality at Walter Reed, 48, 188; the of basic training, 37, 145; the of rehabilitative therapies at Walter Reed, 26; visceral as characteristic of outpatient life at Walter Reed, 3, 7–8, 24, 27, 48–50, 61, 200n25. See also boredom

interviews. See Alec; Carl; Charlie; Daniel; Gavin; Jake; James; Javier; Kevin; Manny; Matthew; Peter; Sophia intimacy: the based on broadly shared public knowledge or familiarity, 65, 75, 83, 94, 174, 188, 193; the conflicts between caretaking and sexual, 174–75; as a lifeline at Brazil’s Vita infirmary, 215–16n7; normative, 3–4; the overlap of sexual with broader public intimacies, 3–4, 174, 196n4, 203n15, 215–16n7; sexual, heteronormative as a basis for establishing personhood, 24, 157–59, 169–72, 214–15n6 Iraq: American protests against the war in, 85–86; America’s po­liti­cal justifications for its military presence in, 75, 208n1; compared to Af­ghan­i­stan as a place of military employment, 119–20, 122; the daily activities of American soldiers in, 106–7, 210n13; injuries and deaths in, 19, 33; the plight of innocent civilians in overlooked, 107, 199n22; soldiers’ memories of the environment in, 33–34, 35–37, 151–52; the Tactical Command Center management in, 119–20 Iraq Veterans Against the War (ivaw), 146, 199n22, 210n13 Jackiewicz, Waclaw, 85, 94 Jake: on “chasing rabbits,” 54; the decisions, ethics, and regrets of, 117–22, 123, 178–80, 210n12, 212n12, 216n9; the injuries of, 2, 118; the presence of family and friends near, 1–3, 51, 177–79; the rehabilitation experience of, 2, 17–18, 26, 45, 47–48, 183, 198n15; the sociality of, 49–53, 216n13; the social link of with Manny, 50–53, 180; the transformation of toward a future life, 1–3, 54, 177–80, 182, 216n9; on working conditions in Iraq and Af­ ghan­i­stan, 119–22, 123 James: on being a soldier as a form of employment, 108–9, 116, 117; the black humor of, 38, 136–37; and bodily attentiveness, 139; the carpentry analogy of, 108–9, 116; the conjugal couplehood of with Erin, 37–38, 174–77, 182; the fraternal associations of at Walter Reed, 48–50; memories of basic training, 36; memories of the environment in Iraq, 35–37, 151–52, 174, 201n6; the personality of, 34, 35, 136–38, 209n6; the presence of family members near, 34, 47–48, 52, 107, 176; the re-­creation of a new self by, 176, 180–82; the rehabilitation experience of, 34, 43, 47, 55, 108, 136; the response of to expressions of patriotic gratitude, 38, 102–3, 107–10, 116, 139–40; the

index  237

James (continued) sociality of, 122, 136, 176; and the “spoiled rich kid” car, 136–38; the transformation of his being in the world, 139–41, 149, 153; visceral combat knowledge as a lingering influence on, 149, 151–52, 213n20 Javier: the familial bonds of, 52, 212n12; his work to recover at Walter Reed, 44–46; the injuries of, 20, 44; the relationship of with his new body, 45, 212n12; the social relations of at Walter Reed, 39, 51 Johnson, President Lyndon B., 74, 82–83, 84, 207n36 Kevin: on car symbolisms inside and outside Walter Reed, 136–37, 138; the injuries of, 132; on life and death obligations during combat, 122–23; the military ser­vice of in Af­ghan­i­stan, 122 killing and being killed: the incompatibility of with the economy of patriotism, 101, 128–29; as job responsibilities for a soldier, 21, 108–9, 119–23, 160, 210–11n1, 210n14; as a remote possibility to enlistees, 106, 116–17, 142. See also death; violence knowledge: based on visceral war zone experience, 8, 141–46, 148–49, 151–55, 190; ontogenesis, 149, 151, 153; shared as a basis for communal pa­ram­e­ters, 136–39, 173–74 Korean War: the ambivalence of the American public toward the, 84–87, 102, 105; injured soldiers at Walter Reed from the, 84–87; the injuries of Anthony J. Troilo, 84; the injuries of Waclaw Jackiewicz, 85, 94; veterans of the, 212n12. See also wars liberalism: and attitudes toward violence, 190–91; the influence of on ideas concerning sacrifice, 103; the influence of on ideas of personhood, 9, 13–14, 158, 169–70, 175, 186, 213n2, 214–15n6; the influence of on the status of the modern soldier, 16, 101–2; the influence of on the valuing of life, 16–17, 200n26 Linker, Beth, 12 Love, Lt. Col. Albert G., 76, 206n24 Lutz, Catherine, 9–10, 65–66, 105–6 Lynch, Pfc. Jessica, 89, 90, 207n45 MacLeish, Kenneth, 13, 46, 113, 132, 203n17, 212n10 Manning, Erin, 149 Manny: the familial bonds of, 50–51, 52, 177; his reasons for enlistment, 116; the injuries of, 50; the social link of to Jake, 50–53, 180 Marrocco, Spc. Brendan, 186–87, 197n9 238 

index

masculinity: athleticism as a component of, 7, 60, 67, 116, 197n9; as the basis for heteronational ideals, 10–11, 13–14, 94, 101, 169–70, 174, 187–88, 197n11; the dilemma of disabled as a primary concern at Walter Reed, 8, 11–13, 17, 69, 95, 169, 172; duty and responsibility as means of reaffirming, 119, 177, 178, 181–82; heteronormative as a basis for establishing personhood, 10, 13, 119, 178; the influence of on military socialities, 46; the masculinizing power of conjugal couplehood, 158–59, 171–72, 182; morality as a component of, 10–11, 117; prosthetic drugs, 172; the reconfiguring effect of injuries on a soldier’s, 50, 153; the rehabilitated soldier body as a symbol of deep, 65–67, 115, 187–88; reproductive capacity as an element of, 10, 171, 172, 175; self-­sufficiency as a reaffirmation of, 158, 169–70, 174, 181–82, 183, 213n2; severe injury as a threat to self-­ perceived, 52, 54–60; the soldier body as an icon of normative, 3, 7; virility as a component of, 11, 60, 115. See also sexuality Matthew, 42 Mayo, Charles, 12, 207n37 medical technologies: catheter, 56; C-­legs, 45, 66; colostomy bags, 42–43, 50, 55; external fixator (Ex-­Fix), 11, 26, 38; picc lines, 39, 41–43, 161; split-­hook terminal devices, 44–45 medications: antibiotics and picc lines, 26, 39–43, 122, 161, 166, 211n5; for erectile ­dysfunction, 56, 59, 172, 178; sleep, 160, 161–62 memory: the fragmented character of most war zone experiences, 33–34, 36–37, 38; the of pre-­ injury experiences, 36–37, 142–43; visceral, 8, 141–49, 151–55, 161, 190; the war story, 34, 36, 37, 99, 160, 201n6 mirror therapy, 43, 44–45. See also physical therapy Mologne House: the function of as a hotel, 1, 34, 73, 94, 114, 120, 174; sociality at, 49, 53, 56, 102, 113–14, 119, 123 moral economy: the influence of Christian values on American, 33, 104, 113, 210n10; Levinasian ethics, 167, 203n15; the liberal of sacrifice, 8, 22, 101–4, 117, 129; the of ordinariness, 3–4, 23–24, 133, 190–91, 199–200n24; patriotic gratitude, 20, 58, 67, 88–89, 94, 97–101, 123–29; the transformative effect of violence on, 22–23, 191, 211n5, 213n18; the vacillations of American regarding the injured soldier, 13–17; the valuations of life and death, 5, 16–17, 190–91, 203n15; the of war, 38, 69, 82, 83–84, 94, 101–2, 120–23, 214n5; the work ethic of the Progressive and New Deal eras, 12, 15–16. See also ordinariness

movement: the analytics of, 132, 133–34; the analytics of and the redefinition of ordinariness, 134–40, 141, 151–55; the analytics of as an alternative to ptsd theories, 133–34, 150–55; body configuration changes and transformations in, 42, 134–35, 141; the of the injured soldier body in civilian spaces, 139–41, 151; and transformations in perceptions of an environment, 132–33, 140, 141–55, 163 National Guard, 2, 17, 53, 195n1, 197–98n12, 204–5n9, 213–14n4 nationalism, 6, 33–34, 66, 140, 197n10, 210n10 New York Times: coverage of amputee athletes, 64, 203–4nn1–2; coverage of events and vip visits to Walter Reed, 82, 84, 86–87, 205n16, 205n19, 207n36, 207n40; coverage of life and people at Walter Reed, 76, 80, 81, 186–87, 197n9, 206nn21–22, 206nn25–34; eulogy to Walter Reed, 70; the role of the in reflecting and in shaping public sentiments toward war, 63–68, 85, 88, 205n15, 207n42, 208n48, 216n14 nma (nonmedical attendant): and conjugal couplehood, 170–71, 185; family members as, 161–62, 170–71, 186; the function of the to prevent suicide by an injured soldier, 39, 160, 163 Obama, President Barack, 33, 196–97n8, 200–201n4, 208n1 objectification of the injured soldier, 84, 101, 103–4, 129, 139–40, 207n4. See also soldiers O’Brien, Tim, 37, 106, 201n6 occupational therapy, 44, 45, 170. See also physical therapy ontogenesis, 149, 151, 153 Operation Enduring Freedom (oef), 19 Operation Iraqi Freedom (oif), 19 Operation New Dawn (ond), 200–201n4 ordinariness: the of civilian life as an aspiration for the injured soldier, 3, 5–7, 8–9, 21–22, 126, 177, 180–81; the conversion of into extra/ ordinariness through war violence, 106–7, 113, 124, 129, 191; versus extraordinariness, 8–9; extraordinary circumstances that become accepted as, 3–4, 21–23, 44–45, 48, 109, 134–38; in the Fisher House environments, 28–33; the ordinaries of Walter Reed, 22, 69, 80, 97–100, 134–35, 189, 191–92, 200n25; the ordinaries of war, 22, 106–7, 113, 141, 199n22; for patients at Walter Reed, 5–7, 21–24, 25–27, 52–53, 60–61, 131–41, 189, 191–92; the potential and limitations within an ordinary, 22–24, 131–33, 141, 144–45, 187–88; the study by Gay Becker

on achieving continuity, 196n3; the study by Veena Das on ordinariness as a tool for overcoming the effects of violence, 5, 191–92, 199–200n24. See also in-­durable sociality; moral economy; transformation pain: as a commonplace at Walter Reed, 21, 23, 45–46, 161, 193, 200n25; the destabilizing effects of, 4, 200n25; the difficulties in communicating or expressing, 154, 160; the disorienting impact of, 18; as an impediment in the struggle toward ordinariness, 23, 175; medications for, 40, 41; as a part of life for Alec, 40–41; as a part of life for Jake, 118; as a part of life for James, 34, 108, 175; as a part of life for Javier, 44–45; as a part of life for Matthew, 42; as a reminder of violence, 4, 190; the politicization of individual by patriotic gratitude, 12–13, 110, 112–13, 114; the presence of in phantom limbs, 44–45. See also boredom patriotism: the connection of to war violence, 9, 108–9, 122–23; the influence of Christianity on American, 33, 104–5, 113, 206n35, 210n10; versus loyalty to one’s fellow soldiers, 112, 119–21, 123, 174, 183, 209–10n9; nationalism and, 6, 33–34, 66, 140, 197n10, 210n10. See also economy of patriotism Pentagon, 71, 204–5n9 personhood: autological self-­making, 13, 174, 177, 180, 182, 186, 188; the biosocial of the injured soldier, 42, 53, 54, 169, 187, 213n2, 216n15; citizen and soldier as joint elements of, 14–15, 16; the destabilization of through violence and injury, 4, 6, 9, 53; intimate de­pen­dency as a basis for solidifying, 157–58, 187, 214–15n6; the liberal devaluing of disabled life, 17, 169; reproductive capacity as an element of, 11; selfhood and, 42, 52, 174, 176, 187, 188, 214–16nn6–7; self-­sovereignty and, 13, 80, 181, 182–84; the unique of the soldier, 9, 10, 13, 14–15; and the valuing of human life, 14–16; Walter Reed as the place where reconstruction of begins, 13. See also disability; rehabilitation Peter: the encounter of with va officials inspecting Fisher House, 110–13; the fight for self-­ sovereignty by, 116–17, 183–84; the fight toward conjugal couplehood by, 183–86, 216n13; the flamboyant heteronormative behavior of, 183, 184, 186; his reasons for enlistment, 183; the injuries of, 111, 183; the reactions of to expressions of patriotic gratitude, 111–13, 115; the relationship of with his parents, 52, 183–84, 186 Phillips, Col. John L., 76–78

index  239

physical therapy: the constancy of for injured soldiers at Walter Reed, 2, 26, 34, 44, 202n10; the demands on concentration to re-­embed once-­automatic bodily functions, 42, 44, 134; the evaluation of movement and rehabilitation, 134–35; and exercise for injured soldiers at Walter Reed, 2, 44; the matc (Military Advanced Training Center), 44, 170; as a point of fraternal contact among injured soldiers, 44, 48; the “tactical athlete,” 7, 67, 197n9. See also mirror therapy; occupational t­ herapy; rehabilitation post-9/11: the American patriotic response to the attacks, 209–10n9; the invasion of Iraq, 17, 74, 102; the mythology surrounding American soldiers, 3, 7, 14, 88, 102, 116; as a reminder of the vulnerability and self-­sovereignty of soldiers, 210n14; the soldier on American soil as a target, 173; warrantless wiretapping, 204–5n9 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 53, 158, 170, 196n4 pragmatism: the often underlying military enlistment, 116; the of soldiers in response to gestures of patriotic gratitude, 115; the of soldiers in the management of their rehabilitation, 49, 160–61 precariousness: the case of Charlie, 52–60; as characteristic of life at Walter Reed, 4, 22–23, 51–52, 60–61, 80, 178–81, 189–90; the of an injured body, 7–8, 26–27, 40–46, 52, 135, 184; the lingering closeness of death as a contributor to, 163, 203n15, 215–16n7; as period of life after war and before the future, 5, 22, 114, 158, 172, 174–77, 188; the potential for instability of intimate relationships for injured soldiers, 2–3, 189–90; as a reminder of vulnerability, 183–84, 193, 203n15 prostheses: the complexities of adding to a human body, 34, 108, 111, 160–61, 171–72, 183; the exposure of by injured soldiers, 109–10, 134, 138–39, 212n12; hand, 44–45; non-­limb, 45; options and supplements to, 2, 23, 34, 44, 108, 136; the symbiotic relationship of to the human body, 45, 176, 204n5; the technologically advanced available at Walter Reed, 26, 43, 45, 49. See also body ptsd (posttraumatic stress disorder): the biological markers of, 150, 211n5; versus the ontological transformation of the injured soldier, 149–53, 155; the original definition of trauma, 154; the original purpose of the diagnosis, 150; as a pathologization of behavioral transformations following injury, 8, 132–33, 150–51; and the politics of Purple Heart recognition, 207n41; the public prominence of, 150, 152, 240 

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154, 211n3; the reliance of on trauma-­induced behavioral dichotomies, 150–51; the scientific definition of, 133–34, 211n5; the shortcomings of, 132–34, 149–51, 153–55, 213n18; statistics concerning sufferers, 19; systems for detecting and monitoring, 201n7. See also stress; tbi (traumatic brain injury) Purple Heart, 84–85, 88–91, 137, 207n41, 212n11 recruitment, 18, 19, 105–6, 142, 174, 198n13, 199n20. See also enlistment Reed, Maj. Walter, 70, 204n9 regret: Jake on his decisions, 118–19, 121; as a threat to survival during combat, 121, 122–23; and the work of soldiers, 115–16 rehabilitation: autological self-­making, 13, 174, 177, 180, 182, 186, 188; complications and setbacks as characteristic of at Walter Reed, 34, 43, 171–72, 201n8; conjugal couplehood and intimacy as fundamental to, 158, 169–75, 182–83, 186–88; efforts to replicate ordinary life for patients at Walter Reed, 79–80, 202n12; the evolution of the meanings of, 7, 202n12, 208n48; the factors affecting individual, 47–48, 59–60; versus hospitalization, 79; as a means of restoring social order, 11–12, 79; movement as a mea­sure of, 134–35; the origins of the science of, 11; patriotic gratitude as an impediment to, 113–14; the post-9/11 extension of periods and inclusion of family, 75, 118–19, 202n12; post–­World War II interests in amputee, 12; as restoration of the productive, heteronormal individual, 11–13, 52, 67, 79, 169–72, 178–79, 186–89, 197n9; sociality as fundamental to, 163, 201n7. See also personhood Roo­se­velt, President Franklin D., 15–16 Rozelle, David, 204n5 sacrifice: as an assumption that obscures the reality of the individual injured soldier, 42, 84, 100, 111–14, 191; as an assumption underlying the economy of patriotism, 8, 10, 100–104, 211–12n7; as a civilian attribution that objectifies soldiers, 103–4, 121, 140, 198n14; the cyclical, debt-­burdened quality of modern American ideas regarding military, 104–5, 108, 112, 125–26; the deliberate personal decision of, 104, 106; as a discomforting valuation for injured soldiers, 102–3, 105–10, 115, 123, 193; the equation of with nationalism and patriotism, 91, 103–5, 110–12, 117, 128–29; the Purple Heart as a recognition of blood

sacrifice, 84; versus the realities of enlistment motivations, 116–17; as a tool of pro-­war po­liti­ cal rhetoric, 82, 91, 94, 104, 208n1; traditional understandings of, 103, 104, 106. See also economy of patriotism; ­violence self-­sovereignty, 13, 80, 181, 182–84 sexuality: as a basis for establishing personhood, 8, 13–14, 50, 170–72, 174–75, 186, 188; the case of Charlie, 53–60, 171; the case of Peter, 183–86; the centrality of to perceptions of nationhood, 10–11, 12–13, 189–90; the Foucauldian concept of, 213n1; the influence of liberal ideas about, 6, 158, 170, 214–15n6; intimacy and, 158–59, 215–16n7; virility as a component of, 11, 60, 115. See also heteronational ideal; masculinity Shepard, Lt. Bert R., 63–67, 85, 204n3 Sinise, Gary, and the Lt. Dan Band, 97, 99–100, 102, 187 sociality: the fleeting nature of at Walter Reed, 48, 56, 135; heteronormative masculinity as an influence on, 46; in-­durable, 27, 46–53, 135, 159, 188, 189; liberal ideas concerning personhood and, 13–14; ordinariness and at Walter Reed, 23–24, 27, 159–60, 168; between patients at Walter Reed, 7–8, 48, 135, 164; productive as a national concern, 11; and the remaking of self at Walter Reed, 174, 202n13. See also fraternal attachment social skin: Brendan Marrocco as an example of a thickening, 186–87; the capacity of military life to thicken, 115–16, 159, 170, 173–74; Charlie’s situation as an example of thinness of, 52–60; Col­on ­ el Reber as an example of strained, 77–78; conjugal couplehood as a means of thickening an individual’s, 214–15n6; Daniel as an example of strained, 163–69; the enfleshment of the, 52–53; environmental factors at Walter Reed that threaten the of patients, 23, 26–27, 52–53, 61, 79, 187; James’s situation as an example of thickness of, 34, 37–38, 47–49, 174–77, 181–82; the presence of family and friends as a means of thickening an individual’s, 46, 52, 172–73; sociality as a means of thickening an individual’s, 48–51, 125, 164; thin couplehood as a sign of vulnerable, 170, 172–73, 183, 184; the thinning effect of solitude on, 167, 177; the vulnerability and changeability of an individual’s, 24, 26–27, 50–53, 61, 79, 172, 187–88 soldiers: active-­duty, 72, 163, 170, 199n19, 202n10, 213–14n4; the American depiction of as family men, 7, 12; citizen-­as the basis

for personhood, 14–16; composite profile of an enlistee, 18; composite profile of a Walter Reed patient, 1–2, 106; death rates among, 19, 33, 76, 206n23; the disorienting impact of traumatic injuries to, 4, 22, 101, 132, 155; as an embodiment of national military power, 10–11; female, 90, 141–46, 192–93, 196n1, 207n45; the financial illiteracy of some, 216n10; gwot casualties and amputations from blasts, 18–19; the heteronormative masculinity of the generic soldier, 3, 10; as individuals who are not people with disabilities, 135; McGinty’s as a place for soldiers to be ordinary, 49, 109–10; Military Health System expenditures on tbi and pstd drugs for, 19; modern deployments of within U.S. borders, 197–98n12; non-­hostile injuries among, 19; pay grades among, 19; poem in defense of (World War II), 9–10; the reproductive function as an assumed element of the symbolism associated with, 10, 14, 189; the responses of to news broadcasts, 120–21; soldiering as work, 105–7, 108–9, 115–17, 119–23, 128–29; soldiering misconstrued as sacrifice, 100–106, 109–14, 129; Spc. Sterling Jones on fraternal bonding among, 209–10n9; suicide rates among, 19, 213–14n4; as symbols of violence and threat, 9–10; traits typical of injured patients at Walter Reed, 1, 17–18. See also objectification of the injured soldier solitude: the Battle Buddy as protection against solitude and suicide, 39, 163, 201n7; the case of Alec, 160–63; the case of Daniel, 163–69; conjugal couplehood as a protection against, 158–59, 165, 169, 177, 188; the nma as protection against solitude and suicide, 39, 160, 161, 162, 163, 201n7; suicide as a product of, 158, 160, 163, 164, 172. See also conjugal couplehood; death Sophia: on her demobilization, 142–43; her reasons for enlistment, 142; the personal transformations caused by her ser­vice in Iraq, 141–46, 153; visceral combat knowledge as a lingering influence on, 143–45, 148–49, 212n14 statistics: American injuries and casualties from explosive blasts in Iraq, 19; civilians killed in Iraq, 33; the growth in the number of soldiers treated at Walter Reed, 18, 73, 74–75, 208n48; gwot soldiers treated at Walter Reed (post-9/11 to June 18, 2008), 18–19; Lt. Col. Albert G. Love, 76, 206n24; percentage of ser­ vice and deaths by ethnic group, 199n19; ptsd sufferers, 19; ser­vice members killed in

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statistics (continued) Iraq, 33; ser­vice members killed in World War I, 76, 206n23 stress: the accidental fall of Lt. Col. Reber (1916), 77–79; the case of Lt. William Calley at My Lai (1968), 80–81, 206n34; the case of Maj. Nadal Hasan (2009), 81–82, 206n35, 214n5; the fatal fall of 1st Lt. Luther M. Ferguson (1916), 77; the melancholia of Col. John L. Phillips (1916), 76–78; shell shock and mental upset, 81, 150. See also ptsd (posttraumatic stress disorder) suicide: the of Col. John L. Phillips (1916), 76–78; the connection between solitude and, 160, 162–63, 201n7; military versus civilian rates, 19, 163, 213–14nn3–4; the nma and Battle Buddies system as systems for preventing, 162, 201n7; ptsd and, 19, 201n7; the scare provoked by Alec, 161–63; tbi and, 77; typical traits of candidates for, 213n1 tbi (traumatic brain injury): Daniel as a probable sufferer of, 91, 164–68; the difficulties in diagnosing accurately, 213n18; expenditures on drugs to treat, 19; the outward expression of among its sufferers, 211n4; and the politics of the Purple Heart award, 207n41; suffered by Alec, 39; suffered by Jake, 2. See also ptsd (posttraumatic stress disorder) technology. See medical technologies transformation: disorientation as the initial point of, 132–33, 155; individual management of postinjury, 8, 211–12n7; the of injured soldiers into workers as a social concern, 15, 79; the mind-­body linkage underlying postinjury, 132, 141, 151–53, 213n18; movement and, 132–33, 140–41, 145–49; ontological, 140, 145, 149, 192; postcombat, 131–33, 142–48, 153–55, 175; ptsd as a mea­sure­ment of individual, 8, 132, 134, 149–50, 153–54; trauma as the impetus underlying, 150. See also ordinariness Truman, President Harry S., 83–84, 88, 207n38 va (Department of Veterans Affairs): Fisher House affiliations with the, 27–28; the inadequacy of hospitals in caring for Vietnam veterans, 73, 94, 208n48; outpatient ser­vices and research at the, 146, 188, 211n3, 213–14n4; the unannounced visits to Fisher Houses by officials, 110–12 value: the changing of the American soldier, 13–17, 24, 42, 83–85; the changing of the human body, 11–12, 14, 105, 207n37; the of heteronormative masculinity in modern America, 10, 242 

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67; the of life and death in modern America, 5, 14–16, 23–24, 200n26; the productive of the injured body, 13, 16–17, 158; the sacrificial of the injured soldier, 83–85, 101–5, 117, 124, 129, 135, 211n7; social, 14, 16, 25, 53, 198n14; the of war in modern America, 7, 33, 83, 101–5, 120, 123, 200–201n4, 205n10 veterans: the Bonus March (1932) by World War I, 15; Civil War, 14, 15; the homecoming difficulties of, 9–10, 129, 132, 151, 199n22, 202n11, 214n5; Iraq Veterans Against the War (ivaw), 146, 199n22, 210n13; national fears regarding the de­pen­dency of, 14–15; as the original intended occupants for Fisher Houses, 1, 27–28; pensions, entitlements, and benefits for, 14–15; ptsd diagnoses among, 150, 154, 212n17; the public homecomings of, 14–15, 207n43; suicide rates among, 163, 213–14n4; the va (Department of Veterans Affairs), 27–28, 73, 94, 110–13, 146–47, 188, 208n48, 211n3; Vietnam, 73, 94, 102, 122, 150, 207n43, 208n48; visceral combat knowledge as a lingering influence among, 143–49, 151–52, 161, 163, 212n14, 213n20 Vietnam War: the inadequacy of the va system to accommodate veterans of the, 73, 94, 208n48; the injuries of Pvt. William Walker, 85, 88; the large number of injured soldiers at Walter Reed from the, 73, 74–75, 208n48; Lt. William Calley and the My Lai Massacre, 80–81, 206n34; as the occasion of the first definition and treatment of ptsd, 150; President Johnson’s visit with injured soldiers at Walter Reed, 82, 83, 207n36; as the setting for Forrest Gump, 97; Tim O’Brien’s writings about his experiences in the, 37, 106, 201n6; the unpopularity of the with the American public, 14–15, 85–88, 91, 102, 211–12n7; veterans of the, 99, 122, 207n43, 208n48. See also wars violence: combat, 119–20, 121–23, 199n22, 209–10n9; and the economy of patriotism, 8, 99–113, 128–29; the historical variations in the worth of war, 102; the injured soldier body as a symbol of, 5, 6, 8–9, 94, 138; injuries and pain as constant reminders of, 4, 22–23, 131–32, 154, 196n4; and modern liberal ideas regarding war, 3, 12–13, 17, 108–9, 117, 154–55, 190–91; ordinariness as means of constructing personhood following, 5, 7, 189–91; precariousness and, 203n15; the soldier as an embodiment of threat and, 9–10, 11, 214n5; sovereign violence and state power, 3, 9, 80, 116–17, 197–98n12; Veena Das on recovering from, 5, 56, 155, 191,

192, 199–200nn24–25; and visceral memory, 4, 143–46, 161, 165–67; Walter Reed as an environment haunted by, 8, 38, 48, 53, 193. See also economy of patriotism; killing and being killed; sacrifice Vita, Brazil infirmary, 215–16n7 Walter Reed: Abrams Hall barracks, 1, 3, 47, 49, 51, 73, 120; and the anthrax scare in 2001, 74, 205n17; the availability of innovative as well as superior medical care at, 26, 78–79, 81, 187, 198n15, 205n11; bodily attentiveness and pain as commonplace at, 41–46, 134–35, 200n25, 201n8, 202n10; boredom as characteristic of outpatient life at, 7–8, 25–26, 34, 47, 49, 61, 107, 200n25; the Building 18 scandal at, 93–94, 195–96n2, 196–97n8; composite profile of patients at, 1–2, 17–18, 199n21; the continuing transformation of as a medical facility, 7, 26, 67–69, 196–97n8, 201n8, 208n48; contradictions within the environment of, 25–27, 33, 52, 60–61, 201n8; the dilemma of disabled masculinity as a primary concern at, 8, 11–13, 174–77, 184–88; domestic dramas as commonplace at, 1–3, 26–27, 172–73, 179, 200n25; the empathy and mutual understanding among patients at, 49, 160, 172, 202n12, 212n9, 212n12; the founding of Walter Reed General Hospital, 69–70; the fragmented quality of life for patients at, 54, 56, 191–92; the function of as a bridge between extra/ ordinary and ordinary life, 6, 20–24, 46, 48, 134, 169–72, 180–82, 191; the function of as a nucleus for injured soldiers, 72–73, 205n11; the growth of, 71, 72; Heaton Pavilion, 73, 88; in-­durable sociality at, 6–7, 24, 27, 46–53, 135, 159, 188, 189; intensity as characteristic of outpatient life at, 3, 7–8, 24, 27, 48–50, 61, 172–73, 188; the location of, 71–72, 95, 204–5n9; the matc (Military Advanced Training Center), 44, 170, 202n10; media coverage of, 72, 74, 75–78, 80, 82, 83–94, 104, 207n36, 207nn38–40; memories and conversation among patients at, 33–38, 49, 160, 174, 212n9; mental health as a concern at, 76–81, 201n7, 205n11; military personnel at, 75–78, 81–82, 206n35; Mologne House hotel function, 1, 34, 73, 94, 114, 120, 174; Mologne House sociality, 49, 53, 56, 102, 113–14, 119, 123; the multiple incarnations and significations of, 94–95; the name change to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 77; the name change to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, 95; the

national anxiety focused on following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, 71, 74; the non-­combat-­ related functions of, 74, 75–77, 91–92, 205n16; as a nucleus for salvaging injured soldier bodies and minds, 13, 72–76, 78–82, 94–95, 171–72, 204nn3–5; old unit identities among patients at, 46–47, 200n1, 208n47; patients’ families residing at, 75, 172–73, 182–83, 202n12; patients’ lengths of stay at, 2, 73, 75, 115, 202n12, 208n48; patriotic events for the residents of, 33, 97–103, 115; patriotic gestures to the residents of, 39–42, 108–9, 123–28; the post-9/11 patients at, 17–19, 106; as a post-9/11 symbol of the injured soldier with family, 74–75; the purpose of, 69–70; Red Cross building, 79–80, 95, 97; rehabilitation characterized by setbacks and change as typical at, 26, 34, 47, 55, 171–72; the relocation to Bethesda in 2005, 95; as a site representing nationalism and sacrifice, 8, 67, 69, 75, 82–89, 94–95, 125–29; as a site that symbolizes the violence of war, 4, 6, 8, 65–66, 84, 126, 198n16; as the site where the fight toward heteronormative life begins, 13, 25, 51–54, 66–67, 114, 149, 158–59, 171–72; staffing at, 72; the “surges” in patient population at, 72, 73, 74, 196–97n8; the symbolism of as a place of national as well as of individual healing, 12, 65–66, 69; the transient character of residents’ life at, 47–52, 179, 202n12; uncertainty as characteristic of patient life at, 3, 49, 52–53, 108–9, 172–73, 177–80, 188; Vietnam War usage, 73, 80–81, 82, 208n48; War on Terror usage, 74–75; World War I usage, 72–73, 78–79, 81; World War II usage, 73 wars: changing public attitudes toward veterans benefits, 15; Civil War, 14, 15; composite example of a war zone bombing, 21, 106, 160; conscription, 15, 102, 203n1; Gulf War, 207n43, 212n15; the liberal idea of justifiable, 101; modern global, 196n7; modern liberal ideas of the importance of, 33, 101–2, 111, 112–13, 120–21, 200–201n4, 205n10, 210n14; Spanish-­American War, 70, 74; the transition of Walter Reed as seen through, 7; the variations among in the value of war-­violence, 101–2. See also Korean War; Vietnam War; World War I; World War II war slogans and signs: “Army of One,” 174, 198n13; “Love the warrior, hate the war,” 88, 209n4; “Support Our Troops,” 33, 57; “War on Terror,” 3, 33, 74, 128, 200–201n4, 205n10; the yellow ribbon, 57–58, 203n17

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Washington Post: coverage of deaths at Walter Reed, 75, 205–6nn20–22; coverage of Maj. Nadal Hasan’s breakdown and massacre, 206n35; coverage of Walter Reed (1918), 79–80, 206n30; coverage of Walter Reed during the Vietnam War, 85, 88, 207n44; coverage of Walter Reed during World War II, 83, 204n3, 207nn38–39; and the Walter Reed scandal (2007), 93–94, 120, 195–96n2, 196–97n8 World War I: the ambivalence of the American public toward, 102; America’s participation in, 72, 204–5n9, 205n12; battle deaths during, 206n23; the Bonus March by veterans from, 15–16; the concept of hospitalization during, 79; the controversy over benefits entitlements for veterans, 15, 198n14; the identification of

244 

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shell-­shock among soldiers in, 150; injured soldiers from as the impetus for Walter Reed’s inception, 11–12; Walter Reed General Hospital designated as an amputation facility, 78–79. See also wars World War II: amputee veteran athletes, 63–67, 203–4nn1–2; the increase in the number of soldiers treated at Walter Reed following America’s entry into, 73; military ser­vice as a duty owed, 15–16; President Truman’s visit to Walter Reed during, 83; public enthusiasm in support of, 102; public fears of soldiers returning from, 9–10; rehabilitation as a means of restoring social order following, 12, 188. See also wars Wounded Warriors, 94, 115