Trained to Care: The Role of Obligation in Military Experience

Abstract

The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan renewed attention to US military service members and veterans, but the daily life of service members remains a mystery in both popular and scholarly writing. This dissertation explores veterans’ reflections on their experiences of everyday relationships within the US military. My starting point is a sentiment echoed by many veterans: that the relationships they experience in the military are closer and more caring than any they have known since. Employing a phenomenological approach to mundane details of military training, I explore ways in which service members learn to care, which I define as an ability to appreciate and fulfill obligations to each other. I argue that the care they experience is rooted in collectivist obligations imposed by the military—obligations to work together toward shared goals amidst shared risks. Under the rubric of an Ethics of Care, I suggest that the scaffolds that we use to build care are often mundane, and always worthy of attention. I interviewed nineteen military service members, all of whom served in the 9/11 era. Not all of them deployed to combat. I started my collection of evidence with the idea that military training, and not combat, is the common denominator of military service. Employing an open-ended phenomenological interview format, I gave participants space and time to explore the relationships that they found most meaningful in their experience. From the empirical evidence emerged three phenomena that became the central chapters of this dissertation. The first of these phenomena is downtime. The military often requires service members to spend vast amounts of time alongside each other, and that time is often spent chatting with each other. The second phenomenon is team organization. Service members experience highly formalized and redundant organizational structures wherein there is a high ratio of leaders-to-subordinates. The third phenomenon is training. Service members experience training constantly, and it was the single most common activity that participants discussed as the setting for relationships. Each of these phenomena yielded insights into how mundane aspects of service—activities and organizational structures alike—became scaffolds for relationship. Chapter Three explores the role of downtime in relationship formation. Downtime conversation provides the essential means for service members to get to know each other and to integrate into a collectivist culture. Chapter Four explores the roles of military regulation and military organization in relationship formation. The modern US military is designed around small units, and regulations articulate the obligations that leaders and subordinates have to each other. Chapter Five explores the role of training activities in relationship formation. The fundamentals of soldiering—marksmanship and physical fitness—provide opportunity for service members to understand their obligations to each other and act on those obligations. The transformation of obligation to action is essential for service members to demonstrate care for each other. The growing field of Veterans Studies is committed to exploring diverse ways in which military service and veteran experience are connected, but there is a need for qualitative work that explores the meaning of military experiences. This dissertation is a step toward a more detailed approach to the mundane experiences of military service. I also suggest that phenomenology, with its close attention to the lived experience of individuals, might serve as a model for future qualitative work in Veterans Studies.