Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community

by Kenneth T. MacLeish

Overview

Making War at Fort Hood offers an illuminating look at war through the daily lives of the people whose job it is to produce it. Kenneth MacLeish conducted a year of intensive fieldwork among soldiers and their families at and around the US Army's Fort Hood in central Texas. He shows how war's reach extends far beyond the battlefield into military communities where violence is as routine, boring, and normal as it is shocking and traumatic.

Fort Hood is one of the largest military installations in the world, and many of the 55,000 personnel based there have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. MacLeish provides intimate portraits of Fort Hood's soldiers and those closest to them, drawing on numerous in-depth interviews and diverse ethnographic material. He explores the exceptional position that soldiers occupy in relation to violence--not only trained to fight and kill, but placed deliberately in harm's way and offered up to die. The death and destruction of war happen to soldiers on purpose. MacLeish interweaves gripping narrative with critical theory and anthropological analysis to vividly describe this unique condition of vulnerability. Along the way, he sheds new light on the dynamics of military family life, stereotypes of veterans, what it means for civilians to say "thank you" to soldiers, and other questions about the sometimes ordinary, sometimes agonizing labor of making war.

Making War at Fort Hood is the first ethnography to examine the everyday lives of the soldiers, families, and communities who personally bear the burden of America's most recent wars.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691165707
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2015
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Kenneth T. MacLeish is assistant professor of medicine, health, and society at Vanderbilt University.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations ix
Prologue: "Don't Fuckin' Leave Any of This Shit Out" 1
Introduction 6
1A Site of Exception 27
2Heat, Weight, Metal, Gore, Exposure 50
3Being Stuck and Other Problems in the Reproduction of Life 93
4Vicissitudes of Love 134
5War Economy 179
Postscript: So-called Resiliency 223
Acknowledgments 231
Appendix: Army Rank Structure 235
Notes 239
References 249
Index 261

Editorial Reviews

Third Place for the 2013 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology and American Anthropological Association

Honorable Mention for the 2015 Delmos Jones and Jagna Scharff Memorial Book Award, Society for the Anthropology of North America

"MacLeish writes eloquently. . . . [T]his portrait of Army life on American turf is a welcome change of pace from the recent surge of battle-focused narratives."--Publishers Weekly

"In bringing troops from the background to the front where they belong, this book should be required reading for Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and anyone else responsible for sending soldiers to that folly in the desert. They should read it before they go to bed and when they wake up. MacLeish has shown them, and us, what we do to others when we send them to fight our wars."--James T Crouse, Times Higher Education

"Making War at Fort Hood is an ambitious, provocative book. It will be of significant value to historians of contemporary military conflicts, the organizational culture of the U.S. Army, and the lived experience of war. . . . It is an important work that deserves attention."--Jacqueline Whitt, H-Net Reviews

"Making War at Fort Hood is essential reading for those with an interest in modern Army life and for those in leadership positions."--Lieutenant Colonel G. Alan Knight, Journal of Army History

"In Making War at Fort Hood, Kenneth MacLeish . . . draws on interviews with [returning soldiers] and members of their families in an ethnographic exploration of the impact of deployment on their everyday lives. . . . MacLeish documents, often poignantly, the difficulties soldiers have in making sense of their experiences and in moving on."--Dr. Glenn Altschuler, Florida Courier

"The real thrust of [Making War at Fort Hood] is to show the American public--insulated from having to care greatly by an all-volunteer army and battles being fought on credit--that it nonetheless bears responsibility for the violence being done abroad and at home in its name."--ForeWord

"To its great credit, MacLeish's project refuses to paint soldiers as either noble heroes or unwitting victims, two of the most dominant and therefore the most tired archetypes of our time. In a society that has exoticized and abstracted the military, MacLeish re-humanizes it. He is also remarkably precise in how he describes the institution of the Army: how its various bureaucracies, all geared at least tangentially toward killing people and destroying property, prescribe and encompass so many aspects of a soldier's life, from the most consequential to the seemingly benign, such as haircut styles and family day picnics. MacLeish's book is smart, necessary, and insightful."--Brian Van Reet, Daily Beast

"The book illuminates the impact that two wars over a 12-year period can have on deployed soldiers, their families and their community."--San Antonio Express-News

"Drawing on observations and interviews conducted during a year at Fort Hood, this ethnography provides a poignant account of military life, especially the impact of war on U.S. soldiers and their families. . . . This concise, engaging, and well-referenced text is a welcome addition to the field of military ethnography."--Choice

"MacLeish offers us something richer: a sensitively rendered portrait of social actors who both do and do not get to choose their course, who force us to rethink basic notions of agency and autonomy from the vantage point of violence as a way of life."--Marcel La Flamm, Public Books

"A refreshing approach."--Annessa Ann Babic, Journal of American Studies of Turkey

"In this theoretically rich, empathic, and revelatory ethnography, Kenneth MacLeish ably tackles the challenges that face all US anthropologists who engage with the military. . . . The book is impressive and engaging in theoretical terms. . . . MacLeish has made an incisive contribution to military anthropology that will be of particular value to students of violence, care, US society, or fine ethnographic writing."--Keith Brown, Great Plains Research

From the Publisher

Twenty-first-century servicemen and women are leading a new kind of soldier’s life—overwhelmingly married, they rotate routinely between the battlefield and a home in the suburbs. Multiple tours are the norm. Compartmentalizing verges from a coping mechanism to a survival tactic. But what kind of impact does this normalization of abnormality have on soldiers, their families, and military base communities? Vanderbilt’s MacLeish offers the beginnings of an explanation in his case study of Fort Hood, Tex., where “hat is ‘normal’ is not necessarily tolerable,” and couples find it “difficult to say who it worse,” soldier or spouse. The author describes the base as a complex network of “thresholds and distinctions,” whose structure holds true on the battlefield, where “the Army owns the ... but the soldier is forced to own its pains.” MacLeish writes eloquently of love as a panacea for soldiers and their families, noting that it is an effective “gesture of sovereignty” in a system of “disciplinary constraint.” But MacLeish advocates for a grander “collective social responsibility for violence” done in society’s name. Though his conclusions have been reached before, this portrait of Army life on American turf is a welcome change of pace from the recent surge of battle-focused narratives. 6 halftones. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

The real thrust of [Making War at Fort Hood] is to show the American public—insulated from having to care greatly by an all-volunteer army and battles being fought on credit—that it nonetheless bears responsibility for the violence being done abroad and at home in its name.

ForeWord

The book illuminates the impact that two wars over a 12-year period can have on deployed soldiers, their families and their community.

San Antonio Express-News

In bringing troops from the background to the front where they belong, this book should be required reading for Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and anyone else responsible for sending soldiers to that folly in the desert. They should read it before they go to bed and when they wake up. MacLeish has shown them, and us, what we do to others when we send them to fight our wars.

Times Higher Education - James T Crouse

In Making War at Fort Hood, Kenneth MacLeish . . . draws on interviews with [returning soldiers] and members of their families in an ethnographic exploration of the impact of deployment on their everyday lives. . . . MacLeish documents, often poignantly, the difficulties soldiers have in making sense of their experiences and in moving on.

Florida Courier - Dr. Glenn Altschuler

The chronicle of MacLeish's (Medicine, Health and Society/Vanderbilt Univ.) immersion in the culture of Fort Hood, Texas, to understand daily life on military bases. The author spent a year observing the rhythms of life and death at Fort Hood, a base with about 55,000 individuals, many of whom have returned to the United States from Iraq and Afghanistan. MacLeish expanded his doctoral thesis in this book, so the language is sometimes arcane, meant for a scholarly audience accustomed to authors devoting significant portions of a book explaining the methodology employed. Such clinical research can seem cold when set against an intentional culture of violence, in which the military troops are being trained to kill. MacLeish opens with a traumatized veteran called Dime, who resides near Fort Hood after experiencing the horrors of war in Iraq. Dime is receiving assistance for his various traumas, but MacLeish suggests that escaping the trauma is especially difficult when living near a military base, where war violence is anticipated and institutionalized--it is the norm, routine. The author ends with the mass killing on the base on November 5, 2009, when Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire inside the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Processing Center. Notwithstanding the Hasan incident, the image of Fort Hood had been suffering because of the base's recent highest-ever rate of suicide. A depressing yet enlightening account that mostly overcomes its academic jargon.

Kirkus Reviews