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Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography
After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed
In After War Zoë H. Wool explores how the American soldiers most severely injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars struggle to build some kind of ordinary life while recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center from grievous injuries like lost limbs and traumatic brain injury. Between 2007 and 2008, Wool spent time with many of these mostly male soldiers and their families and loved ones in an effort to understand what it's like to be blown up and then pulled toward an ideal and ordinary civilian life in a place where the possibilities of such a life are called into question. Contextualizing these soldiers within a broader political and moral framework, Wool considers the soldier body as a historically, politically, and morally laden national icon of normative masculinity. She shows how injury, disability, and the reality of soldiers' experiences and lives unsettle this icon and disrupt the all-too-common narrative of the heroic wounded veteran as the embodiment of patriotic self-sacrifice. For these soldiers, the uncanny ordinariness of seemingly extraordinary everyday circumstances and practices at Walter Reed create a reality that will never be normal.
264 pages, Paperback
First published November 27, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 28, 2018
This book is really cool, imo, and a really important read for my BA thesis work. As my BA focuses heavily on the effects of PTSD and trauma, I felt it would be remiss for me to ignore the history of the diagnosis and the way that soldiers interact with the trauma of war (even though I, obviously, despise soldiers and the military). So I was worried I would really hate the book. But this ethnography is compassionate and mind-working (? it makes me Think), and Wool does repeatedly engage with the oppressive systems that her subjects are a part of, not as a primary focus but as a regular reminder of context, and a signaling of voices that don't get to be heard. Wool makes really interesting arguments about the link between physical and psychic trauma and the way that trauma affects our brains and physicality in the world, which I think is really cool, and I'm excited to write about it for my BA.
December 24, 2020
Shattered Bodies and Broken Minds
It is said that Americans don’t have social security. Soldiers do. Earnings for active duty military service or active duty training have been covered under the Social Security Act since 1957. Veterans get social security benefits after they are discharged. Military service members who become disabled while on active duty can file for disability claims. The social security system also covers families and relatives of a deceased soldier. Active duty military members can retire after twenty years of active duty service. In exchange, they receive retirement pay for life. Veterans get free or low-cost medical care through VA hospitals and medical facilities. They have access to special education programs, housing and home loan guarantees, job training and skills upgrading, small business loans, and even burial and memorial benefits. Their situation contrasts with the thirty million Americans who do not have health insurance and who cannot afford medical costs, and with the many more who get only minimal retirement pension and healthcare. In sum, when you join the US Army, Uncle Sam gets your back covered.
Fieldwork and care work
But being a soldier in a warlike nation comes with a high risk. Wars waged abroad bring home their lot of shattered lives, broken bodies, and crippled minds. These are the lives and bodies that Zoë Wool encountered while doing fieldwork at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC. Her book begins with a seven-pages lexicon of abbreviations and acronyms, from ACU (Army combat uniform) to VA (Department of Veterans Affairs). Any person who has approached a military administration will recognize the heavy use of jargon and code words that puts a distance between those in the know and the civilians outside. But the dehumanizing aspect of military language is soon countered by the vivid portraits from the gallery of characters that the reader encounters. Zoë Wool makes the book’s purpose and design clear in the introduction. Readers won’t find reams of statistics, or dates and facts arranged in a linear history, or the description of the running and functioning of an institution. Neither will they hear a vocal denunciation of the US military-healthcare complex. Although the author did some work with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and attended congressional hearings related to the “war on terror,” her book centers on the lives of those with whom she spent time at Walter Reed.
Fieldwork, or spending time with people in order to answer research questions, is “the thing anthropologists do.” But the term “fieldwork” does not necessarily describe the kind of work researchers like Zoë Wool are engaged in. “Emotional work” or “caring” may be closer to what she actually did, although she wasn’t a caregiver or didn’t try to pass as such. But she cared about the people she encountered at Walter Reeds in a deep and emotional way. Whenever she could, she gave them a hand and helped them to do small things, she registered their ordinary thoughts, or lent an ear to their silence. Asked about the purpose of her research, she often said: “I just want to see what life is like here for you guys.” She wasn’t there to listen to their stories, for they had no stories to tell. Their broken bodies did the talking: missing limbs, infected bones, colostomy bags, catheters, intravenous lines, wheelchairs, and numbing medication. As for themselves, their experience and memory of the war theater was shattered and broken into pieces. Talk of war rarely took narrative form. Injured soldiers were often prompted to talk about their combat experience with visiting journalists and well-wishers, but the anthropologist didn’t add to their burden and ask them about this “asshole of a place” that was Iraq. They preferred to keep silent, and she respected that.
The most warlike people on earth
Life at Walter Reed follows very American norms. US soldiers and veterans swear only by nation, mother, and apple pie—or rather by country roads, girlfriend, and painkillers. A feeling of ordinariness permeates every situation in a place that nonetheless falls out of the ordinary. The fact that the patients are soldiers, and their injuries sustained during war, marks the situation in unique ways. Of course, Walter Reed has sheltered and treated other soldiers in previous engagements: Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and World War I. The United States is, after all, a bellicose nation, and Americans are the most war-prone people on earth if we judge by the twentieth century’s record. Heroism and patriotism have always been linked to the violence of war, and the image of the wounded soldier undergirds the national narrative of the United States. But this time was different. Injuries that were fatal in previous conflicts can now be healed or contained. A disproportionate number of soldiers were exposed to the blasting of IED or EFP (explosively formed projectiles) which have the purpose to maim and to cripple as much as to kill. These are the people that Zoë Wool encountered at Walter Reed. In addition to bodily injuries, they had to cope with PTSD, throbbing headaches, and the adverse effects of medication. Blown-up bodies can be stitched back; but broken minds can never be restored to normal.
The lives of injured soldiers at Walter Reed are characterized by an unstable oscillation between the extreme and the unremarkable, a balance the author calls “the extra/ordinary.” As she describes it, “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.” “Surprises were so expected you could almost see them coming.” Moments of intense boredom alternated with flashes of unbearable pain. People became fast friends without the preliminary step of getting acquainted, and they parted accordingly. While the atmosphere at the housing facility was made to recreate a “home away from home,” journalists and philanthropists popped in regularly, and people would get notes telling them Miss America will be making a visit. Publicity and patriotism saturated the place, with ubiquitous stars and stripes banners, yellow ribbons, and “support our troops” signs. Many patients hated going to special events for injured soldiers because doing so made them feel like a “charity case,” but they nonetheless accepted the invitation to be wined and dined by nation-loving benefactors.
Private donations and public support
Indeed, the mix of public support and private charity is what characterizes Walter Reed from the ground up. The housing facility in which Zoë Wool did her research, the Fisher House, is named after a married couple of benefactors who wanted to provide a living space for the spouses, parents and siblings of injured soldiers so as to recreate a form of family life. Each house functions as its own nonprofit organization and relies on the generosity of philanthropic organizations and individuals. Injured soldiers are never left alone: whether in the street or in their living room, grateful strangers come to see and meet and touch them in order to offer them thanks. The field of exchange in which soldiers are included is all at once moral, material, and affective. Claims about the sacrifice of injured soldiers are claims about the valuation of life and death in the context of America’s wars abroad. The deadly risk of soldiering is rendered sacred, and blood sacrifice is the measure the debt that society incurs. Soldiers do not always adhere to this moral economy: they do not see themselves as self-sacrificing heroes, and consider what they did on the war front as mere “work” or “a job”. Similarly, attending patriotic dinners, or accepting the grateful messages of strangers, is considered by them as part of their job.
The Fisher House at Walter Reed is also suffused with the ideology of the normative family. The institution was created to host the conjugal partners and close relatives of injured soldiers. It provides a space where couples can recreate a normal life before leaving to civilian residence. But normalcy can be elusive in the extra/ordinary context of Walter Reed. Soldiers typically married at a very young age shortly before getting enlisted, and never experienced married life as conventionally defined. Apart from their parents’ place, there was no place they could call home, a place where they used to reside and to which they could go back. Their injury and medical condition created new forms of dependency that raised specters of abandonment, isolation, and solitude. Families did not offer a refuge from the impermanence, instability, and boredom that characterized life at Walter Reed. They were torn by domestic violence, sexual frustration, or unwanted pregnancies. Soldiers held to intimate attachments like lifelines in a rough sea, while the material perks earned by their companion entered in the calculus of spouses who chose to love and to cherish for better and for worse. The pensioned veteran is the opposite of the single-mother “welfare queen”: social benefits and state support is what makes couples stay together.
The military-healthcare complex
Walter Reed General Hospital was built in 1908. It is the place American presidents visit to express the nation’s gratefulness to injured soldiers. It is also the place where Donald J. Trump got tested and treated for Covid-19. This mix of high politics and intimate care is what characterizes the military-healthcare complex. The expression “military-industrial complex” was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to warn against the unholy alliance between the nation’s military and the defense industry that supplies it. Its medical equivalent raises another specter: that of a country in which a passage through the US Armed Forces is the only way to access decent living and healthcare for the disenfranchised classes. Military benefits are considered as the only legitimate form of social security. The welfare state is reduced to the warfare state. This dependency fuels an unending process of overseas wars and military entanglements. In her book, Zoë Wool doesn’t indulge in such social critique; but her deeply moving portrayal of shattered bodies and broken minds warns us of any temptation to consider homecoming soldiers solely as war heroes, victims of trauma, or bearers of patriotic pride.
It is said that Americans don’t have social security. Soldiers do. Earnings for active duty military service or active duty training have been covered under the Social Security Act since 1957. Veterans get social security benefits after they are discharged. Military service members who become disabled while on active duty can file for disability claims. The social security system also covers families and relatives of a deceased soldier. Active duty military members can retire after twenty years of active duty service. In exchange, they receive retirement pay for life. Veterans get free or low-cost medical care through VA hospitals and medical facilities. They have access to special education programs, housing and home loan guarantees, job training and skills upgrading, small business loans, and even burial and memorial benefits. Their situation contrasts with the thirty million Americans who do not have health insurance and who cannot afford medical costs, and with the many more who get only minimal retirement pension and healthcare. In sum, when you join the US Army, Uncle Sam gets your back covered.
Fieldwork and care work
But being a soldier in a warlike nation comes with a high risk. Wars waged abroad bring home their lot of shattered lives, broken bodies, and crippled minds. These are the lives and bodies that Zoë Wool encountered while doing fieldwork at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC. Her book begins with a seven-pages lexicon of abbreviations and acronyms, from ACU (Army combat uniform) to VA (Department of Veterans Affairs). Any person who has approached a military administration will recognize the heavy use of jargon and code words that puts a distance between those in the know and the civilians outside. But the dehumanizing aspect of military language is soon countered by the vivid portraits from the gallery of characters that the reader encounters. Zoë Wool makes the book’s purpose and design clear in the introduction. Readers won’t find reams of statistics, or dates and facts arranged in a linear history, or the description of the running and functioning of an institution. Neither will they hear a vocal denunciation of the US military-healthcare complex. Although the author did some work with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and attended congressional hearings related to the “war on terror,” her book centers on the lives of those with whom she spent time at Walter Reed.
Fieldwork, or spending time with people in order to answer research questions, is “the thing anthropologists do.” But the term “fieldwork” does not necessarily describe the kind of work researchers like Zoë Wool are engaged in. “Emotional work” or “caring” may be closer to what she actually did, although she wasn’t a caregiver or didn’t try to pass as such. But she cared about the people she encountered at Walter Reeds in a deep and emotional way. Whenever she could, she gave them a hand and helped them to do small things, she registered their ordinary thoughts, or lent an ear to their silence. Asked about the purpose of her research, she often said: “I just want to see what life is like here for you guys.” She wasn’t there to listen to their stories, for they had no stories to tell. Their broken bodies did the talking: missing limbs, infected bones, colostomy bags, catheters, intravenous lines, wheelchairs, and numbing medication. As for themselves, their experience and memory of the war theater was shattered and broken into pieces. Talk of war rarely took narrative form. Injured soldiers were often prompted to talk about their combat experience with visiting journalists and well-wishers, but the anthropologist didn’t add to their burden and ask them about this “asshole of a place” that was Iraq. They preferred to keep silent, and she respected that.
The most warlike people on earth
Life at Walter Reed follows very American norms. US soldiers and veterans swear only by nation, mother, and apple pie—or rather by country roads, girlfriend, and painkillers. A feeling of ordinariness permeates every situation in a place that nonetheless falls out of the ordinary. The fact that the patients are soldiers, and their injuries sustained during war, marks the situation in unique ways. Of course, Walter Reed has sheltered and treated other soldiers in previous engagements: Vietnam, Korea, World War II, and World War I. The United States is, after all, a bellicose nation, and Americans are the most war-prone people on earth if we judge by the twentieth century’s record. Heroism and patriotism have always been linked to the violence of war, and the image of the wounded soldier undergirds the national narrative of the United States. But this time was different. Injuries that were fatal in previous conflicts can now be healed or contained. A disproportionate number of soldiers were exposed to the blasting of IED or EFP (explosively formed projectiles) which have the purpose to maim and to cripple as much as to kill. These are the people that Zoë Wool encountered at Walter Reed. In addition to bodily injuries, they had to cope with PTSD, throbbing headaches, and the adverse effects of medication. Blown-up bodies can be stitched back; but broken minds can never be restored to normal.
The lives of injured soldiers at Walter Reed are characterized by an unstable oscillation between the extreme and the unremarkable, a balance the author calls “the extra/ordinary.” As she describes it, “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.” “Surprises were so expected you could almost see them coming.” Moments of intense boredom alternated with flashes of unbearable pain. People became fast friends without the preliminary step of getting acquainted, and they parted accordingly. While the atmosphere at the housing facility was made to recreate a “home away from home,” journalists and philanthropists popped in regularly, and people would get notes telling them Miss America will be making a visit. Publicity and patriotism saturated the place, with ubiquitous stars and stripes banners, yellow ribbons, and “support our troops” signs. Many patients hated going to special events for injured soldiers because doing so made them feel like a “charity case,” but they nonetheless accepted the invitation to be wined and dined by nation-loving benefactors.
Private donations and public support
Indeed, the mix of public support and private charity is what characterizes Walter Reed from the ground up. The housing facility in which Zoë Wool did her research, the Fisher House, is named after a married couple of benefactors who wanted to provide a living space for the spouses, parents and siblings of injured soldiers so as to recreate a form of family life. Each house functions as its own nonprofit organization and relies on the generosity of philanthropic organizations and individuals. Injured soldiers are never left alone: whether in the street or in their living room, grateful strangers come to see and meet and touch them in order to offer them thanks. The field of exchange in which soldiers are included is all at once moral, material, and affective. Claims about the sacrifice of injured soldiers are claims about the valuation of life and death in the context of America’s wars abroad. The deadly risk of soldiering is rendered sacred, and blood sacrifice is the measure the debt that society incurs. Soldiers do not always adhere to this moral economy: they do not see themselves as self-sacrificing heroes, and consider what they did on the war front as mere “work” or “a job”. Similarly, attending patriotic dinners, or accepting the grateful messages of strangers, is considered by them as part of their job.
The Fisher House at Walter Reed is also suffused with the ideology of the normative family. The institution was created to host the conjugal partners and close relatives of injured soldiers. It provides a space where couples can recreate a normal life before leaving to civilian residence. But normalcy can be elusive in the extra/ordinary context of Walter Reed. Soldiers typically married at a very young age shortly before getting enlisted, and never experienced married life as conventionally defined. Apart from their parents’ place, there was no place they could call home, a place where they used to reside and to which they could go back. Their injury and medical condition created new forms of dependency that raised specters of abandonment, isolation, and solitude. Families did not offer a refuge from the impermanence, instability, and boredom that characterized life at Walter Reed. They were torn by domestic violence, sexual frustration, or unwanted pregnancies. Soldiers held to intimate attachments like lifelines in a rough sea, while the material perks earned by their companion entered in the calculus of spouses who chose to love and to cherish for better and for worse. The pensioned veteran is the opposite of the single-mother “welfare queen”: social benefits and state support is what makes couples stay together.
The military-healthcare complex
Walter Reed General Hospital was built in 1908. It is the place American presidents visit to express the nation’s gratefulness to injured soldiers. It is also the place where Donald J. Trump got tested and treated for Covid-19. This mix of high politics and intimate care is what characterizes the military-healthcare complex. The expression “military-industrial complex” was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to warn against the unholy alliance between the nation’s military and the defense industry that supplies it. Its medical equivalent raises another specter: that of a country in which a passage through the US Armed Forces is the only way to access decent living and healthcare for the disenfranchised classes. Military benefits are considered as the only legitimate form of social security. The welfare state is reduced to the warfare state. This dependency fuels an unending process of overseas wars and military entanglements. In her book, Zoë Wool doesn’t indulge in such social critique; but her deeply moving portrayal of shattered bodies and broken minds warns us of any temptation to consider homecoming soldiers solely as war heroes, victims of trauma, or bearers of patriotic pride.
Read
February 24, 2016"For anyone looking for an intimate depiction of military trauma or scholars looking for a strong example of how the rising generation of anthropologists are writing about violence, After War is a must read." — Christopher Webb Somatosphere
11/18/2015
"After War demands that we reckon with the ways violence lives on in even the most civilian and intimate of spaces. ... After War focuses narrowly on veterans, but in asking how we make the world inhabitable after world altering violence, it points to the limits of medicalized understandings of trauma. If only some ways of being 'count' as posttraumatic, we miss the ways in which posttraumatic movement is a sensible reaction to violence." — Emma Shaw Crane Public Books
02/15/2016
11/18/2015
"After War demands that we reckon with the ways violence lives on in even the most civilian and intimate of spaces. ... After War focuses narrowly on veterans, but in asking how we make the world inhabitable after world altering violence, it points to the limits of medicalized understandings of trauma. If only some ways of being 'count' as posttraumatic, we miss the ways in which posttraumatic movement is a sensible reaction to violence." — Emma Shaw Crane Public Books
02/15/2016
March 11, 2022
3.5
chapter 4 was a vibe the rest was kinda good kinda me dragging myself through it
i actually read a whole anthropology book i am shocked
chapter 4 was a vibe the rest was kinda good kinda me dragging myself through it
i actually read a whole anthropology book i am shocked
Read
October 12, 2018362.1086 W9131 2015
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews