Hood in central Texas, however, the vulnerability that came with being deployed in harm’s way was an abiding preoccupation. For so many of the soldiers I spent time with at and around the U.S. In military logic as well as the civilian imagination, these technologies work in concert with discipline and training to produce soldiers as subjects who, thanks to their insensitivity to pain and their immunity from danger, can reliably be sent to face bullets, bombs, and the other attendant threats of a war zone. soldiers’ capacity for violence and enhance their ability to withstand it. But for soldiers themselves, their training, combat environment, protective gear, and weapons are a rich font of both emotional and bodily feeling that exists in complex tension with the also deeply felt military imperative to carry on in the face of extreme discomfort and danger.Ī whole range of technologies, from weapons and armor to battlefield medicine, extend U.S.
I argue that modern military discipline and technology conspire to cultivate soldiers as highly durable, capable, unfeeling, interchangeable bodies, or what might be called, after Susan Buck-Morss (1992), anesthetic subjects. Hood, examines sensory and affective dimensions of soldiers’ intimate bodily relationships with the technologies that alternately or even simultaneously keep them alive and expose them to harm. This article, based on fieldwork among soldiers and military families at the U.S. But, as this article explores, soldiers themselves just as often associate the life-sustaining technology of modern warfare with feelings that range from a pragmatic ambivalence about exposure to harm all the way to profoundly unsettling vulnerability. soldiers are equipped present an image of lethal capacity and physical invulnerability. For many civilians, the high-tech weapons, armor, and military medicine with which U.S.
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