Courtesy of the red, white and blue : a midwest American perspective on troops, war and nation

Abstract

This thesis takes as its starting point American warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan as of 2008, and explores how American service members, as well as their families and friends, look at these wars. Information is collected throughout a six month fieldwork, carried out in 2008 in a small town in the Upper Midwest, USA. Participant observation and interviews conducted during fieldwork constitute the basis for the empirical descriptions. The main questions the thesis offers answers to are: What do American service members see themselves as fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan? To them, why is their country waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan? And furthermore, what informs service members’ and other Americans’ perspectives on these matters? This thesis suggests that the answers to these questions are not so much connected to the specifics of the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as to how military and American warfare in general is perceived within the limits of an American nationalistic world view. The thesis explores the above mentioned theme through a look at speech and practice in informal as well as formalized, ritual situations. The many settings the reader is introduced to includes an Army recruiting office, a public elementary school, Memorial Day celebrations, the motorcycle group the Patriot Guard Riders’ missions, and the celebration of a National Guard unit returning home from Iraq. One gets to know people ranging from Army recruiters to the girls they helped enlisting at the age of 17, the concerned mother of a soldier, and a bunch of rather unconcerned 5th graders performing their patriotic duty decorating their town’s cemetery with Star Spangled Banners. Through these different persons and settings, just as differing perspectives on the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are offered. The wars are justified both with regard to them being part of the Global War on Terror, as well as being liberating missions on behalf of the Iraqi and Afghani people. The wars are resisted based on suspicions that the US government might be waging war with crooked intentions, like quests for oil, as well as on insufficient knowledge with regard to for example the presence of weapons of mass destruction. ‘Support Our Troops’ as an idea is explored, and argued to be defining for the American patriotic paradigm, and thus being a constituting element for both support and resistance to American warfare.