“Support the Troops”: the Solider, the Citizen, and Our Ongoing Attachment to Militarism in post-9/11 America
Barnard Professor of Anthropology Nadia Abu El-Haj’s recently released book Combat Trauma elucidates the ways in which a rising focus on the psychological consequences of war on American combat personnel has dovetailed with ubiquitous calls to “support the troops” so as to undermine criticisms of US militarism in the post 9/11 era. Abu El-Haj tracks the shifting discourse about war veterans’ psychological injuries beginning with Vietnam-Era anti-war veterans and their psychiatric allies who understood soldiers’ trauma as compatible with critiques of American imperialism. Over time, and particularly after 9/11, this discourse shifted toward a hyper focus on a depoliticized PTSD. Vietnam serves as a particularly potent starting point for Abu El-Haj’s evaluation of the ways that politics, morality, and psychology once served as powerful and interwoven aspects of the anti-war movements critique against the imperialism of the American military. Fifty years later, Abu El-Haj asks what has happened to a cultural climate drowned in vague calls to “support the troops” while paralyzed against the possibility of meaningful conversations about the consequences of American militarism within the last twenty years.
In conversation with Kelsey Kitzke (BC ‘23) Abu El-Haj talks about the changing understandings of trauma, the ways the ultimate focus on American soldier’s psychological wounds diverts attention from broader consequences of American wars, and what the left’s role in critiquing American imperialism has been and should be.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Kelsey Kitzke: I wanted to start off with how you arrived at this project.
Nadia Abu El-Haj: I came to this project a year or two into the war in Iraq. I was struck by the coverage in the US press where there just seemed to be more and more articles about American soldiers suffering from PTSD. It really struck me that the understanding of PTSD was emerging from a focus on American soldiers watching their buddies die or being injured, really putting them in a more victimized position.
I already knew the history of the literature on war and combat trauma because I’d been trained in the history of science and I’ve been interested in psychiatry. I knew that in the 1970s, when the public conversation was happening around the American war in Vietnam, there was a conversation about the traumatizing effects of perpetration. But the second, more personal reason was, you know, I didn’t grow up in this country. I had lived in Lebanon for a long time, and I also spent time in Iraq in the late eighties. [The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan represented] the first time I had been in the US during a sustained American combat war. So I was struck by the representation of the war, particularly with embedded journalists. There was very little reporting on what it was actually like to live through war for the vast majority of people in harm’s way: civilians, not military personnel. It really did strike me that there were real political stakes in representing the war through the point of view of the American soldier traumatized by combat.
KK: And it terms of that representation of war in American consciousness, there’s this way that the American public experiences the war through the soldier…
NAEH: Yes. Ultimately, that is the central thread of the book. Contrary to the widespread common sense that no attention had been paid to these wars over the last twenty years, I think a lot of attention has been paid, even if it’s superficial, even if it’s in popular culture, even if it’s rhetorical. It’s to this figure of the traumatized soldier. There’s not a whole lot of attention paid to how the war is fought on the ground or the consequences of that. There is some and it has increased over time, but the question I am asking is what commands attention from the public and what shapes political speech? It’s certainly not what the American military has done to others. What commands attention is what is owed to the soldiers who went off to war in “our name.”
KK: I mean, the only thing I can think of recently where that attention was paid was when the US pulled out of Afghanistan. But even that became more about the US’s absence than what had been of its presence.
NAEH: Absolutely. There were those two weeks, you’re absolutely right, because the pullout was so desperate, and because there were thousands upon thousands of Afghans trying to get through the airport and then of course the suicide bombing. There was a focus, for about two weeks, on the fact that there were Afghans in harm’s way. But I agree that it was always tethered to a few things: Afghan allies, what it means to leave people who work for the US behind, and the fact that the real crisis was a military failure to win the war rather than reassessing the war from the get-go. And the third thing is there was, even in those two weeks, which then dissipated, a conversation about Afghans being trapped. This was also tethered very heavily to the trauma that former members of the military were having because they were breaking promises to people who had been their allies and a second trauma of seeing such a chaotic exit, being left with a sense of, Was it worth it? What did we do? So that was part of the conversation. And then of course, Kabul falls, the Americans pull out their last troops, and then we lose sight again.
So that’s what I want to say. Especially as the wars go on and embedded journalists aren’t the only ones in the war zones, there has been coverage of some of the consequences, but it’s not sustained and it doesn’t command real attention and it’s gotten no traction in the public domain. What kind of reparations are owed? That’s not a conversation.
KK: If we can turn to the history the book is tracing, Vietnam is a real specter. You track how, during the war in Vietnam, the soldier and the war are deeply entangled. They’re not able to be separated. Can you describe how we got to a point where the soldier and the war are held apart?
NAEH: Right, so, what happens in the seventies is a wave of political activism to get the American Psychiatric Association to recognize combat trauma and put it into the DSM. Anti-war activists who were veterans and the psychiatrists who worked with them developed an understanding of what they initially called Post-Vietnam Syndrome, which is not just an understanding of a psychic condition, it is also an understanding of the war. So, people are traumatized and they are traumatized from having perpetrated atrocities in what was explicitly articulated as a colonial or imperial war and a racist war. So now, with Post-Vietnam Syndrome, there is no separation between speaking of the suffering of the soldier or the veteran and speaking of the war.
By the end of the war in Vietnam, the military has sort of fallen apart, there is a lot of agitation against it, the draft gets pulled. Then, in the late seventies and in a more sustained way during the Reagan administration, you see a very conscious effort to reconstruct the war in Vietnam, the American military, and a national attitude towards the military. The reconstruction of the war in Vietnam says the military did not lose on the battlefield, it lost because the military was not allowed to do what they needed to do because there was so much activism at home. What follows is a resuscitation of the military as a professional force and a sense of the soldier as the iconic citizen to whom something is owed.
Now you begin to get the rhetoric that structures contemporary American discourse on war. In fact, with the first Gulf War (1990-91), we saw a separation of the soldier from the war. The narrative shifted toward what soldiers suffered, soldiers who became vets and survived, how they were traumatized by war and by how they were treated when they returned home. That becomes: You can oppose the war but support the soldier.
KK: Despite this rhetorical separation, what you’re describing actually happening is a kind of political conjoining.
NAEH: Again, the question I am asking is, what do we mean when we say support the soldier? Do we mean people who have been injured in battle, whether psychiatry or physically, deserve to be well taken care of institutionally, as in the medical system and disability rights? Of course, that’s something all American citizens should have, universal healthcare. But that’s not what the rhetoric of “support the troops” really means. It’s a political invocation that you have to hold the soldier in high regard, regardless of what you think of the war.
This has had an incredibly detrimental effect on the ability to sustain a conversation about first principles and wars separate from the experiences of individual American soldiers. Because often critiques of the war are then taken as critiques of the soldier.
KK: Can you talk about the difference between an all-volunteer force and a draft? I am wondering how that makes a difference to this discourse. In the book, you talk about the military becoming a kind of American caste. With a draft, the military is more demographically representative of the country, at least theoretically. An all-volunteer force isn’t structurally representative as the draft is, but we’re still called on to think of the military as the ultimate representatives for America in the world.
NAEH: Absolutely. The reconstruction of the soldier as the iconic citizen, “support the troops,” was absolutely tethered to the fact that this is an all-volunteer force, which really means a professional force. I mean it’s interesting to call it an all-volunteer force; people are getting paid, it’s a profession. Having said that, I think the draft question is a really important one. I mean on the one hand, I’m against the draft because I’m against the military; on the other hand, I think people may have more skin in the game if there was a draft because it really is certain subsections of the population who are going and fighting these wars. So what I’m about to say isn’t to undermine that. But at the same time, it’s worth keeping in mind that the distinction isn’t as severe as it seems.
Even during the war in Vietnam, the reason that the veterans against the war were so powerful in the movement is they couldn’t be accused of not having been there. A lot of the opposition to the college kids or whatever who were protesting the wars was, You don’t know what you’re talking about, you weren’t there. That civilian-military divide already existed, even when there was a draft.
And the other thing is, even with the draft it was very class and race skewed. People who were privileged got deferments, or they got into the national guard. It was not as equalizing as the re-narration claims. It was never that equalizing. Now the primary factor determining military involvement is having family in the military. People either grew up on bases or they have lots of soldiers or veterans in their extended family. It’s not primarily minorities who enlist. It’s not primarily poor people. The vast majority of the army is white and middle-class, the sinking middle-class. It’s the same group that supports Trump and probably out of similar motivations.
KK: That also goes against the left’s argument about the American military, or the criticism of the American military, that it exploits marginalized groups and those groups end up suffering disproportionality from the negative effects of military service.
NAEH: What you’re saying is really important. That’s how progressives get pulled into what I call attachment to militarism. Because they are not willing to be overly critical of the military. They are huge proponents of the “support our troops” rhetoric. Not just “support our troops,” but also endorse the troops’ account of war. You can see this at the end of Zoe Wool’s anthropology book After War. The closing chapter says, more or less, ‘For me to even question their experiences I have to recognize this is from a position of privilege.’ No. You can have an analysis and you can listen to people, and you can still say, no, those people won’t dominate this account of war, they won’t dictate the truth.
For people who consider themselves leftists, they take this stance in the name of “we are privileged, they are not.” A class-race thing. But when you land in Iraq as a soldier, no one on the ground cares. You are an imperial soldier. You’re an American soldier. That perspective gets lost with the constant call for deference. The deference is justified by what we cannot know. But think about what soldiers cannot know. They cannot know what it’s like for civilians to live or die in a combat zone. They cannot even know what it’s like for an opposing combatant. They cannot know what it’s like to have their families in harm’s way. There are so many things they cannot know. That, we don’t talk about.
KK: In a way, in the American consciousness, the wars are located in America, rather than abroad.
NAEH: In Christian Appy’s phrasing, they are an American tragedy. There are gestures towards other people. We know that other people have suffered. But that’s not what we are talking about. That might be the primary thing we need to talk about.
KK: This focus and the figure of the traumatized soldier seem to be an example of a larger neoliberal shift being tracked by anthropology towards a sense that morality is opposed to politics.
NAEH: Absolutely. Respecting the individual traumatized soldier becomes a moral obligation that paralyzes the possibility of engaging in real political critiques of militarism, insisting that it is a central and fundamental discussion that the US must have.
I mean, we’re still at war. The war on terror has not ended. The Brown University “Cost of War” project has a global map showing where the US military is involved in operations or has bases. It’s extraordinary. Like eighty countries in the world have been subjected to this.
KK: It is interesting because in that Post-Vietnam discourse as you point out, with the focus on the perpetrator’s trauma, morality was very central to politics and psychology, and now these threads are completely separate.
NAEH: It was such a different period. It wasn’t influenced by this post-political way of thinking of our moral obligations to other human beings. That was a political idea then. The ideas of the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, anti-colonial wars, their politics were everywhere. There was no sense of an either-or.
I think that’s what’s so interesting about the 1970s moment and people like Robert Jay Lifton. Now we’re being given a choice to either recognize soldier’s trauma and stay quiet or dismiss the suffering of the American soldier and have a political conversation. But the model that Vietnam-era veterans, psychiatrists, and activists gave us allowed us to do both at the same time.
I am not saying people don’t come back from war deeply injured. A lot of people come back from war with serious trauma that is very hard to overcome. But it can’t be an either-or.
KK: I was struck by your history of trauma discourse and treatment, especially because I think trauma is, I’m not sure diffused is the right word, but I hear the word “trauma” in popular discourse so often. Everyone has trauma. It has become this universal psychological injury, and sometimes this seems to deflect responsibility, or rather, deflects morality in a way that morality has come to deflect politics.
NAEH: Yeah, it’s very ubiquitous and very expansive. This is because of various shifts, including understandings of what trauma is, because it’s become very ubiquitous in American society, and in being tethered to the idea of victimization. People don’t explicitly call soldiers victims, and soldiers don’t explicitly call themselves victims, but because that’s what we imagine a traumatized person to be, you’re effectively putting soldiers in the category of victim. And this, again, frames who suffers from war.
Exactly as you’re saying, this discussion isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening in a culture obsessed with the figure of the traumatized victim.
KK: What does that definition of trauma do to a definition of healing? And how is that different from how Vietnam-era psychiatrists were thinking about healing?
NAEH: Formally, it was much more psychodynamic. The treatment in the VA, from its founding, was talk therapy. It was about guilt. It was about responsibility. There was a shift at the end of the seventies, at the tail end of psychoanalysis dominating American psychiatry. The field has moved profoundly away from psychodynamic theories of mental disorders in favor of what is known as “evidence-based medicine” based on randomized control trials. A lot of this is the result of funding and the transformation of the healthcare and health insurance industries over the years. There are defined protocols, defined measures of success, and a defined maximum treatment time. The military is operating in this biomedical psychiatric paradigm that dominates the US and much of the world. Much more about the brain than the mind. Much more about biochemistry and genetics and now increasingly neuroscience.
Putting aside the larger political questions for a moment, there is not a lot of evidence that these short-term protocols are effective for military veterans. And honestly, intuitively, it makes sense to me. I just don’t know how you take something so deeply traumatic, everything from having your best buddy blown up next to you to killing another person, on repeat, and think that in a twelve-week regimen you’re going to find resolution. Things like prolonged exposure therapy, which was developed by Edna Foa at UPenn to treat women who had survived single-incident rapes, have been quite successful in their domain, because it’s this intense incident, an incident with clear victimization. But to transfer that onto an experience of complex trauma, which is the reality for most soldiers, does not work. The soldiers are dealing with the effects of chronic trauma, months and years on end. The idea that can you focus on one incident and it stands in for the rest, that doesn’t make sense. It feels like putting a band aid on metastatic cancer.
KK: You also go into the evolution of more recent thinking on combat trauma, specifically the concept of moral injury, which might address some of the gaps you just mentioned. Can you explain more?
NAEH: Yes. So the idea of moral injury was first named by Jonathan Shay in books written in the nineties. He worked at the Boston VA with Vietnam veterans. He describes what psychologists were seeing in military personnel coming back from combat, and how it was different from what they were seeing in victims of assault or rape. For many of these guys who have gone into combat, fear is not their primary issue. In some ways, they are selected for their lack of fear, and then they are trained to repress or distort it. So, while fear is a primary affect for survivors of rape and assault, it is not a primary affect for most veterans. They suffer from what is called impacted grief, or what Freud would have called melancholia, the irresolvable grief that comes from watching their best friends get killed next to them.
They also suffer from what Shay calls moral injury. Which they describe as a condition of people who have been traumatized by something that they have done or failed to do or witnessed. The point is that soldiers are thought of as agents of violence, not simply victims of violence. This opens up important treatment questions. It also demonstrates how, if you’re not identifying the right ideology in medical language, or the right affects, you really can’t treat people.
It opens up the conversation about who the soldiers are in the context of combat. It locates the problem in the mind. It acknowledges that people have a conscience and they’re conflicted and that conflict causes the crisis. I mean, trauma is neurological, there is a brain response, but it’s not just that. They use the language of moral transgression. They use the language of the soul. The soul is not the brain. Even the physicians are talking about the soul. Although it doesn’t go [all the way toward a possible political conversation] because it’s more about this is the business of war: you train people to kill and they’re going to suffer from it and we have to treat them. But, at least, there’s a pushback to say that trauma has something to do with the mind, consciousness, and a sense of who you are as a human being and not just a kind of brain, genetic, or biochemical response. This is a conversation that could ascend the medical professional and could open a real conversation about war. But not in this larger environment where the political and moral are separated.
KK: I want to go back to a point that came up when you discussed this work at a BCRW talk last fall. Someone pointed out that the left’s view of the police, including the growing willingness to condemn the police individually and in a systems way, particularly with the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives, is so strikingly different from the leftist military critique.
NAEH: If you think back to 2016, 2020, for all the pushback against the Trump administration and the mobilization to elect Biden, there was virtually no conversation that the US was still at war. That wasn’t part of the progressive challenge to the Trump administration.
That says a lot about the American political sphere, right or left. There are small pockets of the left that are different, but very small. The American political sphere is ultimately a nationalist one. It does not think about US global power. It does not think about US imperial power in a way that translates to an understanding of what progressive politics could be.
And so the police thing is very telling. The police academies draw from the same class and race distribution as the military. They’re not different. No progressive political person is going to say, “Support the police, even if you don’t support the war on Black people.” That would be an unacceptable position. And yet, here we are. It calls for some very serious soul-searching.
And beyond that, people have said to me, You know, the military really is a thing of social mobility. And I’m like, Okay, but if you’re on the receiving end of American military violence, would you really say that’s okay? In order to say something like that, you have to see the military, war, being a soldier entirely within an American national framework, because in the end you don’t care about anyone else.