Body, memory and emotions of male members of the army with direct experience of war

This chapter interweaves bodily memory and emotions contextualized by the discourse of the local war, military actions and interactions. ¹ Its focus is on the bodily and emotional experience of Russian male members of the army aged 44 to 49 years who participated in the war in Afghanistan (1979–1989). I have used the approaches of Merleau-Ponty (1999) and Halbwachs (2007). Merleau-Ponty (1999) has written about the perceiving human body interflowing with consciousness. An existing body is viewed as an expressive unity of the senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, and in its activity the body intentionally orients to others, thus the living body becomes a subject of perception and at the same time an object of perceiving others (Merleau-Ponty 1999: 265, 274, 277). Merleau-Ponty pays attention to vision and the field of visibility from the perspective of the senses. This point is of great importance because male members of the army often mentioned in their narratives their experience of seeing and feeling their enemies at a distance or near at hand, the death of comrades and their own wounds.