ABSTRACT
While the last chapter discussed the construction of particular performances of military masculinity in population-centric counterinsurgency associated with ‘soldier-scholars’ highlighting the ‘caring’ side of counterinsurgency, this chapter analyses a range of military memoirs from soldiers and Marines that tell a rather diff erent story. Where the previous chapter emphasised the prevalence of the concept of ‘cultural sensitivity’ and a conception of a ‘kinder, gentler war’, this chapter discusses the centrality of gaining combat experience as a part of counterinsurgency and how this also shapes the military masculinity of this form of warfare. In large part US military memoirs confi rm what Woodrow and Jenkings’s (2012: 122) study of British soldiers’ memoirs showed, namely that it is not uncommon that the ‘enthusiasm for reconstruction work’ is ‘tempered with a parallel enthusiasm for direct combat’. And it is this enthusiasm for direct combat, its embodied manifestations, its gendered performances and its implications for counterinsurgency military masculinities that this chapter charts. This not only shows that the practice of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan cannot be reduced to ‘armed social work’ and that there are limitations as to how the ideals of counterinsurgency doctrine travels down military ranks, it also shows the centrality of the body as a vehicle through which the practice of war is made sense of and communicated.
