ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the personal reflections of those involved as protagonists in that moment and focuses on British military personnel in order to bring their specific understanding of their position and experiences to bear on the problematising of ideas of war and post-war, reconstruction and post-conflict. It explains narratives which was a military deployment portrayed as reconstructive of the Afghan state by NATO governments, and which for its protagonists looked a lot like a war. The chapter draws on a work of an ESRC-funded research project the social production of the contemporary British military memoir. It investigates the understandings of one set of protagonists in the Afghan conflict of the relationships and distinctions between states of conflict and states of reconstruction within that territory. And the experiences of the use of legitimized violence as part of the process of nation-building. Enthusiasm for reconstruction work is represented in war memoirs as tempered with a parallel enthusiasm for direct combat.
