The third commentary in this week’s symposium on Katharine Millar’s Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community, from Cian O’Driscoll. Cian is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at Australian National University. His principal area of research is the intersection between normative international relations theory and the history of political thought, with a particular focus on the ethics of war. His published work examines the development of the just war tradition over time and the role it plays in circumscribing contemporary debates about the rights and wrongs of warfare. These themes are reflected in his two monographs: Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Just War (Oxford, 2019) and The Renegotiation of the Just War Tradition (Palgrave, 2008). Cian has also co-edited three volumes and his work has been published in leading journals in the field, including International Studies Quarterly, the European Journal of International Relations, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the Journal of Global Security Studies, Review of International Studies, Ethics & International Affairs, and Millennium. He was the Principal Investigator on an ESRC project entitled Moral Victories and was a 2019 ISRF fellow. Cian is also currently the Chair of the International Ethics section of the International Studies Association.
Kate Millar’s Support the Troops is one of those books that leads you to look at the world in slightly different way than you did before. It offers a very rich account of how the StT discourse mobilises and sustains a very particular vision of civil-military relations—with implications for how we understand the nature of the modern liberal democratic state. I won’t summarise the book here, however, or even engage it in any direct way. Rather, what I want to do is think with it, extend it, and use it as a generative platform from which to reflect on four matters that are perhaps best described as orthogonal to Millar’s interests.
Seeing Both Sides
The first is the story of Willie Dunne. We don’t really meet anyone like Willie Dunne in Support The Troops, primarily because he’s fictional, after a fashion, but also because he doesn’t (straightforwardly) come from the US or the UK, which are the main sites for Kate’s analysis. Dunne, you see, is a character in Sebastian Barry’s celebrated novel about Irish soldiers serving in the British Army in World War One, A Long Long Way.
Though fictional, Dunne’s story is rooted in the history. Dunne was one of 200,000 Irishmen—many of them of green, nationalist background—who responded to the call made in August 1914 by John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster, for the men of Ireland to fight for the British Army in Europe. “I say to the government that they may withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland,” Redmond had declared. “I say that the coast of Ireland will be defended from foreign invasion by her armed sons, and for this purpose armed nationalist Catholics in the south will be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulstermen in the North.”[i] Over 30,000 Irishmen would subsequently die on the Western Front in the service of the British Army. Dunne would not die in Flanders; a different fate awaited him. He would be among the soldiers who happened to be home on furlough in Dublin in April 1916—a significant date in Irish history. In the wrong place, at the wrong time, he found his leave terminated early, as he was redirected by the Crown to Dublin City centre to put down by force what would later come to be known as the Easter Rising.
Determined to launch a rebellion that would overthrow British rule in Ireland, an armed militia of 1,250 volunteers acting on the orders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood had seized key buildings in Dublin on Easter Monday, the 24th April, 1916. Alongside several thousand other Irishmen, Willie Dunne was among the 16,000 British Army troops dispatched that same day to engage the rebels. The fighting, which focused primarily on Dublin, lasted for just shy of one week. It concluded with the unconditional surrender of the rebel forces. In just six days of combat, 485 people had been killed, with over half of that number being non-combatants. The British government consolidated its victory with the imprisonment of 3,500 suspected rebels and the execution of 16 high-profile leaders of the Rising. “A terrible beauty has been born,” W. B. Yeats would subsequently write of these events, with the advent of violent Irish nationalism very much in mind.
What’s interesting about this case is the local response it elicited. Except for a very small minority of people, the Rising and the men who carried it out were decried by the general population of Dublin, young and old, rich and poor. Indeed, the ordinary people of the city lined the streets to hurl abuse at the revolutionaries upon their defeat. Robert Holland, who had fought in the Rising, recalled being barracked by the general public as he was being marched into captivity at the end of the fighting. The reasons for this opprobrium are not difficult to discern. The Rising had done severe damage to the city and exacted a high death toll upon its resentful civilian population. Members of the Irish Parliamentary Party regarded the Rising as a betrayal of everything that the Home Rule movement had worked for in Ireland over the years. Last but certainly not least, the Rising was seen by many as a stab in the back of the young Irishmen like Willie Dunne fighting in France and Belgium at the time. The people hurling the abuse were, of course, the families and friends of Dunne and his comrades. Foremost among them were, of course, the so-called “separation women,” that is, the women whose husbands and sons were at the front. The inimitable character of Bessie Burgess in Sean O’Casey’s 1926 play, The Plough and the Stars, who rages at the rebel forces, accusing them of treachery, is representative of this response.
Sebastian Barry’s Dunne is an interesting character for us, and should be for Millar too, I want to argue, because he reflects a kind of splitting or fracturing of the StT liberal military contract. A victim of empire, yes, but Dunne is also its reticent, unwilling, but ultimately acquiescent executioner. And whatever support he and his fellows received from people of Dublin at the time swiftly evaporated, receding to nothing over time. While the revolutionaries who carried out the Rising were subsequently (in many cases posthumously) celebrated, the Irishmen who served in the British Army in WWI were effectively forgotten, the memory of what they had done disregarded, at least in Ireland. No wreaths were laid in their memory, no commemorative activities performed in their honour, until, really, the past twenty years, when journalists and public intellectuals such as Kevin Myers sought to recall their memory to the public conscious in Ireland. Even so, they play little part in the national story, and are instead largely forgotten, overlooked, the victims—to borrow Myers’s turn of phrase—of a “nationalist orthodoxy of silence.”
I bring Dunne’s story to the fore because I think it casts an oblique light on the straight lines that constitute the liberal military contract that Millar discusses, and the StT discourse that reflects and propagates it. The account Millar offers is beautifully constructed, and, perhaps most impressively, substantiated by impressive statistical analysis. But the aggregate data can sometimes obscure marginal perspectives, which happens to be where we sometimes encounter disclosive points of view.[ii] Moreover, Millar’s decision to train her analysis primarily on the US and UK means that her focus is upon states that are attuned to being on the sending rather than the receiving end of expeditionary forces. The case of Willie Dunne casts an oblique light on this work, then, by telling us something about the crossed lines that can tangle a StT discourse in a country that is not only divided among itself but also both a recipient and an exporter of military force in the service of empire.
Home Comforts
The second matter orthogonal to the focus of the book is, turning the telescope around, how soldiers understand and relate to the support they ostensibly receive from home. How do they understand their assigned role in the liberal military contract that the StT discourse sustains? Does it fulfil them, or do they feel duped by it? I can’t offer a definitive answer to this question, but it doesn’t hurt to muse.
I read a lot of war memoirs for my day-job, and one of the most fascinating aspects of these texts is the way they reference “home.” Soldiers go to war, they often tell us, with a view to protecting what we might call “home,” i.e., their family, friends, loved ones, and so forth. This can be freely given, or, as in the case of the white feather, which Millar alludes to in the text, it can be coercively extracted. Either way, the logic is not only pervasive, it is also deeply imbricated with patriarchal values. While women are expected to stay behind to look after the home, the men are enjoined take up arms to protect it. All the while, the idea of “home” itself stands, in soldiers’ minds, not only as a cypher for better times, but also as a mental idyll into which they can retreat when things become too much for them.[iii]
Once at war, soldiers report the sense of renewal but also hazard that the receipt of mail from home stirs in them. The desire to be “seen” and to be acknowledged and appreciated by a home audience is lived out through the letters that soldiers write but also receive. Soldiers often speak of how they benefitted from having someone to write to while at war, a partner or a personal friend with whom they could share their frontline experiences. It is through such correspondences that many make sense of their identity as a soldier. The arrival of a care package is a moment of joy that brings tidings from home, the promise of better days ahead, and perhaps even a few everyday comforts. On the other hand, soldiers also sometimes express a sense of unease around the issue of correspondence with those at home. The problem here seems to be that a letter from home can set a soldier to thinking, which can be a dangerous thing. More directly, a letter can take a soldier’s mind away from where they’re actually at, which is at war, and tempt them to think of home—a fatal undoing.[iv] The receipt of tender, loving support from home can, it follows, in the wrong circumstances, and of course speaking figuratively, be tantamount to killing a soldier with kindness.
Finally, soldiers often return home to find that, actually, they can never properly return “home.” Because of the things they have done in the service of protecting their home, they have tainted themselves, and alienated themselves from their loved ones, in a way that excludes them from the very home they were fighting for. The sense of betrayal is palpable: the ideal of military service as sacrifice is transmuted to the bitterness of being sacrificed.[v] Consider how Tim O’Brien puts it in The Things They Carried: “Send boys to war, don’t be offended when they come back talking dirty.” All of which leads toward the question of what kind of support society is ready and willing to furnish to the troops when, possibly broken and battered, they are back among us? The record on this front is hard to gauge, but there is no shortage of testimony to support the view that many soldiers who have incurred mental or physical injuries in the service of their countries subsequently come to feel abandoned by their states. By taking the soldier’s perspective into account, then, and extending our focus to encompass the aftermath of war, we acquire a clear view of the limits of the StT discourse—and the cynical way it promises care to soldiers only for it to be withheld when it is arguably most needed.
#IStandWithBenRobertsSmith
The third matter lies close to home for me. It bears on the commission of war crimes by members of the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) in Afghanistan over the period 2005-16. On the 19th November, 2020, the Chief of the Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, announced the findings of a formal inquiry which determined that, alongside a raft of other offences, Australian troops had been culpable of the murder of 39 Afghan nationals in 23 separate incidents. The details of the report shamed Australia. In the years that have followed, the Australian government and the ADF have worked hard to develop an appropriate response to these events. This has involved developing plans for legal proceedings against individual members of the ADF implicated in war crimes and the stripping of medals and honours from entire units who may have had involvement in these incidents.
If the response to the recent court case involving Ben Roberts Smith, once a revered war hero but recently cited as a war criminal by the news media, is anything to go by, these plans will provoke fierce debate. While many Australians are keen to see those culpable of war crimes punished for their wrongdoing, there is also a segment of society vocally opposed to holding these men to account. How, they ask, can it be right that the Australian government tasked these troops to kill in its name only to punish them when they followed orders? And why is it, they query, that the blame for any atrocities committed has so far fallen only on rank-and-file soldiers, and not the top brass? Twitter hashtags imploring people to support “our boys” started trending in the days pursuant to the court’s finding that there is sufficient evidence to support the charge that Roberts Smith is indeed a murderer and a war criminal. It will, then, be fascinating to see exactly how the StT discourse plays out in Australia over the coming months and years, as the general public is confronted with war crimes trials and evidence of wrongdoing by its troops. How robust will the StT discourse prove in these vexed circumstances?
No Man Left Behind?
There is a fourth and final reflection, which bears on which troops are to be supported. The answer to this is clearly “our” troops, but it is not necessarily obvious what that might encompass—especially in the context of contemporary armed conflict. Does the term “our” troops cover just the members of one’s own national army, or does it also extend to the members of allied forces, or even private military contractors? Recent events in Ukraine and Russia mean that the case of Wagner troops springs to mind. What about those cases, too, in which members of minority or disadvantaged groups have served in a national military while, at the same time, being viewed as second-class citizens at home. There is a rich literature, for instance, on African-American troops serving with the US armed forces in Vietnam, the so-called Buffalo Soldiers in World War II, and soldiers from Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander backgrounds in the Australian military. Could it be that there are gradations of, so to speak, “ourness,” such that, instead of viewing this category in binary terms, troops might be understood to be ours to a greater or lesser degree?
Millar doesn’t take up these issues directly. She writes primarily about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and she focuses mostly on the part played by US and UK troops in these conflicts. But, as alluded to above, these troops didn’t fight alone. They were members of a multinational coalition. They also fought alongside, and in alliance with, the national armies of Iraq and Afghanistan. Where do these host-forces sit in relation to the StT discourse? Are they covered by it, or do they fall beyond its reach? So far as we are talking about the circulation of StT as a popular discourse in the US and UK, it does not appear to account for members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Iraqi national army. The promise of support it betokens is not extended to these particular soldiers. Fighting for the side though they may be, they are wearing the wrong uniforms. Once again, then, we encounter the hard limits of the StT discourse. Support these troops, it encourages us, but not those ones—even if it’s ostensibly their war that “our boys” are waging.
This exclusion has material effects and can in some circumstances be a matter of life and death. It prefigures a policy landscape wherein coalition troops benefit from the very best medical care available, while ANA troops, for example, are either not granted access to medevac platforms at all or are denied expatriation to overseas medical facilities for necessary life-saving surgery. Instead, they are returned to the tender mercies of their own healthcare system, where the life-saving treatments they need are often not available. To the degree that we might think of this set of issues as an outer edge or even endpoint of the StT discourse, it casts an ugly light on it. Support the troops, it exhorts us, but not all of them. Stand and fight together, it implores, but only some get on the chopper, while others are left to bleed out. No man left behind—so long as you are British or American or Danish or Dutch, and not Afghani or Iraqi. Lo, the Afghanistan of recent years and the Dublin of Willie Dunne suddenly don’t seem so far apart: they both complicate the story of StT by telling us something about the crossed lines that entangle it in a country that is on both the sending and receiving end of military force.
The reason for raising these matters, which as I say are orthogonal to Millar’s interests, is not to criticise her for writing the book that she did, and not a different one. Rather, it is to suggest how the lines of inquiry that Millar develops in Support the Troops might be extended to different and arguably more complex historical and empirical contexts. The fact that there is more work to be done is a testament to the generative quality of Millar’s work and of this outstanding book in particular.
[i] Ronan McGreevy, ‘John Redmond and the First World War’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 107: 428 (2018), p. 409.
[ii] Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London: Allen Lane, 1997), xii.
[iii] D. C. Gill, How We Are Changed by War: A Study of Letters and Diaries from Colonial Conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 42.
[iv] For a thoughtful expression of this view: Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012). Elsewhere, Ernest Hemingway famously wrote that the “greatest gift a soldier can acquire” is the ability to “suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after.” Quoted in: Alex Vernon, Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O’Brien (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), p. 63.
[v] Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 86.
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