Longing for Home by M. Jan Holton

Author:M. Jan Holton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Finding a Relatively Safe Space

Even though I was home, I never left the battlefield.… The home I came back to was not the one I left. My Family was not the same, I was not the same. I felt that something important was stolen from me and there was nobody I could talk to about it. Nobody except the guys I was over there with. I would look for combat patches, look for buddies to talk to, look for the Soldiers who went through what I went through and felt the same way I did. There were many of us.26

—Major Carlos Huerta

At least in Iraq I had an armored vehicle and body armor, and I carried and operated several weapon systems. Most importantly, we had skilled soldiers watching each others’ backs. At home, I have none of that.… If I had a choice, I would still be in Iraq or in Afghanistan.27

—Anonymous

In combat, soldiers have a unique resource that serves as a powerful “holding community,” to draw from Winnicott’s language, which helps mitigate the full effects of living in the reality that no actual safe space exists on the frontlines. Here, the contested and conflicting categories of victim and perpetrator must be held at bay, or the full force of all that lies beneath them will come tumbling in, making effectiveness—and staying alive—difficult.

Other than the sheer practicality of literal protection within a group of fellow soldiers, such a community often serves as a temporary replacement for the home place—that which defines the relatively safe spaces. I have previously described the idea of creating “relative safety” to mean a lessening of danger through cooperative participation.28 Especially in national volunteer armies, the community of soldiers temporarily replaces all other social communities by establishing a relatively safe holding place in which those with a moral obligation of care for one another “serve to create a temporary psychic space, and when possible a physical space, created between individuals (or a group) out of mutual belief and trust, the result of which is of positive psychological benefit.”29

Here I am borrowing a concept developed from my work with a Sudanese refugee population. I can recall hearing the stories of the Lost Boy refugees and others, some of whom had also been rebel fighters, describe the role of their “brothers.” While there may be limits to how we compare the Lost Boy refugees of Sudan with American soldiers, I think there is a close parallel between the relational brotherhood among the Lost Boys and the incredibly close bond among American soldiers who have fought together.

A distinct role of this combat family pushes the notion of relative safety to its extreme. The “buddy” that stands next to a person in the middle of a firefight defines relative safety by at once watching the other’s flank and also stepping into the same chaos of potential death. The intensity of each combat moment leaves an imprint on participants. Only those standing in that moment can know the specific context—the threats as they emerge, the perceptions and misperceptions, all that goes right and all that goes wrong.

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