ABSTRACT
In the last few years, Canadian Forces have taken a leading role in suppressing insurgency activities in Afghanistan, capacity building of the Afghan National Army, and supporting infrastructure projects as part of the UN-sanctioned, NATO-led International Stabilization Assistance Force (Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces 2009). Since expanding into the southern provinces of Afghanistan, Canadian soldiers have been increasingly engaged in frequent and tense combat with members of the Taliban while patrolling “outside the wire” and the safety of Kandahar Airfield’s guarded walls (Irwin 2006). As Canada’s first combat operation since the Korean War, this military and political situation has generated nationwide attention as politicians, academics, activists, and citizens engage in a polarized debate regarding the nature and legitimacy of Canada’s new international military role in Afghanistan. Canadian infantry soldiers have also been significantly contributing to this debate through storytelling based on their first-hand experience of Afghanistan, international development, and war. Unprecedented in the history of war, these twenty-first century emails and blogs offer an alternative and challenging perspective to Canadian civilians and media. Anthropologists have long been interested in storytelling as a window into a particular
culture (Rosaldo 1986) and most recently as an ethnographic technique in a globalized world (Rapport 2000). For military anthropologists, oral storytelling is a meaningful element in soldiers’ lives for its contribution to social cohesion, its role in crystalizing hazy experiences, in generating social identity, and in making possible the exchange of knowledge and experience (Ben-Ari 1998; Irwin 2002). In the age of the internet, electronic storytelling (or blogging) constitutes the commemoration of soldiers’ experience in civil society (Keren 2005). Although stories play an important functional role for a particular individual, group or culture, storytelling is fundamentally a socially situated activity constituting and reflecting experiential, social, and cultural characteristics (Brenneis 1996; Briggs 1996; Gubrium and Holstein 2008; Irwin 2002; Rosaldo 1986). Stories have also been shown to embody culturally shared narratives of morality
(Tolvanen and Jylha 2005) and to provide a platform for the socialization of morality and the sanctioning of individuals and groups (Garrett and Baquedano-López 2002). Using a narrative ethnography approach (Gubrium and Holstein 2008), we analyze
two combat stories, comparing the ways soldiers use language, create meaning, and communicate to civilian and military audiences. Specifically, we examine one soldier’s internet blog and another’s recorded account of the same combat engagement. Drawing on the textual evidence from these combat stories, we reveal the sociomoral nature of soldiers’ narratives, including examples of social sanctioning and praise of appropriate soldierly behaviour, the narrator’s actions, and the legitimacy of war and Canada’s role in Afghanistan.
