ABSTRACT
During World War II (WWII), social scientists interviewed soldiers in the field (Stouffer et al. 1949), conducted focus groups with soldiers recently returned from combat, and collected oral histories from them (Marshall et al. 1946; Marshall 1947). These classic studies sought not only to document what took place within the combat zone, but also to produce theoretical schemes to account for them. Recent research by Wong (2004, 2005) and Ender (2005a,b) extends this tradition to soldiers in Iraq. Wong’s analyses emphasize the complexity of what some term fourth-generation warfare (Lind et al. 1989; Lind 2004) (war in which at least one of the sides is a military force not organized and controlled by a nation-state) and the corresponding requirement for US military personnel to perform multiple roles and tasks, often ones for which they were neither socialized nor trained. In this paper, we address these complexities, focusing on the “psychological contracts” soldiers form with their units and the military.
