ABSTRACT
In the late autumn of 2008 I was travelling back to London after a day’s fieldwork at a military training centre in Surrey. When I got off the train at Waterloo I noticed two uniformed soldiers in front of me and recognised one of them as the officer in charge of a diversity recruitment programme whom I had recently interviewed. I caught up with him at the ticket barriers and we chatted for a few minutes in the crowded rush-hour concourse before going our separate ways. As the two men vanished into the throng, I had the immediate sensation of seeing myself standing there as though I were naked. Ashamed to be thought of as complicit with the British government’s war machine, I felt acutely self-conscious that I had just been talking to soldiers in public. Three or even two months earlier this would not have been fathomable. Apart from the fact that men in camouflage suits were seldom seen on public transport, I did not think of myself as someone who was able to cross that extraordinary divide between the familiar social world and the hostile apparatus of military power. At that moment I felt undeniably uncomfortable, but I resolved to put this new awareness to good use and to maintain that visceral sense of estrangement during the rest of my research.
