“Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a Marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts — a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.”

Then again, if I wasn’t human, would I read Thoreau?

The question is obviously not a literal one. The actual vocabulary makes it clear that we are dealing with ideas about soldiering, not the reality of their genetic relation to civilians. After all, this is a humanity that is ‘made’ and ‘unmade’, ‘constructed’, ‘reconstructed’ and ‘worked on’. Consequently, the assumption is not that soldiers are ‘an amorphous mass’, but that the way soldiers are thought of is historically and politically variable, perhaps importantly so. There is no need to imagine that this reduces to the claim that there are no differences among soldiers in terms of opinions, life trajectories or IQs.

You may have issues with something called ‘post-modernism’, but that doesn’t mean that the only questions worth asking are those about operational efficiency. There are all kinds of ways of discussing soldiering. It doesn’t seem particularly arguable that in some narratives soldiers are imagined as psychotic killers, in others as brave (if naive) young men thrown into situations beyond their ken, and in still others as cold-minded mercenaries or adrenalin-junkies. In current TV adverts for the British military they are portrayed principally as a rescue service for African children. For sure, soldiers can be all this and more, but different narratives are dominant at different times. Is it irrelevant if the ways we collectively commemorate the dead have changed? Should scholars be silent regarding the different tropes that go with being a stalwart British soldier in Halmand or a rapacious predator in Darfur?

Are academics human? Let’s explore!