The aspirational promise of soldiering: an analysis of military recruitment testimonials

Abstract

Young people across the globe willingly join the military, knowing that they may be required to kill, maim, and perhaps even die. Considering the starkness of this barebone condition, armed forces strive to make enlisting desirable through recruitment campaigns. While the appeal of military aspirational promises–particularly the promise of manhood–figure centrally in much critical scholarship, the detailed components of these pledges warrant closer scrutiny. This article therefore explores the aspirational promises pledged in military recruitment campaigns from the US Army and the Swedish Armed Forces. Based on a narrative analysis of video testimonials in which ‘real’ soldiers tell their enlistment stories, we lay bare the overarching story grammar made up of distinct plot points (lack, hardship, agency and growth) that comprise the aspirational promises in these campaigns. In tracing these plot points in two distinct sites, the article offers well-needed insight into how the appeal of contemporary soldiering is being constructed and how this appeal attempts to govern potential soldiers. Despite their differences, the campaigns present soldiering as a or the way to regulate and govern the self in relation to norms about what constitutes a successful, self-fulfilled or complete citizen-subject. The aspirational figures in the testimonials promise that one can redress one’s deficiencies and transcend the racialized, gendered, and classed, etc. limits one confronts in oneself and in civilian life. These soldier stories, despite their hyperreal climaxes and journeys, appear to be real and lived and theirs. Vitally, they could also be ours.