Post-Heroic Warfare Revisited: Meaning and Legitimation of Military Losses

Abstract

The article challenges the thesis that western societies have moved towards a post-heroic mood in which military casualties are interpreted as nothing but a waste of life. Using content analysis and qualitative textual analysis of obituaries produced by the Royal Danish Army in memory of soldiers killed during the Second World War (1940–1945) and the military campaign in Afghanistan (2002–2014), the article shows that a ‘good’ military death is no longer conceived of as a patriotic sacrifice, but is instead legitimised by an appeal to the unique moral worth, humanitarian goals and high professionalism of the fallen. The article concludes that fatalities in international military engagement have invoked a sense of post-patriotic heroism instead of a post-heroic crisis, and argues that the social order of modern society has underpinned, rather than undermined, ideals of military self-sacrifice and heroism, contrary to the predominant assumption of the literature on post-heroic warfare.

Keywords

Afghanistan death Denmark legitimation military casualty obituary post-heroic warfare Second World War

Introduction

The commemoration of dead soldiers, whether their death is considered good or bad, heroic, necessary or utterly tragic, is of great relevance for wider society, since the fallen are prone to playing a role in the promotion, reproduction and contestation of the collective identities, moral values and social coherence of large groups of people. Accordingly, a key theme in the literature on dead soldiers is the investment of fatalities with meaning and higher purpose. Max Weber (2004: 225, emphases in original), for instance, argued that death on the battlefield attains a positive value because of the strengthening of the feelings of community in face of an external threat: ‘[d]eath in arms, only here in this massiveness of death, can the individual believe that he knows that he dies “for” something’. Discussing the power of collective symbols over individual consciousness, Émile Durkheim (1965: 251–252) similarly found that: ‘[t]he soldier who dies for his flag, dies for his country […] [because he] loses sight of the fact that the flag is only a sign’.

More recent studies have shown that memorial practices surrounding soldiers killed in war have provided consolation to those left behind (Bourke, 1996; Winter, 1995); expressed the values of society as sacred in the sense that these values (and hence society) are worth dying for (Marvin and Ingle, 1996); and worked as a propaganda instrument in service of the warring state (Jarvis, 2010; Mosse, 1994). Scholars have above all explored the ‘memory–nation nexus’ (Pierre Nora in Olick, 2003: 2), focusing on the dual process in which images of national heroism have made death on the battlefield meaningful and mourning of the fallen has nurtured nationalism. Other scholars have, however, begun to speak of an increase in the so-called ‘casualty factor’, ‘casualty aversion’, ‘casualty shyness’ or ‘casualty phobia’ in western democracies (Smith, 2005), arguing that the emergence of a post-heroic spirit has prevented death in action from being perceived as an act of heroism.

In calling for ‘a new mentality that would inject unheroic realism into military endeavour’, the military strategist Edward N Luttwak (1995: 122) popularised the term ‘post-heroic warfare’. The new concept was a reaction to an assumed unwillingness to accept fatalities in post-industrial societies as a result of their low birth rate. Richard Gabriel (1987: 44) had, however, already visited the issue under the heading No More Heroes: ‘[w]hen so many are killed and maimed so quickly [due to the power of modern weapons], of what value is the notion of personal sacrifice?’ he asked. More recently, Angus Calder (2004: x) has contended that ‘Homeric, Virgilian, Romantic and Wagnerian conceptions of heroism, conditioning representations of war, have lost their glamour […] [and that the idea] that it is sweet and decorous to die for one’s country, may have lost some of its potency’. An even stronger claim is Christopher Coker’s (2007: 102) assertion that ‘society as a whole can no longer interpret sacrifice except as a waste of life’, but he thinks that the post-heroic spirit derives from growing liberal beliefs and ‘deep scepticism towards all organised violence, whatever form it takes’ (Coker, 2007: 1). In contrast to the widespread assumption that images of the fallen as victims (and not heroes) have emerged in the wake of the First World War and the Vietnam War, Cheyney Ryan (2014) has identified the post-heroic spirit with current developments in the moral discourse of war, questioning whether universal and cosmopolitan (as opposed to particularistic and national) values are capable of motivating and justifying military self-sacrifice.

A reading of the literature outside the study of military affairs might suggest that post-heroic warfare is merely one dimension of the general demise of the hero-figure. Bringing to mind the classical work on heroes and hero-worship by Thomas Carlyle (2001 [1841]) and Joseph Campbell (2008 [1949]), Daniel Boorstin (1992 [1961]: 49) has argued that democratic belief, ‘which has brought with it a passion for human equality, has carried a distrust, or at least a suspicion of individual heroic greatness’, while the growth of sociology and psychology – or rationalisation more generally – has dissolved ‘the heroes’ heroic qualities […] into a blur of environmental influences and internal maladjustments’ (1992 [1961]: 52). Somewhat similarly, Orrin E Klapp (2014 [1962]: 169) has conjectured that the deterioration of the gallery of American heroes constitutes ‘a symptom of severe alienation and anomie’. In line with Boorstin and Klapp, Susan Drucker and Robert Cathcart (1994: 3) have called attention to the growing role of the media as a driving force behind the corrosion of heroism, noting that ‘in the wake of the televised Vietnam War and the videogame war in the Persian Gulf with revelations concerning death by friendly fire and “jobs left undone”, even General Schwarzkopf may have a difficult time maintaining hero status’. Finally, Ernest Becker (1997 [1973]: 6) has surmised, with perhaps the greatest apprehension of all, that a profound crisis of heroism threatens to undermine the realisation of humans’ true potential:

Man will lay down his life for his country, his society, his family. He will choose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic, timeless, and supremely meaningful. The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture set up. […] We are living in a crisis of heroism that reaches into every aspect of our social life.

In brief, the literature on post-heroic warfare and heroism is characterised by a basic assumption that heroism has evaporated in the course of modernisation, whatever concrete reasons are given. The concept of post-heroic warfare captures, perhaps, one tendency of the longue durée of western history, but the underlying conviction of the literature also leaves us visually impaired to nuances, black swans and counter-developments in the meaning and legitimation of fatalities. In view of this connection it is significant that studies in policy and media have assessed how national interests, the course of warfare, the domestic political debate and long-term social changes have, in fact, constituted important variables in determining the degree of willingness to accept fatalities (Smith, 2005), while the Oxford Changing Character of War Programme has called attention to how historically specific the discourse on military self-sacrifice and heroism can be. In summing up the research of this programme, Sibylle Scheipers (2014: 3) has rightly concluded that ‘it makes little sense to speak of a “post-heroic condition” when we conceive of the dynamic of the social construction of war heroes and their commemoration as both contested and open-ended’.

My aim here is to challenge the concept of post-heroic warfare from another viewpoint. Starting out from a brief discussion of a ‘good’ death in the military, inspired by Peter Berger (1990), I present an analysis of obituaries produced by the Royal Danish Army in memory of its dead from the Second World War (1940–1945) and the campaign in Afghanistan (2002–2014). The analysis shows that claims about the death of heroism and an assumed death taboo have been exaggerated, at least in the case of Denmark. While it is to some extent true that soldiers are no longer dying heroically for king and country, they nonetheless do so on the basis of a common ideal of job proficiency and a moral commitment to ‘making a difference’. I suggest that Danish losses in the Afghan War have invoked a sense of post-patriotic heroism instead of a post-heroic crisis, indicating that the social order of modern society has in fact underpinned and not undermined the public commemoration of dead soldiers as heroes. In the concluding discussion, I consider the wider commemorative practices in Denmark and other nations, especially the UK, and suggest that the remembrance of dead servicemen has not been detached from the memory–nation nexus, but simply tied to changes in the nomos of society.

A ‘Good’ Death and the Military Obituary: Theoretical Framework

Although Durkheim’s study of suicide and funeral rites and Weber’s exploration of the Calvinian doctrine of predestination placed death as a key object for sociological analysis, the human experience of death has, first and foremost, been dealt with by psychoanalysts and psychologists, who have focused on the normative aspects of a ‘good’ death (Kellehear, 2007: 90; Walter, 2008). Gradually, the notion of a ‘good’ death has begun to attract attention from sociologists. Their aim has been to explore the social phenomenon of death as it relates to the social structure and historical processes such as demographic developments, political subjugation, urbanisation, individualisation, secularisation and rationalisation (Árnason and Hafsteinsson, 2003; Kellehear, 2007; Parsons, 1963; Seale, 1998; Walter, 2003). In their line of work, the notion of a ‘good’ death has thus been re-constructed from a prescriptive model in palliative care to a theoretically saturated concept for analysis purposes.

Derived from the work of Peter Berger (1990: 44), the notion of a ‘good’ death envisages dying ‘while retaining to the end a meaningful relationship with the nomos of one’s society – subjectively meaningful to oneself and objectively meaningful in the minds of others’. As part of the order of common meaning, or ‘nomos’ as Berger labelled it, perceiving a death as ‘good’ entails a ‘nomizing’ process with which ‘the several meanings of the actors are integrated into an order of common meaning’ (Berger, 1990: 19). The subjugation of death to a meaningful order is consequently linked to a process of legitimation within which ‘socially objectified “knowledge” […] serve[s] to explain and justify the social order’ (Berger, 1990: 29). The observation that the social construction of a ‘good’ death is bound up with the exercise of control as part of the reproduction of the social order – an idea that also permeates the concept of ‘resurrective practice’ developed by Clive Seale (1998: 3–4) and several other studies (e.g. Árnason and Hafsteinsson, 2003; Kellehear, 2007: 103–104) – is clearly evident if one considers the management of death in the armed forces.

According to Eyal Ben-Ari (2005), the bureaucracy of death management has to be accompanied by a profound belief in a ‘good’ military death to ensure mental health, esprit de corps and combat performance within the ranks, and maintain legitimacy in the eyes of politicians and civilians alike. The military has, above all, inculcated belief in a ‘good’ death through the remembrance of servicemen killed on duty, and the obituaries to fallen soldiers have played an important role in this context (Danilova, 2015; King, 2010; Zehfuss, 2009). The nomising property of the military obituary is not unique, since such texts constitute ‘effective apparatuses for presenting the deceased in consistency with the bereaved’s aspirations for themselves and their dead’ (Bonsu, 2007: 202). As a ‘genre of governance’ (Fairclough, 2003: 32), the military obituary thus serves to sustain the social order both inside and outside the organisation by operating within the ranks of the military, the family (of the fallen) and the national public. Keeping in mind the holistic viewpoint of Berger’s theory, military obituaries not only provide a key to understanding how the forces seek to maintain legitimacy in the wake of losses, but also how changes in the society they serve have influenced the nature of a ‘good’ death for a soldier. As death by cancer and old age is the most delineated in the sociological literature (Walter, 2008), an analysis of a ‘good’ death in the military world might even advance our general empirical knowledge of death and help to assess the generalised nature of previous studies.

Data and Methods

To answer the research question if and how the meaning and legitimation of military losses have diminished or alternatively changed, the data for the analysis consist of obituaries written and published by the Royal Danish Army in the wake of the Second World War and the War in Afghanistan. I have only included obituaries composed in the wake of combat-related casualties, covering those who died as a result of hostile action or friendly fire while serving in the forces (Danish Defence, 2015a).¹ On this basis, I have collected 12 obituaries from the Second World War through an examination of military magazines,² as well as 32 units commemorating Helmand’s dead through a search on the newsfeed of the army’s website. To the best of my knowledge, I have included every obituary of relevance to my search criteria. The construction of an analytical strategy is inspired by a historical content analysis of US obituaries conducted by Gary Long (1987) and the tool-box for qualitative textual analysis provided by Norman Fairclough (2003). I have focused throughout on information about the fallen soldiers and the presence or absence of legitimising language about death. In the process of coding, some of the obituaries can be put into two or more categories and when such cases arise, the obituaries are included in all of the relevant categories. Differences between the two groups of obituaries are analysed statistically by cross tabulation and the level of significance calculated by Fisher’s Exact Test in order to take account of the small size of the data set (N = 44).

Analysis

The analysis is organised in four parts: after a brief overview of battle casualties in the Danish army from the Second World War to the present, it provides a general description of the military obituary and some of the overall developments of the genre. I then present a qualitative and quantitative textual analysis of the representation of the war dead, before identifying the main strategies of legitimation and their changes over time.

A Brief History of Fallen Danish Soldiers

On the outbreak of the Second World War, the government of Denmark pursued a survival strategy based on neutrality and negotiation. This response was in line with the pacific policy of the social democratic and social liberal parties that had shaped foreign policy and dominated the view on military force ever since the devastating defeat by Prussia and Austria in 1864 (Rasmussen, 2005). Although Denmark was not a combatant in the Second World War, an estimated 40 Danish army soldiers were killed as a consequence of the German invasion on 9 April 1940, and the brief exchange of fire when the negotiation policy collapsed on 29 August 1943.³ The deployment of Danish servicemen with UN peacekeeping missions between 1948 and 1992 resulted in 36 losses of which very few were combat-related (Danish Defence, 2015a).⁴ As the country changed its geopolitical strategy to play a more active role in international affairs after the disappearance of the Soviet threat, the international engagement of the military increased and with it the number of casualties (Table 1), most notably in Afghanistan, where Denmark has lost the most men per capita in the coalition (Jakobsen, 2013). The dead of Helmand thus represent the largest number of fatalities in the Danish forces since the Second World War.

Table 1.

Casualties of the Danish forces, 1992–2014.

Location	Mission	Year	Combat-related casualties	Non-combat-related casualties
Lebanon	UNIFIL	2009	0	1
Iraq	OIF	2003–2007	6	2
Afghanistan	ISAF	2002–2014	37	6
Kosovo	KFOR	1999–	0	1
Bosnia-Herzegovina	IFOR/SFO	1996–2004	1	2
Croatia	UNDPROFOR	1992–1995	4	4
Other UN missions		1992–	0	4
Total number of fallen			48	20

Note: combat-related casualties denote soldiers who have died as a result of hostile action, Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) and friendly fire. Non-combat-related casualties include losses due to illness or accidents.

Source: Danish Defence (2015a), updated 31 January 2014.

General Description and Developments of the Military Obituary

The obituaries usually contain a close-up photograph of the deceased (smiling in uniform) and a short text written by commanding officers and occasionally colleagues (around 600 words on average). In the case of several deaths in the same incident these are remembered collectively in one obituary. The obituary text typically includes a very brief and sanitised description of the incident leading to death and a positive portrait of the deceased. The portrait involves an account of the deceased’s career and achievements in the military and a description of his (and in a single case her) distinct qualities as a colleague, friend and family member. The bereaved family and comrades-in-arms are frequently greeted with condolences. In contrast to the obituaries of the Second World War, contemporary obituaries are characterised by a democratic inclusion of the rank and file (see Table 2) and a ‘hybridization of the genre’ (Fairclough, 2003: 34), blending the conventional biography with letters to bereaved families, memorial speeches and accounts from commemorative ceremonies. As a result of the speedy publication online (one or two days versus one month during the Second World War), the military obituary has also gained a more immediate character. Although Danish Defence has omitted to gather these obituaries on a single memorial website (unlike the British Armed Forces), the fact that obituary writing has entered the curriculum at the Royal Danish Army Officers’ Academy in the wake of the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan indeed suggests that the obituary has become a more important part of the army’s apparatus in managing death (Sørensen, 2013). The earliest online obituary is dated 3 May 2007.

Table 2.

Obituaries of the Danish fallen of the Second World War and the War in Afghanistan, presented by rank and in total.

	Second World War (N = 12)	War in Afghanistan (N = 32)
Privates and sergeants	4	32
Officers	9	4
Total number of fallen	13	36

Note: the Danish army has published an obituary in honour of all but one of the fallen of the Afghan mission. During the Second World War, however, only four obituaries honoured a fallen soldier below officer rank, although 25 privates and sergeants were killed as a consequence of the German invasion in 1940 and Operation Safari in 1943.

Representation of the Fallen

A comparison between the obituary written in memory of lieutenant Poul Arne Hansen-Nord, who died in combat on 29 August 1943, and private Jacob Sten Lund Olsen who was killed by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in Afghanistan on 3 September 2011 serves to illustrate how the military ascribes meaning to casualties by portraying the deceased. A coding of the use of ‘generic categories’ (Fairclough, 2003: 146) in the obituary of Hansen-Nord that was written by his chief at the Guard Hussar Regiment shows that the deceased is remembered with reference to his social role as a soldier (76%), countryman (10%), friend (8%) and son (1%).⁵ This representation is quite dynamic and anything but neutral, since the text oscillates between ‘realist statements’ and highly moralised ‘evaluations’ (Fairclough, 2003: 172–173). The quotation below is made up from the introduction and final section of the obituary:

Lieutenant Hansen-Nord was born 3/7 1916 at Nordgården [the Northern Farm] near Ringsted [provincial town in Denmark], which his father owned. Raised in the countryside in a strong Danish home, the love for the Danish soil, for country and people was early awakened, and it fell very naturally that he chose a commission in the army as his life path, he wished a profession where he could make the greatest efforts for the preservation of what he loved. […] It is sad that this young, very promising officer only reached the first milestone on the military road, but his life was not in vain. His courage, sacrifice and dutiful devotion to his country, the army that he belonged to, and his regiment will live on and be a shining example to us all. (Fog, 1944: 41–42)

Here the life history of Hansen-Nord is literally wrapped in the patriotic foil of the opening and final paragraphs. In between, he is described in terms of his ‘immense vitality’, ‘bravery’, ‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘dutiful devotion’ and characterised as ‘open’, ‘fearless’, ‘festive’, ‘joyful’, ‘exuberant’, ‘quick witted’ and in possession of ‘the courage of his convictions’. These qualities together with his ambitious nature and tough attitude towards subordinates are praised and conceptualised as a proof of his native disposition.

As a second example, the obituary in memory of Olsen includes a letter by the head of the Danish Battle Group and another by the comrades in his unit. Once again the coding of generic categories shows that Olsen is represented as a soldier (29%) and then as a unique personality (28%), friend (18%) and family member (7%).⁶ The national identity of private Olsen is subtly included, and exceptionally, when he is described in terms of his love for Bornholm, a small island where he was brought up (7%). In contrast to the obituary of Hansen-Nord, soldiering and ultimately death are conceived as a reflection of moral worth and a unique personality. This is underlined by the rhetorical juxtaposition of seemingly opposite character traits: the ‘temperamental fighter’ with the ‘conspicuous tattoos and physical strength’ was also ‘a calm and balanced person’ who was ‘by nature a little shy’, but nevertheless a role-model by virtue of his ‘loyalty’, ‘helpfulness’, ‘compassion’, ‘sense of responsibility’, ‘zeal and zest for life’. Information about his penchant for ‘honey schnapps and bad dance rhythm’ and ability ‘as no other […] [to] convey his good spirits and positive attitude to life with a single glance’ also stresses this notion of individuality (Knudsen and the Unit, 2011).

If these findings are combined with the statistical analysis, one can observe significant differences between the obituaries of the Second World War and the Afghan War. As demonstrated by Table 3, these differences highlight a statistically significant reduction in the proportion of obituaries providing information about birth date, birthplace, marital status, residential history, family occupation, native qualities and masculinity. A major part of this information serves to position the deceased within a national topography. Occasionally that topography is even attributed a metaphysical meaning – as the obituary of Hansen-Nord illustrates – since it is linked to the formation of the patriotic and manly qualities of the fallen. One of the consequences of the introduction of women into the Royal Danish Army in the 1950s, and the rapprochement between the military and civilian spheres that followed, is the decline of the ‘cult of manliness’ (Coker, 2003: 105). Although classical masculine virtues, for instance physical strength, are admired in Helmand’s fallen, they are almost never explicitly gendered. Combined with the statistically significant increase in obituary content emphasising qualities of work and physical attributes, the lack of references to the national and masculine virtues shows that the soldiers are remembered as individuals who have invested their unique personality in a professional career in the army (in line with obituaries to fallen British soldiers, i.e. Danilova, 2015; King; 2010; Zehfuss, 2009). So apart from being a way of paying tribute to the deceased and upholding a positive image of the military in the wake of fatalities, the focus on job performance bears witness to changes in the memory–military–nation nexus.

Table 3.

Information about the fallen, frequency (%).

	Second World War (N = 12)		War in Afghanistan (N = 32)
Personal data
Date of birth**	10	(83.3)	0	(0.0)
Date of death	11	(91.7)	25	(78.1)
Place of birth**	6	(50.0)	0	(0.0)
Place of death	8	(66.7)	24	(75.0)
Age of deceased*	1	(8.3)	16	(50.0)
Marital status	6	(50.0)	6	(18.8)
Residential history**	7	(58.3)	2	(3.1)
Nickname	1	(8.3)	6	(18.8)
Family relations
Names	4	(33.3)	4	(12.5)
Personality and social characteristics	1	(8.3)	0	(0.0)
Occupation**	8	(66.7)	0	(0.0)
Mentioned but without names	5	(41.7)	23	(71.9)
Work history
Education	1	(8.3)	2	(6.3)
Civil career	1	(8.3)	1	(3.1)
Military career	11	(91.7)	25	(78.1)
Attitude and behaviour towards work	10	(83.3)	31	(96.9)
Quality of work and job performance**	6	(56.6)	30	(93.8)
Personality, disposition and personal characteristics
Personality and disposition	12	(100.0)	31	(96.9)
Attitude and behaviour towards self-improvement	2	(16.7)	7	(21.1)
Attitude and behaviour towards others	11	(91.7)	28	(87.5)
Attitude and behaviour towards family	2	(16.7)	10	(31.2)
Native qualities and acts*	4	(33.3)	1	(3.1)
Humanitarian qualities and acts	0	(0.00)	7	(21.9)
Masculine qualities and acts*	4	(33.3)	1	(3.1)
Religious qualities and acts	0	(0.0)	0	(0.0)
Political preferences and activities	0	(0.0)	1	(3.1)
Physical attributes**	1	(8.3)	17	(53.1)
Hobbies	2	(16.7)	11	(34.4)

Note: *p < .05; **p < .01. Inspired by Long (1987: 970–971).

Strategies of Legitimation

In this section, I investigate the more explicit strategies deployed to invest death in action with moral meaning. These forms of legitimation are typically included in the narration of the fatal incident, or occur in the final paragraph of the text in which the soldiers assert their moral commitment to honour the memory of their dead comrade. As demonstrated by Table 4, the military-external reference point of legitimation has changed from fatherland to humanity, whereas the military-internal reference point seems to have been more permanently tied to a notion of professional sacrifice, which, however, has itself undergone an important change.

Table 4.

Legitimation of casualties, frequency (%).

	Second World War (N = 12)		War in Afghanistan (N = 32)
Military-external reference point
Patriotic sacrifice**	8	(66.7)	0	(0.0)
Humanitarian sacrifice*	0	(0.0)	12	(37.5)
Military-internal reference point
Professional sacrifice*	3	(25.0)	12	(37.5)
Buddy sacrifice	0	(0.0)	4	(12.5)
No explicit legitimation of death	2	(16.7)	8	(25.0)

Note: *p < .05; **p < .01.

Patriotic Sacrifice

King and country have constituted the main reference points in the normative discourse on self-sacrifice in war since Christianity lost its function as the prime source of moral meaning in the wake of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 (Berger, 1990: 48). Justifying death in the name of the fatherland is also the dominating form of legitimation in the Second World War obituaries. As already noted, Hansen-Nord is honoured for his ‘courage, sacrifice and dutiful devotion to his country’ (Fog, 1944: 41–42). In another obituary, it is stressed that the ‘fallen comrades gave their lives and those injured sacrificed their blood as they defended king and country, and their sacrifice was not in vain’ (Unnamed editor, 1940). In a more elaborate style, it is described how

Lennart Ahlefeldt fell with honour and with head held high. Courage, valour, a sense of duty to his country, and ruthlessness for himself were prominent traits of character in him. […] he went quietly into death and was proud of dying for his country. (Giersing and Hansen, 1945: 1–2)

As illustrated in Table 4, the legitimising discourse on national self-sacrifice is quite absent from the obituaries commemorating the servicemen who died in Afghanistan some 70 years later.

Humanitarian Sacrifice

Transitioning from the sample of the Second World War to the War in Afghanistan entails a statistically significant shift in the legitimation of casualties, since the dead soldiers of Afghanistan have been recruited into a humanitarian discourse on helping the world’s needy. Incorporating the official humanitarian goals of the Helmand campaign after 2006, the casualty is metamorphosed into a compassionate relief worker. This is evident from the following quotation:

Lieutenant Jonas Peter Pløger gave his life in the struggle for better conditions for the Afghan people who are in daily need of security and stability. He rejoiced whenever he and the unit achieved results that helped this process in the right direction. […] Now his light lives in us and in the results he contributed to achieve. His example will help us to move forward again tomorrow. (Hansen, 2010)

In this discourse, death in action is considered to be evidence of an altruistic disposition. Private Dan Gyde, for instance, ‘was very dedicated in helping others, and it was in this effort that Dan had to pay the ultimate price’ (Soelberg and the Units, 2008). The humanitarian discourse has not, however, eliminated combat as a military virtue as one might think. A bereaved platoon thus assures us that they ‘will be fighting to solve a task that Steffen wholeheartedly believed in. A task in which egoism and self-glorification play no part. A task in which the joy of being able to help others is honoured’ (Third Unit et al., 2009). An officer similarly declares that ‘we will continue fighting for a better Afghanistan. We owe Rocco this, his efforts should not be in vain’ (Lønborg, 2008).

Professional Sacrifice

The military obituary typically shows warfare as work and makes sense of death within this context. In the obituaries of the Second World War, the discourse on professional sacrifice is closely linked to values of duty, loyalty and obedience. As we have seen, Hansen-Nord proved his ‘courage, sacrifice, and dutiful devotion’ not only to his country but also to ‘the army that he belonged to, and his regiment’ (Fog, 1944). Similarly ‘Godtfredsen and Brodersen fell during the execution of a given order in defence of their country. No more than anyone else in the army did they fail in their duty that morning’ (Førslev, 1940: 183). In the context of the Afghan War, the professional self-sacrifice has not only increased significantly but also subjugated a more common ideal of job proficiency. It is, for instance, emphasised how private Simon Mundt Jørgensen ‘the same day he died still ensured that the work he had begun that morning was completed’ (Berger, 2010). In many cases it is relatedly claimed that a man was killed ‘while he did the job he loved’ (Soelberg and the Units, 2008). In this context the euphemism of ‘paying the ultimate price’ is used in a way that implies the sole act of doing the job is worth the risk to life. As for instance, ‘Jacob, Sebastian and Benjamin all knew what they were getting into. They knew that they might have to pay the ultimate price. Yet they left without blinking to solve the task they were trained to do’ (Christensen et al., 2008). At other times the discourse on professional sacrifice not merely evokes a sense of responsible risk-taking but promotes the fallen to the status of a role model:

Henrik knew the dangers. On his fifth deployment, he had decided that it was a danger he would expose himself to. He knew what he was doing. Henrik was a professional soldier – second to none. […] We have to live on, and we shall do so in his spirit. We have to live on in the most professional way, as Henrik was the most professional soldier among us. (Christensen and Andersen, 2008)

Buddy Sacrifice

Although both buddy sacrifice and professional sacrifice refer to the military unit, the buddy sacrifice is less abstract than getting killed as a token of professional devotion or dying in the name of the nation or humanity (Brænder, 2009: 64; Coker, 2003: 34). Buddy sacrifice is most clearly expressed in the obituary of private Gyde who ‘under heavy fire tried to fight his way toward his wounded colleague Jacob. This heroic act would prove to be his last’ (Soelberg and the Units, 2008). In this connection it is worth noting that the strategies of legitimation are complementary rather than mutually exclusive, since the death of private Gyde is also perceived as a humanitarian and professional sacrifice. Although empirical studies have shown that most soldiers risk their lives for platoon members and not some ideological call or national loyalty (Maleševicć, 2010: 187), this form of legitimation is, somewhat surprisingly, statistically insignificant in the analysed data. Despite the fact that dying to save a comrade constitutes a key narrative among soldiers (not to mention in war movies and literature), the analysis proposes that attempts at legitimising military casualties usually transcend the value system specific to the brotherhood in arms and in a way subordinates these in favour of more widespread principles defined by the state. This idea is further elaborated below.

Concluding Discussion

This analysis has led to the conclusion that the notion of a ‘good’ military death is no longer conceived as a patriotic sacrifice, but legitimised by appealing to the uniqueness, moral worth, humanitarian goal and high professionalism of the deceased. As a consequence, the development from the Second World War to the military expeditions of the post-Cold War environment does not point in the direction of a post-heroic zeitgeist. Instead, the analysis indicates the emergence of a post-patriotic discourse on military self-sacrifice and heroism, contrary to the basic assumption of the literature on post-heroism. The basic claim emerging from the data thus demonstrates that ideas such as the tabooing of death and the eclipse of heroes have been largely exaggerated, which corroborates others’ studies of death (Árnason and Hafsteinsson, 2003; Parsons, 1963; Seale, 1998; Walter, 2008) and military heroism (Kelly, 2012; Scheipers, 2014; Sørensen, 2016).

The military does not exist in isolation, and so the script of a ‘good’ military death is also informed by attitudes towards death in broader society. At a very general level, the memorial discourse linked to the soldiers’ obituaries points to the long-term development of a secular or this-worldly orientation in western societies, so that ‘meaning is sought in the nature of this life, and when a loved one dies, it is likely that it is their life that will be celebrated rather than the assumption of their entry into heaven’ (Howarth, 2007: 32). Although the violent death of the young soldiers differs dramatically from the ‘average’ death in Denmark and other western countries, the soldiers’ death is nonetheless ascribed meaning and legitimacy within a more common achievement-oriented ethic, since their obituaries express a ‘strong urge to “round up” a life […] with a record of creditable achievements’ (Parsons, 1963: 63). The obituaries’ claims that the soldiers were killed while they did the job they loved is consistent with the paradigmatic idea of a ‘good’ death as one of your own choosing (Árnason and Hafsteinsson, 2003; Walter, 2003). The contemporary ideal of personal autonomy in the face of death, and indeed the characteristic of death preparation as a project of self-identity (Seale, 1998), is similarly mirrored in the military’s attempt to secure a ‘well-managed death’ (Kellehear, 2007: 147), for instance by forcing its personnel to fill out My Last Will. If I fall in the service of the Danish Forces before deployment (Sørensen, 2016: 15). In alignment with the broader cultural script of a ‘good’ death, fatalities are thus framed as a marker of a fully lived life and something that the bereaved must draw strength from in order to live – and soldier – on.

Needless to say there are wide national differences in the public commemoration of dead soldiers. The emphasis upon humanitarian causes in contemporary Denmark, the UK, Germany and Japan, for instance, is less pronounced in countries such as Israel and the USA, where a more conventional discourse on national sacrifice prevails (Ben-Ari, 2005; Brænder, 2009; Drake, 2013; Sørensen, 2016). Future elaborations might also strengthen our understanding of when, where and how different value systems are evoked (if they are) in legitimising military casualties, and what their effects might be. In this regard it is significant that although the military obituary of today lacks patriotic imagery, the broader memorial practices have in fact involved explicit national symbols, for instance, in connection to the ceremony at the ramp held at the departure of the aircraft carrying the fallen back home; the solemn reception at the military airport in Denmark; the military funerals; and the annual memorial services. On these occasions official representatives of Danish Defence, government and national church are present. The coffin of the fallen is cloaked in the national flag and patriotic and Christian songs referring to the nation’s martial history are sung. Although a notion of patriotic sacrifice has occasionally been aired at these occasions, the public commemoration of dead soldiers has by and large reflected the post-patriotic discourse linked to the military obituary, whereas the invocation of national iconography has resembled what Michael Billig (1995) has called ‘banal nationalism’.

Recent studies of obituaries of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan have found that the grieving discourse on the loss of unique personalities, skilful professionals and family members constitute ‘a significant part of the production of the frames that make war possible’ (Zehfuss, 2009: 419) and ‘[foreclosed] the public discussion of ethical dilemmas of modern conflicts’ (Danilova, 2015: 277). Although it is difficult to assess the impact of the military obituaries and other forms of response to death by the military, the notion of military heroism invoked by the inscriptions on tombstones of dead servicemen (Sørensen, 2016), soldiers’ tattoos in memory of their dead comrades (Grarup, 2013), You Tube videos commemorating the fallen with appeals to national, Christian and Viking symbols (Knudsen and Stage, 2012) and memorial Facebook-groups like BIAs memorial page for Danish soldiers indicate, anecdotally at least, that the Danish army has successfully inculcated a belief in a ‘good’ military death among its personnel. Accusations about a lack of proper military equipment, experience or skill have sometimes accompanied the loss of Danish life in Helmand, but the doubling of applicants for military service from 2005 to 2010 (Rasmussen, 2010) and the fact that the political and public support for the Afghan War has been the highest in the coalition despite the highest casualty rate per capita (Jakobsen, 2013) suggest that the discourse on post-patriotic heroism has also been accepted in Danish society at large.

Finally, remembering dead servicemen as heroes has been part of the formation of national identity. Considering the military obituary as a key to post-modern memory, Anthony King (2010) argues that the personalised and domesticated image of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan points to a change in the social contract and national self-understanding. While King (2010: 22) concludes that British citizens ‘no longer live so much in a nation-state but in a national community of personalities, united through a shared domestic sphere’, the present analysis instead leads to the conclusion that the ability to invest one’s personality in professional progress and international commitment has replaced patriotic duty and loyalty as a primary civic ideal.⁷ Considering the invocation of traditional national symbols during the public commemoration of fallen Danish soldiers, it appears that the advancement of personal self-fulfilment, humanitarianism and professionalism as values worth dying for has not been detached from the memory–nation nexus. Rather, changes in the commemorative discourse have elucidated the fact that post-patriotic values have come to constitute the order of common meaning, or nomos, of the Danish society.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Gunnar Lind Haase Svendsen, Niels Reeh and the peer reviewers of Sociology for commenting on this article.

Funding

PhD grant from the University of Southern Denmark.

Notes

Kristian Frisk obtained an MA in Sociology of Religion at the University of Copenhagen in 2012 and is currently a PhD student in Cultural Sociology at the University of Southern Denmark. His current research focuses on soldiery, heroism, national identity, religion, war-culture dynamics and globalisation processes.

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