Abstract
The subject-matter of Weary Warriors is complex. It explores how the psychological wounds incurred through participation in armed conflict are understood, constructed and contested by those affected and by those charged with their care. This is no easy topic to explore. One reason is the sheer volume of potentially available empirical material on which to draw to explore the experiences of (primarily) military personnel in terms of their post-conflict mental health and their treatment. The authors have cast their net wide, to include experiences and evidence from across the key conflicts of the 20th century, with glances back to the 19th century and into the 21st century. As they establish early in this book, war is injurious to psychological well-being. This is a historical constant, but this book does not provide a straightforward chronological account of that constant across different times and ages. What Moss and Prince set out and succeed to do is to use that constant to address two rather more complex questions. The first of these concerns the ways in which medical diagnoses (primarily from members of the medical profession working within military organisations and institutions) can be seen to be inextricably linked to dominant constructs within those institutions, about what the warrior is, how he or she should be and what military forces and wider institutions need him or her to be. Military psychiatry, in other words, is shown to be political. The key contribution this book makes to current understanding of war and its effects is its demonstration of just how hard military institutions have to work to account for and control wider perceptions of the hidden wounds that armed conflicts inflict. The second set of complexities navigated by this book is more abstract, a sub-plot to the story of evolution of military psychiatry as a means of control, and concerns how we might conceptualise in Foucauldian terms the operation of power and authority wielded by those institutions. Because of this, Weary Warriors (the tragedies of its subject-matter aside) is a deeply satisfying book to read. The literature on war and its aftermath is crowded with volumes accounting for the experiences of the specific harms inflicted on individuals and the specificities of the damages of particular conflicts. Weary Warriors provides an excellent example of an account of war which manages to weave the specificities of time and place of singular conflicts within a broader narrative accounting for the power and politics of a much wider and enduring set of practices around the treatment of those who carry with them the invisible marks of experience of conflict. This history of the militarised constitution of the idea of mental damage is pluralist in its sources, and the authors are unafraid of using a diversity of sources to make their case. Above all, we see the care with which the authors negotiate the possibilities which follow the naming and labelling of the group which constitute the core of this book – the weary warriors themselves.