Flecchia, Samantha

English

UNH Scholars' Repository

SpectrumSpring 2015 Article 103-1-2015Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013."Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty ina Military Community." Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity PressSamantha FlecchiaUniversity of New Hampshire, DurhamFollow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrumThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Journals and Publications at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository.It has been accepted for inclusion in Spectrum by an authorized editor of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information,please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.Recommended CitationFlecchia, Samantha (2015) "Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. "Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a MilitaryCommunity." Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press," Spectrum: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 10.Available at: https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol4/iss1/10  106MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.  Samantha Flecchia  Making War At Fort Hood by Ken MacLeish is an ethnography that chronicles the lives on soldiers on the Fort Hood military base in Killeen, Texas. Fort Hood is a large military base with upwards of 220,000 soldiers located in a rural and isolated area about halfway between Austin and Waco in East-Central Texas. The ethnography focuses on both individuals who have not made it off base and those who have served in Iraq, some for multiple tours of duty. Although these men and women come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and choose to enlist for different reasons, they eventually all end up in the same boat due to their involvement within the army. Even those who just participated in combat training without actually being deployed seemed to be physically, mentally, and emotionally affected by their time spent with the armed forces. Their involvement with the army has left them with battered bodies, chronic pain, and other problems far beyond the physical body. Additionally, the soldiers profiled in Making War at Fort Hood all experienced the same tensions that come with army life, including fear of future deployments and strains on relationships with spouses and children. Many soldiers also expressed feelings of being “trapped” by the armed forces, or that the army dragged them into a cycle of pain and poverty that is hard to escape.   There are three primary arguments that MacLeish makes in Making War at Fort Hood. The first of these is that the army is an institution that does not care about its soldiers; it only cares about making war. The army destroys soldiers physically, emotionally, and socioeconomically, thrusting them into a cycle of exhaustion and 1Flecchia: Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. "Making War at Fort Hood:Published by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2015  107hardships, yet does little to alleviate these problems. The second argument MacLeish makes is that there is so much more to life in the army that meets the eye. Enlisting in the army affects not only the soldier, but also his entire family, and changes the lives of everyone involved. Soldiers often feel disconnected from their significant others, often because they do not want to burden them with the hardships they have faced. Deployment thus not only puts strains on marriages, but also affects relationships parents have with their children, and sometimes even leaves children without parents. This leads into his third and final argument, which is that once you join the army you are forever changed. Many people believe that the only problems soldiers face when they return home are post-traumatic stress disorder and other traumatic brain injuries. This is most certainly a huge issue for servicemen and women – one soldier recalls flying to the ground when she heard a car backfire – but problems returning soldiers face also involve physical injury, difficulty assimilating back into society, and more.   Making War at Fort Hood encompasses many different themes that medical anthropologists have recently been studying. Specifically, MacLeish’s work is very similar to that of Seth Holmes’ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, in that Holmes and MacLeish both explore the ideas of violence and hierarchies. In his work, Holmes outlines a social structure on the Tanaka Farm in Washington State where the migrant workers are paid incredibly low wages to pick berries, the hardest form of physical labor on the farm (Holmes 2013). Migrant workers are also ridiculed by their supervisors while they work and called derogatory names. In Making War at Fort Hood, MacLeish describes a hierarchical structure of the army that has many parallels to the one described in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. The privates, or lowest-ranking soldiers, are also treated brutally by 2Spectrum, Vol. 4 [2015], Iss. 1, Art. 10https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol4/iss1/10  108their commanding officers. This treatment carries over into other aspects of their existence, especially when they return home and have to adjust to a civilian life. The soldiers take the military mindset everywhere they go and with everything they do, treating life like the army. The higher up the ladder you go in the army, through corporals and sergeants, the more respected officers are and the easier their job gets. There is not as much physical or emotional wear-and-tear involved, and often these men and women are not the ones fighting on the front lines. This is extremely similar to the higher-ranking persons on the Tanaka Farm in that most of them have desk jobs that require little to no physical activity and make considerably more money than the pickers.  Additionally, in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Holmes describes the different types of violence that the migrant Mexican workers experience while picking berries on the farm. These workers undergo structural violence, or violence associated with a person’s race, gender, religion, or other defining factor, as well as symbolic violence, or violence associated with stereotyping based on that structural violence (Holmes 2013, 89). The workers are automatically prejudiced due to their race and migrant status, and are often seen as incompetent and lazy. These types of violence resemble the same types of forces that soldiers face in their daily lives. Similar to the workers on the Tanaka Farm, soldiers are also frequently seen as unintelligent, and injured soldiers are deemed lazy by their other comrades, supervisors, and doctors that treat them. For instance, Peters, a soldier with shoulder and back injuries, is subject to “skepticism and suspicion” from doctors about whether his injuries are legitimate, and he has been refused treatment for his ailments on multiple occasions and by multiple practitioners (MacLeish 2013, 110).   3Flecchia: Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. "Making War at Fort Hood:Published by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2015  109Along those same lines, MacLeish touches on another theme in medical anthropology when he discusses all of the ways that soldiers’ bodies are treated as tools or machines. Soldiers’ bodies are similar to athletes’ bodies inasmuch as they are supposed to be strong and able to perform at their highest levels. Additionally, soldiers and athletes are treated similarly as far as injuries are concerned. In both lines of work, injuries make the person seem weak, incapable of doing their job, and lazy (MacLeish 2013; Overman 2010). Like an athlete who receives a concussion or other “invisible” injury and is pressured to get back into the game, a soldier who does not have a life-threatening injury is expected to take a minimal amount of time off before getting back in the line of duty. Finally, injured soldiers are often believed to be faking their injuries when indeed they truly are hurt. Stevens, a soldier whom MacLeish profiles deeply and who has chronic knee pain due to his participation in combat training, sums up the Army’s view on injury when he states, “They told is in basic, ‘Anything that’s not life, limb, or eyesight, suck it up. If you tell us you’re hurt, we’re going to assume you’re faking” (MacLeish 2013, 112). This is yet another parallel between soldiers and athletes, in that it is believed that athletes often milk their injuries for attention (Overman 2009, 129).  MacLeish compiles a strong account of army life that is informative, incredibly detailed, and well written. One of the biggest strengths of Making War at Fort Hood is that it covers virtually all of the bases of army life. Nothing is left out in the effects that war has on all aspects on soldiers’ lives, and the reader can clearly see how war affects both the soldier and those around them. Oftentimes people do not realize how hard it is having a family member in the military, and a large part of MacLeish’s argument is that 4Spectrum, Vol. 4 [2015], Iss. 1, Art. 10https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol4/iss1/10  110war can have just a strong of an affect on a soldier’s family as on the soldier himself. Additionally, another strength of MacLeish’s work is that he isn’t afraid to get gory to make a point. There are many graphic accounts of soldiers watching their friends get blown up right in front of their eyes and watching their bodies get turned into “spaghetti” (MacLeish 2013, 86). Another soldier recalls how he just wanted something to bring home to his comrade’s family in a casket, yet his body was just completely torn to shreds so that it was not even possible (MacLeish 2013, 88). These brutal accounts of the horrors of war emphasize the trauma deployed soldiers face on an everyday basis, and give the audience a clear insight into what it is like to be a soldier for a living. Finally, one of the strongest points of MacLeish’s argument is the clever analysis of how the equipment used to protect soldiers also often does harm to their bodies. Even soldiers who had never been deployed were injured in basic training due to the pure weight of all the typical army supplies each soldier has to lug around and wear each day, from the bulletproof vests to weapons and other gear.   There are very few weaknesses in MacLeish’s work, although there are certainly a few things that hinder his arguments. One aspect that is missing is that there is very little mention of any soldier that has not had a negative experience in war. Soldiers he befriends are able to talk and laugh with him, yet they all get serious when they talk about the hardships the army has caused them. The other major weakness of his work is that it tends to feel repetitive, and MacLeish often makes the same points more than once. Maybe using fewer examples with more details instead of tons of examples with less detail could have more effectively gotten his arguments across. Additionally, one of the major aspects that his work is lacking is the first-hand experience needed to drive home 5Flecchia: Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. "Making War at Fort Hood:Published by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2015  111his main points even further. One of these perspectives is the ethnographic experience of actually going into combat. Traveling to Iraq and going on tour may have been logistically impossible, however author participation in combat drills or other forms of army training could have provided a much-needed first-person perspective on the physical, mental and emotional effects of war. What MacLeish needed to employ was the same type of “deep hanging out,” (Geertz 1998) or embodied anthropology, that Holmes used in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, where he actually lived and worked on the Tanaka farm with the migrant workers instead of just studying them. In addition, another added detail he could have employed is actually living in Fort Hood instead of just working there. By living on the military base, MacLeish could have gained further insight into the daily life of someone who spends all of their time at Fort Hood and developed closer bonds with the people he studied.    There are multiple groups of readers who may find Making War at Fort Hood to be both an interesting and useful read. Young Americans who are thinking about enlisting in our nation’s armed forces should certainly give this ethnography a read, as it brings up many important points people often fail to recognize about army life. Reading this book would allow them to decide if the benefits of enlisting outweigh the end results, and if they still wish to fight for their country knowing that they won’t return as the same person afterward. Additionally, any American who has lived through the “War on Terror” in Iraq would learn much more about war from reading this book than watching the news. Americans usually only hear about wars when soldiers die, and do not realize that the ones who make it home are so badly damaged. Reading this book could also convince more Americans to support our nation’s troops, a movement that has died off 6Spectrum, Vol. 4 [2015], Iss. 1, Art. 10https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol4/iss1/10  112considerably since 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War. Finally, other anthropologists may find this book informative, especially those studying war, military life, and/or traumatic brain injuries. They could also learn from the way MacLeish formed relationships with the soldiers on base and the extensive ethnographic methods he used in his research.   References Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Hanging Out.” The New York Review of Books, October 22.,  2005. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/oct/22/deep-hanging-out/. Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. MacLeish, Kenneth T. Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military  Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Overman, Steven J. Living Out of Bounds: The Male Athlete’s Everyday Life. Lincoln:  Bison Books, 2010.        7Flecchia: Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. "Making War at Fort Hood:Published by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2015

Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013.  Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

University of New Hampshire

Spectrum
Spring 2015 Article 10
3-1-2015
Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013.
"Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in
a Military Community." Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press
Samantha Flecchia
University of New Hampshire, Durham
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Journals and Publications at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository.
It has been accepted for inclusion in Spectrum by an authorized editor of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information,
please contact nicole.hentz@unh.edu.
Recommended Citation
Flecchia, Samantha (2015) "Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. "Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military
Community." Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press," Spectrum: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 10.
Available at: https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol4/iss1/10
 
 
106
MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a 
Military Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 
 
Samantha Flecchia 
 
Making War At Fort Hood by Ken MacLeish is an ethnography that chronicles 
the lives on soldiers on the Fort Hood military base in Killeen, Texas. Fort Hood is a 
large military base with upwards of 220,000 soldiers located in a rural and isolated area 
about halfway between Austin and Waco in East-Central Texas. The ethnography focuses 
on both individuals who have not made it off base and those who have served in Iraq, 
some for multiple tours of duty. Although these men and women come from different 
socioeconomic backgrounds and choose to enlist for different reasons, they eventually all 
end up in the same boat due to their involvement within the army. Even those who just 
participated in combat training without actually being deployed seemed to be physically, 
mentally, and emotionally affected by their time spent with the armed forces. Their 
involvement with the army has left them with battered bodies, chronic pain, and other 
problems far beyond the physical body. Additionally, the soldiers profiled in Making War 
at Fort Hood all experienced the same tensions that come with army life, including fear 
of future deployments and strains on relationships with spouses and children. Many 
soldiers also expressed feelings of being “trapped” by the armed forces, or that the army 
dragged them into a cycle of pain and poverty that is hard to escape.  
 There are three primary arguments that MacLeish makes in Making War at Fort 
Hood. The first of these is that the army is an institution that does not care about its 
soldiers; it only cares about making war. The army destroys soldiers physically, 
emotionally, and socioeconomically, thrusting them into a cycle of exhaustion and 
1
Flecchia: Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. "Making War at Fort Hood:
Published by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2015
 
 
107
hardships, yet does little to alleviate these problems. The second argument MacLeish 
makes is that there is so much more to life in the army that meets the eye. Enlisting in the 
army affects not only the soldier, but also his entire family, and changes the lives of 
everyone involved. Soldiers often feel disconnected from their significant others, often 
because they do not want to burden them with the hardships they have faced. Deployment 
thus not only puts strains on marriages, but also affects relationships parents have with 
their children, and sometimes even leaves children without parents. This leads into his 
third and final argument, which is that once you join the army you are forever changed. 
Many people believe that the only problems soldiers face when they return home are 
post-traumatic stress disorder and other traumatic brain injuries. This is most certainly a 
huge issue for servicemen and women – one soldier recalls flying to the ground when she 
heard a car backfire – but problems returning soldiers face also involve physical injury, 
difficulty assimilating back into society, and more.   
Making War at Fort Hood encompasses many different themes that medical 
anthropologists have recently been studying. Specifically, MacLeish’s work is very 
similar to that of Seth Holmes’ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, in that Holmes and MacLeish 
both explore the ideas of violence and hierarchies. In his work, Holmes outlines a social 
structure on the Tanaka Farm in Washington State where the migrant workers are paid 
incredibly low wages to pick berries, the hardest form of physical labor on the farm 
(Holmes 2013). Migrant workers are also ridiculed by their supervisors while they work 
and called derogatory names. In Making War at Fort Hood, MacLeish describes a 
hierarchical structure of the army that has many parallels to the one described in Fresh 
Fruit, Broken Bodies. The privates, or lowest-ranking soldiers, are also treated brutally by 
2
Spectrum, Vol. 4 [2015], Iss. 1, Art. 10
https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol4/iss1/10
 
 
108
their commanding officers. This treatment carries over into other aspects of their 
existence, especially when they return home and have to adjust to a civilian life. The 
soldiers take the military mindset everywhere they go and with everything they do, 
treating life like the army. The higher up the ladder you go in the army, through corporals 
and sergeants, the more respected officers are and the easier their job gets. There is not as 
much physical or emotional wear-and-tear involved, and often these men and women are 
not the ones fighting on the front lines. This is extremely similar to the higher-ranking 
persons on the Tanaka Farm in that most of them have desk jobs that require little to no 
physical activity and make considerably more money than the pickers.  
Additionally, in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Holmes describes the different types 
of violence that the migrant Mexican workers experience while picking berries on the 
farm. These workers undergo structural violence, or violence associated with a person’s 
race, gender, religion, or other defining factor, as well as symbolic violence, or violence 
associated with stereotyping based on that structural violence (Holmes 2013, 89). The 
workers are automatically prejudiced due to their race and migrant status, and are often 
seen as incompetent and lazy. These types of violence resemble the same types of forces 
that soldiers face in their daily lives. Similar to the workers on the Tanaka Farm, soldiers 
are also frequently seen as unintelligent, and injured soldiers are deemed lazy by their 
other comrades, supervisors, and doctors that treat them. For instance, Peters, a soldier 
with shoulder and back injuries, is subject to “skepticism and suspicion” from doctors 
about whether his injuries are legitimate, and he has been refused treatment for his 
ailments on multiple occasions and by multiple practitioners (MacLeish 2013, 110).  
 
3
Flecchia: Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. "Making War at Fort Hood:
Published by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2015
 
 
109
Along those same lines, MacLeish touches on another theme in medical 
anthropology when he discusses all of the ways that soldiers’ bodies are treated as tools 
or machines. Soldiers’ bodies are similar to athletes’ bodies inasmuch as they are 
supposed to be strong and able to perform at their highest levels. Additionally, soldiers 
and athletes are treated similarly as far as injuries are concerned. In both lines of work, 
injuries make the person seem weak, incapable of doing their job, and lazy (MacLeish 
2013; Overman 2010). Like an athlete who receives a concussion or other “invisible” 
injury and is pressured to get back into the game, a soldier who does not have a life-
threatening injury is expected to take a minimal amount of time off before getting back in 
the line of duty. Finally, injured soldiers are often believed to be faking their injuries 
when indeed they truly are hurt. Stevens, a soldier whom MacLeish profiles deeply and 
who has chronic knee pain due to his participation in combat training, sums up the 
Army’s view on injury when he states, “They told is in basic, ‘Anything that’s not life, 
limb, or eyesight, suck it up. If you tell us you’re hurt, we’re going to assume you’re 
faking” (MacLeish 2013, 112). This is yet another parallel between soldiers and athletes, 
in that it is believed that athletes often milk their injuries for attention (Overman 2009, 
129).  
MacLeish compiles a strong account of army life that is informative, incredibly 
detailed, and well written. One of the biggest strengths of Making War at Fort Hood is 
that it covers virtually all of the bases of army life. Nothing is left out in the effects that 
war has on all aspects on soldiers’ lives, and the reader can clearly see how war affects 
both the soldier and those around them. Oftentimes people do not realize how hard it is 
having a family member in the military, and a large part of MacLeish’s argument is that 
4
Spectrum, Vol. 4 [2015], Iss. 1, Art. 10
https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol4/iss1/10
 
 
110
war can have just a strong of an affect on a soldier’s family as on the soldier himself. 
Additionally, another strength of MacLeish’s work is that he isn’t afraid to get gory to 
make a point. There are many graphic accounts of soldiers watching their friends get 
blown up right in front of their eyes and watching their bodies get turned into “spaghetti” 
(MacLeish 2013, 86). Another soldier recalls how he just wanted something to bring 
home to his comrade’s family in a casket, yet his body was just completely torn to shreds 
so that it was not even possible (MacLeish 2013, 88). These brutal accounts of the 
horrors of war emphasize the trauma deployed soldiers face on an everyday basis, and 
give the audience a clear insight into what it is like to be a soldier for a living. Finally, 
one of the strongest points of MacLeish’s argument is the clever analysis of how the 
equipment used to protect soldiers also often does harm to their bodies. Even soldiers 
who had never been deployed were injured in basic training due to the pure weight of all 
the typical army supplies each soldier has to lug around and wear each day, from the 
bulletproof vests to weapons and other gear.   
There are very few weaknesses in MacLeish’s work, although there are certainly a 
few things that hinder his arguments. One aspect that is missing is that there is very little 
mention of any soldier that has not had a negative experience in war. Soldiers he 
befriends are able to talk and laugh with him, yet they all get serious when they talk about 
the hardships the army has caused them. The other major weakness of his work is that it 
tends to feel repetitive, and MacLeish often makes the same points more than once. 
Maybe using fewer examples with more details instead of tons of examples with less 
detail could have more effectively gotten his arguments across. Additionally, one of the 
major aspects that his work is lacking is the first-hand experience needed to drive home 
5
Flecchia: Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. "Making War at Fort Hood:
Published by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2015
 
 
111
his main points even further. One of these perspectives is the ethnographic experience of 
actually going into combat. Traveling to Iraq and going on tour may have been 
logistically impossible, however author participation in combat drills or other forms of 
army training could have provided a much-needed first-person perspective on the 
physical, mental and emotional effects of war. What MacLeish needed to employ was the 
same type of “deep hanging out,” (Geertz 1998) or embodied anthropology, that Holmes 
used in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, where he actually lived and worked on the Tanaka 
farm with the migrant workers instead of just studying them. In addition, another added 
detail he could have employed is actually living in Fort Hood instead of just working 
there. By living on the military base, MacLeish could have gained further insight into the 
daily life of someone who spends all of their time at Fort Hood and developed closer 
bonds with the people he studied.   
 There are multiple groups of readers who may find Making War at Fort Hood to 
be both an interesting and useful read. Young Americans who are thinking about enlisting 
in our nation’s armed forces should certainly give this ethnography a read, as it brings up 
many important points people often fail to recognize about army life. Reading this book 
would allow them to decide if the benefits of enlisting outweigh the end results, and if 
they still wish to fight for their country knowing that they won’t return as the same 
person afterward. Additionally, any American who has lived through the “War on Terror” 
in Iraq would learn much more about war from reading this book than watching the news. 
Americans usually only hear about wars when soldiers die, and do not realize that the 
ones who make it home are so badly damaged. Reading this book could also convince 
more Americans to support our nation’s troops, a movement that has died off 
6
Spectrum, Vol. 4 [2015], Iss. 1, Art. 10
https://scholars.unh.edu/spectrum/vol4/iss1/10
 
 
112
considerably since 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War. Finally, other anthropologists may 
find this book informative, especially those studying war, military life, and/or traumatic 
brain injuries. They could also learn from the way MacLeish formed relationships with 
the soldiers on base and the extensive ethnographic methods he used in his research.  
 
References 
Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Hanging Out.” The New York Review of Books, October 22.,  
2005. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/oct/22/deep-hanging-out/. 
Holmes, Seth M. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States.  
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 
MacLeish, Kenneth T. Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military  
Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. 
Overman, Steven J. Living Out of Bounds: The Male Athlete’s Everyday Life. Lincoln:  
Bison Books, 2010. 
 
  
 
 
 
 
7
Flecchia: Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. "Making War at Fort Hood:
Published by University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2015


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Book Review: MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

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