K. MacLeish 4S 2012 1 RESILIENCY AND THE PROBLEM OF SOLDIERLY PERSONHOOD Ken MacLeish Center for Medicine, Health and Society Vanderbilt University k.macleish@vanderbilt.edu 4S/EASST, Copenhagen, Denmark, 19 October 2012 This paper is a critical examination of some of the techniques deployed to institutionally manage the effects of posttraumatic stress on U.S. soldiers who have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The psychiatric label posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is by far the most familiar interpretive frame for these experiences, and it is a frame that has been critiqued extensively—as narrow, stigmatizing, and essentializing, among other things. But other, avowedly non-medical paradigms can be just as problematic and constraining in their assumptions about the relationship of human life to doing and experiencing violence. I conducted twelve months of fieldwork at the U.S. Army’s Ft. Hood in 2007 and 2008 looking at the everyday experience of war and military institutions, including the ways that basic bodily and mental experiences are inevitably freighted with moral and political stakes in these settings of intense biopolitical regulation (MacLeish 2013). I’m currently extending this examination to US military behavioral health programs and practices, and here today, the Army’s force-wide Comprehensive Soldier Fitness behavioral health program, or CSF. CSF claims to enhance human capacity and “fitness” to make soldiers more resistant to stress and thereby “better before deployment,” in the words of Army Chief of Staff General George Casey (Casey 2011). The bigger conceptual question here, I argue, concerns the contradiction between the “exceptional” character of war and the organized, routine exposure of soldiers to violence, and what kinds of people we want or imagine soldiers to be.