Walking with Soldiers: How I learned to stop worrying and love cadets

Susanna Hast

“Walking with Soldiers” examines an auto-ethnographic moment of marching across the city of Helsinki with first-year cadets of the Finnish National Defence University. In a reparative reading, the walk dismantles boundaries of bodies, critiques, and affects. Through a walking methodology and autoethnography, the present exposition demonstrates how the author began orienteering within military structures through an affective investment. The exposition is a researcher’s journey across subjectivities and difference in a female civilian body. Epistemologically, it brings theory closer to the skin; and empirically, it offers insight into the affective world of belonging. “Walking with Soldiers” is multimodal and polyphonic: it consists of a text for reading, three audio tracks for listening and co-walking, as well as illustrations created by Julia Järvelä based on photographs taken by the author. The provided materials can be selectively attended to. The artistic technique used in the exposition is seduction: the reader/listener is invited into an experience. The exposition is a conversation between critical military studies and artistic research: it gives artistic attention to a military march and places importance on the acoustic and vibrating qualities of academic research. The writing itself subverts the practice of authoritative scholarly writing by presenting descriptive work as theoretical work, and by using citations as companions from the outside.

— a walking methodology

Walking is one of the many bodily methodologies which examine intensities and materialities – sensual, affective, rhythmic and temporal experience (Springgay and Truman 2017). Walking as a method affects the relationship between interviewer and interviewee, and thus results in data different from an immobile context (Anderson 2004, Evans and Jones 2011).

In walking methodologies, it is thought that the place and the geographical context inform the interviews. But I think movement affected my interviews more than place. The walking interviews also disrupted self-body situational awareness. They drew attention to language and rationality, away from sensory experience. But then again, of course knowledge is spatialised, and beings in space make place and movement, and place and movement make them. Place and movement made the interaction the way it was. So, when we sat down for interviews at the Defence University, later on, the stillness, the closed space, the bad air, the institutional setting and symbols all around made the interview less rhythmical and much more tense. I wish I had done all the interviews while walking.

The military walking method and my walking method are two different things. Cadets were training, I was researching. It was not aimless walking, but labour walking, and it was not exactly meant to be enjoyable. Walking is not necessarily pleasurable, especially after 20 kilometres and a heavy load on the back. Walking can be exhausting and boring. One cadet told me that he felt the interview made him forget how much pain he was in. Time moved faster. Walking was painful, talking was a pleasure.

We can think of marching as one of those military practices that increase the soldiers' resilience and endurance as well as promote social cohesion through movement. Benjamin Schrader (2017), an academic and a veteran, explains that life in the military is filled with disciplinary training of the body. The purpose of this disciplining is “to maintain the ability to do the job required of a soldier, which is often to kill but only to kill those whom they are told to kill and when they are told to kill” (19).

Walking is a mundane practice which turns into marching only when other ideas and practices are attached to it. Walking is not marching until it is seen and felt as militaristic. Timed marching is so common in military movement language that it is difficult not to associate the two.

Military cohesion is about movement training, but it is even more about emotional training. Jesse Crane-Seeber (2016) makes an interesting connection between military service and kink, what he calls kink-informed queer theory of militarization. He (2016, 9) argues that the fetishism of militarism comes from the association of pleasure, admiration and desire with the will to endure suffering. Pleasure is derived from self-mastery, but one under submission. Then bodily movement, suffering and pleasure are all intrinsically entangled.

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