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.

Act three

Being a body, leaving a body

We are waiting because there is a queue to perform the control point’s task. I need to pee. There is no toilet, which means I need to pee in nature. I get up and try to find a place where I can squat without anyone seeing me. But cadets seem to be everywhere, and because it is so dark, I do not want to wander too far. I finally find a place where I hope not to run into anyone, but it is also a spot from where I can see another group of cadets marching towards the control point.

The following is hard to explain, but I will try. Squatting, I feel an odd sense of relief and power. I am exactly where I am supposed to be, and where I want to be. At that moment, I belong to the world as a body. I belong to no place and every place. I do not remember if I laughed out loud, or in my head, but I laughed out of childish joy. I am under no threat. I do not feel like a sexed/gendered body. Maybe I felt this way, because “I wanted there to be places to go where I could just leave my body behind” (Ahmed 2017, 29).

As if I am simultaneously a body, and I am leaving a body behind. I am in a place I have not been before. There is nothing familiar to rely on. For once, in a public space, I do not have to be careful and cautious.

I do not feel protected, and yet I feel safe. My body has a new presence. I am de-gendered, and in my eyes, soldiers are de-gendered too.

I feel outside of all places, and inside all possibilities.

As we approach the base, I am told I will not get in from the gates without a commander’s escort, so I am prepared to be stopped at the checkpoint. Yet, I walk so confident as part of the group that I get in, even though I am not supposed to. I stand out with my civilian clothes, but even still, I am not stopped and checked. Then someone says, or maybe it was later at the base, that I fit in so well the guard did not realise I was not a cadet.

When the march is over, and the blisters are examined at the sports field outside, joking increases. Someone realises I am still there. The fact that they forgot that they need to be careful with what they say in my presence makes us all laugh. A cadet proposes a group hug. Someone says, “We are soldiers, and we do not show emotion. You should write that down.”

“Soldiers”, his word, not mine.

Tip

Tip

Act three

Being a body, leaving a body