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.

It is writing otherwise, even not writing at all. The performer and spectator are interchanging, and so is paranoia and reparation. Neither is, without the other.

We are never self-contained. The need to belong is a profound human experience and I never imagined it would concern me personally on a fieldwork day with the cadets. Belonging is overwhelmingly political, and its manipulations can be traced to violence from home to state, from street to basement. When belonging takes precedence over humane, people do awful things just to fit in.

Walking with soldiers unsettles my thinking and my attachments. I see a ritual not just in the regime of a military body, but in the body and voice of the critic.

Walking with soldiers is an eerie relationship – it is bliss. Normal and perverse coexist in a queer orienteering experience. Walking with soldiers is a promise of a different body, the burden of the lived body, and the weight of ghosts in cemeteries. The civilian-soldier divide becomes an unsatisfying binary. A soldier’s exceptional body and my capable body are different, yet the same. I am excluded and included, I am a target and an agent. I am gazing, I am gazed. I began with a binary, and arrived elsewhere. Because difference is an experience rather than an unchangeable reality, walking with soldiers is a practice for transmuting difference.

Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world. We are true through and through, and have with us, by the mere fact of belonging to the world, and not merely being in the world in the way that things are, all that we need to transcend ourselves. (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 530).

I loved the experience, the order, and the care. So, I had a personally reparative experience but would my flirting with the military be of any interest to anyone else?

Because I attach personal pleasure to the study of military training and I am honest about it, I emerge as a disturbing and disobedient plurality. In my experience, such disturbance speaks to people, because it excites the question, who am I?

The military is always interesting because it is dangerous and sexy, so anyone I ask will talk with me about soldiers. But how could I speak to the military? By studying the autoethnographic moment. A paranoid walk would likely be treated with suspicion by those who believe in the military, but an intentional walk on ambivalent ground is more likely to be heard by anyone.

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