Still Different... Still Men... and Still Broken

Still, the brokenness of an injured enlisted infantryman is different than other forms of brokenness in this organization. It is different in that it refers to a unique process of social blame and the conferring of social value and identity.

The cultural contexts through which particular stigmas become activated are linked to the foundations of the cultural meanings of both the body and identity. In the Corps, the expectation of performance and the perfectibility of both the identity and the body are historically positioned as sites that define organizational belonging, a healthy and organi­zationally defined masculine self that relies on organizational ideals of “normalized iden­tities and bodies” that perform under extreme pressure. This does not mean that the inter­nalization of the stigma was not resisted. Indeed, these injured Marines told me that they often tried to resist when other Marines, namely their peers, labeled them and treated them as if they were less, that is, broken.

Pain, a multidimensional and multifactorial experience, is also a discursive practice that produces specific types of subjectivity in the USMC. I kept asking questions about what belonging meant to these young injured men. Did it mean that they received no re­spect? If this was the case, what did a lack of respect imply to them? Many of the young men I interviewed revealed that they no longer felt like they really belonged in the USMC. Despite having completed and graduated from boot camp, or having spent sig­nificant time (often two or three years or more in the fleet), many told me that they often felt that they were not full Marines: that is, that they were not treated with the full respect accorded to members who did not have persistent injuries.

Being an enlisted infantryman in the USMC is not merely a single-minded pursuit of systemic and ritualized violence instigated (at least in part) by the nation, or passively endured by the recruit. Beyond this, the cultural discourses about bearing forms of acute pain and stress nurtures a subjectivity whereby the Marines come to understand them­selves, as selves and as Marines.