William Paul Downey

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: This project investigates how the intimate emotional bonds created during military service inform the largely undetermined and still unfolding meanings associated with traumatic memory, nationalism, and the contemporary socio-political climate in the United States. Specifically, my fieldwork focuses on about 100 infantry veterans of the USMC, that I also deployed with to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. Between January 2023 and June of 2024, I travelled the continental US to wherever my interlocutors lived, to do 10 extensive life history interviews, over 20 memory interviews that focused explicitly on the fragmented memories of one deployment, 20 transition interviews that focused on the experience of leaving the military and re-entering US society as a civilian, and participant observation at reunions, funerals, weddings, and more. This was done to analyze the relations between unprocessed experiences in combat and the role that the emotional dynamics between brothers of military-era relationships play in the shifting meanings and memories of military service and contemporary nationalism.