Critical veteran researchers’ unique adequacy: accounting for friendly-fire and fratricide

ABSTRACT Drawing on ethnomethodology’s concept of unique adequacy, this paper addresses the contribution that critical veteran researchers (CVRs) can potentially bring to Critical Military Studies (CMS) on the basis of their military service, post-military life, and the members’ knowledge they therefore have. CVR members’ knowledges are framed through ethnomethodology’s arguments about unique adequacy as a requirement of methods. CVR’s unique adequacy is used to explore issues around the contribution that this particular group of researchers can make in critical analysis and research practices associated with critical military studies as an intellectual project. The paper argues against the reification and promotion of veteran exceptionalism regarding descriptions of ‘the reality of war’, militarism or militarization. Rather, it is about seeing CVR’s military participation and post-military lives, their members’ knowledge and unique adequacy, as constituting a positive resource. The paper illustrates this argument by taking the phenomenon of friendly-fire and fratricide as a topic. It identifies problems in the normative literature about it using the examples from two different genres: the formal analysis of combat identification, and experiential accounts from personal memoirs. The paper then critiques a specific campaign account of fratricide from a CVR perspective utilizing the author’s own unique adequacy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limits of uniquely adequate knowledge generated from embodied veteran researcher experience, its benefits in terms of the identification of new research topics and approaches, and the ultimate necessity for critical analysis research to be underpinned and informed by reference to unique adequacy.