The Willing: Danish Soldiers on Endurance, Edgework, and Engagement in the Post-9/11 Era

This article addresses the question of culture and subjective life by virtue of exploring soldierly self-fashioning in the context of military subjectification. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Danish combat troops, this study anthropologically investigates contemporary soldiering as a struggle with 'wills'. I examine individual soldiers' mobilisation of 'will' to follow their desires for becoming 'hard men' and 'true warriors' in the contexts of the Danish armed forces and the US-led war in Afghanistan. I theorise volition in terms of bodily stretching, character fashioning, and emotional re-orientation and argue that overcoming is becoming. I show that soldierly becomings are fashioned through enactments of 'will to pain' across three hyper-masculinised modalities of soldiering: endurance ('will to persevere' through pain and suffering), edgework ('will to risk' a life or death in pain and suffering), and engagement ('will to kill' by inflicting pain and suffering and live with the moral consequences).