Dogs of War: The Biopolitics of Loving and Leaving the U.S. Canine Forces in Vietnam (original) (raw)

That dog was Marine! Human-Dog Assemblages in the Pacific War

A photograph taken on the island of Iwo Jima in 1945 shows an American marine apparently asleep in a hastily dug foxhole. His body swathed in a camouflage poncho, the man's helmeted head presses against the island's black volcanic sand and his rifle lies on the crest of his hole. This form of image, a marine at rest, is a familiar one in the archive of America's Pacific War, but what distinguishes this particular picture is that, even in the midst of sleep, the serviceman's left hand is clutching a leash, at the end of which is a dog, a Doberman. In counterpoint to the 'master' , the dog sits at alert, ears pricked attentively, noble gaze directed across the body of the human and outwards towards unseen dangers. This paper will focus on the Marine dog battalions deployed against Japan in the Pacific: the product of a striking confluence of race and animal-based orders of knowledge and orientation. The Japanese, it was hoped (so 'animal-like' in their being according to the prevailing American understanding), would meet an equally sentient and yet superior opponent in the form of the Marine Doberman. Yet simultaneously, the process of combat encouraged the increasing anthropomorphising of the dogs, to the extent that they were assigned ranks within the Marine Corps, promoted and so on. A funeral memorial built on the island of Guam in tribute to a number of individual Marine dogs features in the paper as a key symbol of these processes. Such contradictions, especially as they converge around issues of culture, class, gender and identity, are at the heart of the human-animal nexus and form the concerns of this paper This journal article is available in Animal Studies JournalAbstract: A photograph taken on the island of Iwo Jima in 1945 shows an American marine apparently asleep in a hastily dug foxhole. His body swathed in a camouflage poncho, the man's helmeted head presses against the island's black volcanic sand and his rifle lies on the crest of his hole. This form of image, a marine at rest, is a familiar one in the archive of America's Pacific War, but what distinguishes this particular picture is that, even in the midst of sleep, the serviceman's left hand is clutching a leash, at the end of which is a dog, a Doberman. In counterpoint to the 'master', the dog sits at alert, ears pricked attentively, noble gaze directed across the body of the human and outwards towards unseen dangers. This paper will focus on the Marine dog battalions deployed against Japan in the Pacific: the product of a striking confluence of race and animal-based orders of knowledge and orientation. The Japanese, it was hoped (so 'animal-like' in their being according to the prevailing American understanding), would meet an equally sentient and yet superior opponent in the form of the Marine Doberman. Yet simultaneously, the process of combat encouraged the increasing anthropomorphising of the dogs, to the extent that they were assigned ranks within the Marine Corps, promoted and so on. A funeral memorial built on the island of Guam in tribute to a number of individual Marine dogs features in the paper as a key symbol of these processes. Such contradictions, especially as they converge around issues of culture, class, gender and identity, are at the heart of the human-animal nexus and form the concerns of this paper.

Military Working Dogs in the United States Armed Forces from World War I to Vietnam

I want to thank my family, especially my parents, for their continued support of my educational endeavors. I would like to thank Dr. Raymond Krohn for agreeing to be part of my advisory committee. He helped me tremendously through my writing process. A big thank you to Dr. Emily Wakild, without taking your class I would not have found such an interesting topic that suited me. To my committee chair, Dr. David Walker, thank you for the time you dedicated to helping me throughout this process. vi

Interspecies Affection and Military Aims: Was There a Totalitarian Dog?

Environmental Humanities, 2018

The image of totalitarianism is central to liberal ideology as the nefarious antithesis of free market exchange: the inevitable outcome of planned economies, which control their subjects' lives down to the most intimate detail. Against this image of complete state control, the multispecies ethnography of early Soviet institutions gives us a fortuitous edge to ask how centrally planned economies structure the lives of those actors whose biosocial demands can be neither stamped out nor befuddled by propaganda. In this article we examine the institutions of the Stalinist state that could have created the totalitarian service dog: institutions that planned the distribution, raising, and breeding of family dogs for military service. Our narrative begins with a recently discovered genealogical document, issued to a German Shepherd bred by plan and born during the World War II Leningrad Blockade. Reading this document together with service-dog manuals, Soviet physiological studies, archival military documents, and autobiographical narratives, we unravel the history of Leningrad's early Soviet military-service dog husbandry program. This program, we argue, relied on a particular distinction of public and private: at once stimulating affectionate interspecies bonds between dogs and their handlers and sequestering those relationships from the image of rational, scientifically objective interspecies communication. This reduction of human-dog relations to those criteria that could be scientifically studied and centrally planned yielded tangible results: it allowed the State's dog husbandry program to create apparently unified groups of dogs and dog handlers and to successfully mobilize these groups for new military tasks, like mine detection, during World War II.

The Dogs of War and the Dogs at Home: Thresholds of Loss

In the media room at the Freud Museum in Vienna, home movies of the Freud family run on an endless loop. Entitled Freud: 1930–1939, the movies are narrated by Anna Freud, who oversaw their compilation and editing during the last two years of her life. Within these ostensibly “private” scenes of the Freud family, the family dogs assume a surprisingly central role. This essay argues that the focus on the dogs becomes a way to narrate and narrate around traumatic loss. For the Freuds these traumatic losses involved their forced exile to London, in 1938, as well as the later deaths of four of Freud’s sisters in concentration camps. In combination, the flickering images from 1930–1939 and Anna Freud’s voiceover—recorded some fifty years later—generate an elliptical and asynchronous accounting of loss. In addition to offering an intimate glimpse of the Freud family, the home movies thus raise broader questions about the temporality of witness and how we can see and hear the pain of the other. As one way into these questions, the essay reads with and against Sigmund Freud’s account of repetition compulsion and the management of loss in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. [Pub. in American Imago 6.2 (2009): 231-51.]

Doggy-biopolitics: Governing via the First Dog

Organization, 2016

Biopolitics, traditionally understood as management of the human population, has been extended to include nonhuman animal life and posthuman life. In this article, we turn to literatures that advance Foucauldian biopolitics to explore the mode of government enabled by the dog of the US presidential family – the First Dog called Bo Obama. With analytical focus on vitalisation efforts, we follow the construction of Bo in various outlets, such as the websites of the White House and an animal rights organisation. Bo’s microphysical escapades and the negotiation thereof show how contemporary biopolitics, which targets the vitality of the dog population, is linked to seductive neoliberal management techniques and subjectivities. We discuss ‘cuddly management’ in relation to Foucauldian scholarship within organisation and management studies and propose that the construction of Bo facilitates interspecies family norms and an empathic embrace of difference circumscribed by vitalisation effor...

Stray Dogs, Post-Humanism and Cosmopolitan Belongingness: Interspecies Hospitality in Times of War

Millennium, 2018

International Relations scholars have recently begun exploring the politics of human-animal relations in global affairs. Building on Jacques Derrida's work on hospitality and animals, this article theorises possibilities of responsibility to animals in war zones, pushing the limits of what it means to be with and for others regardless of their human or animal otherness. Specifically, I develop a critical account of cosmopolitan belongingness to illustrate how our being on earth is always a 'being-with' animal others. In thinking through possibilities of post-human belongingness that could emerge in times of war, cosmopolitanism becomes a futural task, an out-of-time and endless confrontation of past and future opportunities for interspecies togetherness. The theoretical significance of this approach is illustrated with a case study on the killing of stray dogs during the Iraq War. This case reveals a cosmopolitanism calibrated to more fully consider possibilities of human-animal belongingness amidst violence.

Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America

2012

Contributors include Ryan Hediger, Lisa Jean Moore, Mary Kosut, John Kinder, Steven F. Alger, Janet M. Alger, Robert Tindol, Riitta-Marja Leinonen, Brian Lindseth, Paul Huebener, Boria Sax, Brian M. Lowe, and Hilda Kean.