The military environment, whether in training or in combat, entails physical and psychological isolation. When the unit is all one has to depend on for survival and support, the bonds and relationships that emerge have a different character than those between friends at home. Military service also allows no opportunity for soldiers to have space or “take a break” within their relationships. Due to the accelerated formation of bonds within these spaces of isolation, a deeper sense of mutual reliance emerges. US Marine Corps Lance Corporal Colton Carlson’s experience with his own injury and his unit’s reactions is illuminating when contemplating the depth and strength of the bonds of brotherhood. His brothers disregarded personal safety to come to his aid. Christina Jarvis, a scholar on war and gender, writes that this is often characteristic of American troops. In World War II especially, soldiers would endanger their own lives to rescue injured fellow servicemen, as well as the remains of fallen soldiers, because of the cultural value placed on the physical body.
Given the significant value placed on operating as a team and the great lengths soldiers will go to rescue their own, being isolated by physical barriers in war can be highly distressing. One way this occurs is through injury. Injured soldiers must undergo a liminal phase of isolation during treatment and recovery when they are separated from their units and placed into the unfamiliar context of a hospital or treatment facility. Through a lengthy recovery process, which often involves significant amounts of physical therapy, the soldier will sometimes become part of a brotherhood of injured males.
In many cultures, there is a strong link between the uninjured male body and culturally constructed notions of masculinity. The idealized male is strong, fit, and whole; the injured male body threatens that archetype. The brotherhood of injured males must support and uphold each other in the face of this cultural stigma. In The Thin Red Line, novelist James Jones writes, “They had crossed a strange line; they had become wounded men; and everybody realized, including themselves, dimly, that they were now different. . . . They had been initiated into a strange, insane, twilight fraternity where explanations would be forever impossible.”
