“These Little Green Shorts”
By: Jaremey R. McMullin
This year and last, many of us have discovered not just that we like walks but that we depend on them. They have boosted our mental health during extended periods of social isolation. When I first passed from ‘walks are nice enough’ to ‘walks are prescription medicine’ sometime in April 2020, I thought back to my first interview with Danny Maher, who co-founded a group called Irreverent Warriors, and the subject of my article in the latest issue of IFJP, ‘Decent and indecent exposures: naked veterans and militarized (counter-)violences after war.’
A few months after Danny exited the US military, he went on a transformative, multi-day hike with his father in the San Bernardino Mountains of California. To be sure, this hike was more intense than the proverbial lockdown walk in the park: 15 miles a day, heavy packs, steep vertical incline, extreme temperature shifts. Prior to going to the mountains, he had lost a close mentor and friend, also a veteran, to suicide. The entire hike, he said, was marked by ‘immense pain and immense joy’:
The whole experience was incredible […] and I was, like, euphoric. [I said to myself,] ‘If I brought some of my combat veteran friends who are all fucked up in the head out here,’ I was like, ‘I know this would un-fuck lots of their mental issues, just to experience the pain and the beauty again’ […] I literally thought, ‘I could literally save some dudes’ lives by bringing them out here’.
He shared the idea with one of his close friends. Ultimately, permit requirements and health and safety concerns transformed the idea of a mountain hike into an urban hybrid walk-pub crawl. His friend (and eventual co-founder of IW) suggested another edit, too, saying, ‘Dude, let’s step it up. Let’s do it in silkies.’ The Silkies Hikes were born.
Silkies are insanely short and tight-fitting green boxer briefs. They used to be standard issue in the Marines as underwear and for fitness training. Active-duty and veteran Marines nourish a unique regard for silkies, and the Hikes lean in to that attachment, and then lean in some more. The nearly-naked Hikers also gather for a purpose: to prevent veteran suicide, which claims an estimated 22 veterans a day in the US. In emphasizing prevention, they inject a subversive element into the usual ‘walk for a cause’.
Danny explains, ‘Everyone else is talking about awareness, awareness, awareness. How does awareness prevent someone from killing themselves? If you’re considering suicide, you’re aware of suicide.’ In contrast, the Hikes aspire to actively prevent suicide through the intimacy, nostalgia, and vulnerability that they say the underwear-clad environment promotes. They claim this environment fosters mutual support, underscoring the need for periodic veteran-only sociality to survive.
These assertions emphasize a paradox I have written about across disparate contexts: reintegration into civilian life requires periodic separation from it. The bawdy humor and nude camaraderie of the Hikes further complicate matters: a re-militarized approach to a supposedly civilianizing process. Can militarized attachment—to barracks nostalgia and to the irreverent humor and communal nudity of basic training—be mobilized as a counter-violent maneuver (e.g., as suicide prevention)? And, how can research on veterans accommodate the complex simultaneity of their re-/de-militarizing moves?
A rich history of feminist work on militarized masculinity accentuates how multiplicity, contingency, and contradiction underpin militarized masculine performativity. I’m thinking, of course, about work on militarized masculinity by Cynthia Enloe, Maria Stern, Marysia Zalewski, Marsha Henry, Julia Welland, Aaron Belkin, and many others. I’m also influenced by beautifully researched and nuanced work on veterans by Sarah Bulmer, David Jackson, Maya Eichler, Victoria Basham, Synne Dyvik, and Benjamin Schrader. What all of this work has in common is its openness to be moved by and learn from research participants. It also understands how seeing veterans as either re-militarizing or de-militarizing subjects risks classifying them as either ‘good veterans’ or ‘bad veterans’.
The Silkies Hikers narrate why they think resurrecting some aspects of military life is necessary to survive homefront vulnerabilities. The playfulness, humor, and irreverence they bring to that narration complicates the status of nudity in work on militarized masculinity. Nudity has a long history as abuse, exclusion, and violence in the military. And, cathexis—attachment to the material objects, symbols, and rituals of militarization—works to normalize war-making projects. At the same time, here are individuals narrating attachment—to silkies as material objects and to nearly-nude camaraderie as a military ritual—but anchoring this narration to ideas of alternative therapy. Can these latter representations find space in efforts to study real world instances—always likely to be messy and contradictory—of subjects trying to de-militarize through re-militarized cathexis, to survive the civilian world by carving out temporalities and spaces of veteran-only sociality? The article suggests the possibility that it is possible to mourn the prevalence of veteran suicide *and* the structures that make the Silkies Hikes a necessary yet incomplete modality of suicide prevention whilst also learning from Hike participants about why they think the Hikes are meaningful and effective in preventing suicide.
Since the article was prepped and proofed, a very different collective assembly that included veterans and active duty military took place: the 6 January attack on the US Capitol. When the violent, insurrectionist, and racist actions of some veterans take center stage, I hope this article can also be a reminder that lots of other veterans are out there doing different work, including providing mutual support and using their bodies to attempt to prevent one form of violence that persists after war.
If, in addition to reading about the Hikes in the pages of IFJP, you’d like to also see what they look like from the perspective of their participants—and hear from some of the Hikers themselves—then you can watch a documentary short film I made about Irreverent Warriors and the Hikes, Silkies.
Read the full article here: “Decent and indecent exposures: naked veterans and militarized (counter-)violences after war“
Jaremey R. McMullin (he/him/his) is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He has published research on ex-combatant reintegration and veterans’ transition in Mozambique, Namibia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, and the United States. He directed and produced an award-winning documentary short film series on everyday peace, Liberia: Legacies of Peace. Interviews with the Silkies Hikers and other veteran-led groups in the US was supported by a Research Incentive Grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.
All photos of the Silkies Hikers by Matthew Hyndman.
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