Enduring Military Boredom: From 1750 to the Present Book

Acknowledgements ix

1 Introduction: Enduring Military Boredom 1

An enduring inner enemy 1

Sources and procedures 4

Structures 5

2 Boredom in Military History 9

The invention of Russian Roulette 9

Records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 10

The Great War 18

The Second World War 24

Vigilance and acedia in Vietnam 32

Peacekeeping operations 42

The first Gulf War and the story of a jarhead 51

The War on Terror 54

Conclusion: Military boredom as a human phenomenon 64

3 Navigating against the Wind of Entropy 66

Levels of boredom: Martin Doehlemann 66

Boredom and navigation: Orrin E. Klapp 69

A military adaptation of Klapp's model 73

Enduring boredom 75

Knocked down by fear-the broken mast 76

Conclusion 77

4 Bored in Afghanistan? 78

Withstanding stones and intruders 78

Diaries containing statements about boredom 79

The soldiers and their tasks 80

Boredom defined 81

'It is good for human beings to be bored' 83

Filling time, willing to fill time 86

Excitement, please, but not too much of it! 90

Exhaustion, rest, and restlessness 93

Should have been somewhere else? 97

The meaning and problem of place 101

Managing inner pressure 103

Meaning, morality and the coherence of flow 105

5 Voyage Boredom 110

Introduction 110

Cadets and boredom-an unexpected story 114

Boredom as being 'bogged down in the mud' 117

The young cadets and the sea 120

On accepting constraints 123

Boredom and the meaning of friendship 126

The brotherhood of barracks boredom 130

The buoy watch-meaning on the margins 133

Vita activa, vita contemplativa 136

The buoy watch as an ambiguous place 139

Boredom asegocentrism: From situational awareness to ego awareness 140

Conclusion 142

6 Submarine Boredom 144

Swallowed by the sea: Life in a submarine 144

Redundancy-a source of boredom, but also of security and safety 147

Redundancy as a pedagogical challenge 157

Boredom and invisibility-the quest for recognition 163

Seeing by hearing-the ability to see the invisible 170

Conclusion 172

7 Enduring Boredom-But How? 174

Introduction 174

Maintaining by entertaining-the meaning of social placebos 175

Hardiness and boredom 178

Military-pedagogical implications for enduring boredom 180

Generative boredom-boring times as a prelude to creativity 182

Notes 186

References 190

Index 195