THE EXTRA/ORDINARY ATMOSPHERE OF WALTER REED

The feeling of ordinariness within Walter Reed was marked by excesses — of social value and symbolic meaning, of pain and uncertainty, of military bureaucracy, of publicity — which distinguished life there from other forms of American life and their unmarked ordinaries by degrees. There soldiers are remaking themselves and the lives they will have, processes that, by their very definition, cannot be completed within the space of Walter Reed in which they are attempted. Marked by excess and aspirational normativity, life at Walter Reed was permeated by confounding contradictions.

As they settled into outpatient life at Walter Reed, the heaviness of so much hitting each soldier all at once was matched only by the weight of boredom that, even in the presence of pain and frustration and anger and sadness, was the overriding feeling there. Life was heavy and slow. Soldiers felt it in the excruciating sluggishness of each day. Hours died impossibly long deaths watching TV, playing video games, sleeping, smoking, nothing. Even the daily activities of therapy appointments and paperwork filing and occasional formation were hemmed in by time that was impossibly hard to kill. Waiting in an office or on a line and getting exhausted and waiting until tomorrow; waiting for the doctors to say what to do about a newly infected bone only to have them recommend more antibiotics and more wait-and-see; waiting for the Fed Ex delivery of a new car part and then waiting until the shop was open to work on it, only to find out the shop wasn't available for personal use; waiting for the bus to take everyone out to a fancy dinner, where we would wait until some well-meaning speaker would say something about heroism so we could hurry up and eat our steak and then wait for the bus to bring us all back. While everything changes so quickly at Walter Reed, the affective apprehension of time is marked by boredom like you wouldn't believe: inescapable, inevitable, and everywhere (on boredom, see Taussig 2004).

Life at Walter Reed does not conform to idealized trajectories of rehabilitation, trajectories that govern clinical expectations but aren't quite transposable from medical textbooks to embodied contingencies (see Messinger 2010; for an interesting comparison see Zaman 2005: 79–86). By American standards, soldiers received remarkable care, had ready access to all the newest war-born innovations of surgery and prosthetics, to medications and intensive rehabilitative therapies that were not subject to the rules, whims, and fees of civilian insurance providers. Even so, the temporality of the body was twisted around like a Möbius strip. For example, Jake went through surgery after surgery to reconstruct his leg, but it only seemed to get worse. After they had done all they could, it still took months for him to convince them to cut the damned thing off so he could walk for more than twenty minutes at a time. The simple telos of a healing body gave way to the material facts of precarious bodies. For Alec,