War serves as a unique encounter with violence, one which triggers an equally unique linguistic response or injury and, consequently, necessitates its own type of poetic prosthesis. This is not because the kind of linguistic injury I describe is unique to war or soldiers, as evident, for example, in Susan Brison’s discussion of linguistic scepticism or injury in the wake of sexual assault, and in decades of trauma discourse concerning anything from familial abuse to genocide, torture and natural disasters. War, however, as both event and social symbol, is indeed set apart through the unique form of life that makes up the wartime experiences, one that must be recognised by those who attempt to reach past the isolation and frustration of returning veterans. War is, then, a form of life, a culture, a setting, the discussion of which is inseparable from any analysis of the kind of devastation war brings upon its veterans. Speaking of the importance of clinical professionals gaining information regarding military culture and the war form of life, Amanda Roberts-Lewis, a social work professor aiding care takers to understand veterans’ wartime experiences, claims that ‘in order to provide good mental health services to the military folks who are coming home, you must understand the culture of this group. Understanding the culture will assist you in becoming a better clinician.’ As this chapter will discuss, however, beyond the everyday social realities of military culture, it is also, and importantly in terms of the unique struggle with language after war, a symbolic form of life.

War is symbolic as a result of it being a form of life, at least in the context of modern warfare in the English-speaking West, dominated by overt symbolism – soldiers are fashioned, trained, taught to function as identical, transparent signifiers in the grand symbolic exchange that is war. As such, war exerts a particular kind of strain on the two poles which, in this book, serve as the starting point of a kind of linguistic injury: the communal (symbolic), referring to the community of which soldiers are symbols, as well as to the symbolic interplay of war and the symbolic interplay of the home in addition to the community the soldiers themselves form during their military service; and the extremely personal, unspoken, painful, and unsymbolic nature of violent events (indexical).