Friendly fire

Abstract

From September 1990 to June 1991, the UK deployed 53,462 military personnel in the Gulf War. In 1993 reports began to surface in the UK about unexplained health problems occurring amongst Gulf War veterans. This paper considers the way sufferers of Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) came to label their condition in this way. Unlike other research into this illness, this work focuses on sufferers' own accounts to better understand the way GWS is perceived by those it affects. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the UK, data for this paper were collected mainly by in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with GWS sufferers, their family members, doctors and scientists, as well as Gulf veterans. Findings suggest that GWS narratives provide a template to make sense of life events and illness. Investigating the way veterans came to ascribe to GWS as an explanation of their suffering, it became clear that contact with other sufferers was central to this process. Through participation in the veterans group and by assimilating the stories of other sufferers, a culturally specific narrative form is learned. This provides a framework for the reflexive re‐interpretation of one's past and helps to construct a narrative of GWS. Unlike most work on narrative which focuses on the individual, this interpretation suggests that the collective aspect is central. In the absence of a diagnostic test and a coherence of symptoms, it is the concordance between the individual and collective narrative that is persuasive.