Civilian World Research Articles

U.S. combat veterans’ responses to suicide and combat deaths: A mixed-methods study

RationaleLimited research has examined how combat veterans experience deaths of comrades to combat or suicide. We sought to investigate the process and identify factors that predict the level of grief among post-9/11 U.S. veterans. MethodsUsing a mixed-methods study design during 2016–2017, U.S. combat veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts who lost comrades to both combat and suicide (N = 28) participated in semi-structured interviews, and veterans who lost a comrade in combat or to suicide (N = 178) completed online surveys that assessed grief, combat exposure, unit cohesion, anger, posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), and past diagnoses of PTSD and depression. ResultsText analyses of interview transcripts revealed seven themes: 1) Suicide death is unexpected and can make acceptance of loss harder; 2) Combat death is expected and can ease acceptance of loss; 3) Combat death is heroic and can make acceptance of loss easier; 4) Brotherhood forged in combat intensifies the emotional response; 5) Guilt over the inability to prevent a comrade's death makes acceptance harder; 6) Attribution of blame for a death creates anger; and 7) Detachment from the civilian world may make it more difficult to cope with comrades' deaths. Regression analyses of survey data indicated: 1) suicide loss predicted non-acceptance of the loss; 2) mode of death moderated the association between unit cohesion and grief; 3) combat exposure, anger, closeness to the deceased, and having a past diagnosis of depression predicted the level of grief; and 4) combat exposure is a similarly strong predictor of grief and PTSS. Results highlight how veterans' grief further delineates war's toll. ConclusionThe mixed-methods design tells a rich story about a previously unexplored consequence of war. These findings have important public health implications because outcomes impact not only veterans but also their families and communities.

Health Protection: Military Concepts Applied to the Civilian World.

The article discusses health protection in the U.S., focusing upon how military concepts can be applied to the civilian world. Particular focus is given to how military medicine has advanced trauma and emergency care in the U.S. Additional topics discussed include disease prevention during the American Civil War, the clear evidence that healthy populations are more productive and prosperous than those who are not, and how public health can be improved in the US. by holding leaders accountable.

A review of the landscape: Challenges and gaps in trauma response to civilian high threat mass casualty incidents.

The ultimate goal of the emergency response and trauma system is to reduce potentially preventable death from trauma. Tremendous advances in trauma care emerged from the past 15 years of United States' combat engagements around the globe. Unfortunately, combat and insurgency tactics have also metastasized to the civilian world, resulting in increasingly complex and dynamic acts of intentional mass violence. These high threat active violent incidents (AVIs) pose significant preparedness, response, and clinical care challenges to the civilian healthcare systems. Currently, there are several operational and policy gaps that limit the successful preparedness and response to AVIs and dynamic MCIs in the United States.

Family-focused interventions and resources for veterans and their families.

Accelerated by the decreasing military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, many military members are currently transitioning out of active duty into civilian life. Many of these new veterans have recently experienced combat deployment(s), and some are struggling with the aftermath of combat exposure, separation from family, and reintegration stressors. These challenges often follow these military families as they enter the civilian world, a time with its own major life changes vocationally, socially, and interpersonally. Although numerous resources have been developed to assist service members during their transition to the civilian world, relatively fewer exist for partners, children, and broader family systems. Family psychoeducation is a nonpathologizing, strengths-focused model of care that has documented benefits in the arena of mental illness. This article describes some manualized family psychoeducational programs and online and phone-based resources that may be useful to veteran families during this time of change. The programs and resources described herein are all available for free, primarily online. Because of a wide variety of barriers and limitations for family based care in the Veterans Affairs health care system, veteran families are and will continue to seek mental health care in public sector settings. Community providers can enhance their military culture competence by familiarizing themselves with these resources and drawing upon them in working with transitioning military families. (PsycINFO Database Record

Has Current French Training for Military Orthopedic Surgeons Deployed in External Operations Been Appropriately Adapted?

The current evolution of surgical practices is increasingly trending toward hyper-specialization. For military surgeons, their practice in France does not differ from their civilian counterparts. In contrast, in external operations, they have to deal with specific war injuries in austere conditions. They are also required to take care of local populations. Therefore, specific training is necessary, and the French Military Health Service Academy (Ecole du Val-de-Grâce) Paris has set up a specific training called Advanced Course for Deployment Surgery (ACDS) in 2007. The aim of this study is to assess the relevance of this teaching regarding pathologies encountered during current conflicts. The activity of deploying orthopedic surgeons during the three recent major external operations (Afghanistan, Mali, and Central African Republic) has been retrospectively recorded in terms of global volume, types of trauma, status of patients who had been operated on, and indications. These data have been compared with teaching during the ACDS. Our study found a high variability in terms of operating volume, types of trauma, patients' statuses, and types of operations performed depending on the operation theaters. The volume of surgical activity carried out within Role 3 is much more important than that in Role 2 with more than half of the surgeries performed as scheduled surgery to the benefit of the local population. Within advanced Role 2 surgical structures deployed in Mali and Central Africa, more than 70% of the activity was performed as emergencies. Surgical indications were varied, ranging from emergency surgery to limb reconstructive surgery. A lot of non-orthopedic procedures such as vascular repairs and decompressive craniotomies were also performed. All of the encountered pathologies were taught during ACDS. The large variety and technical nature of the performed operations requires the training of highly qualified military orthopedic surgeons with both experience in war surgery and management of after-effects and complications. Orthopedists are also required to carry out procedures dealing with neurosurgery, general, and/or vascular surgery on missions. These data highlight the complexity of military surgeons' training along with the hyper-specialization of the civilian medical world. For more than 10 yr, French military surgeons have benefited from a training program called ACDS to meet these objectives. This initial training seems to be appropriated adapted in view of the managed pathologies.

Negotiating home base: Narratives of psychological well-being among female military members

The current study aimed to understand how active duty service women with low levels of current psychological distress make sense of their military experiences in ways that might contribute to psychological well-being. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with active duty female members in the Canadian Forces and transcripts were analyzed using narrative analysis. A sense of belonging was found to be of utmost salience to the women, with several participants negotiating and constructing places that felt like home to them, and with different degrees of attachment to the military versus civilian world. The findings of this work are discussed within the context of focusing prevention and intervention efforts on increasing belongingness and a sense of home for female service members.

Pat Greene: From Jarhead to Egghead

This case challenges the adage, “You can take a man out of the Marines, but you can't take the Marines out of the man.” Newly transitioning as a Marine officer into his first civilian job, Pat Greene will need to learn how to flex his leadership communication style to meet the demands of his new work culture. The case illustrates the contingent and situational nature of effective communication, or in other words, how a communication style that may be highly effective in one context can be a real misfit in another. This case is designed to introduce a model for communication strategy that takes into account the influence of context, work culture, and role expectations on leadership voice and style. The model can be used to (1) analyze how things got to where they are, and (2) coach Greene to modify his style intentionally for better results in the future. Key discussion points may include (1) contrasting communicating out of habit to communicating with awareness and intention; (2) the value of style flexing effectively across contexts, audiences, and situations; and (3) the pros and cons of “tell/sell” and “consult/join” approaches. This case is suitable for traditional MBA and executive audiences, particularly ones that include a significant number of transitioning military and/or “career switching” learners. Excerpt UVA-BC-0271 Rev. Dec. 1, 2020 Pat Greene: From Jarhead to Egghead As Pat Greene climbed into his car, he smiled wryly to himself. Only a moment before, his wife had playfully reminded him: “You know, Pat, today you go from being a jarhead to an egghead. I know you can do it. Good luck today!” With that she had given him a big kiss, and he was on his way. Today, in late September 2016, would be Greene's first day as director of content development at DoDApps, a small start-up in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, that contracted with the US Department of Defense (DoD). “So much change at once,” he thought to himself. “Business school, separating from the Marines, and now a new job, all in a matter of months.” And Stacy's baby bump was just starting to show; in five more months, he would be a new dad. In his driveway in Ashburn, Virginia, Greene studied alternate routes on his car's GPS. Normally, he would want to choose the fastest route to work. Today, however, he wanted to give himself plenty of time. Washington metro traffic was notoriously hard to predict. But more importantly, he wanted to use his drive time for putting on his game face. He'd heard stories from other transitioning military members, so he knew leading in the civilian world would be different. But just how different remained to be seen. . . .

The Heat is On: Thermal Sensing and Newsgathering – A Look at the Legal Implications of Modern Newsgathering

Thermal imaging technology, which was once used primarily by the military, has made its way into the civilian world. Journalists have begun making use of the technology, and, as that use becomes more prevalent, concerns about legal issues also arise. This article, relying on tort privacy cases, Fourth Amendment case law, and theoretical conceptualizations of privacy, provides an in-depth examination of the legal implications surrounding the use of thermal imaging devices for newsgathering.

The meaning of "loneliness" for traumatized veterans: A semiotic investigation of veterans' written narratives

Loneliness may be a pertinent problem for veterans in the often-traumatic aftermath of war, and while the qualitative nature of this loneliness bears clinical significance, it remains largely uninvestigated. Specifically, while a sole qualitative study suggests that veterans’ loneliness revolves around the notion of being alone with their experiences (i.e., experiential loneliness), no current study examined what “loneliness” as a signifier may mean from the veteran’s perspective. To fill this gap, in the current semiotic investigation, published books written by veterans were located and scrutinized for the terms “lonely,” “loneliness,” “alone,” and “aloneness.” The meanings of these terms were derived from the narrative contexts in which they appeared. Four books were found suitable for the current investigation. Analysis confirmed the validity of the experiential loneliness construct and yielded a stratified experience with multiple nuanced meanings: a) being the only one who feels in a certain way, b) not being understood, c) being unable to communicate the experience, d) having the experience concealed or invisible to others, e) feeling alien and homeless in a civilian world, and f) being alone in coping. Underscoring the difference between the experiences of loneliness revealed in the analysis and other types of loneliness, findings are discussed in the context of clinical and societal implications.

A Heat-Resistant and Energetic Metal-Organic Framework Assembled by Chelating Ligand.

Heat-resistant explosives with high performance and insensitivity to external stimulus or thermal are indispensable in both the military and civilian worlds especially when utilized under harsh conditions. We designed and synthesized a new heat-resistant three-dimensional chelating energetic metal-organic framework (CEMOF-1) by employing 4-amino-4H-1,2,4-triazole-3,5-diol (ATDO) as a ligand. Because of its chelating 3D structural feature, good oxygen balance (-29.58%), and high crystal density (2.234 g cm-3), CEMOF-1 demonstrates high decomposition temperature (445 °C), insensitivity to stimulation, and excellent detonation velocity (10.05 km s-1) and detonation pressure (49.36 GPa). The advantages of facile synthesis, thermal stability, and powerful explosive performance make CEMOF-1 as a promising candidate for heat-resistant explosives in future applications.

Peer Advisors for Veteran Education (PAVE): Implementing a sustainable peer support program for student veterans on college campuses

Student veterans have been attending college in greater numbers since the passing of the Post/9-11 GI Bill. Although similar to other nontraditional students, student veterans face unique transition challenges that can impact their pursuit of higher education. Many student veterans could benefit from dedicated programs to help them succeed in college, which in turn would enable them to secure employment in the civilian world. Facilitating the success of student veterans also makes wise use of the financial and institutional resources invested in their education. Peer support programs can help by providing an established community of other student veterans who can normalize transition experiences, offer social support, reduce stigma associated with help-seeking, and connect to useful services on and off campus. This paper describes the iterative development of a nationwide peer support program for student veterans, Peer Advisors for Education (PAVE), which uses trained peers to provide outreach, support, and linkage to resources to assist student veterans. Through a hybrid technology platform for training and program management, PAVE has been delivered on 40 college campuses nationwide and is well-positioned for larger scale national rollout.

Identity adjustment among Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans with reintegration difficulty.

To examine perceptions of identity adjustment in a diverse, national sample of U.S. veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The authors conducted a planned thematic analysis of text written by Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans when they were asked to describe their reintegration difficulties as part of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of online expressive writing (Sayer et al., 2015). Participants were 100 randomly selected veterans from the larger study (42 women and 58 men, 60 active duty and 38 reserves or National Guard). Nearly 2/3s of participants wrote about their identity adjustment. The 5 interrelated areas of identity adjustment difficulty were (a) feeling like one does not belong in civilian society, (b) missing the military's culture and structured lifestyle, (c) holding negative views of civilian society, (d) feeling left behind compared to civilian counterparts due to military service, and (e) having difficulty finding meaning in the civilian world. The authors did not observe differences by gender. However, those deployed from active duty were particularly likely to feel as if they did not belong in civilian society and that they had not acquired needed skills, whereas those deployed from the reserves or National Guard experienced difficulty in reestablishing former civilian identities. Identity adjustment is a critical yet understudied aspect of veteran reintegration into community life following combat deployment. (PsycINFO Database Record

Military lives: coaching transitions

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to first consider how veterans use talk to shape interpretations of personal and social identify. Second, this paper seeks to gain an understanding of how veterans see themselves in a civilian world, their ability to re-conceptualise and realign their perspective on life to support their transition in to a civilian world.Design/methodology/approachUnderpinned by Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, the work provides a qualitative analysis data from coaching interviews with five veterans.FindingsThe findings revealed the on-going legacy of military life and how its distinctiveness and belief centred on kinship shapes personal identity and the way they see their civilian world. The work sheds light on to the benefits of this Ricoeur’s self-reflexive approach and how it can be used to provide a deeper insight in to the nature of personal transitions and how narrative can be used to expose complexities of the narratives of personal history and meaning as the narrator becomes both the seeker and what is sought.Practical implicationsThe work reinforces the value of Ricoeur’s self-reflexive approach identifying narrative mediating between two “poles” of identity and the act of mimesis; prefiguration, configuration and refiguration as veterans project stories of their world and their place within it.Originality/valueThe paper provides new insights in to the importance of narrative identify broadening its potential application with engagement across diverse communities, thereby providing depth and rigour of its conceptual understanding of personal identify. The work further provides insights in to the challenges facing veterans to integrate within a civilian society.

Tourniquets in Trauma Care: A Review of Application.

Traumatic hemorrhage has been identified as the leading cause of battlefield death in recent conflicts. Although injury patterns are not directly reproducible to the civilian world, treatment advancements can be used to provide care to patients worldwide. Long-standing dogma regarding the use of tourniquets has been disproved, and there is now recognition of the critical role that tourniquets play in trauma care. The history and evolution of tourniquets, including the identification of previous faults in application, will lead to an examination of the current devices in use along with evidence-based recommendations for use. A review of ongoing programs to reduce hemorrhage as a cause of death in civilian and law enforcement medicine promotes the application analysis. Tourniquets, as simple technology, have the potential to save many lives through appropriate use, but preconceived myths and notions have limited its use to combat medicine. An increase in utilization could have a much greater impact in areas other than combat.

VET Connect: an emerging peer leadership program for Veterans on campus

Currently, more than 1 million US Veterans are receiving Veterans Affairs (VA) education benefits to pursue college diplomas, advanced degrees, or vocational training. As increasing numbers of military members return home, colleges and universities must be prepared to support their transition to non-military educational and occupational settings. The VET (Veterans Embracing Transition) Connect Peer Leadership Program was designed to support student Veterans and assist them in transitioning to campus life. This study used a qualitative approach to examine the effects of VET Connect on Peer Leaders. Findings reveal that the program reduced participants' sense of isolation by connecting student Veterans to faculty and staff, to other student Veterans, and to the general student population. Participants reported that VET Connect promoted self-growth and integration, allowing them to transition to campus and civilian life. They reported developing skills such as public speaking and knowledge of campus resources, as well as insight into their emotions and self-acceptance. Participants also reported experiencing a renewed sense of purpose. Overall, findings suggest that VET Connect may serve as a potent high impact practice that engages Veterans in college and reduces the loneliness and distress that often accompany reintegration to the civilian world.

A case study of two recreation programs serving soldiers on Warrior in Transition Units

This case study examined recreation programs on two US military installations serving soldiers who were injured during Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, or Operation New Dawn, and were on Warrior in Transition Units. The recreation programs were the Adaptive Reconditioning program at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii and the Resiliency Through Art program on US Army Garrison in Vicenza, Italy. Data from demographic questionnaires, interviews, and documents were analyzed and revealed three themes: the civilian world, compliance, and masculinity.

Between Friends

The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s 1946 film about three World War II veterans returning home to a small Midwestern town, has long been notable for its frank treatment of wartime trauma, disability, and the personal and cultural crises of masculinity precipitated by the end of the war. At a moment when disability studies has gained a firm foothold in the academy, the article returns to this touchstone text to reconsider the film’s staging of the disabled male body. The article complicates the equation of disability with castration implicit in readings of masculinity and heterosexuality in the film’s rehabilitation narratives by considering the role of friendship in the film’s depiction of masculinity and disability. The argument is that to focus on heterosexual romance in The Best Years of Our Lives is to tell only half the story; the narrative of homosocial friendship between Al, Fred, and Homer is equally important to their reintegration into the civilian world. Friendship provides an ameliorative space outside the narratives of heterosexual romance that structure the film’s logic of rehabilitation, and does not demand elision of the war’s traumas and the traces, visible and invisible, that it leaves behind.

Perspectives of veterans with mild traumatic brain injury on community reintegration: Making sense of unplanned separation from service.

For veterans separated from the military as a result of acquired mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), the transition from a military identity to a civilian one is complicated by health, cognitive, and psychosocial factors. We conducted in-depth interviews with 8 veterans with mTBI to understand how they perceived the experience of departure from the military, rehabilitation services provided at a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Polytrauma Network Site, and reentry into civilian life. Two distinct patterns of thinking about community reintegration emerged. The first pattern was characterized by the perception of a need to fade one's military identity. The second pattern, conversely, advanced the perception of a need to maintain the integrity of one's military identity though living in a civilian world. These perceptions may be linked to individuals' roles while in the military and whether violent acts were committed in carrying out the mission of service, acts not consonant with positive self-appraisal in the civilian world. The crisis of unplanned, involuntary separation from the military was universally perceived as a crisis equal to that of the precipitating injury itself. The perception that civilians lacked understanding of veterans' military past and their current transition set up expectations for interactions with health care providers, as well as greatly impacting relationships with friend and family. Our veterans' shared perceptions support existing mandates for greater dissemination of military culture training to health care providers serving veterans both at VA and military facilities as well as in the civilian community at large. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Female Spirit

The Female Spirit Diane Goodman (bio) Red Peonies: Two Novellas of China Frank Stewart, Series Editor; Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, Guest Editors University of Hawaii Press www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9738-9780824872878.aspx 200Pages; Print, $20.00 Red Peonies: Two Novellas of China is the first English translation of The Woman Liu and The Woman Yang by Chinese writer Zhang Yihe. Translated by Guest Editors Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, the novellas in this issue of Manoa (28:2, 2016) also features the artwork of Xing Danwen from her series Sleep Walking (2001), disCONNECTION (2002–2003), Duplication Series (2003) and Urban Fiction (2004–2008). As Gernant and Zeping explain in the Editor’s Notes, Zhang Yihe was 28 years old when she was convicted in 1970 as a counterrevolutionary and sentenced to 20 years in a labor prison. Her conviction was partly motivated by her father’s rightist political activities that angered Mao Zedong, and an entry in her own diary that offended Mao’s very powerful wife. Prior to her incarceration, Zhang was a student in the Literature Department at the Chinese Opera Academy; released 10 years into her sentence at the age of 38, she returned to academics, where she eventually became a professor in the graduate school of the Opera Academy in Beijing. Over the course of her scholarly career, Zhang published several histories (two of which are banned in China), and taught and advised graduate students. She retired in 2001 and began to write fiction. The novellas, The Woman Liu and The Woman Yang, are, respectively, the stories of Liu Yueying and Yang Fenfang, two women whom Zhang met while she was in prison. Although certainly each story contains fictionalized versions of real life events, in addition to incidents and perhaps even characters possibly entirely invented, both novellas clearly contain actual people and true circumstances so that the general impression of Red Peonies is more fact than fiction. Gernant and Zeping excerpt a comment from an interview where Zhang was asked about possible contradictions between writing history and writing literature: I simply tell stories. I never consider whether they’re literature or history. Because I don’t even think about this issue, I don’t see any ‘contradiction between literary expression and historical reality.’ [End Page 27] Both novellas no doubt move in and out of both genres. The Woman Liu, possibly because it takes place almost entirely in M Prison where Zhang Yuhe (a thinly disguised version of Zhang Yihe), tells other prisoners’s stories does seem more like historical reporting. The Woman Yang, on the other hand, with its third person omniscient narrator and opening pre-prison chapters, does seem to pay more attention to the craft and devices of fiction and, thus, seems more like “literary expression.” Still, both novellas powerfully and tenderly tell the stories of Chinese women, both in and out of prison, struggling during the Cultural Revolution. Nearly all of The Woman Liu takes place in M prison where Zhang is known as an “expert writer” and as such is charged with helping fellow prisoners write their summaries, the mandatory end-of-the-year report of their efforts to reform. It is through this charge that Zhang learns the story of Liu’s crime and the heartbreak of its aftermath. Although Liu, Yang, Zhang and other characters appear in both novellas, The Woman Yang begins in the civilian world and chronicles a great deal of the young Yang’s life before she arrives at M prison where, ultimately, Zhang offers to write her summary. Prominent in both prisoners’s stories is the cultural and personal, literal and figurative, significance of food and of hunger—physical and emotional. Right at the start of The Woman Liu, narrator/fellow prisoner Zhang Yuhe explains, If you asked what made the biggest impact on me here, I would answer with one word: hunger…As time passed, people grew so confused that they felt they would soon stop breathing, and they wished someone would come over and strangle them. Simply to end the hunger. Of course the hunger is actual and real, the portions rarely large enough to...

Domestic Violence: The Narrative Architectures of Michael Haneke's Funny Games

Domestic Violence:The Narrative Architectures of Michael Haneke's Funny Games Dale Pattison (bio) On November 8, 2001, President George W. Bush took the stage at the main ballroom of the Georgia World Conference Center to deliver what would become one of his most controversial public addresses on the newly created Office of Homeland Security. Positioning the President within a milieu of firefighters, police officers, and military personnel, the optics of the scene were designed to collapse boundaries between civilian and military worlds, and to use the President as a mediating point between these otherwise distinct realms of American life. The substance of the President's speech mirrored this spatial move, repeatedly emphasizing the ways in which the War on Terror would require Americans living within the country's national borders to "add [their] eyes and ears to [the state's] efforts to find and stop those who want to do us harm." The War on Terror, Bush argued, "must be fought not only overseas but also here at home." The President's speech implied that civilians—not alone the military—would be instrumental in combatting terror and protecting the American homeland. In closing his address, Bush relayed his first orders to the newly conscripted American people, announcing, "we have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, 'Let's roll'" ("Address to the Nation").1 Out of this speech emerged the Presidential Task Force on Citizen Preparedness in the War on Terrorism, a program designed to help Americans "prepare in their homes, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and houses [End Page 197] of worship" for their new roles as protectors of the homeland (Allen A01). Fewer than three months later, in the President's State of the Union Address, Bush established the U.S.A. Freedom Corps, a coordinating council that would assist and train Americans who wished to volunteer themselves for the protection of the homeland. In his address, Bush asked "for every American to commit at least two years, four thousand hours over the rest of your lifetime, to the service of your neighbors and your Nation." Echoing earlier statements on the need for civic engagement in implementing homeland security, Bush went on to remark: Homeland security will make America not only stronger but, in many ways, better. Knowledge gained from bioterrorism research will improve public health. Stronger police and fire departments will mean safer neighborhoods. Stricter border enforcement will help combat illegal drugs. And as government works to better secure our homeland, America will continue to depend on the eyes and ears of alert citizens. ("The President's State of the Union Address") The administration's framing of homeland security as a positive force in shaping American civic life came to fruition in this address. In volunteering for the protection of the homeland, Americans could participate in the advancement of both military and civilian projects, making the country safer and more prosperous all at the same time. The observations above highlight the ways in which the administration mobilized civilians as instruments of state power in the wake of September 11th. As many critics have noted, establishing the rhetorical link between the home and the homeland was vital to the state's ability to advance the politics of homeland security. The deployment of the homeland as a rhetorical device plays upon individuals' attachment to "the home," a concept intimately connected to security, stability, and one's sense of self. The frequent use of the home as a site of political intervention in the two Presidential addresses above reveals the complex engagement with domesticity that undergirds the project of homeland security.2 While the rhetorical figuring of the homeland as a domestic space was critical to how the state shaped public opinion, representations of the home in popular media also [End Page 198] contributed significantly to advancing the politics of homeland security. This essay uses Michael Haneke's Funny Games (2007), a film that appears to have little to do with homeland security, domestic space, or the anxieties that emerged in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, to examine the ways in which political violence—particularly as a product of the state's mobilization of domesticity—intrudes...