Afterlives

Abstract

This chapter explores forms in which the afterlife of military service in the Yugoslav People’s Army manifests itself amid the ruins of Yugoslavia, working against the stillness of the aftermath and questioning and destabilizing it. These are forms signaled by silence, hesitation, and suspension. They are intrinsic to the affective afterlife of friendships made in the army, marked by the impossibility of recuperating the lost future that was imaginable in military uniform, and the simultaneous need to persistently and constantly return to it. The afterlife of military service also reveals itself in former soldiers’ insistence on universal and moral qualities and the possibility of being recognized and recognizing others as good men/humans. Insisting on these qualities, they also strive to preserve themselves in the tumultuous, fractured, and shifting reality of Yugoslavia’s aftermath.