Epilogue: A “Good” Military Death

Abstract

As an epilogue to the present volume, this article picks up its central themes. It elaborates some of the main points about casualty aversion that are made in the preceding contributions. At the same time, by adding its own themes and insights, this article is complementary in character. It focuses on how a “good” military death is defined by cultural scripts and how, in accordance with those scripts, death is dealt with by the military organization and its guild of experts. Cultural scripts change over time and may differ from one society to another. As a consequence, the practices of dealing with military death may differ too. Generally speaking, though, military organizations throughout the West echo the ways in which casualties nowadays are looked upon by parent societies.