Base comforts and amenities distance personnel psychologically from the wars they support

Evidence

Throughout my visits to various bases, I repeatedly had to remind myself about the role they play in waging war—such is the distance one can feel from conflict in these manicured Little Americas, with all their comforts and conveniences. And while military personnel and their families surely have a harder time forgetting the connection between bases and bloodshed, many of them mention a similar distance. At Gitmo, people describe forgetting about the prison on the other side of the base, let alone the wars raging thousands of miles away. Even within war zones, military personnel testify that Internet access, Skype, and other amenities make it possible to forget you’re in the middle of a war. They make it possible to regard the “bloody snarl of combat,” as the former Army public affairs officer and novelist David Abrams put it, as if “through a telescope … at a safe, sanitized distance.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 467

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: Article angle: ‘Little America’ amenities as a moral anesthetic — how convenience infrastructure on bases and in war zones functions as psychological insulation from combat violence.
• XREF: Broader theme: how quotidian comfort buffers people from the violence their institutions produce (echoes Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil, and the ‘sanitized distance’ of drone warfare discussions).