The Myth of Defending the Homeland
The Myth of Defending the Homeland

Combat Preparation in Conscripts' Reflections of Compulsory Military Service (1968–2004)

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on conscripts’ reflections of compulsory military service in the Czechoslovak and Czech army in 1968–2004, as experienced by different generations. I pay attention mainly to the narrative representation of certain aspects of the meaning of compulsory military service, namely the conscripts’ preparedness for the defence of their country and actual deployment in combat. This is done through an analysis and interpretation of oral history interviews. On a practical level, I explore reflections of military exercises, the relation of contemporary witnesses to weapons and their potential use, evaluation of combat vehicles and effectiveness of combat alerts. In a theoretical perspective, the article is based on the cultural model of military history with an emphasis on confronting the discourse based on experience with the official model of compulsory military service, takingin to account collectively shared ideas about the army. In general, what predominates in the recollections of actors is a rather negative image of the army as a more or less useless “total institution”, which, up until the 1990s – undoubtedly mainly as a result of the August 1968 occupation – de facto had no social prestige. Due to an ambivalent experience with the duality of the disciplinary order, many contemporaries gradually concluded that the essence of “real” military service was not military training (the official order), but the individual way of coping with violent repression and with the violation of human dignity by more “senior” soldiers against “junior” ones.

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