The Myth of Defending the Homeland. Combat Preparation in Conscripts’ Reflections of Compulsory Military Service (1968-2004)

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F68378114%3A_____%2F21%3A00550076" target="_blank" >RIV/68378114:_____/21:00550076 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://sd.usd.cas.cz/pdfs/sod/2021/03/05.pdf" target="_blank" >https://sd.usd.cas.cz/pdfs/sod/2021/03/05.pdf</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.51134/sod.2021.051" target="_blank" >10.51134/sod.2021.051</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

The Myth of Defending the Homeland. Combat Preparation in Conscripts’ Reflections of Compulsory Military Service (1968-2004)

Original language description

The article focuses on the 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, taking into 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.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_ost - Miscellaneous article in a specialist periodical

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60101 - History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA19-19311S" target="_blank" >GA19-19311S: Army as an instrument of socialization: Reflection of the phenomenon of compulsury military service in the Czech lands (1968-2004)</a><br>

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2021

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Czech Journal of Contemporary History

ISSN

2336-3142

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

28

Issue of the periodical within the volume

3

Country of publishing house

CZ - CZECH REPUBLIC

Number of pages

22

Pages from-to

726-747

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85126116912