This paper analyses the personal experiences of Dutch army members during military battlefield tours to historical war sites. We present a qualitative interview based analysis of the experiences and uses of the past by the Dutch military and discuss the tensions present in the military battlefield tours. In doing so, we argue for integrating research about cognitive procedures of re-enactment and bodily experiences on historical sites. Our findings suggest that the military battlefield tours help to evoke a specific placebound engagement with the past. Visits to former war sites evoke detailed and vivid images of the past. The historical landscape thereby provides external clues and arguments that assist in comprehending the course of a historical event. The multiple visual and sensual triggers on a historical site allow for cognitive and bodily knowledge and appeal to the participant's imagination. How and to what extent the past is imagined strongly depends on the knowledge and cultural background of the participant, as well as the attempts of the participants to actively do something imaginatively with the material present on site. When trying to understand the emotional impact and consequences of warfare, the participants tend to identify with past actors, which sometimes generates dilemmas.

An important aspect of contemporary volunteer tourism is generated by the possibility of having personal, emotional and affective encounters and experiences. Volunteer summer camps on former war sites, organized by the German Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (ARSP), can be regarded as an expression of a contemporary form of tourism, which consists of the development of a personal, affective, and immersive approach to learning and volunteering on former war sites. A performative approach to studying emotion is applied, and helps to locate and understand the social, cultural, and political components that instigate the desire for affective volunteer tourism. For this study, 26 semi-structured in-depth interviews have been conducted with participants of ARSP volunteer summer camps that focused on conserving and maintaining former war sites in Italy, Lithuania, and France. The results indicate that volunteers expect war themed summer camps to be impactful (in terms of work) and emotional (in terms of personal experiences). Yet, the sought-after impact and emotion are not always found, which gives rise to contradictory feelings and tensions. Feelings of guilt about unmet expectations have caused volunteers to re-evaluate their motives and look for different ways to make the summer camps meaningful to them. Participants were encouraged to critically reflect, on this form of volunteer tourism in particular, and on societal debates about war and volunteer tourism in general.

This article analyzes the war memories and processes of meaning-making of Dutch veterans who returned to places related to their deployment in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It argues that the incentive to return can be found in the difficulties that veterans have in assigning positive meaning to their deployment because existing collective and cultural memories about the war and the genocide in Srebrenica do not align with many of the veterans' experiences during and after the war. In the analysis of interviews conducted with seventeen Dutch veterans, attention is paid to their wartime memories, motivation to return, and experiences during the return trips. Returning to former places of deployment provides a way to reconcile memories, especially traumatic ones.The building of these memories passes through several phases: introspection; opening up to family, friends, and relatives; and helping others. [veterans, return trip, memory, trauma, and Bosnia-Herzegovina]

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