In this paper, we explore the Non‐Medical Attendant program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, which subsidizes the presence of war‐injured soldiers' family members as they live for months or even years at Walter Reed during treatment and rehabilitation. We elaborate the ambiguities of the program and draw on ethnographic research to demonstrate how the program's vagaries combine with the context of an overburdened military medical system and the more familiar strains of family caregiving to place family members in a gray zone of care where the line between labors of love and institutionally compensated work is blurred. [caregiving, military, family, love]

This paper explores the expansive possibilities for a critical military studies that approaches the mechanisms of war-making as coextensive with broader arrangements of social life, rather than as intersecting or overlapping with distinguishable social spheres, like gender. The potential here is both analytical and theoretical: analytical in that it opens up productive avenues of critique through which to explore, but not resolve, the contradictions that animate war-making and military life; theoretical in that war-making and military life offer spaces through which to consider deep questions of social theoryof, for example, the contours of a life worth living in liberal fantasies of the good lifethat are amplified in this context, but that resonate well beyond it. In conversation with queer theory, the paper illustrates these possibilities by thinking through the ways that concern about soldier and veteran suicide is imbricated with heteronormative ideals of the family and practices of caregiving in the contemporary US.

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During a recent discussion of the defining ordeal of his life-the hunting accident in which at age twelve he unintentionally shot and killed his younger brother-the American poet Gregory Orr noted that trauma, violence, and death shatter meaning. 1 In the disorienting aftermath of this tragedy his parents each retreated into their own torment, as did Orr in his terror and alienation. Orr eventually found his way to poetry, to art, which have sustained but not, in his words, "healed" him. His poetry is a