"It was a terrible two years... I felt like a prisoner:" actor's escapes from memory and the experience of compulsory basic military service
Abstract
The study is a continuation of the oral history project GAČR 19-19311S entitled The Army as an Instrument of Socialization: reflection on the phenomenon of basic military service in the Czech lands (1968-2004), which was conducted in 2019-2021. In its final output, the collective monograph "Between Military Drudgery and Service to the Fatherland", the author published chapters dealing with the influence of compulsory military service, and especially the effect of the dual military disciplinary order (official order, and unofficial, so-called "senior soldier rule") on the historical subjectivity of former soldiers.
The issues elaborated in the aforementioned chapter are further developed in this text in terms of interpreting various kinds of physical or imaginary escapes from the experience and memory of basic military service. The corpus of sources here consists mainly of newly acquired oral-historical interviews archived at the Institute for Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
Using concepts and notions of the post-positivist oral history tradition, the author interpretively outlines a possible form of a "horizon of shared possibilities" of such escapes and proposes a typology of historical subjectivities representing different kinds of escapes.