Buddy Watch: Care and Constraint Under the Watchful Eye of Military Suicide Risk Management in War

Officially referred to as “unit watch” and more colloquially as “buddy watch,” the use of continuous direct observation and restrictive measures enforced by peers is a widely used, though controversial, tool in the US Army's suicide prevention efforts. Borrowing from the Army concept and system of the battle buddy, the partnering of soldiers who assist each other in and out of combat, the unit watch is simultaneously conceived as a means of “family” concern, treatment, surveillance, restraint, and even mentorship. Drawing on fieldwork among soldiers and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I explore what the practice of unit watch reveals about institutional and psychiatric interventions as a form of constraint‐as‐care in settings of global US military power. I emphasize the bodily and affective dimensions of the unit watch and the forms of sociality, including coerced obligation and forced intimacy, that the unit watch can produce. Soldiers’ accounts of being watched and watching others under the sign of unauthorized violence also highlight the tense and ambivalent nature of managing suicide in material, institutional, and geopolitical settings organized for the production of violence.