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Abstract 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. 

This article examines exposure in the mobile reach of care in war in order to theorise exposure as care. It does so from the margins, focusing on US military medical professionals of the officer class in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who feel distanced from the ‘real’ war experience represented by the infantry soldier, and thus engage in practices of exposure to gain the ‘trust’ and ‘respect’ of their soldier-patients. To grasp something of the promise and perils of exposure and its everyday enactments, I analyse one army physician assistant’s accounts of secretly stealing away on combat missions and the use of an ambulation tool called ‘the walkabout’ by the military mental healthcare community. The material, operational, and tactical settings of counterinsurgency and the professional cultures of military care occupations dynamically intersect to engender specific contexts for, opportunities within, and risks associated with exposure among military elite. An examination of exposure reveals that military medical professionals recast the hegemonic authority of proximity to soldiering in terms of the ethical norms and professional values of medicine: in a word, as care. 

Abstract With the United States military stretched thin in the “global war on terror,” military officials have embraced psychopharmaceuticals in the effort to enable more troops to remain “mission-capable.” Within the intimate conditions in which deployed military personnel work and live, soldiers learn to read for signs of psychopharmaceutical use by others, and consequently, may become accountable to those on medication in new ways. On convoys and in the barracks, up in the observation post and out in the motor pool, the presence and perceived volatility of psychopharmaceuticals can enlist non-medical military personnel into the surveillance and monitoring of medicated peers, in sites far beyond the clinic. Drawing on fieldwork with Army personnel and veterans, this article explores collective and relational aspects of psychopharmaceutical use among soldiers deployed post-9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan. I theorize this social landscape as a form of “medication by proxy,” both to play on the fluidity of the locus of medication administration and effects within the military corporate body, and to emphasize the material and spatial ways that proximity to psychopharmaceuticals pulls soldiers into relationships of care, concern and risk management. Cases presented here reveal a devolution and dispersal of biomedical psychiatric power that complicates mainstream narratives of mental health stigma in the US military.