Anchored Ashore: American Life at Guantanamo

Abstract

This dissertation explores how the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (Gitmo) was necessarily a safe deployment destination for American personnel responsible for the detention operation underway at the Joint Task Force – Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) post-9/11. It treats Gitmo as a site of U.S. militarism and domesticity, moving away from portrayals focused solely on its carceral agenda. What emerges is a version of Gitmo that is unfamiliar to most but that was no less real to American personnel on the ground between 2002-2004 who came to see the base as a boon. It was hard for them to lament too closely the overwhelming prospect of being sent to war when they were headed somewhere without combat. Their unusual wartime experiences on a base that looked and felt like a stateside suburb paradoxically reinforced the exceptionalism of the operation they were assigned, but in unexpected ways: personnel, many on their first ever overseas deployment, did not agonize over their safety in this “foreign” locale.

But the war’s arrival to this small U.S. neighborhood was also strange because detainees were labeled by one JTF-GTMO commander as “the worst of the worst.” So, why bring them closer to American military families who already lived on base? And upon learning that the war was inbound, why did these Americans choose to stay? This dissertation queries these decisions by exploring the arrival of the wartime cadre and its detainee operation, and the seemingly careless decision to remain on base and live next door to alleged terrorists. None of these decisions registered as unusual on base, offering a unique vantage not only on the routes of U.S. power globally, but also on how this militarism is domesticated and made ordinary as to become part of Americans’ everyday. At Gitmo we find the intersections of the global and local, and how U.S. national security becomes a lived experience for Americans.