Patrick G. Watson

In this article we present an ethnomethodological study of a controversial case of ‘friendly fire’ from the Iraq War in which leaked video footage, war on video, acquired particular significance. We examine testimony given during a United States Air Force (USAF) investigation of the incident alongside transcribed excerpts from
the video to make visible the methods employed by the investigators to assess the propriety of the actions of the pilots involved. With a focus on the way in which the USAF investigators pursued their own analysis of language-in-use in their discussions with the pilots about what had been captured on the video, we turn attention to the background expectancies that analytical work was grounded in. These ‘vernacular’ forms of video analysis and the expectancies which inform them constitute, we suggest, an inquiry into military culture from within that culture. As such, attending to them provides insights into that culture.

Through the ongoing work of leak sites, public inquiries, criminal investigations, journalists, whistleblowers, researchers and others, the public has gained access to a growing number of videos of live military operations in recent years. Capturing such things as friendly fire attacks, civilian deaths and extrajudicial or illegal killings, these videos have attracted public and academic attention due to their ‘revelatory’ qualities. Through an analysis of two particular instances, WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder and footage of a targeted assassination by the Israeli Defence Force, we argue it is important to analyse exactly how such deaths are digitally re-presented if we are to make use of videos as data in the study of episodes of military violence and the evidential politics they give rise to.

In this article, we examine a controversial friendly fire incident that took place during the early stages of the Iraq war. Our focus is on how a cockpit video of the incident was used post facto in a military inquiry to arrive at an understanding of the actions of the pilots involved. We shall concentrate specifically on a series of interpretive difficulties that highlighted the problematic status of the video as evidence and explore what their resolution might tell us about military practice, and the place of friendly fire within it more broadly.

In this paper we analyse a ‘friendly fire’ incident from the second Gulf War and the controversy which came to envelop it during a coroner's inquest in 2007. Focusing on the cockpit video of the incident that was leaked to the media during that inquest, we examine what the military and civilian investigators were involved in reconstructing: the incident as it unfolded in real time. Our analysis is grounded in a praxeological perspective that draws on and links ethnomethodological studies of work, research into ‘normal’ accidents, disasters and risks, and recent ethnographies of the military. Based on our analysis, we suggest that the accounts offered after the event by the military and civilian inquiries should be treated less as competing descriptions than different ways of problematizing particular aspects of the military–political ‘machineries’ the pilots' actions were enmeshed within.

In this chapter we discuss what ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can contribute to studies of the military, specifically understandings of ‘action-in-interaction’ in military settings. The chapter is methodologically focused and explores how work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis provides an alternative way of approaching the problems posed in studying the different forms of practice that constitute ‘soldierly work’. Rather than approach these issues in the abstract, and in line with the central thrust of ethnomethodological (e.g. Garfinkel 1967, 2002; Heritage 1984; Lynch 2007) and conversation analytic studies (e.g. Heritage 1995; Pomerantz & Fehr 1997; Sacks 1995; Schegloff 2007), we shall outline this approach through a discussion of the methods employed, and difficulties encountered, in the course of research we conducted into a specific case. This was a fatal ‘blue-on-blue’ or ‘friendly fire’ attack on British infantry by American aircraft during the Second Gulf War (see Mair, Watson, Elsey & Smith 2012; Mair, Elsey, Watson & Smith 2013). What initially drew us to the incident was the availability of a cockpit video-tape that was leaked to the public during a controversial coroner’s inquest in 2007, some four years after the attack took place. Crucially this videotape contained the audio communications between the two pilots involved in the attack and the ground forward air controller (GFAC) they were working with, providing unparalleled access to such an incident as it unfolded. Our interest in the footage was twofold. We wanted, firstly, to see what insights we could glean from data of this kind about combat as experienced first-hand, ‘first-time-through’ (Garfinkel, Lynch & Livingston 1981); and, secondly, we wanted to look at what the three official inquiries made of the incident (including two military boards of inquiry, alongside the coroner’s inquest) and explore how they had used (and problematised) the video as a resource for analysing the actions of the pilots.

This methodological strategy reflects the ‘duplex’ forms of analysis that ethnomethodology and conversation analysis rest upon (Watson 2009): in this case, an analysis of the pilot’s communicative and sense-making practices coupled with an analysis of locally situated reconstructions of those practices by a number of authoritative auditors. This analysis of members’ reconstructions of practices, rather than ours as researchers, involved us ‘tacking’ between the video and after-the-fact accounts of what the video could be said to show. In order to explain how we proceeded, we will initially discuss the problems we encountered in transcribing the video and what those difficulties themselves revealed about what the pilots were doing. After that, we turn to the ways in which we established links between the video and the reports published by the official inquiries, reports which offered competing and apparently conflicting interpretations of what happened and why. Based on this, and having linked our research to wider work in the field as we go, we will conclude, finally, by returning to the question of what ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research adds to our understanding of action-in-interaction in military settings: namely, a focus on its specificities and the forms of organisation internal to it.

As the ease of collecting, handling and presenting video images has increased, so too has the opportunity to explore how video gets taken up and put to work in different areas of social life. One way ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts have incorporated video into studies is as a means of accessing (un/part-)witnessed scenes of social action and interaction (i.e. Sudnow 1968, 1972, vom Lehn, Heath & Hindmarsh 2002; Heath, Hindmarsh & Luff 2010; Mondada 2006; Sormani 2014). A second line of research has examined how members use and/or make sense of video as a practical accomplishment in different settings (Goodwin 1994; Mair et. al. 2012; 2013; 2016; Jones & Raymond 2012, Vertesi 2015). One thing common to both approaches has been a specified attention to how members make actions captured on video evidently reportable as THE locus for re-presenting ‘the action’ in numerous ways. This session explores how action is treated in video, and what opportunities there are for EM/CA scholars to incorporate and understand video’s multiple uses in social life without falling prey to what Malcom Ashmore once termed ‘analytical nostalgia’ and the associated danger of ‘instructed readings’ (Livingston 1992, Hutchinson, Read & Sharrock 2008). Under-explored here is, perhaps, the ways in which ‘vision’ (professional and otherwise) (Goodwin 2000) and praxiologies of perception (Coulter 1990) involve sets of locally built and revisable ‘viewer’s maxims’ (Sacks 1972) deployed for particular practical purposes rather than a ‘physics’ or formal mechanics of action.