The end-of-mission airlock: More than a homecoming tool for French Army soldiers

Returning from war missions can be difficult for French Army soldiers. An alteration of their relationship to time, called a ritual of suspense, allows soldiers sent on missions to exist in a continuous cognitive present state that helps protect them from the stressors of war. The focus of this anthropological comparative study was on the end-of-mission airlock, a practice designed to help soldiers exit from this ritual, to leave an in-the-moment mindset and better reintegrate into civilian/garrison life. Using an ethnographic framework of operational projection (from preparation for war to return) with two French Army groups, this article explores the lived reality of soldiers. As one of the two groups observed was unable to complete an end-of-mission airlock as planned, a comparative analysis was conducted to explain the impact of end-of-mission airlocks on soldiers' abilities to return to the realities of civilian/garrison life after being in a theatre of war. The comparison indicates the incomplete airlock resulted in a failure to re-anchor in a tri-partitioned time (past-present-future) as measured by soldiers' ability to decompress, increase health and well-being, and limit drug consumption. Without a way to exit the ritual of suspense, soldiers remain in a continuous present state. Descriptive results of this study provide a complementary basis for exploring end-of-mission airlocks as a protective link for the mental health of deployed French military personnel that could be reinforced based on this implicit social process.