Rhetorical Persuasion and Storytelling in the Military Organisation

by
Giuseppe Caforio
in ARMED FORCES, SOLDIERS AND CIVIL- MILITARY RELATIONS: ESSAYS IN
HONOR OF JUERGEN KULMANN, ed. G.Caforio, C. Dandeker and G. Kuemmel,
Wiesbaden, Verlag fur Sozialwissenschaffen, 2009: pp. 89 - 100

When I joined the platoon of parachutists that had been assigned to me after being
commissioned as a lieutenant and completing the necessary specialisation courses, I found the
non-commissioned officers (sergeants and corporals) of the platoon waiting for me in line in a
dormitory on the first floor of the barracks. The sergeant presents the force to me, I ask their
names and exchange a couple of words with the group, then say, Lets go down to the canteen
and have a drink together and dismiss them. The NCOs salute, one after the other, and then,
one after the other, jump out an open window that gave onto the courtyard. I understood I had
to follow them without any hesitation, even if I didnt know how I would land on the cobbles,
otherwise I would lose face. I jumped and luckily in the courtyard beneath the window there
was a big heap of sand left by bricklayers who were working on the outer wall.
It was a way of putting a newly arrived officer to the test, but also of establishing a kind of
complicity, a bluff experienced together and then... who knows how it would have been told. (1).
Introduction
We find various definitions of rhetoric and a great number of studies on rhetoric as a discipline. For
the purposes of this study it seems sufficient to point out that rhetoric can be defined as eloquence
of speaking and writing (Devoto Oli, 1971) or, in a way more oriented to our purposes, the study
of effective thinking, writing, and speaking strategies; rhetoricians analyze and evaluate what
works and what does not work in a specific context (Helen Hadley Porter, 2004).
Storytelling is narration, understood as a literary activity that aims at the artistic transfiguration of
real or imagined events arranged in a chronological way (Devoto Oli, 1971). Helen Hadley Porter
defines it thusly (op. cit.): Narration is storytelling and is frequently paired with specific and
concrete description in essays with an expressive purpose. An autobiographical, writer-focused, or
personal experience essay will basically be a descriptive narrative with event, character, and
setting developed with specific sensory details.
I thought it would be interesting to report Porters definitions as well because they appear to be
always oriented toward a purpose, and this orientation seems consonant with the project of this
conference, whose organisers write in the conceptual background: Rhetoric and narratives are
basic instruments for making sense of situations and events, facilitating decisions to happen, for
creating opportunities and for committing people to projects. They allow the members of
organizations to make sense of their professional or work situation. It is the same sense that
Robert Einarsson (2003) gives when, referring in particular to narrative, he considers it as the
fabric of culture and tradition and, later on, identifies the instrumentality of narrative with
respect to ideology, writing: Narratives are clearly a primary vehicle of ideologies, both
nationally and on the individual level. The ideologies that we inherit and those we fabricate in our

conversations with ourselves and others are a powerful force in providing a delimited world where
good is good and bad is bad.
Other writers consider organisations themselves as storytelling systems ( Boje, 1991) and most
agree that newcomers are socialised in the organisational culture by way of storytelling (Deal and
Kennedy, 1982, Schein, 1991).
In addition, if I am allowed to borrow a concept of imagined communities, used repeatedly in the
1980s by various authors (2) in reference to the ideological construction of the national community,
the rhetorical persuasion that comes from narrative appears functional to creating communities and
communions even where they do not actually exist. This is true not only for nations but also for the
subcultures of smaller organisations.
As Anderson (Benedict Anderson, 1985) writes in regard to nations, ideologies do not describe
any pre-existing community, if anything, they attempt to evoke it, to create it, and seek to do so in
the most convincing way possible for the greatest possible number of interlocutors. It is a question
of ideologies that do not rest on true assumptions but on verisimilar assumptions, not on founded
descriptions but on possible narrations.
Thus, if rhetorical persuasion and storytelling operate in organisations, especially in the sense of
creating cultural communities, where individuals are ideologically bound to achieving a project
and draw sense and meaning for their daily actions from it, this is particularly true for the
military, where the necessity of making sense of situations and events is undoubtedly a more
pressing concern in the face of such special situations as those of combat.
The military organisation is aimed at the exercise of organised violence in potential or actual
situations of armed conflict. Always from a teleological standpoint, whatever the prevalent use
of military units may be in a given historical period (3), their technical, cultural and moral
preparation is oriented to the most demanding one, combat.
Warfighting is a condition where nearly all the individuals needs are compressed and deprived of
gratification, the threats regard the essential aspects of the person (life, physical integrity), radical
value conflicts are created (contrast between moral codes and combat codes), individualism is often
stifled, and the individual ego is assailed by anxiety, fear, pain, uncertainty, and a sense of
impotence (see, among others, Stouffer, 1949). It is therefore a situation where there is an extreme
necessity that people be committed to the project and that individuals can make sense of their work
situation in face of the harsh reality of death and destruction of the battlefield.
But military activity is also a group activity, carried out in what are usually emergency situations,
that more than others requires strong esprit de corps, solid internal cohesion of the units. The
sense of community, necessary for any organisation, is therefore felt particularly strongly here,
and the creation and maintenance of an ideology that support it is and always has been a
constant concern of the military manager (4).
It therefore appears interesting and meaningful to analyse how rhetorical persuasion and storytelling
operate and are achieved in the military organisation.
The Weight of Tradition
History has always seen armies as protagonists. Although we have left the historiographical period
that the French have called histoire-bataille, even the most specific forms of social history
cannot overlook the fact that the great changes on the international scene have almost always
been produced through the exercise of organised violence.
The historic centrality of armies and war thus give significance and importance to the military
organisation, in which, as James Burk (1999) writes, warfighting determines the central
beliefs, values and complex symbolic formations that define military culture (5).
It is not surprising, therefore, that all military organisations in the various countries have an
institute, a centre or an office devoted to the military history of their armed forces, even in
contexts and in countries where other military studies appear to be below par or neglected.

The cultivation of studies of military history in all military organisations thus has, as a by-product, a
flourishing of military narrative, centred for the most part on single episodes that are often
marginal with respect to the larger story and in whose narration reality and fantasy are equally
mixed. Their function is no less important for the organisation than the dissemination and
teaching of actual history, however. Indeed, for the organisation, military-based narrative
often war memoirs, also autobiographical features two aspects that are not present in history.
The first is constituted by the sublimation of facts, events and behaviours that is normally made by
the narrator and that is totally precluded to history as a science. The second is that narration,
often episodic, enables and encourages an identification of the recipient with the protagonist or
the writer, an identification that, by virtue of the sublimation mentioned above, cannot fail to
lead to sentiments and behaviours that are positive for the organisation. A significant and wellknown example is represented by American war films, especially dealing with episodes of the
Second World War.
Narration linked to tradition also finds expression in the use of symbolic artifacts (see Enrico Maria
Piras, 2006) aimed at creating and reinforcing a sense of belonging and of continuity.
Referring here to a few examples borrowed from my personal experience, I can cite how on the
stairways of the command building of the Military Parachute School in Pisa there was (and still may
be) a series of panels tracing the history of the parachute, from the first drawings by Leonardo da
Vinci to the experiments of Garnerin, Blanchard and Berry and on to photographs of the most recent
models. This achieved a clear reference to the historical and proto-scientific roots of the equipment
that characterised the specialisation, rooted it in time, and simultaneously provided the members of
the organisation with uncommon knowledge of the history of that equipment.
Again, in another barracks building, there were copies of photographs of parachutists of the
Folgore division in combat actions during World War II. Here the figurative storytelling appeared
to be aimed at reminding the men, even in peacetime, that the parachutist has always been first and
foremost an elite fighter.
Rhetorical persuasion and storytelling also enter into the strictly institutional activity of individual
military units, where teaching the regimental history (which often mixes narrative cues and
aspects in with the actual history of the unit) plays the dual role of shaping the complex of
beliefs, values and complex symbolic formations that define military culture and of creating a
specific esprit de corps of the regiment that puts it in competition and comparison with similar
units of the same armed force. As Winslow writes for a Canadian airborne regiment, New
members learned airborne history during the Airborne Indoctrination Course (AIC, one of the
Regiments socialization mechanisms). Soldiers were taught a sense of duty and debt to the
past, to those that had fought and died in previous war (Winslow, 1999). But, as said, training
processes of this kind are more or less present in all military organisations.
History and Stories
As we have seen, the distinction between history and stories is not very clear-cut in the military
organisation and therefore in the preceding section I included in the former, under the heading the
weight of tradition, all that which, although also having narrative aspects, is imparted more or less
officially by the organisation, normally through written texts.
In this section, instead, I want to deal with actual storytelling, as it occurs by oral tradition (at times
also rooted in time) within all military units.
It must be said in advance that storytelling in the military takes on important functions of cohesion,
of creating or strengthening the esprit de corps, and therefore constitutes an element that must be
taken into consideration by the military manager.
It is particularly widespread and significant in special units (a confirmation of its function of
enhancing the esprit de corps, where it is even more important), so I will take a few concrete
examples from these units.
Here, too, I will start with a personal recollection.

In a company of Italian parachutists that I had the honour of commanding the story was told of an
experienced non-com who had adopted, along with his platoon, some rather unorthodox procedures
in a military exercise. The story went as follows: the unit had had the task of carrying out, following
a parachute drop, a sabotage mission against an enemy installation and then to exfiltrate themselves
with a long march through the Pisan Hills. After brilliantly executing the jump and the sabotage
action, instead of undertaking the long, fatiguing march, the unit had gone to the nearest railway
station and taken the train to Pisa, whereupon they made their return to the barracks marching and
singing, in perfect formation and with a martial air that had amazed everybody because it was after
such a long and supposedly fatiguing march.
The story is interesting because it offers interesting insights into its effects on the personnel. It tells
of an initiative characterised by brazenness (lack of respect for rules), imagination in adapting to a
contingent situation, an attitude of strong complicity among the men, and a valorisation of the
formal military aspects (the unit returning in march step and singing) but in the framework of
accomplishing the task (sabotaging the objective).
If one thinks about it, however, one can easily see how these are the characteristics that a special
unit commander would like to have in his men: it is here that storytelling takes on the function of a
parable, of a symbolic and, in this case, also amusing and witty way of educating, of teaching.
Other stories, again taken from those collected among Italian parachutists, clearly have the aim of
favouring a selection of new recruits on the basis of qualities of character, as in this one told by a
parachutist:
When we got to the dormitory the older guys told us: this evening no off duty,
combat uniform and a light digging tool. Were going behind the sports field where
each of you will dig a grave to his own size. As you know, given the high mortality in
military jumps theres no time to do it later...
Or this one:
Major So-and-So was trying a new parachute but, after exiting the plane, the static
line didnt come unhooked from the parachute pack. So he had to haul himself up the
line hand over hand and get back in the plane. Finally back inside he gasps, Damn,
this isnt even going to count in my number of jumps!
The event actually occurred with an incorrectly used American T-10 parachute, but its
transformation into a story and its dissemination are obviously aimed at making the exceptional
normal and teaching what character and poise the parachutist must possess.
Storytelling also appears to be extremely effective in giving the sense of the combat situation, of
materialising it, making it almost tangible, such as in the lived experience recounted by Tom
Squitieri, a soldier during the Gulf War and, later, journalist (reported in Journalists War Home, in
http://www.newseum.org/warstories/interviews/mov/wars/war.asp?warID=1)
Shattered shrapnel and it started the truck on fire. And all of a sudden youre totally
disoriented, totally disoriented, smoke everywhere and fire and heat. And of course,
the feeling of hot metal going into your body, my face, my arm, my leg, I was hit with
the shrapnel including my face above it, so, there was blood coming down into my
eyes. Its not like the movies or the TV shows where, you know, everythings fine and
someone runs to help you. The driver, he had been wounded as well. I, we knew we
had to get out of the truck. My leg was killing me. My arm was killing me from being
wounded, and I couldnt leave him there. I just couldnt leave him there. So, I, I had
to kick the door open on my side with my one good leg,..
And not only about combat, but also about the other deployment situations now typical for the
military. The picture given of the situation in Somalia in 1991, described by the journalist Dan
Rather upon his arrival in Mogadishu, is a case in point (in Journalists War Home, cited):
I began the drive from the Mogadishu airport into the city itself and it began to sink
in that here was, even for experienced correspondents, a unique situation. Its a
country that doesnt have a government. Theres no police force. Theres no water.

Theres no electricity and theres death everywhere. And the drive from the
Mogadishu airport into the city itself is among the more unforgettable things I have
ever experienced because death has a peculiar, totally unique stench. It permeated
every second.
No official account or history can give such a real, palpable picture of lived situations as their
narration does.
Rite and Initiation
Rhetorical persuasion within the military also makes use of rite. Rite is very important for the
military organisation, because it sublimates simple rules of aggregation that tend to give a
semblance of order to the chaos of combat, to the moral and material disorder of armed
conflict.
Think of the functions of the sergeant, the serra-gente of battle units of old, aimed at forming the
men into cadres, enclosing them in an ideal square in order to keep them from dispersing
with rushes forward (lone assaults) toward the enemy or recoiling backward (evasion of the
situation) or laterally (scattering, uncertainty), thus failing the fundamental objective of the
military manoeuvre of focusing the thrust at the desired point and time.
These original elementary functions of forming troops in cadres for combat later became formal
rules of formation, marching, presentation for review at military ceremonies, and so forth,
which strictly observe a ritual that is codified in regulations and handbooks.
Like storytelling, rite is also educational, because it teaches the individual that he must blend into
the group, that it is only the group the platoon, the company that counts, and that is
protagonist of the rite itself. Rite also reminds of tradition, giving it greater weight, making the
individual feel the ideal bond with those who preceded him in the ranks (6), with the history of
the unit of which he is a member, and the moral obligation to live up to it.
But beyond official rite, the public military ceremonies that everyone is familiar with, there are a
number of rites in the military that are much less well known and have begun to be talked about
only in the last few years. These are rites of passage whose importance in military culture
and capacity of persuasion on individuals must not be underestimated.
Rites of passage of status, or initiations, as they are also called, have the purpose of screening the
individual for a set of qualities that make him an integral, accepted part of the group and his
effective determination to be part of it, and tend to represent a crucial milestone in the
individuals professional military history, as earning a university degree (and the accompanying
students rites) might be in ordinary professional life.
Such rites originate from the spontaneous primary group (7) and are themselves spontaneous,
completely unofficial; on the contrary, they are often prohibited and combated by the
institutional authority. As such they take on different characteristics and forms from country to
country, and even from unit to unit (although transversal connections often exist (8)),
occasionally degenerating into outright abuse of the individual. For this last aspect they have
often been lumped together with military hazing, from which they must absolutely be
distinguished: hazing is based on the bullying of new recruits by more experienced soldiers and
has the sole aim of bringing material advantages to the latter (often illicit) and is prolonged
over time, whereas rites of passage mark a change of status that is recognised collectively in a
precise, unique moment in the soldiers personal history. All the authors who have studied the
phenomenon are in agreement on this point (see, for example, Winslow, 1999, Battistelli 2000).
The importance of the study of military initiation rites does not derive only from their interest as a
social phenomenon but also from the positive role that they play in the creation and
reinforcement of esprit de corps. It is now commonly observed in comparative studies
conducted on different units that where these rites exist, esprit de corps is stronger and more
deeply felt. Indeed, according to some, studies showed that the more severe the rite of
initiation was, the greater the bonding to the group is (Aronson and Mills, 1959), a position

shared by Winslow (1999), Hank Nuwer (2001) and, much earlier, by Grinker and Spiegel
(1945). This assessment is also indirectly confirmed in an Italian study (see G. Carducci, 1999),
where it is pointed out that these rites appear to be more widespread in the armys top
operational units.
In agreement with this positive assessment are also the opinions of those directly concerned, as they
appear in numerous interviews conducted by various authors. Donna Winslow reports a
statement by a Canadian parachutist, for example: Zulu Warrior was a smoker or initiation
ritual at which we demonstrated to our peers that we new guys were enthusiastic and anxious
to be part of the unitWe all felt closer-knit and united after it (op. cit.).
In a research that I myself carried out among the Italian parachutists of the Folgore Brigade
(Caforio, 2000), I found that a strong majority of the interviewees appeared favourable to these
initiation rites, and also that the relationship with the old hands was viewed positively by
most, where one hears expressions like for the unit, the action of the older guy is like a
mothers milk for her child.
An explanation of this phenomenon is given by a commission of experts that carried out an
investigation in Italy on the phenomenon (see Archivio Disarmo, 1999). Noting the difficulties that
the recruit encounters in fitting in to the new social reality of the military unit, the commission
writes: In this sense the recruit needs a cohesive primary group, a subculture, a role of reference
that shows him the possibility and modalities of physical and psychological survival of the present
situation. The veteran/new recruit relationship responds to all of this. It offers the recruit a social
microsystem, that is, a set of structures, statuses, norms and values.
Naturally, rites of passage do not have only positive aspects for unit cohesion. They can mix in and
merge with unacceptable practices of hazing and/or mobbing, at times reaching extremes that
require drastic countermeasures which in some cases have arrived at disbandment of the unit.
As Winslow again writes, strong group cohesion is a double-edged sword: what can be
functional unit bonding for war can quickly become dysfunctional in an army at peace
(Winslow, op. cit., p. 453).
To finish up, it should be pointed out that rites of passage are frequent in storytelling, where they
are often heavily emphasised, and end up constituting an important part of the cultural
background of the individual military unit. In some units they are filmed and distributed as
videos, like the gadgets and other objects that identify a unit (see Winslow, op. cit., as well as
Piras, op. cit., for the significance of artifacts).
The Manager and Storytelling
The necessity for an interdisciplinary approach to study of the military in general (9), produced by
the ever-growing complexity of the use of armed forces and of their leadership, extensively
impacts the aspects of management as well, for the study of which many disciplines appear
necessary today, moving beyond the strictly positivist approach prevalent in the past.
In this framework of greater openness to research, rhetoric and narratives become meaningful tools
for a deeper understanding and management of the human and social aspects of the military
universe. They make it possible to penetrate and comprehend aspects of the dynamics of social
groups, particularly of the so-called small groups (Stouffer, 1949), which would otherwise
remain unexplored.
The three aspects examined here, the weight of tradition, the content of the stories, and rites of
passage as an element of storytelling, constitute interpretive elements that are characteristic of,
and in part perhaps peculiar to, the military institution (10). The military manager must be
aware of them and be able to discern their contents, also in order to know how to accept the
aspects of them that appear functional to the purposes of the institution and to neutralise and
block the dysfunctional ones.

All this in a constant relationship of dialogue and clarification with the broader parent society (what
is called civil society), which can have difficulty understanding and accepting some forms of
socialisation internal to the military.
A commander who does not know how to valorise and turn to account the activity and the life of the
small groups that spontaneously form within units places a heavy handicap on the efficiency of
those units, but on the other hand, one who winds up being passively dominated by this activity
loses his leadership over the unit that he commands. It is a delicate balance that the military
manager most of the time achieves on the basis of his personal qualities and sensibility, but
which can be considerably aided by study and knowledge of the phenomena dealt with here.
Notes
____________________________
(1) Autobiographical.
(2) Such as Benedict Anderson, and Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, for example.
(3) The last few years have seen a gradual increase in operations whose main focus is not
combat, such as Peace Support Operations (PSOs) or, with a more general paradigm,
Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW). However, the use of military units in such
operations is still accompanied by actual warfighting missions (Afghanistan and Iraq, for
example), and the face of international conflict remains extremely changeable.
(4) Team spirit that appears increasingly less spontaneous in todays post-modern society.
Winslow observes in this regard, on the subject of the initiation rites of recruits, that
coming from civilian society that elevates the individual, initiates are in a world where the
value of the group is supreme (Winslow, 1999).
(5) For the definition of the term I find the one given by Donna Winslow to be excellent:
Culture is a social force that control patterns of organizational behaviour. It shapes
members cognition and perceptions of meaning and realities. It provides affective energy
for mobilization and identifies who belongs to the group and who does not (Winslow,
1999).
(6) In military ceremonies the reference to the past is always present: one need only think of the
honours to the fallen, included more or less in the military ceremonies of all armies. And
that which, with an efficacious French expression, one can say with the phrase le mort
saisit le vif (the dead seizes the living).
(7) See Stouffer, 1950.
(8) Winslow (1999) cites in this regard the example of the Canadian parachutists studied by her,
who included in their rites of passage a Zulu war dance, in use in the British military, who
derive the Zulu warrior practice from the English troops deployed in the Boer War in South
Africa at the turn of the last century.
(9) See Caforio, 2006.
(10) Rites of passage are present, of course, in many other contexts (colleges, sports teams, etc.),
but they rarely have the same importance and significance that they have in the military.
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