According to the realist tradition in International Relations, the use of military violence by a state is mostly to be considered as a rational response to an identifiable threat or to the rise of a peer-competitor. Mainstream research the organizational behavior of the armed forces, for their part, usually focuss on how institutions implement policies rather than how their consruct reprentations of the enemy. Contemporary conflits, as the ones of the years 2000 in Afghanistan and Iraq, have however shown how illusive the idea of an easily recognizable adversary is on the battefields. Ultimately, it seems that the decision to interprate who, in practice, is the enemy rest on the soldiers shoulders. Using a broad range of American soldiers testimonies taken from their memoirs, our contribution's aim is to explore the criterions and registers used by soldiers to select their targets.
