What is ethnography in times of war? How does war shape the conditions and possibilities of ethnographic research? How do the exigencies of daily life in a war zone ultimately prescribe and restrict what kinds of research can be done? In the following essay, I reflect on my experiences conducting ethnographic fieldwork in southeastern Turkey in unexpected wartime conditions. During the two years that I spent in the field, a series of local and national crises disrupted a fragile peace that had lasted for the previous few years. Confronted with disaster after disaster, I was continually compelled to reevaluate my project—interrogating my research questions, changing my research methods, and assessing whether I would be able to continue my research at all. The war defined my time in the field and dictated the possibilities and limitations of the work that I was able to do. While I had planned to examine earlier histories of violence, ultimately the contemporaneous war and its effects on daily life, the politics of memory, and the landscape became a central focus of my fieldwork.