Rotor Hearts: The Helicopter as Postmodern War's Pacemaker

Airmobility, dig it, you weren't going anywhere. It made you feel safe, it made you feel Omni, but it was only a stunt, technology. Mobility was just mobility, it saved lives or took them all the time.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

Blades thumping rhythmically, the Bell UH-1 "Huey" Iroquois helicopter, one of the many war craft carrying America into 1960s Vietnam, flies across the abyss between the late mechanization of World War II and the current virtuality of cyberwar in transparent battlespace. The gas-turbine-powered Huey turboshaft rotor marks an event in early-postmodern war, as America once again finds itself both through and in high technology. The rotor that turned lazily during the early days of battle in Vietnam is now running at full throttle, holding aloft the Boeing Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche stealth helicopter as it flies backward, banks vertically, and slips sideways, sliding fluidly through the battlefield of C⁴ I² (command, control, communication, computing, intelligence, and interoperability). The spinning machine typifies what Chris Gray (1997: 50) calls postmodern war, a constellation of "computation and information, the increases in speed, the proliferation of contradictory trends, strange marriages and alliances, machine mediations of culture."

In this essay, I approach the helicopter as a sign of postmodern war from a phenomenological perspective.Initially, the helicopter seems to be yet another piece of war technology; but that appearance dissolves in the face of the machine's fluidity, its unusual construction, the quality of its fragile body, and the rotor heart—not in any way a human one—that lifts that body into early-postmodern war.

Air Born

The helicopter is an unlikely war tool: delicately structured with an almost papery aluminum skin, its power plant and hydraulics requiring endless hours of tuning, the aircraft body veined by exposed fuel lines and connector rods, as if the ship's organs had been everted to make arteries and tendons visible. The helicopter's fleet ductility matches well with battlefield chaos, or what Carl von Clausewitz (1989: 119) famously called the friction of war. It is liminal technology—neither a jet nor a tank—yet able to act as both on account of its capacity to deliver high explosives and rockets and to move over impassable terrain.

But the helicopter also presents itself as an aeronautic disaster.

My senses were overwhelmed by the clamor and bouncing and vibrations of the H-23 [Hiller piston-engine helicopter]. The blades whirled crazily overhead; parts studied in ground school in static drawings now spun relentlessly and vibrated, powered by the roaring, growling engine behind my back. All the parts wanted to go their own way, but somehow the instructor was controlling them, averaging their various motions into a position three feet above the grass. We floated above the ground, gently rising and falling on an invisible sea. (Mason 1984: 31)

In Robert Mason's account, the machine appears to be chaos reified, an object at war with itself ("all the parts wanted to go their own way"). The helicopter demands the user's complete attention: both feet control pedals that direct the rudder and stabilizer, one hand holds the collective, a sort of combined joystick, rotor-control, throttle, and radio key, while the other attends to the cockpit switches. The powered helicopter is about motion ("whirled crazily," "spun relentlessly") and noise ("clamor," "growling"). Without power, the helicopter, unlike most fixed-wing aircraft, becomes a barely controllable dropping rock. The only thing that balances all of the forces is the pilot's calm mathematical direction, indicated by Mason's use of the word averaging. Significantly, the craft floats "on an invisible sea," thereby anticipating images of fluidity in discussions of contemporary battlespace (United States Army 1994: 2.9-2.10).

The Hiller's reciprocating engine keeps the helicopter tethered to the earth; the machine will not fly into the new world of liminal air space until the arrival of the turbine-powered Huey...