“What Young Men and Women Do When Their Country is Attacked”: Interventionist Discourse and the Rewriting of Violence in Adolescent Literature of the Iraq War

This article examines recent adolescent literature of the Iraq War, arguing that these texts contribute to interventionist discourse in two key ways. First, they describe the Iraq War and the soldier’s experience in language that evokes tenets of interventionist discourse, casting it as an appropriate response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, as a humanitarian mission, and as an intervention in which it is appropriate for dutiful, patriotic young Americans to participate. Simultaneously, each text acknowledges but revises controversial moments of violence that have dominated media coverage of the Iraq war and have shaped the growing opposition to it.