Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. These observations might be guided by a writer like Jonathan Shay, whose book Achilles in Vietnam notes the parallels between Achilles’s experience of the Trojan War as described by Homer and the oral histories of Vietnam War veterans. Both ancient and modern warriors feel the sting of a commander’s betrayal, the surreal thrill of a berserker rage, and the devastation of losing a close comrade. Homer also has much to teach us, argues Shay, about the importance of honoring the enemy and the necessity of grieving for the dead. 2. I have written about Jones’s description of combat numbness, and how that phenomenon is left out of both the 1964 and 1998 film adaptations of The Thin Red Line, in an article titled “The Other World of War: Malick’s Adaptation of The Thin Red Line.” 3. O’Brien’s is one of the more sophisticated answers to what Frederic Jameson has called war’s “nominalist dilemma: the abstraction from totality or the here and now of sensory immediacy and confusion” (1532). Jan Mieszkowski has written similarly about the relation between “a battle as something processed with the senses (the ‘visibility’) and a battle as something grasped through logical or narratological abstractions (its ‘recountability’)” (1649). O’Brien embraces that dilemma. 4. Tom Schatz treats this subject in some detail in “World War II and the Hollywood ‘War Film.’” 5. Another blog, “Sgt. Stryker: Support Our Troops,” with entries dating back to March 2007, seems to be unrelated. 176 Notes to Pages 11–35 6. In a footnote, he notes a sixth type of content, the “dissenting soldier testimony: Iraq war veterans bearing public witness to dark war experiences, such as killing unarmed civilians with the consent of their superiors.” This final type of video, however, does not actually show images documenting the controversial aspects of war, and thus falls outside of the scope of his article. 7. Quotations from Salam Pax and Riverbend are drawn from the published versions of their blogs—Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi and Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq.Theblogsarestillaccessibleonlineatdear_raed.blogspot.comandriverbendblog.blogspot.com, but not all of the original entries have been maintained. The published books also include introductions and, in the case of Riverbend’s, historical commentary to provide context for her entries. 8. The military has adapted games for its own use, and game companies have likewise earned huge profits creating scenarios based on war and the military. Chris Suellentrop has written that video games about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are “blockbusters,” and that in 2010 games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are “the most popular fictional depictions of America’s current wars” (62). 1. Lines of Sight 1. In some ways, Swofford and Buzzell are doing the opposite of what Tania Modleski has argued should be done with horror movies. Horror is often characterized as fairly vapid, a vehicle for insipid pleasure and the affirmation of mainstream values. But, Modleski argues, films like Halloween should be watched with an eye to the ways they can be critically energizing, “as apocalyptic and nihilistic, as hostile to meaning, form, pleasure, and the specious good as many types of high art” (771). Swofford and Buzzell reverse that directive—instead of watching seemingly pleasurable films for critical purposes, they take films intended as critical and political statements and watch them purely for pleasure. 2. Baudrillard misses the potent combination of satisfaction and anticipation that watching war can evoke, particularly when he claims that “the Persian Gulf War did not take place.” According to him, it was a “virtual war,” a war “stripped of its passions,” watched but not felt—at least not by the American government or the audience of noncombatants (Gulf War 64). American civilians may indeed have found the Gulf War “empty,” an “unreal war where nothing is extreme,” and thus neither compelling nor satisfying, but the soldier’s perspective is notably different (33). Representations of war can become empty for soldiers as well, though not as a result of the “multiplication of fakes and the hallucination of violence” that Baudrillard diagnoses (Gulf War 75), the loss of distinction between the real and the image that he also sees in films like Apocalypse Now (Simulacra 59–60). Instead, those representations empty out precisely because they differ so much from the experience of real war. 3. See Kakutani, Malcolm Jones, and Caldwell. 4. Mulvey argues that the tension between the...