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

Introduction

Introduction Being a Soldier makes me proud, it’s the in between part that can be tough. —from the military blog “American Soldier,” posted 29 January 2006 Near the end of Jarhead, his 2003 memoir of the Persian Gulf War, Marine infantryman Anthony Swofford writes about celebrating with his company when they learn that the war is suddenly over. “The music plays throughout the day, Hendrix, the Stones, the Who, music from a different war,” he complains. “Ours is barely over but we begin to tell stories already” (335). Like many other soldiers from the Gulf War and the Iraq War, Swofford finds himself drawn to 1960s rock and roll and other touchstones of the Vietnam era, yet he is eager to show how this war, his war, is unique. He is effectively “in between” the old war stories and the new one that he and his fellow soldiers will help to tell. The only thing to do, as he and his comrades demonstrate, is to start talking. Most people have become familiar with what life was like for a soldier in Vietnam through the popular representations of that war. Films like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket as well as books by Philip Caputo, Michael Herr, and Tim O’Brien follow the experiences of young men, usually drafted into service, encountering thick jungle, guerrilla warfare, and rock 2 Introduction and roll, while gradually descending into disillusionment and political cynicism. It is an engaging narrative, and a pervasive one. But as Swofford notes, the soldier’s experience in Iraq is a different story. This book explores this new war story in prose, poetry, and films about the American soldier’s experience in the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War—or, in soldier’s lingo, in “the Suck.” Among the many changes in the soldier’s experience, such as the effects of large-scale advances in medical and communications technology and the greatly increased presence of women in the military, what is most evident in these narratives is the soldier ’s desire to be truly “in between,” to break down and transcend the cultural and social categories that have traditionally defined identity. Ultimately , however, that desire is thwarted. War, and contemporary American war in particular, enforces categorization even as it forces encounters across the boundaries of media, gender, nation, and the body. Different wars make for different stories, although some elements of the war experience are constants. Accounts from Homer to O’Brien describe the soldier’s initiation into battle and how he begins to identify himself as a fighter. They reveal how life as a soldier affects his conception of manhood or masculinity. War can make (or unmake) the man—and today it is a proving ground for women as well. Stories of war depict the soldier’s encounters with the enemy and with the civilians of another culture , groups that are not always easily distinguished from one another. And they portray the aftermath of war, a homecoming that in many cases is shaped by physical or mental trauma. But these features of life as a soldier are experienced and expressed differently in different wars. Think how the shock of the trenches for new soldiers reared on Kipling has come to define World War I, or how the Vietnam War affected our national perception of disability. Stories from contemporary American wars—the Persian Gulf War and the much lengthier Iraq War—are only now beginning to be told. This new narrative, as stories about war always do, reveals what it means to fight in a particular war as well as how that fighting reflects the politics and culture of the nation. (The war in Afghanistan predates the Iraq War and will likely outlast it, as political and military attention shifts to that conflict during the Obama presidency. But to date, that war has inspired fewer and less prominent works of literature and film than the wars in Iraq.) This book explores the different aspects of the contemporary American soldier’s experience while paying particular attention to a paradox of these Introduction 3 late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century wars. The soldiers fighting in the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars and represented in these narratives have grown up in a culture of mediation, where it has been more acceptable than ever before to subvert or transcend traditional categories and norms of behavior, gender, and ethnicity. Similarly, developments in...