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

2. Making a Military Man: Iraq, Gender, and the Failure of the Masculine Collective

2 Making a Military Man Iraq, Gender, and the Failure of the Masculine Collective What makes a man? It’s an old question, but the critic Susan Jeffords frames it in a new way. What, she asks, does a man make? Jeffords has argued that during and after the Vietnam War, the power of the masculine collective, a community forged in war and represented extensively back home in the United States, effectively remade or “remasculinized” the American cultural landscape. Jeffords’s argument leads us to a consideration of our contemporary moment, and the stories some soldiers have told about their service in the wars in Iraq. How do they represent themselves and, more particularly, their gender, after their experience of violence and war? Does her argument still apply to these new American wars and their effect on American culture? In fact, things have changed. Several of the memoirists writing about Iraq emphasize the ruptures in their own sense of masculine identity and the corollary failure of the masculine collective, indicating a different experience of gender and culture than Jeffords identifies in and after Vietnam. In this chapter, I consider memoirs by three veterans. Joel Turnipseed was 50 Chapter 2 a Marine reservist during the Persian Gulf War who worked in the Sixth Motor Transport Battalion, or “Baghdad Express,” and later published a memoir by that name in 2003. Nathaniel Fick was a Marine Corps officer who served in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, and published One Bullet Away in 2005. Kayla Williams, one of the growing number of female soldiers serving in the military, worked as an Arabic translator for Army military intelligence in Iraq, and her memoir Love My Rifle More Than You appeared in 2005. Turnipseed, Fick, and Williams all struggle with their conceptions of masculinity, and military masculinity in particular. Notably, each describes gender and masculinity as a kind of performance rather than an essential quality, which would perhaps indicate a greater freedom or at least flexibility with regard to gender norms. Turnipseed explicitly discusses his desire to use dress, speech, and text to “act the part” that he wants to play, while Fick identifies his competence and worth as a soldier in his ability to perform the role of the hard military man. Williams’s narrative in particular demonstrates her desire to reach across gender boundaries and be considered a true brother in arms. But in each case, the writer’s performance of masculinity fails to be sustainable or sustaining in the context of war. Turnipseed, Fick, and Williams all describe that failure as well as the sense of isolation from their fellow soldiers that occurs as either cause or effect. Theorists of cultural performance like Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, and Judith Halberstam celebrate the freedom that comes, they argue, when we decide to play a role, and particularly when we manipulate and vary the role that we play.1 Obviously, however, some venues are more amenable than others to this kind of experimentation . Creating order out of the chaos of war often necessitates many forms of binary thinking. If one does not define oneself against the enemy, for instance, one will not be an effective soldier—that is, one will not be able to kill. And that need for binaries creeps into other aspects of the soldier’s experience and identity. So what does make a man? Mark Twain famously asserted that what makes a man is his wardrobe, because “naked people have little or no influence on society” (6). Though in these paparazzi-saturated days the latter part of his statement may no longer hold true, certainly the construction of appearance and the cultural assumptions associated with fashion, grooming , bearing, and accessories are significant elements in a critical discussion Making a Military Man 51 of masculinity. In war, however, it is commonly understood that what makes a military man is a little more than just his uniform. The initiation into the military includes the requisite haircut, assignment of a service number, and issuing of equipment and, of course, standard clothing. All this begins the process of “soldierization,” or the identification of the self as soldier—but the completion of that process is understood in more abstract terms. In notable cases, becoming a complete military man means achieving the status of a hero, standing out as exceptional within the larger machine of war. The hero is typically one who fights with great skill...