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

4. One of U.S.: Combat Trauma on Film in Alive Day Memories and In the Valley of Elah

4 One of U.S. Combat Trauma on Film in Alive Day Memories and In the Valley of Elah The experience of war doesn’t always end after the soldier returns home. The life of a veteran is different both from the life of a soldier and from that of a civilian, although the social and political acknowledgement of that difference is by no means a given. The years during and after the Vietnam War brought the figure of the veteran, and in particular the physically disabled veteran, into the public eye in new ways. Popular representations like Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Ron Kovic’s best-selling autobiography Born on the Fourth of July (1976), which was adapted for the screen in 1989, told stories about disabled vets that were both compelling and sympathetic. Since that time our understanding of the physically and mentally traumatic effects of war has continued to grow, yet the result of that understanding is not always the appropriate or even adequate availability of treatment. Physically disabled veterans, for instance, have become much more socially and politically visible, yet during the Iraq War the resources for their rehabilitation have been revealed to be scandalously lacking. In February 2007 Dana Priest and Ann One of U.S. 137 Hull of the Washington Post published a special report on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center that described the facility as overcrowded and bureaucratically bogged down, as critically injured veterans struggled for even the most basic medical care. Psychological care for veterans is also much needed but often deficient. A study by the RAND Corporation, released in April 2008, revealed that nearly 20 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or major depression. Slightly more than half of those soldiers seek help for their symptoms; others fear that acknowledging the problem would hurt their careers. But even among those who do, only about half of that number receive help that researchers consider “minimally adequate” for their illnesses (“One in Five”). Trauma generally, and physical disability in particular, are often discussed with reference to the tropes of vision or visibility. How much damage is or is not seen? What exists in or out of the “public eye”? How do these bodies and identities function as objects of the non-traumatized and non-disabled gaze? Appropriately, given this connection to vision, these aspects of the war (and post-war) experience have been explored on-screen. Among a number of films in 2007 dealing with the Iraq War, HBO’s documentary Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq and Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah both place physical and mental trauma and the homecomings they engender in the glare of the spotlight. In Alive Day, this glare is literal, as James Gandolfini interviews ten veterans whose disabilities range from triple amputation to severe traumatic brain injury and are shown unveiled by dim lighting, camera angles, or concealing clothing. Elah follows a father’s quest to uncover the circumstances of the death of his son, who was killed while AWOL in America. As the film progresses, the father pieces together fragments of a portrait of combat trauma and its aftermath that is finally rendered tragically clear. These soldiers’ stories emphasize their access to technology both during and after war, in the form of sophisticated prostheses as well as digital media. These technologies carry the promise of transcendence—theoretically, one can communicate easily with loved ones by sending messages, pictures, and e-mail, thus bridging the long distance between the war front and the home front, or make oneself whole again with artificial limbs that allow for mobility and independence. (The idea that anyone, traumatized or not, can ever achieve “wholeness” or “normality” has been critiqued by disability 138 Chapter 4 scholars like Lennard Davis; nonetheless, the desire for that status is still a common element in these kinds of personal narratives.) These two films, however, demonstrate the inevitable difficulties of healing minds and bodies that have been fragmented by war. Technology isn’t always the answer for the self—though it may be, as it turns out, for the story. In both films soldiers’ use of digital technologies is a prominent narrative element, and those soldiers’ images and videos of the war experience “fill in the gaps,” so to speak, in these stories of trauma, allowing the audience to...