-
Six. Reading War on the Body: The Example of Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
262 chapter six Reading War on the Body The Example of Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country We do not need their testimony. Our own scars and stumps of limbs are witness enough for others and for ourselves. —John Kerry If you can’t believe the veteran who fought the war and was wounded in the war, who can you believe? —Ron Kovic War can be war without feeling like war. —Miriam Cooke I don’t think you have to live through a trauma to understand it. —Maya Lin When the subject is war, who has the knowledge, the authority—the right— to speak? Few questions can carry more civic, political, and moral urgency in an age such as ours, when war has come to threaten not just individual human lives but all human life and perhaps all life on Earth as well. We all have an enormous stake in who gets to talk about war or, more precisely, in who gets to be heard talking about it, pronouncing judgment on it, telling stories about it, defining it, declaring it—and declaring it ended. Over the centuries, soldiers, politicians, artists, and other citizens have turned to the body for answers to this crucial question. Indeed, as demonstrated by the epigraphs from John Kerry and Ron Kovic, Vietnam veterans who have both gone on to play active roles in American politics, speaking parts in the political drama of war are still routinely associated with specific somatic credentials and are awarded or withheld largely on the basis of their presence or absence. More specifically, Kerry and Kovic suggest that war veterans bear credentials that especially entitle them to such speaking roles. Whether scarred, stumped, crippled, poisoned, pierced, burned, or simply marked by Reading War on the Body 263 the less visceral but still visible insignia of medals, stripes, and badges, the veteran’s body has traditionally been understood to offer irrefutable material proof of a unique right to enter and shape discourse on war. After all, as Kovic points out, if you can’t trust a wounded veteran to tell it to you straight about war, who can you trust? This unique entitlement rests on what historian Eric J. Leed has called a “myth of experience” in which “the knowledge gained in experience” is presumed to be “inseparable from the person who learns, and uncommunicable to those who have not shared the experience” (28). Whatever and wherever war is understood to be, in other words, the veteran is quintessentially one who has been “there,” one whose body witnesses that he knows firsthand whereof he speaks. Under the terms of this myth, this “unchanging metanarrative ” that Miriam Cooke calls the “War Story” (43), veterans enjoy a legitimacy and privilege that make their words on war especially significant.1 This has even been true of the academic study of war and war writing, in which veterans have emerged as leading scholarly commentators on the literature of the world wars, the Korean War, and especially the Vietnam War.2 But the veterans’ rightful access to subject positions where war is concerned also harbors the potential to become a monopoly over them, to reduce those whose bodies are situated differently relative to war—the men, women, and children who ostensibly “have not shared the experience” of armed conflict—to the status of uninitiated “civilians.” In this scenario, civilians become those who must be protected from war experience (and from the knowledge, responsibility , authority, and power that go along with it) and who, in a vicious double bind, may be deemed unqualified to offer opinions about the experiences they are thereby “protected” from having. This is a dilemma I feel acutely, as a teacher and critic struggling with contemporary representations of war and as a person whose identity was to an important extent forged in the historical crucible of war—a war, however, that I did not experience “firsthand” and indeed barely registered at all on a conscious level. Born late in 1961, I was not yet four years old when the massive troop escalations of 1965 catapulted the Vietnam War into American popular consciousness, barely six when the Tet Offensive of 1968 shook the confidence of U.S. citizens in the war effort, eleven when the Paris Accords were signed in 1973, and only thirteen when Saigon fell in 1975. No one in my immediate family, or in the families of my friends, fought or even served in Vietnam...