by Roy Scranton
I did basic and advanced individual training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where I learned to operate the targeting computer that would be the focus of my military occupational specialty. I was a 13P, which is a combat arms MOS, but one of the nerdier ones. It would be my job to sit in a tracked vehicle behind the lines and send down targeting data to the giant multiple-launch-rocket-systems launchers, which would then fire long-range rockets armed with air-dispersed antipersonnel bomblets deep into enemy territory.
I’d gotten station-of-choice in my contract, so after AIT I headed for Germany, where I was assigned to the First Armored Division (“Old Ironsides”). Soon after arriving, I was made the battery commander’s driver and unit armorer. I found myself suddenly responsible for half a million dollars of weapons and electronics I had no idea how to take care of. I knew how to maintain an M16 and vaguely remembered taking apart a SAW once in basic, but I was completely boggled by the Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher, the M2 .50 caliber machine gun, and all our night-vision goggles, coding machines, and GPS devices. As if the weapons weren’t confusing enough, I also had to keep track of what got issued to whom and puzzle out the arcane Army bureaucracy involved in trying to get anything fixed. The previous armorer had given me two days of training before he split back to the States; my first-line supervisor, the unit supply sergeant who should have been my mentor, spoke a kind of English incomprehensible to non-Spanish speakers and spent most of his time cruising internet dating sites.
Over that fall and winter, I was so busy, overwhelmed by new responsibilities, frantically trying to learn the ropes, and taking two college classes on top of it all, that I hardly had any energy left to worry about the impending war with Iraq. When we were told for sure we’d be going, though, the formerly distracted curiosity with which we’d faced the future turned in an instant to an ominously solemn sense of fate.
We deployed to Kuwait in May 2003, then drove from there to Baghdad. Since the fighting war was over and our MLRS rockets all but useless, we were tasked to “needs of the Army.” We worked a variety of missions: picking up old Iraqi mortar and artillery rounds, running IED patrols, and assisting cordon-and-search operations, among others. I was transferred from the arms room, which, since we all carried our weapons with us anyway, was merely storage, and spent my tour driving a Humvee.
To be honest, those brutal, maddening days in Baghdad in the summer of 2003, when I thought every morning I was going to die, were some of the sweetest and purest of my life. Each moment gleamed with transcendent splendor. I knew it was pure danger, just adrenaline and focus, and that over time my body and mind would lose the ability to cope with the stress. I knew that, as with any drug, I would develop a certain tolerance. Yet none of that changed the fact that I drove through the city with sparkly eyes, alive to the trees’ shadows cutting the street, the aching, tender curve of a baker’s Arabic neon sign, the lugubrious sweep of the gray-green Tigris, the manic systemic flow of traffic like waves, the ebb and pulse of foreign bodies.
Nor was I merely passive to the glory—I was action, movement, life itself. I could feel the shudder in the wheel at 50 mph through bumper-to-bumper rush, just my fingers on the column and my foot tapping lightly gas-to-brake as I swung two tons of steel around a truck piled twenty feet high with bricks, brushing between it and a van full of Iraqis, all of them gaping, maybe an inch on either side. Sweet like sex, the gut-grinning crunch of ramming a civilian car, angels singing as I sped through jammed intersections without stopping, God’s own righteousness when I picked up my rifle to take a man in my sights.
Everything miserable and beautiful at once.
On the road, in the mix of it, I was pure motion. I did not wonder who I was or what I had to do or think about tomorrow. My fate was held in hidden hands and my horizon limited to the rising and setting sun. I saw we had to die and it was foolish to deny it. I saw our lives were merely preparation for the emptiness to come. I saw how all was vanity, how nothing mattered except forthrightness of purpose and motion. I saw how ridiculous we animals were to think ourselves so civilized, to think our words and thoughts mattered, when really we were nothing more than complicated meat, counting-beasts puzzling ourselves with specious enigmas. I saw we were nothing but guts and eyeballs, and the closer we lived in our skin, the more beautiful we became. I saw that the true glory of existence was in being free from existence itself, free from attachment, free from loss. I saw that only in the purity of fearless, thoughtless action were we truly alive.
The feeling passed. As the year wore on, I saw futures extending beyond the brilliance of those strange and dangerous days. I began to want to live again, finish school, write more, get married, maybe have kids. I wanted something more than the blur of the moment and the pseudo-truths of adrenaline and terror. I grew attached again to existence.
After the chaotic summer and fall of 2003, Baghdad seemed to calm. In early 2004, we ran patrols in the al-Dora neighborhood on the south side and I thought perhaps the door had opened to peace and stability. There were fewer bombings, ambushes, and attacks; the streets seemed quieter, the people less fearful and surly. My unit prepared to redeploy to Germany, and I looked back over my time in Iraq with a sense of relief and achievement. In simply making it through, in riding out the fear I felt every time we’d crossed the wire, in taking on a kind of hardness, and in learning to push myself past my limits, I’d proven whatever it was I’d needed to prove.
I have a picture of myself standing by my Humvee on an overpass in Baghdad, taken one afternoon when we’d set up an ad hoc traffic control point. I’ve got my M-16 and grenade launcher hanging across my body armor, and I’m standing looking into the distance like some dauntless conqueror, some Cortés, Ozymandias, or Alexander. My helmet’s slightly too small for my head, and my fatigue pants are too big and baggy, giving me a clownish, dumpy, sort of pinhead look. I make a ridiculous soldier.
Yet I did my job. I moved when I was called upon. I stood fast when I was needed to stand fast. I felt I’d accomplished what I’d come for—my dad, after all, had gotten no closer to Vietnam than two nights spent on a destroyer tender in Da Nang harbor.
Unfortunately, we weren’t done. Just before we were to leave, in the spring of 2004, Iraq erupted again into violence. Sunni fighters took Fallujah, captured four mercenaries, killed them, set their bodies on fire, and hung them from a bridge, while closer to home Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army took to the streets of Baghdad with RPGs and rifles. I was on the truck to go to the airport to fly back to Germany when we were told to download our gear. We had new orders, extending us in-country indefinitely.
The last few months in Baghdad, we mostly drove convoy security between the Baghdad airport and Karbala. I was bitter and angry; I felt I’d done my part, and I wanted to go home before I got killed. I was sick of Iraq, the army, my rifle, my boots, and the tension in every mission somewhere between boredom and terror.
After some weeks, I finally made it back to Germany, passed the sergeant’s promotion board, and was transferred to Fort Sill. Through pure luck, I dodged another deployment and spent the rest of my time in the army training privates, going to sergeants’ school, taking college courses, studying for the GRE, and applying to universities. I also began a novel about my war, typing away in the dark hours before first formation.
In April 2006, I threw my desert boots in a dumpster and took a flight to Berlin, leaving the war behind—or so I thought. The truth was, I’d just begun learning how to carry it with me.
5.
It’s been a long four years, writing, thinking, reading, trying to understand the connection between thought and deed, who I was and who I became and why we use certain words for things. I’ve struggled with the ideas of innocence and experience, trauma and revelation, fiction and truth. I’m still not sure how to remember my war. I’m unsure about a lot of things.
My gravest doubt, to echo the soldier and philosopher J. Gle
nn Gray, is whether I’ve learned anything from my war at all. In the end, my adrenaline-drenched days driving through Baghdad, my moments of terror and hell-bent fury, and my chilling scrapes with death were just more mere human existence, a dazzled bath of glandular chemicals, nothing sublime.
I got my war stories, but I didn’t find any authentic bedrock I could stand on and say, “This is real.” I found no soldier’s faith, no concrete names of villages. How we understand and account for violence, death, and destruction seems just as contingent and convention-ridden as any other aspect of human culture, and the notion that there’s another “really real reality” somehow reachable beyond the physical, mental, and cultural constructs shaping our being in the world seems wholly naive. We find in war what we want to, what we expect, what we’ve been trained to see.
What’s troubling, though, is that I’ve continued to want to believe, however tenuously, that I’ve had some sort of revelatory and existential encounter with “truth.” I must have learned something profound, some steely-hearted Hobbesian revelation about the “way things really are,” some peek into the heart of darkness, or at least something important about myself—right? Maybe, I tell myself, I just haven’t figured it out yet. And how do I explain my disappointment in having to wonder whether or not I’ve had a revelation?
Equally troubling, I’ve found the moral authority imputed to me as a veteran gratifying and am reluctant to give it up, even though it depends on this very idea of an encounter with truth I don’t wholly believe in. I like how it sets me apart, how people assume I know something they don’t, how my war has made me special. Over time, I’ve gotten used to dropping Iraq into conversation like bait, and while this is certainly an improvement over the nervous, angry silence I lived in before, if I’d seen then the way I use it now, I would have been appalled at my easy cynicism.
Just a few years ago, I wanted to shout in people’s faces. Now I walk down Sixth Avenue carrying my dirty little war like a card I hand over for credit. It doesn’t buy anything on its own, but it does change the calculus: the Post Office gives veterans ten free points on their civil service exam; being a vet, having been to Iraq, gives me similar points in all kinds of ways, from publishing articles to sleeping with women. It might have even helped me get into graduate school.
And what’s wrong with that? It’s what I went for. I’d joined the army so I could write with authority not just about war but about history, love, life, meaning, and truth. George Orwell, Sam Fuller, Norman Mailer—these are the men I followed, men who went to battle in some sense already wanting to be writers. The tradition goes back to Hemingway at least—Hemingway the self-aggrandizing con artist who spent all of six weeks at the front, as a nurse, before getting himself blown up. He didn’t even carry a rifle. I was in Iraq for thirteen months and had a grenade launcher—why shouldn’t I own that moral authority? Or at least, if I think it’s a question, step up and put it on the line.
So here it is on the line.
I had an easy deployment. I didn’t kill anybody. I never even fired my weapon in combat. I mostly drove around Baghdad. I saw nasty things and met some nasty people. I got shot at. I twisted my ankle. Some of my fellow soldiers didn’t come back in one piece, and some didn’t come back at all. I remember the UN building’s wreckage after it got car-bombed, Humvees burning on Route Irish, the sound of incoming mortar rounds, blood, smoke, and fear.
I remember hating the Iraqis. Hadjis, we called them, and it took me a few years to train myself out of using the word. I remember learning to despise weakness, incompetence, and stupidity—not least because they could get me killed—and learning to enjoy feeling pain and inflicting it on others, not least because it could help me stay alive. I remember the posturing and machismo of military culture and how I was so frightened of being deemed not manly enough, not brave enough, not tough enough, that I hid my love for poetry, my checkered hippie past, and much else besides.
Coming back from Iraq on leave through Dallas–Fort Worth, I remember being disturbed by all the people thanking me for my service. I remember dusty bodies in Baghdad streets. I remember standing with pride when I got pinned sergeant. I remember the day I got out and left Fort Sill, feeling so light, free, and full of hope, yet stricken with an unexpected and deeply unwelcome sense of loss. I remember the faces of friends I’ll never see again.
Mostly I was lucky. I got everything I wanted: I got my college money; I got my teeth fixed; I saw the dirty work of empire up close, did it with my own two hands and learned its moral cost; I felt the ultimate exhilaration Winston Churchill spoke of, that of being shot at and missed; I saw the chaos of war and wrote a novel about it.
I proved to myself I was man enough, whatever that means. The last time I saw my dad was at my sister’s wedding in October 2006. He tried to talk to me and I cut him down. As if seeing him for the first time, I understood in a flash what kind of man he would have been in the service: a braggart, competent but lazy, noisy, untrustworthy, a moral coward. The roles we’d played in my childhood were now reversed: instead of me not meeting his standard of what a man was, now he failed to meet mine.
Since then, I’ve continued to struggle with what things mean, what a man is or what truth is, but with a difference. My struggle now is no longer merely in my soul but in the world. Rather than treading water in a metaphysical sea, my feet are planted on the simple, quotidian earth. With this body comes mortality, an end and eventual rot, but also the concreteness of human being, our animal life and breathing thoughts. [2010]
Memories of My Green Machine
War has its own logic.
—J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors
Memory: “The insights of one hour are blotted out by the events of the next, and few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the momentous truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling. This is especially true of men at war.”1
My Green Machine 1: Unarmored but armed, woodland camo with olive drab liner, Charlie 6, a standard-issue M998 HMMWV. I drove it through traffic-choked, smoky Baghdad streets at the head of the convoy, waiting for the blacktop to explode in shrapnel and fire, watching overpasses for ambushes and rooftops for snipers, watching hadjis for sudden swerves. I gripped the wheel and tapped the gas, weaving unstopping through crowded intersections, feeling tires grip the road and weight shift from right to left. Every morning I opened the hood and lovingly ran hands along belts, rubbed oil between fingers, traced lineaments and undercarriage with tender eyes.
Posthumanism: Something has happened to “Man.” Whether understood as “the subject,” as “the human,” as “Modern Man,” or “Western White Male Hegemonic Identity Discourses,” the problem of “Man” has been brought to a new pitch by various thinkers, more recent than Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx, and the political question of our anthro-ontology has been raised to the status of imminent dilemma. We are, we’re told, postmodern cyborgs engaged in apocalyptic biopolitics: “For millennia,” writes Foucault, “man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with an additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”2 Auschwitz, according to Agamben, has confronted us with the “metaphysical task par excellence,” the “‘politicization’ of bare life.”3 We are decentered, fragmented, fluid, part thing and part animal, primitive and modern at once: “Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘The Animal’ or ‘Animal Life’”—and we should add here “The Object,” “The Parliament of Things,” “Commodity Life,” and even “Technological Man”—“there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living . . . a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead, relations of organization or lack of organization among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death
.”4 We are, we are told, posthuman.
All this seems more or less taken for granted, as if in the realm of ideas the forces arrayed against anthrocarniphallogocentrism themselves formed a theoretical hegemony unwilling to confront the conditions of its possibility. Critics have come out to give the critics a good critique. Neil Badmington argues that posthumanism is not quite ready for prime time: “Posthumanism . . . needs theory, needs theorizing, needs above all to reconsider the untimely celebration of the absolute end of ‘Man.’”5 Daniel T. O’Hara asserts that posthumanist theorists have misread their Foucault, ditching his nihilistic Nietzschean-Heideggerian baggage in order to put him to work toward “liberal or social democratic” progressivism in the service of “all kinds of self-revising subjectivities,” and argues that many of posthumanism’s “prophetic discourses” are in fact not posthuman at all, but very much within a deeply humanistic Romanticism.6 And Derrida, true to form, questions whether we have even begun to question the questions behind our question: “It is thus not a matter of opposing another discourse on the same ‘things’ to the enormous multiplicity of traditional discourses on man, animal, plant, or stone, but of ceaselessly analyzing the whole conceptual machinery, and its interestedness, which has allowed us to speak of the ‘subject’ up to now.”7
Yet something has happened. I would hazard, in fact, that it happened some time ago. On the “crisis of representation,” Bernd Hüppauf writes: “The experience of the dissolution of subjectivity and its traditional patterns of orientation and values, the transformation of modes of perception, and the destruction of vast areas of landscape and experience of time and space have become constitutive elements of modern consciousness . . . It seemed impossible to restore the human face after it had been mutilated in the outburst of destruction after 1914.”8 Rather than maybe washing away on some beach in the future, then, perhaps the human has already passed—blown to pieces almost a century ago in a dismal and muddy gray trench.9