by Roy Scranton
The soldier is formed not only in the mastery of pain, but also in the training to cause it. As Scarry points out, “In battle . . . the soldier’s primary goal . . . is the injuring of enemy soldiers . . .”50 The soldier must learn how to use force, which, according to Weil, is “that x which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.”51 The way a soldier exercises force and makes corpses is not with his bare hands, but through tools, weapons, the objects that constitute the technology of war. Violence, as Hannah Arendt points out, “is distinguished by its instrumental character.”52 The soldier identifies himself with his technology, his rifle, his body armor, his tank or Humvee, because it is his uniform, while at the same time the material world around him comes to life because now it has the power to kill him, whether through an IED buried under a pile of street trash, “hostile territory,” the unseen fire of a sniper, or the potential failure of his own equipment.53 Meanwhile, he comes to see the enemy as a target, a corpse, something less than human.
Fucking Hadjis: We held them all at gunpoint, making them sit with their hands on their heads. “Don’t fucking look at me,” we shouted. “Eyes on the ground!” Our work crew had turned into our prisoners, because one of them had tried to steal some 9mm rounds from the ammo depot where they worked. “Fucking hadjis,” someone muttered, as we waited for orders from higher. Eventually the lieutenant picked five: the thief, his brother, the leader of the work crew, one guy who’d had nothing to do with it but had been angry and disobedient, and another guy who might’ve known the thief somehow. We zip-stripped their thumbs and put sandbags on their heads and threw them in the back of a truck. We took them back to Battalion, where they were interrogated, then we took them to the MP station. The lieutenant had me help him fill out the paperwork: name, address, next of kin, offense. He had their names scribbled on a notepad, nearly everything else was left blank. The MPs started processing them, shoving each one up against the fence and twisting his arms behind him: “Spread your fucking legs! Don’t fucking look at me! You fucking looking at me?”
By the time the Abu Ghraib photos came out, most of us hated the Iraqis so much, we didn’t really care. Command came down with platitudes about unacceptable behavior, but the rest of us knew the score. They were the enemy, all of them, the whole fucking country, maybe even the kids. “You know what?” one of our sergeants told us. “Fuck ’em.”
The Face of the Enemy: “Since humans relate to each other through social cues, rendering the enemy without (and outwith) society is an essential aspect of setting up a target to be hit,” writes Paul Richards.54 Dehumanizing the enemy is such a common feature of war, in fact, that we can almost take it for granted.55 The enemy is not always defined as subhuman, especially not among professional soldiers who feel they are fighting other professional soldiers, but all too often the image of the enemy’s subhuman status is a central feature of modern war.56 This may have something to do with race, as suggested by Gray, and no doubt the worst acts of dehumanization—both physically and symbolically—occur in colonial or imperial wars. Yet this might also have to do with mass mobilization and the need for propaganda. Shay frames the problem thus:
To our modern mind the enemy is detestable—by definition. “Well, he’s the enemy, ain’t he?” said one veteran. “You couldn’t kill them if you thought he was just like you.” This apparently self-evident truth—that men cannot kill an enemy understood to be honorable and like oneself—is something this veteran learned as part of his culture . . . Vietnam-era military training reflexively imparted the image of a demonized adversary . . .57
As Shay points out quite clearly in his discussion of trauma, dehumanizing the enemy has a real effect on the soldier, making his own objectification darker, meaner, and potentially more destructive. As Gray describes his own experience, “It is not the suffering and dying that sickens [the warrior] so much as it is the brutalization of the emotions and the corruption of the heart which prolonged fighting brings.”58
My Weapon: I watched the man come into my sights, right where I had him set up. Another time, I jammed the rifle stock into my shoulder and aimed at the driver behind the windshield. Another time, all I had to do was chamber a round, pulling back the charging handle with a click and riding it forward, and I got my message across. My big black gun was power incarnate: M16A2 5.56mm rifle with 40mm M203 grenade launcher, well-oiled and fastidiously clean. I took her with me everywhere. I cradled her in my arms and nightly rubbed her down and reached to touch her in my sleep. 11.79 pounds with a thirty-round; I was naked without her. I went home on leave in the middle of my tour, and the whole two weeks I kept coming to with a shock because when I reached for her, she wasn’t there. With my rifle I was a soldier: I could kill, I wielded force, I held power. The Iraqis we moved among were something less, something less potent, something I could push around. Without my rifle I was nothing, a target, merely passive. My rifle gave me my world.
The Worldhood of the Rifle: “Possessions are for the combat soldier his only assurance of protection against a threatening world,” writes Gray. “He cares for them, often with more attention than he pays to his own body.”59 A soldier’s things, from Achilles’s shield to the gear in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, are more than mere tools, more even than just fetishes.60 They are world-forming, in a Heideggerian sense, and world-destroying, as in Scarry’s analysis.61 The rifle reveals a world.62
In Being and Time, Heidegger puts forward a description of the way we encounter “entities in the world” such that they are world-disclosing. “Taken strictly,” he writes, “there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is.”63 He explores this phenomenology from the specific utility of any piece of equipment to the environment toward which and in which said equipment exists.
In roads, streets, bridges, buildings, our concern discovers Nature as having some definite direction. A covered railway platform takes account of bad weather; an installation for public lighting takes account of darkness, or rather of specific changes in the presence or absence of daylight—the “position of the sun.” In a clock, account is taken of some definite constellation in the world-system . . . When we make use of clock-equipment, which is proximally and inconspicuously ready-to-hand, the environing Nature is ready-to-hand along with it.64
Mutatis mutandis, a rifle comes along with a world of conflict and an enemy to be destroyed.
Normally, according to Heidegger, “Things” are phenomenologically ready-to-hand in their daily instrumentality, but they become world-disclosing (or present-to-hand) in their “conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy,” that is, as obstacles, failures, and absences.65 When we encounter the obstacle, failure, or absence of an object, we encounter as if newly seen the “toward-this” toward which the object is directed, “and along with it everything connected with the work—the whole ‘workshop’—as that wherein concern always dwells.”66 This newly-revealed context announces itself as the world.
But in war there is something else: the presence of death and the death-dealing, death-defying, and “civilization-destroying” utility of arms and armor opens the possibility of a greater awareness of the “world” as it is disclosed through the world-destroying character of the equipment involved.67 The soldier’s rifle, that is, is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand at once; the soldier moves in an enchanted world of magical objects, where any common “Thing” has the power to kill, and where the human is always reducible and being reduced to the status of a mere “Thing,” an “object,” a target, a tool, or a corpse. “So, too, the ordinary soldier . . . dwells every day in the midst of determinate wounds and indeterminate meaning.”68 In this liminal world of life and death, where every subject is an object and every object a death-dealing subject, a ref
ined and vivid fetishism is more than an atavistic reflex of the narrative animal. The dangerous, heterogeneous relationships between things and Being, between object, animal, and man, the “multiplicity of organizations among realms,” form the essence of the cyborg soldier’s experience of war. As Gray wrote in 1959, “Those thinkers who believe that a new type of man is bound to emerge as a product of our technological development might well study in detail over the last century the varying relation of men to their weapons of war.”69
Storm of Steel: “The incredible massing of forces in the hour of destiny, to fight for a distant future, and the violence it so surprisingly, stunningly unleashed, had taken me for the first time into the depths of something that was more than mere personal experience. That was what distinguished it from what I had been through before; it was an initiation that had not only opened the red-hot chambers of dread but had also led me through them.”70
Thinking War: The “posthuman” transformation is apocalyptic, emancipatory, dehumanizing, profound. The effect of modern industrial warfare on the soldiers in World War I has been noted, but its effect on thought is widespread, complex, and yet to be made fully clear. Through the deadly heterogeneity of war, our narratives of selfhood are fragmented and reformed in strange, precarious, and threatening ways. One possibility is the creative metamorphosis of individuals within ever-renewing social-cybernetic networks of increasing richness and potential; another possibility is the increasing alienation, atomization, and commodification of the destabilized subject; yet a third possibility, embraced by Heidegger and Jünger, is totalitarianism. There may be others, more or less nihilistic.
Jünger’s embrace of the world of the cyborg soldier raises important questions about the future of that world. According to Hüppauf, “Jünger’s claim in 1963 that many of his observations are no longer surprising or provocative, but have become part of everyday experience, seems justified.”71 One of the most disturbing potential aspects of the posthuman, when taken in its full destructive and creative potential, is that as it manifests itself in death and war making (and the Schumpeterian “creative destruction” of global capital), it constricts the range of human possibility to a narrower and narrower horizon. Paraphrasing Jünger, Kittler writes: “The gestalt of the worker [read: warrior] stalls, brings to a standstill in the sense of challenging, provoking, defying, and hunting down any being in the world—including that eminent being-there, ‘Da-sein,’ which man is.”72 This happens not only in the biopolitics of concentration camps and nuclear missiles, but in the very experience of war itself. The horizon of being contracts and intensifies: time shrinks from days to hours to minutes, space transforms into an ominous world of fetishes and threats, and other people divide into allies and enemies. Thought gives way to matter: in the phenomenological ethos of war, “Thinking tends to become not only painful but more and more unnecessary.”73 When posthumanism goes to war, the war is total. Simone Weil writes:
Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn reintroduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own “war aims.” It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end.74
After-Action Report: The line of the horizon rose and bulged in weird and jagged shapes, framed by drifts and columns of smoke. A great turquoise egg, split as if by a giant, loomed in the distance among the buildings, towers, stacks, minarets, and palaces. Crossed by highways thick with cars, bunched in dense collections of hovels and alleys, scarred by megalomania, occupation, shock and awe, the city met us every day with the same cratered face, verging between a sneer and a smile.
Until I got used to the idea of my own death, until I got used to the randomness of things, I saw wires in every trash bag. Watching my speed, watching the traffic around us, watching for the next exit, watching our escorts, I also watched the trash along the streets, the everywhere garbage and corpses of goats and chunks of concrete and abandoned tires, the filth that could kill me.
The city’s skin: trash and sand and smoke, hiding instant death. Up close, far away. War is no place for imagination. Coming up over the river, the apocalyptic panorama fading into the desert, swinging off the exit back into the mess, crammed junctions, bodies pressed wall-to-wall, narrowed sky and muezzin windows. The sun, the shade, blurs of brown and passing colors, little boys in lavender pants and huddled packs of wives in black burkas.
I already feel like a cliché. My memory feels false: checkpoints, translators, freestyle, friendly fire. But there was nothing false about it then, the flood of light and the fear of death. The truth is, I never got used to it.
The city pulsed around us, a big heart beating traffic and smoke. We were only little things, action figures in the field of play, army guys moved around, scattered by fire, piled up, and boxed away. [2010]
Back to Baghdad
1.
Ali was going to kill me.
I lurched to my feet, groping for my glasses, as a vision flared across the dark: Around six the next evening, I go up the Mansour Mall’s four flights of escalators to the food court, passing on my way glitzy Western-style clothing shops and overpriced Chinese tech stores. The food court is packed, as Meethaq had told me it would be, and I scan the crowds of young Iraqis and Baghdadi families for his face. Meethaq’s going to introduce me to his friend Ali, who worked as a terp for the Americans during the war.
The skin on my neck prickles—I want to leave but I go on, pulled in, anxious but incapable of doing anything different. I pass through segregated clusters of twenty-somethings, the men together in leather-fringed blue jeans, with manicured stubble and faux-hawks, the women on their own, keeping nominal hijab in elaborate colored scarves and high-heeled shoes. People are talking all around me, but their conversations are drowned out by a rising ringing and beating in my ears.
Somewhere between Burger Queen and Pizzarro’s I stop and turn. There he is. I don’t know his face, but he knows mine from the cell-phone picture Meethaq took, and I see the recognition in his eyes as he steps toward me, smiling, one hand reaching for mine, the other reaching in his jacket for the trigger to his explosive belt.
“Allahu akbar,” he says, and turns the world to fire.
As I sat in my Baghdad hotel room in the dark, hours yet from dawn, all the pieces slid into place. First, the location. Mansour Mall had good security, but I was sure that if somebody wanted to sneak in a PBIED (personally borne improvised explosive device), they’d be able to. There had to be at least one service entrance, and there was no way they were checking every box of merchandise that came into the mall. More important, the Mansour Mall was Baghdad’s biggest and most modern shopping center. Opened a year before, in 2013, it was a beacon of global commerce. All sorts of consumer goods gleamed under the relentless lighting, from Xboxes to Timberland shoes to Versace purses. The top floor housed Baghdad’s most modern movie theater, showing Transcendence and Captain America: Winter Soldier. Young men and women gathered, browsed, and even mingled, out from under the watchful eye of parents and religious authorities.
For the extremists in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the al Qaeda–spawned movement that had been sending suicide bombers into Baghdad and had, in January, conquered Fallujah and most of Ramadi, Mansour Mall would be a symbol of both Western influence and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s national leadership. It would therefore be a perfect target for an attack t
hree days before Iraq’s upcoming national elections, the first since the Americans had left in 2011. Even a small PBIED in the crowded food court could kill dozens. And all the better for ISIS if one of them was an American journalist and a former US soldier.
Second, there was Meethaq. I wanted to believe his passionate hope for Iraq’s future, his heartfelt patriotism, and his hospitality, but something—perhaps these very qualities—didn’t compute. Meethaq studied at the Iraqi Foreign Service Institute, training to be a diplomat. He’d met me the day before in a charcoal gray suit and a conservative striped tie, and we’d had an awkward but friendly conversation over Diet Pepsis in the food court. He was thirty-one, had studied at the Osaka School for International Public Policy in 2008 and 2009, and before entering the Foreign Service Institute had worked three years at the Japanese Embassy. You wouldn’t think, observing his calm, professional demeanor, that he’d spent most of his adulthood negotiating life under a foreign occupation, that his college years had been interrupted by an invasion, or that the two years after graduating college, during the sectarian civil war, had been so painful and difficult that he refused to talk about them.
Meethaq seemed representative of the educated Sunni upper middle class that had before 2003 formed Iraq’s political and cultural elite. I expected him to be pessimistic, resentful, and grim, given that he was an intelligent young man who, as a Sunni, would have seen privilege turn into prejudice, and who lived in a failing state under increasingly autocratic rule, with dim prospects ahead and two decades of bad blood behind. Instead, Meethaq expressed earnest ambitions for his country: a fervent faith in Iraq’s potential as a developing economy and a viable democracy. Although his hair was prematurely gray and his face serious beyond his years, when he talked about the future, his eyes shone.