by Roy Scranton
The Things They Carried is presented as a series of reminiscences, partly fictionalized, ambiguously true, from O’Brien’s time as an infantryman in Vietnam. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” much as in Owen’s poem, O’Brien offers the voyeuristic drama of watching a fellow soldier die as evidence against “a very old and terrible lie.” On patrol in the jungle, two infantrymen, Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon, are playing catch with a smoke grenade when Lemon steps on a booby trap and gets blown up. Like Owen, O’Brien revisits the moment of death again and again. Whereas Owen’s choking soldier comes back first as a dream, then as the reader’s dream, O’Brien’s exploding Curt Lemon comes back and back and back in a fictional model of traumatic repetition.
What O’Brien ultimately works toward, in this story and throughout The Things They Carried, is the assertion of an encounter with truth that transcends communicability—not only for his characters, but for the writer. The knowledge Tim O’Brien claims to have experienced in Vietnam can’t be understood or even discussed, but only felt.
For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding; the old truths, no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell where you are or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
For O’Brien, a true war story is about the failure of language to communicate experience altogether, which is an assertion that the soldier’s truth is a mystic truth. Illumination here takes the form of negative theology, apophatically denying that the experience of war can be described, thereby denying both the truth of prior descriptions and the possibility that the experience can ever be communicated at all.
Confronting O’Brien’s total negation of language, Kevin Powers’s 2012 Iraq War novel The Yellow Birds flips the script by representing war trauma as the font of poetic transcendence: instead of negating language, the experience of war inspires it. Through flashbacks, The Yellow Birds tells of privates John Bartle and Daniel Murphy, a wartime George and Lennie who deploy to Iraq under the tyrannical rule of one Sergeant Sterling. While downrange, Murphy loses his mind and goes AWOL; Bartle and Sterling eventually find his mutilated corpse. In the novel’s present, Bartle has returned to the US, struggles with PTSD, and is wrongly imprisoned by the military’s Criminal Investigation Division for his alleged involvement in an atrocity committed by Sergeant Sterling, who has in the meantime committed suicide. What redeems Bartle in the end is the novel itself, his story, his voice: the novel dramatizes the transformation of Bartle’s trauma into Powers’s poetry.
Powers’s literary ambitions are signaled in the novel’s first lines, a lyrical meditation on war that builds metaphor upon metaphor into a surreal montage of sensation beyond meaning, extending from its tortuously elaborate sentences through its melodramatic plot to its hyperconscious symbolism of hyacinths. Private Bartle’s narration is a perpetual cry of pain, a constant ache of swollen language that breaks into traumatic revelation when he commits violence:
I moved to the edge of the bridge and began firing at anything moving. I saw one man fall in a heap near the bank of the river among the bulrushes and green fields on its edges. In that moment, I disowned the waters of my youth. My memories of them became a useless luxury, their names as foreign as any that could be found in Nineveh: the Tigris or the Chesapeake, the James or the Shatt al Arab farther to the south, all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own. I was an intruder, at best a visitor, and would be even in my home, in my misremembered history, until the glow of phosphorescence in the Chesapeake I had longed to swim inside again someday became a taunt against my insignificance, a cruel trick of light that had always made me think of stars. No more. I gave up longing, because I was sure that anything seen at such a scale would reveal the universe as cast aside and drowned, and if I ever floated there again, out where the level of the water reached my neck, and my feet lost contact with its muddy bottom, I might realize that to understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.
Noctiluca, I thought, Ceratium, as the tracers began to show themselves in the sifted twilight.
Powers ascends from description to meditation, from simple declarations to disordered hyperbaton, from the concrete names of rivers now turned foreign to the abstract stymieing of pluperfect desires (“until the glow of phosphorescence in the Chesapeake I had longed to swim inside again someday became a taunt against my insignificance”), and finally to esoteric Latin terms deployed in a telling inversion of Owen’s rhetorical move ending “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Where Owen marshals sense data to controvert the authority of Latinate literariness, Powers takes flight from materiality into literature. Where Owen inscribes a vision, Powers poetizes: “Noctiluca, I thought, Ceratium . . .”
For Powers, the conventional tropes of war lit are not a means of conveying truth, but the truth of war itself. The transformation of experience into literature is here characterized as a dissociation from one’s own embodied memory (“I disowned the water of my youth”), a process of evacuation in which concrete facts, Hemingway’s “names of rivers,” become not only interchangeable but also alienated, pure signs operating in a closed economy of literary signification in which Powers (or Bartle) is an interloper (they “all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own”)—an economy we might read as the system of MFA programs and New York publishing circles that shaped The Yellow Birds and its reception. Powers’s climactic turn from experience to literature rather than the other way around suggests that the conventions of traumatic revelation have become purely formal expectations of an audience more interested in war as myth than in war as reality or even as literature.
In one of the most substantial recent articles on contemporary war lit, George Packer in the New Yorker reads the genre as a set of variations on the trauma-hero myth, focusing on the Owen-Hemingway-O’Brien lineage while ignoring works that don’t fit that frame, such as John Dos Passos’s epic U.S.A. trilogy, James Jones’s masterful combat novel The Thin Red Line, John Horne Burns’s acidic portrait of American-occupied Naples, The Gallery, or Stephen Wright’s surreal, elusive novel about media and surveillance in Vietnam, Meditations in Green. Shoehorning more recent war lit from Iraq and Afghanistan into his narrow rubric, Packer extends his interpretation from the literature of those wars to the wars themselves, writing, “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fully meet [Paul] Fussell’s description of the ironic: they were worse than expected. Both began with hubris and false victories, turned into prolonged stalemates, and finally deserved the bitter name of defeat.” This is, we should note, a partial view. Packer was one of the liberal hawks calling for an American invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003, against the advice of State Department officials, Middle East experts, UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, and the US Army chief of staff. Only after spending time on the ground in Baghdad, “seeing what it was really like” and realizing that wars are messy, bloody, dumb, and wasteful, did Packer recant his earlier jingoism.
In light of his own experience, as understood through the lens of Fussell’s canonical reading of World War I poetry in The Great War and Modern Memory, Packer sees the novels, poems, and stories coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan as bearing the truth of a traumatic and disillusioning revelation. He reads Kevin Powers’s rather banal poetry as “meditative and convalescent,” evincing “the poet’s mind reopening after a great shock,” and finds “one of the best distillations of combat” he’d ever read in a dull comparison The Yellow Birds makes between combat and a car accident. Packer interprets Benjamin Busch
’s lyrical memoir Dust to Dust as the formal embodiment of PTSD, writing, “Fragments are perhaps the most honest literary form available to writers who fought so recently.” It’s difficult to know what it would mean for a literary form to be “honest,” unless you are predisposed to understand experience as having a certain shape. Brian Turner, the pre-eminent American poet of the Iraq War, fits rather more easily into Packer’s trauma-hero reading, for Turner’s poetry is already deeply Romantic in sensibility. For Turner, poetry itself is experience as revelation; the fact that he is a war poet is practically accidental, except insofar as we seem to expect our war poets to write precisely that kind of poem. Packer ends his essay by considering Phil Klay’s award-winning short-story collection Redeployment, lauding the book as a paragon not of literary sophistication and suspended judgment, which it is, but of “rigorous honesty” and, of course, irony. Klay’s virtues are, for Packer, the essential virtues of war literature: not art, but experience. This itself is ironic, considering that Klay spent his war behind a desk as a public affairs officer—what the military calls a publicist.
By focusing strictly on writers who happen to be veterans, Packer misses not only some of the most interesting novels published so far about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, The Watch, by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, and They Dragged Them Through the Streets, by Hilary Plum, but also essential work in translation by Iraqi writers, such as Sinan Antoon’s elegiac novel The Corpse Washer and Hassan Blasim’s devastating, surreal short stories in The Corpse Exhibition. What’s more, Packer ignores veteran writers who don’t fit the conventions of the trauma hero myth. A stirring diversity of short stories, novels, poems, essays, and memoirs by a growing community of writers are effaced and reduced to a handful of works that conform to expected conventions.
Where Packer missteps most precipitously, however, is where he considers war literature in its historical and political contexts.
Journalists and historians have to distort war. In order to find the plot—causation, sequence, meaning—they make war more intelligible than it really is. In the literature by veterans, there are virtually no politics or polemics, in stark contrast to the tendentious way in which most Americans, especially those farthest removed from the fighting, discussed Iraq. This new writing takes the war, though not its terrible cost, as a given.
This isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous. It presumes that journalists and historians adhere to conventions of understanding (“causation, sequence, meaning”) whereas novelists and poets do not, which not only offers a patently nonsensical way of approaching literature but also makes extravagant demands upon it: how could a writer possibly communicate any experience without making it “more intelligible than it really is”? Making experience intelligible is just what language does. Furthermore, Packer makes the specious assumption that ignoring the causes, background, and motivating forces for a war represents an absence of politics, rather than seeing it for what it is—a politics of forgetting that actively elides the question of what US soldiers were fighting for and the bigger problem of whom they were killing, in favor of a narrower and more manageable question, “What was it like?”
Packer’s tendentious argument highlights the most troubling consequence of our faith in the revelatory truth of combat experience and our sanctification of the trauma hero: by focusing so insistently on the psychological trauma American soldiers have had to endure, we allow ourselves to forget the death and destruction those very soldiers are responsible for. Consider the title story of Phil Klay’s Redeployment. Klay’s collection opens with a US Marine reflecting on his experience in Iraq as he returns home, declaring, “We shot dogs.” This short, powerful sentence, while factually true, offers readers a comforting moral lie. “We shot dogs” is as accurate as “We built schools” or “We brought democracy,” and works much the way we seem to want our war literature to function: by foregrounding a peripheral detail, it obscures much more significant big-picture realities. By focusing on the fact that we shot dogs, Klay allows American readers to ignore the fact that we shot people.
The story “Redeployment” tells is of a traumatized marine veteran, Sergeant Price, who returns home from Iraq to his wife, Cheryl, and his dog, Vicar. Vicar, he finds, is terminally ill. As Sergeant Price adjusts to peacetime life and processes his experience of the war, he is troubled by Vicar’s worsening condition, and eventually decides to take the dog out to the river and shoot him.
Klay’s Old Yeller narrative of masculine hardening is layered over with a deliberate conflation of Iraqis and dogs. It is telling that Sergeant Price’s dog is named Vicar. A vicar is a representative or substitute, as the pope is the Vicar of Christ, and in “Redeployment,” the tumorous Vicar is a substitute for the narrator’s trauma and guilt. Yet Vicar also stands in as a substitute for the thousands of Iraqis killed during the American occupation. The comparison is made explicit at the story’s end, as Sergeant Price is preparing to shoot his dog, when he remembers his marines killing an insurgent in Fallujah. The insurgent had been found in a cesspool, “hiding beneath the liquid and only coming up for air . . . like a fish rising up to grab a fly.” The insurgent has no face, no name, no body: he is no more than a mouth breaking the surface of a fetid pool.
The sad fact Klay plays on is that most American readers will care more about a dead dog than they will about a dead Iraqi, and in this way “Redeployment” opens up an emotional conduit for those readers to feel the pangs of grief and guilt that come with killing, but without having to connect that feeling to the political reality of the war in Iraq. Whereas an Iraqi victim would have to be reckoned with as a fellow human being, with all the complexity that entails, a dog can simply be pitied and his killer simply empathized with. This moral simplification comes at a cost.
Klay, embodying the moral authority of a veteran, assures American readers that a dead Iraqi needn’t trouble them any more than a dead dog would. And since most of us already feel that way, his story provides a much-desired release, freeing us from the worry that we ought to feel guilty about the havoc the American military unleashed and the blood American soldiers and marines spilled. Sergeant Price is our trauma hero—he pays the “price” for our bloodguilt. Rather than forcing us to face our collective complicity in a brutal war of aggression that has left thousands upon thousands dead, Klay asks us to feel bad for how much psychological pain one sensitive marine has suffered doing what had to be done.
Read in the context of Klay’s other stories in Redeployment, or with the other stories it was published alongside in the collection I co-edited with Matt Gallagher, Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, Klay’s trauma-hero narrative can be read productively and provocatively as one perspective among many. Yet when the trauma-hero myth is taken as representing the ultimate truth of more than a decade of global aggression, we allow the psychological suffering endured by those we sent to kill for us displace and erase the innocents killed in our name. As in Klay’s story, the real victims of American political violence disappear under a load of shit.
The Yellow Birds, “Redeployment,” and American Sniper may portray a loss of innocence that makes the dirty war in Iraq palatable as an individual tragedy, but they only do so by obscuring the connection between American audiences and the millions of Iraqi lives destroyed or shattered since 2003. Focusing on the suffering of Private Bartle, Sergeant Price, or Chief Petty Officer Kyle allows us to forget the suffering of the very people whose land was occupied in our name. There are almost no Iraqis in The Yellow Birds or Redeployment at all, and where they do appear, they are caricatures. If the point of literature is to help us “recognize [our] own suffering in the stories of others,” as George Packer sententiously asserts, rather than soothing our troubled consciences with precisely the stories we want to hear, then novels such as The Yellow Birds and stories such as “Redeployment” are gross moral and literary failures. But t
he failure does not belong to the writers. It belongs to all the readers and citizens who expect veterans to play out for them the ritual fort-da of trauma and recovery, and to carry for them the collective guilt of war.
Such an expectation is the privilege of those who can afford to have others do their killing for them. Off-loading the problem of war onto the figure of the traumatized veteran, however, has long-term costs we have yet to reckon. The imperative to see war clearly is persistent, as urgent today as ever, as US military forces return to Iraq and a new kettle of hawks cry for war in Ukraine and Syria. Understanding the problem of American political violence demands recognizing soldiers as agents of national power and understanding what kind of work the trauma hero is doing when he comes bearing witness in his bloody fatigues. [2015]
The Idea of Order
I Can’t Breathe
It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
—Vladimir Putin, New York Times (September 11, 2013)
1. The First Death
This is a story about bodies and texts. Bodies and difference. Texts and difference. Bodies and violence. This is a story about texts and violence. This is a story about violence and reflection, difference and equivalence, universalism and parochialism, capitalism and cosmopolitanism and racism and war and peace, freedom and repression and language and justice and slavery and serfdom, rich and poor, North and South, America and Russia, France and Algeria, America and Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, Namibia, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Togo, Benin, The Gambia, Gabon, Congo and Angola and Ferguson and Staten Island and Baltimore and Cleveland and Oberlin and New Haven and Princeton and Moscow and Washington and Brooklyn and ontology and epistemology and aesthetics and ethics.