by Roy Scranton
So much for civilian guilt. But why are soldiers so resentful? Sherman explains that soldiers might feel resentful if they feel that civilian “gratitude is merely instrumental, for the sake of getting them to renew their service,” or if they feel more alienated than recognized—if they feel, that is, that civilians don’t really understand what they’re being thankful for. Veterans might feel resentful as well because they feel guilty, angry, or confused about their deeds. They might feel resentful because they suspect the ritual is just that and no more, an insincere formality. The issue, as Sherman frames it, is one of veterans holding citizens accountable.
Sherman’s analysis here is nuanced and illuminating, but it fails to adequately address two significant problems. The first is the issue of Sherman’s “we.” Her book relies throughout on an implicit identification between American citizens and government policy, as if what soldiers did in Iraq or Afghanistan was an expression of national political will. This easy correlation between the values and thoughts of American citizens and the decisions made by the United States government simply cannot be made, especially when it comes to military action, and it is disingenuous to imply that soldiers are acting on behalf of the “American people.” No doubt there are many who would like to believe they are, but Sherman needs a better account of how beliefs about national unity match reality, and what disjunction between the two might mean. In this light, veterans might well be resentful of what they see as citizens’ false claim to agency or their naïveté in confusing polyglot America with the United States government.
The second major problem Sherman downplays is that veterans might feel “used,” not just because the gratitude offered might be instrumental, but because they did some evil shit. Veterans might feel they don’t deserve to be thanked for what they did; they might see what they did not as a service, but as a crime. Sherman touches on this lightly, but only very briefly and only in the most specious way. She brings in the example of Jean Améry, a Holocaust survivor who argued that his refusal to forgive his Nazi torturers had moral power. As Sherman quotes him, “Only I possessed, and still possess the moral truth of the blows that even today roar in my skull, and for that reason I am entitled to judge, not only more than the culprit but also more than society—which thinks only about its continued existence.” Sherman quotes Améry to “remind us of limiting cases for relieving moral resentment, where there can be no possibility of moral healing,” but she doesn’t address the fact that if you map Améry’s situation onto the last fourteen years of war, her example of irrecuperable moral injury lines up not with American soldiers but with orange-suited, force-fed detainees at Guantanamo Bay and naked, tortured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. Simply put, the victims tortured by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t American soldiers, but Iraqis and Afghans.
Sherman relies here and elsewhere on a conflation between Holocaust victims and American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as if there were any moral equivalence between the targets of the Final Solution and the agents of the global “War on Terror.” This thoroughly irresponsible equivalence illuminates the great moral vacuum at the heart of Sherman’s book, which is in the way she persistently turns the question of moral responsibility into a narrative of moral injury. Much of Afterwar comprises stories from soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet all but one of those stories are about what those soldiers suffered, not what they did. This is an enormous failing.
Key to this failing is Sherman’s uncritical reliance on the idea of “moral injury.” She writes that it “refers to experiences of serious inner conflict arising from what one takes to be grievous moral transgressions that can overwhelm one’s sense of goodness and humanity,” but she never unpacks this definition. She never explains how inner ethical conflict leads to injury or what, precisely, is being “injured.” She never makes a case for why this language of victimization and injury ought to replace a language of responsibility, nor why “moral injury” might be more useful than the more conventional language of “guilt,” “shame,” and “betrayal” she uses elsewhere. Nor does Sherman ever make a clear distinction between “moral injury” and PTSD, or discuss why one way of talking about war might be better than the other. Rather, Sherman conflates moral injury with several other diagnostic terms, from survivor guilt to traumatic brain injury, in ways that only obscure what she means. Most disturbingly, Sherman’s phenomenon of “moral injury” produces a victim without a perpetrator: no agent is ever named who does the injuring, nobody is responsible, no one is at fault.
Sherman’s lack of philosophical rigor here might be an oversight, or it might be bad faith. “Moral injury” turns out to be an empty sophism, more useful for David Brooks–style cant than for serious thought about war or morality. With it, you can imply some airy recognition that something went wrong with America’s most recent military adventure but still advertise your support for “the troops,” all while dodging the indelicate question of who exactly might be responsible for injuring whom.
Whatever one might say about the corrupt boondoggle of Afghanistan, the war in Iraq was an aggressive power grab executed with astonishing idiocy, enriching companies such as Halliburton, DynCorp, Bechtel, and ExxonMobil at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and ongoing human suffering almost incomprehensible in its meaninglessness. Anyone doing moral philosophy of war needs to make sense of what it means to know you have committed evil, not as a victim but as a perpetrator, and anyone talking about morality and the Iraq War needs to account for the gross irresponsibility, outright lies, and pointless waste of human life that characterized that conflict. What kind of “moral healing” is appropriate for Specialist Lynndie England, who tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib? Sergeant Frank Wuterich, whose Marines killed twenty-four civilians in Haditha? Colonel Michael D. Steele, whose soldiers testified that he ordered them to “kill all military-age males” in their area? General George Casey, senior commander in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, who incompetently oversaw Iraq’s descent into civil war? What kind of community expresses gratitude for such behavior? While Sherman claims academic expertise on the “battlefield mind of the soldier” and “the moral weight of war,” she doesn’t seem much interested in such questions. Nor does she spend much time on how the “battlefield mind of the soldier” reckons with killing and torturing innocents, or how “we” might carry the moral weight of an unjust, illegal, and aggressive war.
A work of moral philosophy about war that doesn’t discuss agency and what it means to do evil, or how the discrepancy between claims to moral goodness and knowledge of moral evil might be made sense of, isn’t doing philosophy. To be fair, Sherman never claims that’s what Afterwar’s about. She is quite explicit that she has written a manifesto, a call to “build a new kind of integrated community.” The problem is that the community she seeks to build is one for whom war isn’t a moral or political choice, but a moral accident, an abstract force—something like an act of Nature.
Another important thing Sherman leaves out is the fact of war’s tremendous appeal. “Even war has something sublime about it,” wrote Kant, arguing that it is “all the more sublime in proportion to the number of dangers” faced. The sublimity of war is captured in the epic scenes written by Tolstoy in War and Peace, in Ernst Jünger’s memoir Storm of Steel, and in the helicopter assault in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! Throughout history, people have found war not only sublime but exhilarating, purifying, sexually charged, liberating, and ennobling. For many veterans, war was and will remain the most profound experience of their lives. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, looking back on his service in the Civil War: “The generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.”
Some of the men and women who go to war find not only sublimity but vocation. For professional soldiers especially, war is the summit of their life’s w
ork. Peace for such warriors is a dull prison. Some of the assorted disorders that plague veterans after war are doubtlessly attributable to feelings of frustration and diminishment. The contrast between the thrilling power one wielded in war and the petty constraints imposed by civilian life is a familiar theme in veterans’ writing.
Michael Putzel’s hybrid work of journalism, history, and biography, The Price They Paid: Enduring the Wounds of War, illustrates this theme, focusing on the story of Major James Newman, a career soldier whose sublime moment as an air cavalry commander came during the darkest years of the Vietnam War. According to the accounts and recollections Putzel weaves together, Newman was a bold, charismatic, fiercely competent leader, once nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor for a daring helicopter rescue. Yet as soon as Newman came home, his career imploded and his life took a sudden swerve. Newman assaulted his wife, illegally married the wife of a fellow officer, then tried to hire a cab driver to kill his new wife’s husband (she was still married) and burn down his own home.
Newman had earned stellar evaluations in Vietnam, had been promoted on his return, had been awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, and was being groomed and recommended for a career path that gave him a “good shot at eventually earning a general officer’s star, perhaps even two.” After the grand jury indictment charging him with two counts of conspiracy and one of bigamy, though, his military career was over. Less than eighteen months after coming home from Vietnam, where he had commanded dozens of men flying millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment, directing them through complex, coordinated aerial and ground combat with the highest imaginable stakes, James Newman left the military, got divorced, and a few years later went to work as a Buick dealer. He sold cars for the rest of his life.
Putzel makes a great mystery out of Newman’s self-destruction, but it’s not so hard to understand. Newman identifies the problem himself: “‘I couldn’t go kill somebody every day,’ he lamented years later. ‘I didn’t have a mission of no kind.’” When Newman boarded the plane in Vietnam to come back to the US, he was leaving behind his status, his command, his community, the work that made his life meaningful, and the intensity that made his life sublime. He came home to guilt, boredom, and constraint. Is it any wonder he started lighting fires?
The Price They Paid offers insight into what it means for a professional soldier to go to war. What it helps us see best is that war isn’t a state of nature or a moral accident but can be a way of life and, what’s more, a meaningful one. As with Sherman’s book, though, and as in Hobbes’s naturalization of war, Putzel leaves aside the wider questions of war as a political or social activity, especially the war in Vietnam. Yet as long as we refuse to look at the wider political questions of war, we will be able to see it only as disconnected stories of isolated individuals suffering in a state of nature. As long as we refuse to see war as an action for which people and institutions are responsible, we will continue to mistake imperial soldiers like Major James Newman for unfortunate victims.
Over the past two years, police killings of unarmed black men have become prominent in national discussion. The problem is not a few bad apples, but a system of institutionalized racist violence and the people who serve it. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.”
Coates was writing about Ferguson, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Staten Island, but he could have been writing about Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, it is puzzling to me that we have talked so little about the connection between a decade of reckless American military aggression abroad and the police brutality we see today at home. While commentators have expressed alarm at the militarization of police equipment across the US, fewer have been willing to discuss the militarization of American culture. It was not ever thus. During the 1960s, the Vietnam War was often connected to police violence at home, and the struggle for civil rights was allied to the struggle to end the war. We seem reluctant today to connect the War on Terror with the war on black lives, but how many videos do we need of police snipers, police tanks, police drones, and police violence before we recognize chickens that have come home to roost?
Imagine if instead of having a conversation—insufficient as it has been—about systematic racism, we were having a conversation about the moral and psychological stress American police suffer in the course of patrolling their communities. Imagine that instead of talking about Black Lives Matter, we were talking about police health care, police pensions, and police suicide rates. Imagine that instead of hearing about how Rekia Boyd, Michael Brown, John Crawford, Samuel DuBose, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Dante Parker, Tamir Rice, Tony Robinson, and Walter Scott were killed, we never learned their names but instead were treated to stories about Ray Tensing’s posttraumatic stress, Darren Wilson’s marital problems, and Daniel Pantaleo’s moral injury. Imagine that instead of trying, however inadequately, to address America’s long history of racial violence, we were spending our time trying to educate civilians in their obligation to “bridge the police-civilian divide.”
Of course you don’t have to imagine: that’s the very conversation we’ve been having these last fourteen years about war. And as long as we continue having the same conversation, talking as if war were a fact of nature and not a political choice, we’re going to stay locked in the same wartime mentality. As long as our government keeps showing the world that Iraqi lives don’t matter, Afghan lives don’t matter, Muslim lives don’t matter, Arab lives don’t matter, then our police will keep drawing the same conclusion about black lives. Until we reckon with the things we’ve done, we will find no peace, because we will not have owned up to the fact that war is not “nature,” but a choice, a choice we keep making again and again. [2016]
My Flesh and Blood
My body keeps channeling so many contradictory feelings around the figure of the soldier intensity of shame as his body becomes the object of my lust and my violence. I want to kill him for blocking my dream of a demilitarized future, and I want to be fucked by him because the repressive sublimation of his body has become unbearable.
—Rob Halpern, Music for Porn (2012)
1.
Men in tights and spandex clutch each other, hold each other, sweat and bleed together under the white lights, slamming each other to the mat, to the ropes, to the climax, the final turnabout and inspired last-minute rise from soul-obliterating suffering to throw off the hurt and confusion and fear, lay evil low with a perfectly executed suplex, and restore the scales of justice.
The 1980s were a golden age for American professional wrestling, and like a lot of kids, I watched it on TV. My friend Jeff, though, was serious. Maybe it had to do with his being raised in a Catholic church that still observed the Tridentine Mass, or maybe it was the magic of the moment, the conflation of Cold War fears and charismatic freaks—Macho Man Randy Savage, Rowdy Roddy Piper, André the Giant—but he approached each week’s match with religious devotion.
“It’s not real,” I objected. Jeff insisted it was. We argued for weeks, then hashed out a reading that satisfied us both, locating the real in the wrestlers’ bodies: The stories were managed and constructed, we agreed, but Junkyard Dog really did clamber up the ropes in the corner and leap down at Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, clotheslining him with his forearm. Yes, the feuds between Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik were cooked up, but the bodies slamming to the mat each week were raw. It wasn’t until years later, after I’d been to war and had long ago left off watching wrestling, that I realized we were still missing the point.
Meat is not truth. The truth of wrestling cannot be the wrestler’s body, since an infinite number of actual bodies could be destroyed on the mat and wrestling would still go on. No, I began to see, the truth of the event was actually much closer to Jeff’s Tridentine Mass: The bodies lent their s
ubstance to the semiotic exchanges of narrative, face and heel, peripeteia and revenge, all of which shaped and channeled viewers’ desires. The truth was the whole: The ritual synthesis of blood and word, flesh and mask, was what gave those falling bodies weight.
2.
I remember first seeing Omer Fast’s video installation The Casting at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. I’d been out of the army two years, and back from Iraq for four. The installation consisted of two screens with projections on both sides. I found myself transfixed by the flicker in the images, the way the performers blinked and wobbled, mimicking still photos, and was moved by the seamless interweaving of an American soldier’s story about killing an Iraqi with the same soldier’s story about dating an unhappy, self-harming German girl. I didn’t know whether the stories were real, but that didn’t seem to matter: The actors were, and they lent their substance to the semiotic exchanges of the narrative, Germany and Iraq, killing and burning, all of which shaped and channeled viewers’ desires to consume the soldier’s trauma.
The situation Fast’s film dramatizes is suggested in its title: a collective casting an individual in the role of scapegoat. On one side of the screens, there are the lights, the screens, the cameras, the actors playing the interviewer, producers, and staff, the whole spectacular apparatus of consumer capitalism attending to its altar, the screen, and the body upon it.
On the other side of the screens, Fast interviews a man who seems to have been a soldier. “So how do you feel about improvising?” he asks, to which the man responds ambivalently: “It depends on how you feel at the time.” Fast presses: “Can you improvise now?”
The man submits and tells his two stories, twisted together in Fast’s deft editing, offering up a perfect proportion of innocence and blood guilt. We drink down his pain, confusion, and desire to be seen, all mediated through gorgeous shots (on the screens’ other sides) of a burning Humvee, a bloody scarf, an autobahn, American soldiers.