Culture » January 13, 2006

Postcards From the Front (cont’d)

Unhappy things happen when soldiers can’t peg an Iraqi as “good” or “evil.” The narrators struggle to read facial expressions and body language in tense situations, where someone can “look” angry one minute and welcoming the next. Any behavior less than unmistakably benign–loud offers of food or broad smiles–has the potential to be misinterpreted as threatening.

Even Kayla Williams (Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army), an Arab linguist who communicates military directives to the locals, fails to transcend stereotypes. Williams, a former sergeant in the 101st Airborne, credits her two-year relationship with an Arab ex-boyfriend for giving her “sympathy, understanding and respect for the people of Iraq.” And she is more sensitive than an 18-year-old American kid who doesn’t understand the Iraqi tendency to come up close and speak loudly. Yet the bulk of her translations are directed at the Iraqis, not for them. When Iraqis express anger and frustration, she offers platitudes–or in one case, a bag of Skittles–and walks away. More unforgivably, in at least one instance, Williams doesn’t bother to refute a colonel’s mistaken assumption that a group of seriously injured Iraqis–a.k.a. “ragheads”–were trying to kill his men.

But Love My Rifle is more about Williams–her battles with low self-esteem and sexual harassment, fraught relationships with incompetent female superior officers and male soldiers–than the war itself. For Williams and her fellow memoirists, this war isn’t about oil, terrorism, democracy or kicking ass for the U.S. of A. It’s about them–their self-image, their needs, their emotions. This is war in the “Real World,” not the real world, where the fate of nations and people hang in the balance.

A broader perspective

The one writer who defies this navel-gazing is Nathaniel Fick (One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer), who joined the Marine Corps to serve his country: “[I]t was a last bastion of honor in society, a place where young Americans learned to work as a team, to trust one another and themselves, and to sacrifice for a principle.”

Fick is all that we would want our soldiers to be: decent, thoughtful, responsible and brave. Unlike Buzzell, who picks the infantry because his “heart was dead set on pulling a trigger,” he opts for the First Recon Battalion whose primary goal is to gather information, not “spray and pray.” It’s a special kind of Marine who returns from a triumphant tour of duty in Afghanistan only to be disappointed by jingoism at home: “Flag waving, tough talk, a yellow ribbon on every bumper. I didn’t see any interest in understanding the war on the ground. No one acknowledged that the fight would be long and dirty, and that maybe the enemy had courage and ideals, too.”

Unlike his fellow memoirists, Fick cares deeply about military strategy and winning the war. Though he is no antiwar activist, he has been vocal in his criticism of Bush’s Iraq policy in his various media appearances. One Bullet Away documents the incompetence of his commanding officer, the lack of post-invasion planning and lopsided military priorities that forced him “to accept senior officers’ decisions, regardless of their stupidity, criminality, or inhumanity.”

One such criminal decision occurs when everyone inside an airport field is declared hostile. Fick’s men end up shooting two teenage boys. Describing his fight to ensure the boys get proper medical attention, Fick makes clear the real reasons for his altruism: Dead kids are bad for morale.

Fighting (this war), for me, meant two things: winning and getting my men home alive. Alive, though, set the bar too low. I had to get them physically and psychologically intact. They had to know that, whether or not they supported the larger war, they had fought their little piece of it with honor and had retained their humanity.

Those two goals–winning and taking care of his men–may have been compatible when the victory was defined as the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Today the mission is nothing less than bringing peace and democracy to Iraq. Within this context, the death of an Iraqi boy represents a decisive defeat, irrespective of its toll on our soldiers. The low priority that military policy has assigned to Iraqi life throughout this war is exactly what fuels the insurgency.

Since publication, Fick has suggested a shift in military strategy, advocating for “green zones” in Iraq where the people’s “security and comfort are our first priority.” But there are few signs, judging by these memoirs, that our soldiers have the training to take on such an unprecedented task–a task complicated by their inability to distinguish between friend and foe in a war whose frontlines run through the streets, backyards and bedrooms of ordinary Iraqis.

At war with ourselves?

Nearly three years into this conflict, the only military objective Americans can agree on is the welfare of our troops. Since Vietnam, the prime directive of American war-making has been protecting “our sons and daughters in the military.” This is why Bush speaks almost exclusively at military bases and veteran gatherings. It is also why the antiwar movement as of late speaks less of the war’s spurious rationales than of its effects on the soldiers. Morale, body armor, casualty numbers–these are the new buzzwords of post-invasion activism, whose most recognizable face is Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a dead soldier. The Iraqis have become an afterthought.

In Jarhead, during an argument with a German tourist, Swofford stumbles upon the fatal flaw in all national narratives of war:

[T]he problem with believing your country’s battle monuments and deaths are more important than those of other nations is that the enemy disappears … the heroes from one’s own country are no longer believed to have fought against a national enemy but simply with other heroes …

In our stories of this war–including these memoirs–it is the Iraqi people who have disappeared, rendered invisible in a war fought ostensibly on their behalf. Who will speak their truth of this war? More importantly, who will listen?