I’ve been thinking a lot lately about depictions of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve been surfing the Internet, reading blog posts about various forms of military activity. I’ve been reading coverage by print journalists, including Trish Wood’s What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It. And I’ve started to take note of how fictional works like the movie In the Valley of Elah and the forthcoming Stop-Loss (by Kimberly Peirce, who made Boys Don’t Cry) are imagining the fighters.

During the evening rush last Wednesday,I stood for 45 minutes in the rain on Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, opposite a military recruiting office, bedraggled and impatient with the stale anti-war chants (“Give peace a chance”—do spare us the irony!) but glad to be holding a banner from my local group, Prospect Lefferts Voices for Peace and Justice (“FUND OUR NEIGHBORHOODS, NOT THE WAR”). The occasion was a march and vigil marking the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion. “We’re here to protest not the warrior, but the war!” a male voice shouted through a megaphone, and I winced at the implications: We, unlike those perhaps largely apocryphal Sixties anti-war protesters (many of whom were us in an earlier incarnation), are not about to spit on the noble victims of the myth of a Noble Cause. They are our troops. It is, indeed, our love for our troops and our sorrow at the harm that is being done to them for no good reason—-as well as, of course, our concern for all those miserable Iraqis—-that motivates our opposition to this war.

Am I just projecting, based on my own prurient thrills while sampling a fraction of the vast Internet real estate devoted to war-related representations and discussions, when I think I detect a queasy romanticism infusing the groping efforts of many of us opposed to the war(s) to understand who the fighters are and why they fight? Am I generalizing based on insufficient evidence when I descry an effort to retrieve a “good” patriotism (dare I say a “good” patriarchy?) from the charnel house of the imperial debacle? Why is it that we choose to pretend that the only ways to understand what is going on here are demonizing the warrior or idealizing him/her as the noble victim of idealism gone wrong?

The film In the Valley of Elah weirdly represents this split thinking by making the Vietnam veteran father of the murdered Iraq vet function as the noble, self-sacrificing (though inarticulate and insufficiently empathetic) hero—the true believer cruelly robbed of his belief. This father stands for the “good” America, while his murdered son—revealed in the course of the film to have been a tormented perpetrator-(victim) of the everyday atrocities that characterize the U.S. presence in Iraq—represents the split-off evil, the impulse we assign to someone else rather than ourselves. In other words, the father is the “warrior,” while his son, whom the screenplay unfortunately renders increasingly opaque rather than more visible and human as the action unfolds, incarnates a wicked war’s irreducible “otherness.”

But the father is supposed to be a Vietnam vet, and we’re led to believe that his military service was the defining experience of his life, to such an extent that both of his sons felt compelled to join up. So is Vietnam now the “good war”? Just how did the father retain his humanity and illusions through that experience, such that he now can have his faith in his country shattered by learning that imperial occupations entail the routine commission of war crimes and that fighters who experience post-traumatic stress disorders are capable of doing really bad things, not only to the “Hajis” but to their own countrymen?

Kimberly Peirce, of Boys Don’t Cry fame, is quoted in a Sunday New York Times article (Arts and Leisure, 3/28/08) as saying, “When I talked to a wounded solider who lost his limbs and still wants to go back, he told me, ‘It’s not the war, it’s the men.’ That blew my mind. There’s this huge desire for camaraderie and male bonding….The idea of this one guy, this troubled patriot, just kept coming back to me.” Interviewer Katrina Onstad concludes, “In the end, for all [Peirce’s] efforts to open up a discourse on stop-loss and Iraq, it appears as if the movie is being sold as a flick for teenagers, complete with a poster of good-looking young people shown sullen and sexy on the hood of a car.”

I would like to propose an alternative to sentimental images of pumped-up masculine bodies (plus a few pumped-up feminine bodies aggrandized by the strap-on possibilities of mechanized deadly force, including apparently increasing numbers of women pilots flying “combat support” missions) enacting would-be “good” violence that has evil effects for which the actors are not responsible because they were duped by George Bush’s lies. I suggest that we think of “our troops” as roughly analogous to adolescents who join gangs.

Like U.S. soldiers, gang members are largely young men who respond to a lack of more constructive life opportunities by plugging into structures that legitimate violence and coercion as routes to identity. Like soldiers, gang members cultivate solidarity with their buddies, elaborating a culture of phallic supremacy that often has unfortunate consequences for their intimates as well as their declared enemies. Unlike soldiers, however, gang members are mercilessly policed. Even the remote suspicion of gang affiliation gets kids locked up, and worse. I won’t go into the racial overtones of this distinction, except to point out the obvious: that gang members are often kids of color, while American soldiers in a rainbow of colors are workers in an international system of white supremacy that radically devalues Iraq lives in relation to American ones. I will propose that a more nuanced, empathetic, and self-implicating understanding of the bad things many gang members do in the streets should be cultivated in public discourse alongside a more nuanced, critical, and self-questioning understanding of the bad things many U.S. soldiers do in a war zone.

They were just dirty, dirty fucking people, mugging you, giving you dirty looks when you’re over there to help them. Immediately I didn’t like the place at all. Definitely not California.

I just played it cool, you know, hearts and minds, that’s why we went over there in the beginning, and we were just waving, smiling. The very first convoy we went on, I didn’t like them immediately because of the way they treated us when we were trying to help them. They didn’t give us a chance. Their way to flip people off is showing you the bottom of their shoe, and a lot of these little kids were doing it, like, little twelve-, thirteen-year-olds were doing it to us, throwing rocks at us, flipping us off in their Iraqi-culture way. They didn’t like us at all. I never thought highly of them. I couldn’t have thought less of them.
—Jason Smithers, USMC/Infantry, quoted in What Was Asked of Us.

How can we tell the warrior from the war? Not so easily, I’m afraid. Now for a question that’s thornier still: How can we tell the civilian from her murderous civilization?