War And Remembrance: Notes Towards A Taxonomy Of Contemporary War Literature

For a long time it was TGWOT - The Global War on Terror, the term for the US led conflict that officially began on September 11, 2001, though one could argue that it began with the USS Cole attack in 2000, the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, or the Khobar towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, or maybe even the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983 or ... well, you get the picture.

At some point, the operations fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Iraq (again) and now apparently Syria, began to be lumped into a single term, one that conjures up the titles of classic science fiction novels by the likes of Harlan Ellison:  The Forever War.  That term may have been coined by the US journalist Dexter Filkins, who used it for the title of his indispensable 2008 book based on his assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The Forever War is primarily an American war, though at different times and places it has also caught up America's friends and allies, including Canada in Kandahar, Great Britain in Basra and Helmand, Germany in Kundiz, and the Kurds in Raqqa.   However, the Forever War is now part of the American experience, longer than any single conflict in US history, and it is not surprising that after a generation of conflict, American writers and poets of note, most of them military or recent veterans, are now emerging.  However, one could argue that these writers have less of a shared context with their civilian readers than at any other time in US history.   America's all volunteer military, its power augmented formidably by technology, has fought and still fights a war that scarcely touches the home front.

The challenge of communicating across this civil-military disconnect unites many of the authors discussed by Adin Dobkin in his recent essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, "The Never-Ending Book of War".   Some of these writers - Phil Klay, Brian Castner, and Eric Fair, have been previously reviewed on this blog.  

In thinking through Dobkin's review of recent war writing,  the EngLit student in me got to wondering how I would survey the disparate voices of the Forever War.  What literary modes do they work in?  What traditions, genres, and literary predecessors do they draw on?  Dobkin rightly notes the starting point, memory, in his opening paragraph.

"The necessity of a long memory runs throughout our conception of war.  Just consider the phrase,"never forget". 

The phrase "never forget" points to a powerful moral imperative in this mode of history, a dual belief that this history should not be forgotten, and that it not be repeated.  Writers like Castner would rightly have their fallen and wounded comrades remembered, while writers like Fair would not have their country fall back into the moral shame of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

As Dobkin notes, since modern wars do not cause "societal shocks" on the homefront, the writers and publishers of these wars have to fight headwinds of incomprehension, alienation, and indifference, as Klay's characters do upon their return home in the short stories of his book Redeployment.  Other writers, as Dobkin notes, fight the moral obfuscation of language as political change in the Trump era resurrects ideas such as enhanced interrogation/torture.  For some of the current military writers, as they admit to Dobkin, it is discouraging to see that the "Never Again" moral and protest function of war literature, a tradition going back at least far as Eric Remarque and Robert Graves, has little apparent efficacy.  As Eric Fair tells Dobkin, "we're right back to where we started, and in fact, might be headed somewhere far worse".

In the rest of this essay, I propose a few gradations of analysis, or pigeonholes, to enhance Dobkin's summary.   Perhaps its the EngLit student in me who finds taxonomies helpful in refining Dobkin's core idea of remembrance by proposing the following categories, and if nothing else it allows me to locate contemporary war writers more easily in my mental landscape.

Remembrance as Epic -  this classification would be writers working in what we might call the encomiastic tradition, in which heroism and pride win out over anti-heroism and irony within a narrative that follows a relatively uncomplicated moral trajectory, what Dobkin calls "clear-cut good versus evil".  While we see this mode in history used in accounts of recent wars, most notably in Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation (1998) or Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy (2002-2013), today's writers live and work under the shadow of post-modernity, with its scepticism and suspicious, mordant humour.  Thus The Greatest Generation gives way to Generation Kill, in which careerist officers and petty NCOs are almost as much of an adversary to the protagonists as are the enemy.   Some works of military journalism fall at times into the epic mode, such as Fifteen Days, Christie Blatchford's account of the Canadian Army in Kandahar or Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer's account of the life and death of NFLer turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman, though the later part of Krakauer's book falls into irony as he dissects the tragic circumstances of Tillman's death.  Surely the reluctance of many authors to identify with the Epic mode has to do with the moral ambiguity ad even moral taint of wars like the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  As Tom McDermott, an Australian army officer and scholar has noted, that war, fought without a clear causus belli or UN Declaration has a morally "malignant" quality, so that the participants look back with, "if not a sense of shame, at least an absence of pride".

Remembrance as Mimesis - this classification could also be described as the documentary mode of remembrance, in which the writer works to capture a sense of "this is what it was like" for the reader, who is often a civilian to whom the military ethos and war are compelling but foreign.   To borrow two terms from the literary scholar Northrop Frye, we can subdivide this mode into the High Mimetic and Low Mimetic modes.  The High Mimetic mode is something akin to Shakespearean tragedy, in that it shows us admirable but flawed figures struggling against an often inescapable feat.  The EOD operatives in Brian Castner's works, or journalist David Finkel's portrayal of the doomed soldiers climbing into their fragile Humvees for another patrol in bomb-infested Baghdad.  In this mode of memory, the writer can both offer tribute to comrades for their heroism, while also fully acknowledging their ordinary and flawed natures, as well as the terrible ambiguity of the wars to which they offer themselves.   In contrast, the Low Mimetic mode is marked both by graphic realism and a sense of pathos, of a profound sympathy.  In this mode, the subjects are more victims than heroes, and memory is tempered by sorrow and outrage.  In war literature, the templates for this mode include well-known First World War figures such as Wilfrid Owen, particularly his poems "Anthem for Dead Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum Est".   The two perplexed heroes of Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds (2012) are good examples of the low mimetic, as are their real-world counterparts, struggling with injury, suicide, and reintegration to civilian life in David Finkel's sequel, Thank You For Your Service.

Remembrance as Comedy and Satire - in this category the primary mode is irony.  Unlike Shakespearean comedies which include strong characters and some positive new social order being established at the conclusion, the voice of this mode of remembrance in war literature is one of mocking laughter.   Well known examples of military comedy and satire include Robert Grave's Goodbye to All That, Joseph Heller's Catch 22, and Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy.   The antiheroes of military comedy and satire are often junior in rank, profoundly alienated from military culture, fully aware of the incompetence of their peers and superiors, but generally helpless to do anything about it.   A classic contemporary example would be David Abram's Fobbit (2012).   Examples of military parody, or snark, abound in social media circles frequented by military types, as is seen in this well known blog.  Satire is directed more outwards, towards the society which largely ignores its complicity in wars and its responsibility to those who fight in them, while uttering banalities such as "thank you for your service".   A classic example of contemporary military satire is Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012), recently made as a film directed by Ang Lee (2016).

Remembrance As Soul Work - there is something therapeutic about the act of writing.  The literary critic Andrew Brink once described literature as "symbolic repair", a kind of healing by which the act of literary creation helps balance or ease a loss or grief.  A rich PhD thesis or book of interviews with the Forever War generation of writers still needs to be written, perhaps noting how many of them took advantage of MFA programs or other kinds of educational opportunities as ways of easing their transition back into civilian life while processing their wartime experience in a healthy manner.  The work of Phil Klay and Brian Castner would certainly bear examination from this point of view.  in some cases, literature and memoir works in a penitential mode, as the author works through both the effects of moral injury and their complicity in the immoral or shadow side of these wars.  A particularly good example of the penitential mode would be Eric Fair's Consequence, describing how he ended up as an interrogator at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.  One senses that atonement in Fair's writing does not depend upon a transaction with the reader.  Rather, the reader, implicated in acts done in the national cause, must uneasily reflect on his or her own complicity.

Remembrance as Art - this is perhaps the most challenging aspect to war literature of any generation.  What distinguishes a soldier's memoir or a journalist's account of war from that of a poet or novelist?   What are the standards by which we can assess the craft of war literature from the content?   This has always been a contentious subject in literary criticism.  The great poet W.B. Yeats, a master of poetry, wrote in 1936 that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry", yet he was surely wrong when he dismissed Wilfrid Owen's war poetry as "blood and dirt and sucked sugar stick".  What gives Owen his power and his claim on memory is surely that the power and even sweetness of his verse conveys the horror of the subject.  Consider Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth", which captures the sound of battle in its first stanza, but then gives way to this graceful couplet which evokes the grief of a whole society:

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Prose writers like Klay, Power and Castner offer many examples of well worked prose, the result of long hours and revisions.   Some memoirs have a highly poetic quality to their prose; Benjamin Busch`s Dust to Dust (2012) is a particularly strong example.  However, poetry per se invites our attention both for the quality of the craft and whatever hard-earned truths the poet has brought back from war.   Randy Brown's 2015 collection, Welcome to FOB Haiku, is a series of near-virtuoso uses of the haiku form, but also draws on classical English forms such as the sonnet, as well as free verse.   Brown moves easily between modes, from low-mimetic comedy

You'd think the poo pond
would attract more mortar rounds,
but they can't hit sh...

to an Owenesque closing couplet that evokes the gulf of experience between civilian and veteran:

they do not grasp our names our found
on medals and on stones
and on the lips of friends who've seen
what sacrifice has been

Brian Turner's 2005 collection of poems, Here Bullet, based on his experience in Iraq, has a different quality than Brown's often colloquial tone, more formal and perhaps more introspective.   Turner's work is beautiful and haunting, and shows, as Dobkin notes in his essay, how war literature can create strains of empathy which complicate and even overcome the enemy's Otherness.   In Turner's ''In the Leuopold Scope'', a rifleman is suddenly connected with an Iraqi woman on a distant rooftop, hanging laundry.  In the soldier poet's mind, that woman becomes a muse channeling the countless war dead through her billowing clothing, creating a powerful sense that the soldier is an interloper, complicit in an eternal tragedy.

She waits for them to lean forward
into the breeze, for the wind's breath
to return the bodies they once had,
women with breasts swollen by milk,
men with shepherd-thin bodies, children
running hard into the horizon's curving lens.

Conclusion
This survey has been partial at best.   I confess that I am woefully ignorant of war literature written by women veterans, whose experience of the Forever War included many combat and support roles.   Likewise there are no voices of African-American or Hispanic war writers.   There is a whole realm of literature from veterans of NATO armed forces that also played their part in the Forever War.  The UK's Patrick Hennessey (Junior Officer's Reading Club, 2009) is one example.  I would love to discover soldier writers and poets from Canada, Germany, and Denmark, to name just three of many allied countries.

Adin Dobkin has done us a great service by guiding us through an emerging and important body of work.  I hope that my own modest refinements make a further contribution in understanding the shape, variety and importance of contemporary war literature.

MP+

Book Review: David Finkel, Thank You For Your Service

David Finkel, Thank You For Your Service.  Toronto: Bond Street Books, 2013. 

I am slowly working my way through a stack of books about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have been published in the last few years.   My hope is that these books will be useful in the ongoing work of my unit, the Canadian Armed Forces Chaplain School and Centre, and that they will better prepare my colleagues to support those, soldiers and their families, who have been touched by war.

Most of these books are about the US experience in the so-called War on Terror, or as journalist Dexter Filkins called it presciently, almost a decade ago, The Forever War.  However, today's title, while by a US author about US soldiers, seems highly relevant.  As Romeo Dallaire and Carol Off. write in their forwards,  “it could just as easily have been written about Canadians in Afghanistan”. 

“(T)he after-war continues, as eternally as war itself” is how David Finkel ends his book, Thank You For Your Service.  For years now, Finkel has dedicated his work as a journalist to documenting the reality behind the words, “thank you for your service”, too often uttered by those who know nothing to those who can say nothing about the horrible things they have seen and done.  In his honest and unsparing account of ordinary people trying to repair their lives, Finkel reminds us that the terror continues in what he calls the after-war.  Young men return broken and ashamed, afraid to tell their partners “stuff” for fear that they will be seen as monsters.  Young women try to find the patience to raise frightened children and protect them from fathers who have changed.  “As soon as he got home”, one wife says, “he really wasn’t the same no more at all”.

In an earlier book, The Good Soldiers, Finkel embedded with a US Army unit tasked with patrolling one of the most violent parts of Baghdad, “a sorry bomb-filled neighbourhood ... (where) the war felt eventually like the wrong everything”.  These soldiers would armour up, go through their good-luck rituals, and load into convoys of lightly armoured Humvees,   never knowing when they would be blown up.   I reviewed The Good Soldiers here in 2009.  Towards the end of his earlier book, Finkel focused on difficulties of soldiers coming home to the US on leave during their tours. 

He quoted a mental health care specialist who described home as a  "a place of disaster" for most soldiers, whose trips home to the US on leave midway through their tour were not what they expected.   "There's an anger in guys when they go back. They want to go home and be normal, and they're not quite normal," he said, and added, "Coming back from leave is the worst part of the deployment".  Now, years after the war, home is more than ever a place of disaster.

In Thank You For Your Service, Finkel follows some of these same men after their return to the US.  Some came home broken by too many deployments, having seen too much and feeling too much guilt for comrades shot or burned to death inside their vehicles.   The same bonds which held them together would eventually work against them, for as Finkel writes, “To be a soldier in combat was to full love constantly”, only to have the loved one killed or shattered or burned before one’s eyes.

For some of these returning soldiers, these lost comrades haunt them waking and sleeping, like one soldier whose friend appears regularly and says “You let me burn”.  For others, the effects of loss, guilt, and post-traumatic stress are compounded by the physical effects of violence on the body and especially on the brain.  Cognitive loss and dementia are just as real to these soldiers as they are to some professional athletes.   In this harrowing passage, Finkel describes the long-term effects of such an injury on a soldier who, years later, cannot remember how to buy flowers for his wife.

 "Before he got blown up, he could have figured it out.  How hard is it to buy roses?  There’s a flower shop on Fort Riley.  They sell them at Walmart.  But such are the effects of being in a Humvee that rolls over three buried 130-millimeter artillery shells, which explode at the perfect moment.  Up he went, and down he came, and once his brain was done rattling around from a blast wave that passed through him faster than the speed of sound, here came the rest of it.  Memory, fucked.  The ability to pay attention, fucked.  Balance.  Hearing.  Impulse control.  Perception.  Dreams.  All of it, fucked.  “The signature would of the war” is what the military calls traumatic brain injury …  (198)

 Thank You For Your Service takes the reader through a labyrinth of damaged bodies and psyches, and of broken relationships and domestic abuse, that plays out in bleak neighbourhoods around a military base, or in the offices and clinics of a bureaucracy hastily-assembled by a military scrambling to understand and cope with these many unexpected casualties.    While Finkel is sympathetic to the many military and civilian personnel struggling to assist these injured veterans and their families, his conclusion, again and again, is that it is not enough.  Ordered by the chain of command to analyze each suicide, unit and brigade leaders struggle to find out if the member has taken mandated suicide prevention training, as much to cover themselves as to develop lessons learned.  Well-meaning generals cooperate with medical researchers to assess risk factors for suicide, but find that explanations are elusive.  Soldiers are medicated but cannot find adequate long-term treatment programs.   Wives feel alone and cut off from help.  Families struggle to pay the bills as unemployable and wounded veterans run through their benefits.   All of these ongoing struggles are what Finkel calls the “after-war”, as if getting blown up in Baghdad is just the start.

 This is one of the most difficult and demanding books I have ever read about contemporary warfare.   Finkel’s honesty, and the incredible degree of access he has gained to ordinary and damaged people gives this book a brutal and stark truth that a hundred war novels and films could never hope to capture.   It is a book that demands far more of society than empty slogans and cheap celebration of its “warriors”.  While Finkel is not prescriptive in his solutions, he seems to suggest that these veterans demand, and are owed, far more time, attention and care than they currently receive.  However, a society that would pay its debt to these men and women would first have to acknowledge what it asked them to do, and that admission might prove too difficult.

 We should all read this book if only to gain a better understanding of how the ongoing physical, mental and moral injuries of the “after-war” can isolate and oppress those who have returned to an uncomprehending country that no longer feels like home.   A person of faith will note that there is next to nothing said here about how faith or spirituality can be resources for such veterans, a notable absence that should be noted by those chaplains working in the area of spiritual resilience. 

One sees glimpses of hope and endurance here and there, in the care and love that these broken soldiers show one another, or in the determination of a few to walk with them and help them.   As the book ends we see one family seem to start a new life together, somehow still together after countless quarrels and fights, but by then we have learned of  many others who never survived the after-war, having chosen to end their own pain and struggle through suicide.   As a chaplain you will find no easy answers for ministering to veterans like the ones described here, but you will better appreciate the reality of the pain and the immensity of the need.

MP+

Notable Quotable: Tim O'Brien on War

I heard these word's being read yesterday by Garrison Keillor on his radio feature, Writer's Almanac, and GK's distinctive gravelly baritone seemed perfect for this passage. 

The author is Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran whose book  The Things They Carried, is essential reading for trying to understand the experience of war.  I would put it in the same category as Crane's Red Badge of Courage, Raemaker's All Quiet on the Western Front, and a recent book, Phil Klay's Redeployment.

Tim O'Brien in Vietnam

How do you generalize?
War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference — a powerful, implacable beauty — and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.