Unmanned Masculine Military Culture and Virtuous Warfare in Atypical War Narratives

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Unmanned Masculine Military Culture and Virtuous Warfare in Atypical War Narratives UNMANNED MASCULINE MILITARY CULTURE AND VIRTUOUS WARFARE IN ATYPICAL WAR NARRATIVES Jasper van Honk Stamnummer: 01304945 Promotor: Prof. dr. Tobi Smethurst Masterproef voorgelegd voor het behalen van de graad master in de richting taal- en letterkunde: Nederlands - Engels Academiejaar: 2016 - 2017 Acknowledgements First off, I would like to thank my promotor, prof. dr. Smethurst, for suggesting the interesting and relatively new subject of drone warfare and its narratives, for providing valuable feedback on my academic writing, and for accepting the multiple shifts in focus along the way. I would also like to thank my friends and family for their ongoing support during the intense writing process. I am especially grateful to Matthias and Ben for their willingness to provide feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts regarding my structure and thesis statement. Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank Charlien De Sutter for her continual encouragement and support during what have been some of the most stressful weeks of my life: I could not have done it without you. List of Abbreviations IED: Improvised Explosive Device MIME-NET: Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network PMS: Premenstrual Syndrome STA: Surveillance and Target Acquisition ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. ii List of Abbreviations .............................................................................................................................. ii Table of Contents .................................................................................................................................. iii Introduction Part One: The Salience of Injuring and Masculine Ideals .......................................... 1 The Salience of Injuring: The Body in Pain ....................................................................................... 1 The Salience of Masculine Ideals: The Female Malady .................................................................... 3 Introduction Part Two: The (Mis)Representation of War and Killing by Remote Control .......... 7 The (Mis)Representation of War: Virtuous War................................................................................ 7 Killing by Remote Control: Drone Theory ...................................................................................... 10 1 Trauma in the Middle East: Irregular Warfare and Masculine Military Culture in Jarhead and Love My Rifle More than You ...................................... 13 1.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 13 1.1.1 Jarhead ...................................................................................................................... 14 1.1.2 Love My Rifle More than You ................................................................................. 14 1.2 Youth and Early Motivations ................................................................................................. 15 1.2.1 Swofford: Proving His Manhood .............................................................................. 15 1.2.2 Williams: History of Being Liminal ......................................................................... 16 1.3 Boot Camp ............................................................................................................................. 17 1.3.1 Swofford: Drill Instructors and Jarheadese ............................................................... 19 1.3.2 Williams: Masculine over Feminine Qualities .......................................................... 19 1.4 Male Comradeship in the Military ......................................................................................... 20 1.4.1 Swofford: Hates the Grunt Corps, Loves His Elitist Platoon .................................... 21 1.4.2 Williams: Seeking Entry into the Inner Circle .......................................................... 23 1.5 Actual War: A Series of Disappointments ............................................................................. 25 1.5.1 Swofford: Impotence as a Soldier ............................................................................. 26 1.5.2 Williams: Institutional Sexism .................................................................................. 27 1.5.3 Incompetent Leadership and Virtuous Representation ............................................. 29 1.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 31 2 The Lethal Eye in the Sky: Drone Warfare in Grounded and Unmanned ........ 32 2.1 Boredom and Monotony ........................................................................................................ 33 2.1.1 Unmanned ................................................................................................................. 33 2.1.2 Grounded .................................................................................................................. 35 2.2 Hybrid Identities .................................................................................................................... 36 2.2.1 Unmanned ................................................................................................................. 36 iii 2.2.2 Grounded .................................................................................................................. 37 2.3 Unilateral Injuring ................................................................................................................. 40 2.3.1 Unmanned ................................................................................................................. 40 2.3.2 Grounded .................................................................................................................. 42 2.4 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 42 Conclusion 44 Disillusioned Atypical Warriors ...................................................................................................... 44 Bored Cubicle Warriors ................................................................................................................... 46 Closing Notes ................................................................................................................................... 47 Works Cited 48 Word count: 27,513 words iv Introduction Part One: The Salience of Injuring and Masculine Ideals Warfare has always been one of the more prevalent subjects in both historical and modern literature. While not that surprising given the circumstances of military history, warfare is traditionally and almost exclusively represented from a masculine perspective, emphasizing the actions and virtues of a heroic male or a group of males. Frequently, there is an emphasis on masculine ideals like bravery and sacrifice: putting your own life at risk – be it for king and country or for the deity of choice – and being in the middle of the battle seem to be two of the most lauded traits of the generically heroic soldier. However, in recent years several war narratives and memoirs have surfaced where this traditional image is challenged in various ways. Among other aspects, recent authors have critiqued the emphasis on the male perspective, the importance of heroism and self-sacrifice, and the representation of war as noble and “clean” in general. In this introduction, I will establish a general theoretical framework for the analysis of these atypical war narratives. I will begin by explaining how wars and their narratives tend to focus on injuring, specifically out-injuring the opponent, on the male perspective, and on ideals such as bravery and fortitude. As I will show, this focus is based on an ideal of the heroic male shaped by society and its gendered expectations. Rather than heroic and action-packed, modern warfare turns out to be a boring or traumatic experience which is generally waged from a distance. In the second part of this theoretical framework, I will show how this new kind of “virtuous” warfare and the increased distancing from the enemy by using weaponized UAVs or “drones” are fundamentally changing the ways in which nations choose to deal with their adversaries. The Salience of Injuring: The Body in Pain In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), Elaine Scarry analyzes the importance of bodies and their representation in torture and war. She considers war to be the most obvious analogue to torture, given that they have the same two targets: a people and its civilization (61). In war, the enemy is external and occupies a separate space, whereas torture “usually occurs where the enemy is internal and where the destruction of a race and its civilization would be a self-destruction” (61). Further on, she notes a crucial difference: war is “endowed with a moral ambiguity which is wholly 1 absent from torture” (62). Since the texts analyzed in this thesis do not concern torture1 and are evidently focused on bodies both in and at war, I will limit my analysis to the second chapter of Scarry’s book. In this second chapter, The Structure of War: The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues, Scarry investigates what defines war as war, and claims that the immediate activity of
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