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

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

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

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 war is both injuring and a contest (63). The similarity to a contest is concerning, because when participating in war “one participates not simply in an act of injuring, but in the activity of reciprocal injuring where the goal is to out-injure the opponent” (63). As I will show later, the goal of “out-injuring one’s opponent” is combined with a preference for self-preservation in what James Der Derian calls “virtuous war”: preventing as many friendly casualties as possible, even when this leads to more victims on the other side2. This increased number of (civilian) enemy casualties is often obfuscated for both the opposing party and the country doing the injuring, since “the structure of war itself will require that injuring be partially eclipsed from view” (64). Scarry notes that aside from this “active desire to misrepresent”, the salience of injuring and its consequences can also be omitted:

[O]ne can read many pages of a historic or strategic account of a particular military campaign, or listen to many successive installments in a newscast narrative of events in a contemporary war, without encountering the acknowledgment that the purpose of the event described is to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue, as well as to alter the surface, shape, and deep entirety of the objects that human beings recognize as extensions of themselves. (64)

Scarry is probably being deeply ironic here, since it is more than reasonable to assume that most if not all “official” representations of war deliberately hide its bloody and gory nature for propagandistic or moralistic purposes. Further down the page, Scarry seems to notice this herself, since she mentions that

[I]t [the structure of war] requires both the reciprocal infliction of massive injury and the eventual disowning of the injury so that its attributes can be transferred elsewhere, as they cannot if they are permitted to cling to the original site of the wound, the human body. (64)

Scarry quotes Clausewitz’s On War, which states that the soldier’s primary purpose is “the injuring of enemy soldiers; to preserve his own forces has the important but only secondary and “negative” purpose of frustrating and exhausting the opponent’s achievement of his goal” (Clausewitz, qtd. in Scarry 65)3. Since this reasoning is probably used by commanders in both sides of a war, it should not be surprising that “soldiers understand that it is this use to which they have been summoned, this to which they have consented: that they are going either “to die for one’s country” or “to kill for one’s country”” (73). Scarry mentions that this willingness to die for one’s country can deteriorate to the point where these national motives are replaced by “outcomes deeply antagonistic to these motives” (124) and finds this willingness remarkable:

1 Except for a chapter in Kayla Williams’ Love My Rifle More than You (2006), which I will not discuss. 2 Der Derian also notes the exceptional relationship between war and injuring by relating war to death: “What separates and elevates war above lesser (“Copernican”) conceits is its intimate relationship to death. The dead body […] is what gives war its special status, what trumps any lesser issues. […] This fact, the material facticity of the dead soldier, can be censored, hidden in a body bag, air- brushed away, but it provides, even in its erasure, the corporal gravitas of war.” (164) 3 When reading Scarry one should be mindful of her appreciation of Clausewitz which has apparently colored her judgement: she mentions that one of his quotes “has justly contributed to his reputation for astonishing brilliance: one knows on every page that one is in the presence of a massive intelligence” (66).

That the adult human being cannot ordinarily without his consent be physically “altered” by the verbal imposition of any new political philosophy makes all the more remarkable, genuinely awesome, the fact that he sometimes agrees to go to war, agrees to permit this radical self-alteration to his body. Even in the midst of the collective savagery and stupidity of war, the idiom of “heroism,” “sacrifice,” “dedication,” “devotion,” and “bravery” conventionally invoked to describe the soldier’s individual act of consent over his own body is neither inappropriate nor false. (112)

By mentioning these idioms “in the midst of collective savagery” Scarry has arrived at one of the central aspects of this thesis. In war, risking one’s own body is not only expected, but lauded with idioms that are considered to be the core values of the ideal soldier: heroism, sacrifice, dedication, devotion and bravery. In what follows, I will argue that since World War I, gender has shaped expectations for these values by associating negative traits with feminine illnesses.

The Salience of Masculine Ideals: The Female Malady

In The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture (1985) Elaine Showalter examines how Victorian expectations of ‘proper’ female behavior have shaped the definition and treatment of female “maladies” (insanity) since the 1830s. I will focus on the book’s seventh chapter, Male Hysteria, where Showalter argues that male hysteria or shell shock is related to a crisis of the Victorian male ideal. The term “shell shock” was coined by Dr. Charles S. Myers, a Cambridge psychologist who volunteered in France and encountered numerous cases of mental breakdown among men (Showalter 1985:167). He first used it in an article for The Lancet in 1915 because he “assumed that the physical force or chemical effects of a shell bursting at close range had caused these symptoms” (167). However, some of these men had never been near an exploding shell or had never come under fire at all, and “shock” did not seem all that fitting since the breakdown could be gradual as well (168). Showalter mentions that for these reasons

Myers confessed in his memoirs that shell-shock was “a singularly ill-chosen term,” denounced by some medical authorities as a “bungling” and “quasi-legal” diagnosis, and ultimately banned during the final stages of the war. Nonetheless, “shell shock” was a singularly memorable and popular term that stuck4, winning out over such alternatives as “anxiety neurosis,” “war strain,” and “soldier’s heart”. (168)

Shell shock quickly became an epidemic, accounting for as much as 40 percent of all casualties in the fighting zones in 1916 and as much as 80,000 cases by the end of the war, which lead to an emergency since the government was unprepared to handle the surprising number of victims (Showalter 1985:168). Showalter stresses the fact that this “parade of emotionally incapacitated men” provided a “shocking contrast” with the “heroic and masculinist fantasies that had preceded it” (169). After all, “the public image of the Great war was one of strong unreflective masculinity” which she sees embodied in

4 The concept of an ill-fitting term that nevertheless became popular and stuck resembles the way in which PTSD – more specifically the kind described by Cathy Caruth – quickly became an umbrella term for all sorts of mental trauma experienced by soldiers, which led to what Gibbs calls a “theoretical orthodoxy”. For a thoroughly detailed overview of this theoretical evolution, see The Trauma Paradigm and Its Discontents, Gibbs’ introduction to Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (Gibbs 2014:1-44).

“the square, solid untroubled figure of Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief” (169). However, Douglas Haig was not the only source of inspiration for the ideal of a strong and unrelenting heroic male soldier. The image was shaped by numerous influences during these boys’ lives, especially during their education:

[T]his image was prepared by the boys’ books of G.R. Henry, by Rider Haggard’s mal-adventure stories, by the romantic military poems of Tennyson and Robert Bridges. For the public-school boys, the university aesthetes and athletes, victory seemed assured to those who played the game. […] Chief among the values promoted within the male community of the war was the ability to tolerate the appalling filth and stink of the trenches, the relentless noise and the constant threat of death with stoic good humor, and to allude to it in phlegmatic understatement. Indeed, emotional repression was an essential aspect of the British masculine ideal. (169)

As I will illustrate in my close reading of Jarhead, this form of cultural “indoctrination” is still very much alive today. The books of G.R. Henry and the poems of Tennyson may have been replaced by anti-war movies about the Vietnam War like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, but the ideal of emotional repression is still highly coveted. Just like in Scarry’s analysis of war as a contest of out-injuring, participating is here likened to “playing the game”. Imagine the shock of these highly-spirited “chaps” – fresh out of public school, high on ideals of sportsmanship and bravery, with Tennyson and Bridges still ringing clear in their heads – when they were confronted with the brutal reality of the “game” in the trenches: the “appalling filth and stink”, the “relentless noise and the constant threat of death”. After an initial period wherein shell shock was attributed to various unrelated external causes – including physical injury to the brain, food poisoning and even hereditary taint5 – gradually most military psychologists and medical personnel came to agree that

the real cause of shell shock was the emotional disturbance produced by war itself, by chronic conditions of fear, tension, horror, disgust, and grief; and that war neurosis was “an escape from an intolerable situation,” a compromise negotiated by the psyche between the instinct of self- preservation and the prohibitions against deception or flight, which were rendered impossible by ideals of duty, patriotism, and honor. (170)

Military authorities refused to treat victims as disabled since shell shock did not have an organic cause, and some even went as far as to argue that they should be shot for malingering or cowardice (170). Showalter claims that “insensitive though these responses may be, they show how accurately male hysteria was perceived as a form of resistance to the war” (170). She argues that shell shock was not only a form of resistance to the war, but also a form of resistance towards traditional gender expectations in society and the masculine role in war specifically:

The Great War was a crisis of masculinity and a trial of the Victorian masculine ideal. In a sense, the long-term repression of signs of fear that led to shell shock in war was only an exaggeration of the male sex-role expectations, the self-control and emotional disguise of civilian life. (170)

As I will show later, society in general and gender roles in particular have changed a lot, but many of these “male sex-role expectations” still hold true, especially in the case of military training. Consider

5 Even Charles Myers believed that “the frequency of ‘shell shock’ in any unit is an index of its lack of discipline and loyalty”. As Showalter notes, “the idea that the shell shock of individuals is reflected on the performance of the group as a whole obviously made the burden of guilt even worse for those who succumbed to it”, much in the same way as PTSD in the modern military (169-170).

the following passage about society’s reception of fear and objection in its male citizens, and the way this is linked to feminine characteristics:

When all signs of physical fear were judged as weakness and where alternatives to combat – pacifism, conscientious objection, desertion, even suicide – were viewed as unmanly, men were silenced and immobilized and forced, like women, to express their conflicts through the body. Placed in intolerable circumstances of stress, and expected to react with unnatural “courage,” thousands of soldiers reacted instead with the symptoms of hysteria. (171)

Showalter also mentions potential homosexual urges among the soldiers, which at the time and even now is regarded as one of the biggest taboos in military contexts. She notes the consequences of having a large group consisting of only men fight and bond together over an extended period of time: “[a]t the same time that it advocated a forceful and unassailable manliness, the atmosphere of the war was intensely, if unconsciously, homoerotic” (171). For most soldiers, however,

the anguish of shell shock included more general but intense anxieties about masculinity, fears of acting effeminate, even a refusal to continue the bluff of stoic male behavior. If the essence of manliness was not to complain, then shell shock was the body language of masculine complaint, a disguised male protest not only against the war but against the concept of “manliness” itself. While epidemic female hysteria in Victorian England had been a form of protest against a patriarchal society that enforced confinement to a narrowly defined femininity, epidemic male hysteria in World War I was a protest against the politicians, generals, and psychiatrists. The heightened code of masculinity that dominated in wartime was intolerable to surprisingly large amounts of men. (172)

While some wanted to disguise these “troubling parallels” with female nervous disorders (172), many researchers associated victims of shell shock and their behavior with that of homosexuals, impotent men or women: in other words, not “real” or “complete” men. Showalter mentions that “the suggestion of male hysteria being a feminine kind of behavior in male subjects” was “a recurrent theme in the discussions of war neuroses” and that “when military doctors and psychiatrists dismissed shell-shock patients as cowards, they were often hinting at effeminacy or homosexuality” (172). In fact, even the men themselves experienced their anxiety as emasculating. Showalter notes that “many combatants felt themselves rendered powerless, unmanned, by the barrage of horror to which they were subjected, and by their uncontrollable physical and emotional responses to it” (173). Quoting the sociologist Erving Goffman, she links the conditions of the battlefield to an identification with the feminine role:

As the sociologist Erving Goffman has noted, with regard to lack of autonomy and powerlessness the soldier in is an analogous position to women. That most masculine of enterprises, the Great War, the “apocalypse of masculinism,” feminized its conscripts by taking away their sense of control. (173)

Showalter notes a disparity between soldiers suffering from hysteria on the one hand and officers suffering from neurasthenia on the other, claiming that “for officers in particular, the pressures to conform to British ideals of manly stoicism were extreme” and that they often took unnecessary risks to not show their men that they were afraid (174). She summarizes as follows:

In sum, then, the hysterical soldier was seen as simple, emotional, unthinking, passive, suggestible, dependent, and weak – very much the same constellation of traits associated with the hysterical woman – while the complex and overworked neurasthenic officer was much closer to an acceptable, even heroic male ideal. (175)

Interestingly, a lack of autonomy and sense of control is instantly linked to the position of women. While this may make sense given the historically subjected position of women in Victorian England, I will illustrate in my close reading of Love My Rifle More than You that even today, the lack of autonomy or power is associated with female characteristics, especially in a military context. Additionally, I would like to briefly mention Stacey Peebles’ Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq (2011), whose analysis of masculine culture in the contemporary6 U.S. Army will be one of the sources for my close reading of both Jarhead and Love My Rifle More than You. As I will demonstrate in those close readings, both the association of the ideals mentioned by Scarry (heroism, sacrifice, dedication, devotion and bravery) with a military masculine culture and the association of their opposites (fear, cowardice, a lack of power and autonomy) with female gender identities are still very much relevant today, especially in the context of war and the military. To recapitulate, these first part of my theoretical framework is based on theory examining “generic” or “normal” warfare and the virtues expected of soldiers engaging in it. War is a contest of “out-injuring one’s opponent”, where bravery and risking bodily harm are some of the desired male virtues, and where effects and symptoms of trauma and shell shock are associated with undesirable “womanly” traits, such as cowardice and a lack of self- control.

6 Even though the First Gulf War (Jarhead) and the Iraq War (Love My Rifle More than You) started respectively nearly two and three decades ago, I still consider it to be emblematic of the masculine culture in the current United States Army.

Introduction Part Two: The (Mis)Representation of War and Killing by Remote Control

If taking unnecessary risks by putting your own body in the midst of danger and bloodshed is to be heroic and manly, then perhaps avoiding those risks by eliminating the enemy from a safe distance is to be cowardly and feminine. Or is it indicative of a new way of waging war? In these next two chapters, I will describe the ways in which “virtuous war” and the use of drones have permanently changed the face of war. Responsible for dramatically shifting power dynamics in military conflicts, these innovations have caused some critics like Grégoire Chamayou to wonder whether these practices should still be considered warfare, since they more closely resemble assassination and hunting. I will begin my discussion with an analysis of James Der Derian’s Virtuous War, followed by an assessment of Grégoire Chamayou’s Drone Theory.

The (Mis)Representation of War: Virtuous War

In Virtuous War (2009)7, Der Derian attempts to construct a new theory in the field of international relations by “mapping the emergence of a new virtual alliance, the military-industrial-media- entertainment network”8 (xxvii, italics in original). Focusing on the bond between the military and entertainment industries on one hand and on technological innovations on the other, he argues that in recent years these innovations have given rise to a new form of warfare: virtuous war. Given its use in a thesis, I feel it is important to mention the unscholarly character of Virtuous War. In his preface to the new edition, Der Derian notes that his book “is not a scholarly treatise on international relations” and that he “never considered his investigations to be an academic exercise” (xviii-xix). The style of what he calls a “travelogue” alternates between anecdotes about his travels, pop-culture references and densely written philosophical passages about various postmodern theories. While Der Derian’s writing is flawed academically because of its incessant switching of styles and failure to adhere to objective assessments, I will still use it in this thesis because Virtuous War’s core theory – i.e. the view on the new kind of war being waged, its ‘virtuous’ aspects and the importance of innovations in military technology – is especially relevant for the disappointment some of the protagonists feel when noticing the virtuous representations of “their” wars.

7 Virtuous War was first published in 2001 and got an expanded second edition in 2009, upon which I will base my analysis and quotations. Der Derian notes in the preface to the new edition that it is not a revision of an earlier text. The original chapters are unaltered except for some corrected typos. Instead, four new chapters were added (xviii). 8 Examples of the “MIME-NET” noted by Der Derian include simulations used to train fighter pilots showing up in the special effects of Hollywood movies, Marine fire-teams training with the video game Doom (Marine Doom, a retooled version of the original to be exact) and Disney’s former head Imagineer, Bran Ferren, becoming an interior decorator for a naval command ship (xxxvi). For a description of the USS Coronado’s “Disney Room”, see Der Derian (126); for a more detailed description of Marine Doom, see Der Derian (89-90) and Peebles (17).

As Der Derian mentions in his prologue, “technology in the service of virtue has given rise to a global form of virtual violence, virtuous war” (xxvii), emphasizing that “technological innovations have transformed the battlefield” (xxx). Normally, the purpose of these innovations is what Clausewitz (as mentioned in my analysis of Scarry) deems the primary purpose of the soldier: the injuring of enemy soldiers. In other words, the primary purpose of innovations in military technology is the amplification of the primary purpose of the soldier. The goal is to injure enemy soldiers to a greater degree than the previous innovation allowed: in the severity of injuring, in the number of enemy combatants injured, or both. However, this thesis is not concerned with innovations focused on that primary purpose, such as napalm or the atom bomb – it focuses on what the “virtuous” way of waging war. In this new kind of warfare, technological innovations are often deployed with the intention of minimizing the number of friendly casualties. In other words, the primary purpose of military technology in virtuous war is what Clausewitz considers the secondary purpose of the soldier: “to preserve his own forces has the important but only secondary and “negative” purpose of frustrating and exhausting the opponent’s achievement of his goal” (Clausewitz, qtd. in Scarry 65). The military and its innovations have historically tried to preserve the own forces by increasing the distance between the own soldier engaging in combat and the soldier or civilian on the receiving end of this increasingly longer stick9. An interesting aspect, especially when compared with attitudes towards drone operators (so-called “cubicle warriors” who are part of the so-called “Chair Force”), is the degree of elitism associated with distance. Historically, the archers shooting from a distance were technically safer but of lower rank than the knights who charged into the middle of battle10. In modern times this ideal is very much still alive and kicking, but simultaneously a feeling of superiority over the common soldier by the ranged units has taken over – consider the two following quotes as an example. The first is from Virtuous War11, underlining the relatively safe positions of the (military) elite in World War I. The second one is by Anthony Swofford part of a platoon of U.S. Marines snipers (STA) who consider themselves elite forces compared to common infantrymen or “grunts”.

In the First World War, the telephone provided generals with the means and the arrogance to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to their deaths from the relative safety of their chateau headquarters. (Der Derian xxx) The STA Platoons were filled with men who worked in highly disciplined pairs, who gladly took on poor odds and likely death to fulfill thankless missions. I wanted to give myself over to beliefs that were more complex than the base beliefs of the infantry grunt. The grunt dies for nothing, for fifteen thousand poorly placed rounds; the sniper dies for that one perfect shot. (Swofford 58)

The innovations in military technology Der Derian is interested in, to return to his text, are obviously more recent ones. He is primarily interested in the rise of networked information technology, which at the time was announced in certain U.S. military circles as a “Revolution in Military Affairs”12 (xxx). However, a revolution takes more than just technological innovation:

9 I will elaborate on this evolution of distancing when discussing Chamayou’s Drone Theory in the next chapter. 10 The ideal of the heroic soldier risking his own body that I discussed in my discussion of Showalter can be considered a remnant of this historical mentality. 11 The quotation provides a clear example of Der Derian’s biased perception of the military. 12 For a more detailed account of this revolution, see the interview conducted by Der Derian with Andrew Marshall (29-33). Marshall is officially known as “the director of the Office of Net Assessment”, but unofficially as “St. Andrew, the Yoda of the RMA”, another one of Der Derian’s pop-culture references (28).

Political and strategic doctrines as well as civilian and military values must mesh if new technologies are to constitute anything approaching a revolution. In the twenty-first century, we seem to be approaching at great speed just such a moment. It is a virtual revolution in military and diplomatic affairs. (xxx)

As Der Derian remarks, this revolutionary “virtualization” does not entail a revolution in diplomatic or military affairs (let alone human affairs) on its own, but might do so when it is “deployed with the new ethical and economic imperatives for global and democratic reform and neoliberal markets” (xxx- xxxi). In fact, Der Derian claims that “in spite and perhaps because of these efforts, war is ascending to an even “higher” plane, from the virtual to the virtuous” (xxxi, italics in original). He underscores the dominant position of the United States in those “current efforts”, what he considers to be a virtuous way of waging war:

The United States, as unilateral deus ex machina of global politics, is leading the way in this virtual revolution. Its diplomatic and military policies are increasingly based on technological and representational forms of discipline, deterrence, and compulsion that could best be described as “virtuous war.” At the heart of virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distance – with no or minimal casualties. Using networked information and virtual technologies to bring “there” here in near-real time and with near-verisimilitude, virtuous war exercises a comparative as well as strategic advantage for the digitally advanced. Along with time (in the sense of tempo) as the fourth dimension, virtuality has become the “fifth dimension” of U.S. global hegemony. (xxxi, italics in original)

Threatening with violence and dealing damage from a distance and with no or minimal casualties is one of the key features of virtuous war. Der Derian notes that “on the surface, virtuous war cleans up the political discourse as well as the battlefield” and that these virtuous wars are “fought in the same manner as they are represented, by real-time surveillance and TV “live-feeds”” which leads them to “promote a vision of bloodless, humanitarian, hygienic wars” (xxxi). The key insight here is the following distinction: the “sanitization of violence” (xxxiii) applies to violence inflicted by both sides, made possible through the MIME-NET. However, the limitation to “little to no casualties” (xxxi) of virtuous war – i.e. Clausewitz’ secondary purpose of the soldier – is only applicable to one’s own forces, while no efforts are made to limit or even mention the number of enemy casualties:

We can rattle off casualty rates of prototypical virtuous conflicts like the Gulf War (270 Americans lost their lives – more than half in accidents) […] Yet most of us would not know the casualty figures for the other side. Post-Vietnam, the U.S. has made many digital advances; public announcement of enemy body counts is not one of them. […] Virtuous war is anything but less destructive, deadly, or bloody for those on the receiving end of the big technological stick. (xxxi- xxxii, emphasis in original)

Virtuous war, then, is a fundamentally new way of waging war. Abusing superiority in military technology at all times and threatening with severe violence when needed, war is no longer primarily being waged in the bloody battlefield using hand-to-hand or rifle-to-rifle combat. Instead, killing and injuring is preferably done from a distance, e.g. by using drones, since there is no risk of bodily harm for the operators. When things do get “old-fashioned”, i.e. messy and up close, the MIME-NET is called upon to present a sanitized version of the events transpired, purposely omitting enemy casualties, military or otherwise.

Killing by Remote Control: Drone Theory

Drone Theory by Grégoire Chamayou was first published as Théorie du Drone in 2013, translated into English by Janet Lloyd and subsequently published by Penguin Books in 2015. Just like Virtuous War, Drone Theory is not an objective academic source, nor does it pretend to be one. Chamayou is more straightforward about this than Der Derian, stating the polemic and subjective nature of Drone Theory in its introduction:

What I have to say is openly polemical, for, over and above the possible analytical contributions this book may make, its objective is to provide discursive weapons for the use of those men and women who wish to oppose the policy served by drones. (16)

I have included Drone Theory for the same reason I have chosen to include Virtuous War: relevancy. While academically flawed because of its evident subjectivity, its analysis of the unique nature of drones as a weapon – risk-averse, remotely-controlled – is relevant to the two narratives dealing with the daily life of drone operators: Grounded and Unmanned. Chamayou mentions that “in the U.S. Army’s official vocabulary, a drone is broadly defined as a land, sea, or air vehicle that is remotely or automatically controlled” (11). Drones can be divided into categories in a couple of different ways. First, according to the environment they work in, one can differentiate terrestrial, marine, submarine, subterranean and aerial drones (11). Second, whether they are controlled from a distance by human operators (remote control) or controlled autonomously by robotic means (automatic piloting)13 (11). Third, whether they are equipped with weapons (UCAVs: unmanned combat air vehicles) or not (UAVS: unmanned aerial vehicles) (11). My thesis will focus on weaponized, remotely-controlled flying drones used by the U.S. military like the ominously named Predator and Reaper. General T. Michael Moseley claims that

We’ve moved from using UAVs primarily in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance roles before Operation Iraqi Freedom to a true hunter-killer role with the Reaper – a name that captures the lethal nature of this new weapon system. (Moseley, qtd. in Chamayou 11-12)

Chamayou finds the history of drones to be “that of an eye turned into a weapon” (11) According to him, the most accurate definition of a drone is the one by Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence: “flying, high-resolution video cameras armed with missiles” (12). Their definition as essentially weaponized cameras illustrates one of their quintessential aspects. While extremely expensive compared to a regular rifle or pistol, they have the absolute advantage of posing no risk of harm for their operators. Chamayou quotes David Deptula, an Air Force officer who claims that “the real advantage of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to project power14 without projecting vulnerability” since “self-preservation by means of drones involves putting vulnerable bodies out of reach” (12). The drone is the next step in the evolution of distancing:

13 As Chamayou notes, present-day drones combine these two controlling methods in practice, and while “armies do not yet have at their disposal operational autonomous lethal robots […] there are already advanced plans for those.” (11) 14 Chamayou notes that “[p]rojecting power should here be understood in the sense of deploying military force regardless of frontiers. […] In the history of military empires, for many years “projecting power” meant sending in troops, but it is precisely that equation that now has to be dismantled.” (12)

This [self-preservation by means of drones] could be seen as the fulfillment of the ancient desire that inspires the whole history of ballistic weapons: to increase one’s reach so as to hit the enemy from a distance before the opponent can launch its own attack. (12)

The fulfillment of this “ancient desire” is elaborated upon in Chamayou’s own footnotes, where he quotes from an article by Charles D. Link, called “Maturing Aerospace Power”. Chamayou sees a trend of “establishing an unexposed power”: an expression “which is being used by Air Force strategists not only to describe the strategic advantage of the drone, but the procedures of remote warfare in general” and which “was based in what was described as a historical tendency to favor long-range weaponry” (230), a tendency I have mentioned in the previous chapter:

An examination from the long term [sic] trend, from club to spear, to bow and arrow, to catapult, musket, rifle and so on indicates a specific motivation. One wishes to be able to affect an adversary from a sufficient distance so as to avoid being similarly affected. In other words, there is a specific and rational desire to be able to project distant influence without projecting vulnerability in the same ratio. (Link, qtd. in Chamayou 230)

As I have mentioned when discussing virtuous war, the MIME-NET frequently employs euphemistic language to create a sanitized, bloodless version of war, while obscuring or even omitting the wounding and casualties of the enemy forces. The “projection of power” is one of these euphemisms:

However, “projection of power” is also a euphemism that obscures the facts of wounding, killing, destroying. And to do this “without projecting vulnerability” implies that the only vulnerability will be that of the enemy, reduced to the status of a mere target. (12)

Chamayou quotes Scarry’s The Body in Pain to underline the importance of injuring and killing in war. He focuses on the lack of reciprocity when injuring, arriving at the concerning conclusion I have hinted at in the introduction of the previous chapter: drones turn asymmetrical (but still somewhat fair) warfare into something that resembles more of a hunt or an assassination. In fact, Chamayou will frequently employ the images of a hunter or assassin when discussing drone warfare in the rest of his book.

Underlying the palliative military rhetoric, as Elaine Scarry detects, the real claim is that the “successful strategy is one in which the injuring occurs only in one direction” […] By prolonging and radicalizing preexisting tendencies, the armed drone goes to the very limit: for whoever uses such a weapon, it becomes a priori impossible to die as one kills. Warfare, from being possibly asymmetrical, becomes absolutely unilateral. What could still claim to be combat is converted into a campaign of what is, quite simply, slaughter. (Scarry, qtd. in Chamayou 13)

Chamayou links the concerning nature of an absence of reciprocity to an absence of “the traditional principles of a military ethos” (17). These principles are identical to the values appreciated in military men as noted by Showalter and Scarry:

The attempt to eradicate all direct reciprocity in any exposure to hostile violence transforms not only the material conduct of armed violence technically, tactically, and psychically, but also the traditional principles of a military ethos officially based on bravery and a sense of sacrifice. Judged by the yardstick of such classical categories, a drone looks like the weapon of cowards. (17, emphasis in original)

And so, after indirectly referring to concepts of Der Derian’s Virtuous War and directly quoting from Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Chamayou now indirectly references the ideals of the heroic soldier as

analyzed in Showalter’s The Body in Pain: in a way, the theory has come full circle. Drones may very well be an example of virtuous warfare because they protect their operators, but this does not mean that their operators are virtuous, least of all when judged by the “yardstick” of the traditional military and masculine ethos. In this introduction, I have attempted to provide a general theoretical background for the analysis of atypical war narratives. I have begun with the theories of Scarry and Showalter to show the importance of reciprocal injuring, risking one’s own body, and adhering to masculine ideals for a soldier in “traditional” war narratives in order to provide a contrast with the narratives I will analyze. In the second part, I have attempted to show how modern warfare does not adhere to these outdated standards. Instead, war is preferably waged from a distance, e.g. by using weaponized drones, and represented as virtuous in media and recruitment brochures by the MIME-NET. I will look at the memoirs of two contemporary wars that are, according to Der Derian, prototypically virtuous: the Gulf War (Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead) and the Iraq War (Kayla Williams’ Love My Rifle More than You). In my analysis of these narratives, I will use the virtues of the ideal soldier as noted by Scarry and Showalter to emphasize the gendered biases of military training and its homosocial bonds, while showing how they are disillusioned with the representation of their wars as virtuous by the MIME-NET. These theories will be supplemented by Chamayou’s Drone Theory in my analysis of two narratives that deal with the daily life of drone operators: Grounded (a theater play) and Unmanned (a video game).

1 Trauma in the Middle East: Irregular Warfare and Masculine Military Culture in Jarhead and Love My Rifle More than You

1.1 Introduction

In Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq (2011), Stacey Peebles examines the “new war story in prose, poetry, and films of the American soldier’s experience in the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War” (2). I found her book especially relevant for this part of my thesis since, among other narratives, she analyzes Anthony Swofford’s memoir of the Gulf War, Jarhead (2003), and Kayla Williams’ memoir of the Iraq War, Love My Rifle More than You (2006). For my analysis of these two texts, I will use her reading, which is focused on gender and masculine military culture, in tandem with Alan Gibbs’ reading, which is focused on perpetrator trauma1. I will also refer to the theories of Elaine Showalter, Elaine Scarry, and James Der Derian as analyzed in the introduction and theoretical framework. In her introduction, Peebles notes many changes in the soldier’s experience in this new kind of war which result in a new kind of war story, chief among which are “the effects of large-scale advances in medical and communications technology and the greatly increased presence of women in the military” (2). It is this latter development upon which I will focus here, especially the experience of female soldiers in what can be described as masculine military culture. This culture is based on the ideals and evaluation of gender characteristics discussed in Showalter and Scarry. As Peebles puts it:

Accounts from Homer to O’Brien describe the soldier’s initiation into battle and how he begins to identify himself as a fighter. They reveal how life as a soldier affects his conception of manhood or masculinity. War can make (or unmake) the man – and today it is a proving ground for women as well. (Peebles 2)

I will begin with a short introduction to both works, followed by Swofford’s and Williams’ reasons for joining the military to illustrate some of their personality traits. I will also comment on the boot camp episode, seemingly ubiquitous in these types of narratives, where the civilian and his (or her) body and mind are “reified” into tools fit for combat, often with an explicit evaluation of gender traits. I will then discuss how this militarized body and mind provide access to one of the most essential aspects of

1 I derive Gibbs’ reading from his monograph Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (2014) which I have mentioned in the introduction, more specifically its fourth chapter Gulf War Memoirs and Perpetrator Trauma (161-200).

masculine military culture: comradeship, the bond of trust forged between men fighting together. Following this analysis of military training and comradeship, I discuss what happens when Swofford and Williams are actually deployed abroad. They are shocked when they are confronted with the “corporeality” of real war, as opposed to the virtual violence in war movies. At the same time, Swofford and Williams feel like they are cheated out of the experience of being a “real” soldier (ironically, like in the war movies) for a variety of reasons, including boredom and “combat impotence” (Swofford) and institutional sexism (Williams). I also examine how both are disappointed with incompetent behavior by their superiors, and how Swofford is disillusioned by the difference between his experience of the Gulf War and its representation. This representation is based on the other important change noted by Peebles: large-scale advances in communications technology – in Der Derian’s words, the sanitization and misrepresentation of war as virtuous by the MIME-NET.

1.1.1 Jarhead

Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles was published by Scribner in 2003. As suggested by its subtitle, Swofford’s chronicle deals with more than just his time serving in the Marines: it also discusses his youth and the consequences of being a soldier long after he has returned home, although to a lesser extent than in Kayla Williams’ memoir. Anthony Swofford served in the United States Marine Corps in a Scout-Sniper platoon during the first Gulf War, which lasted from the 2nd of August 1990 to the 28th of February 1991. Fought between Iraqi forces and a coalition consisting of 35 nations defending Kuwait fronted by the United States, the First Gulf War can be split up into two operations: Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Desert Shield was a long period during which the coalition mainly built up troops for the defense of Saudi Arabia, while Desert Storm, the actual combat phase, was an overwhelming offensive that lasted just over a month. Most of this month was taken up by an extended aerial and naval bombardment: the ground assault phase was over a mere 100 hours after it started. This led ground troops like Anthony Swofford, who spent most if not all of their time waiting in the desert while seeing little to no combat, to feel that they did not matter and that they were cheated out of a “true” war experience – an expectation which is ironically based on unrealistic Vietnam war movies.

1.1.2 Love My Rifle More than You

Love my Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army, written by Kayla Williams and co- written by Michael Staub2, was published in 2006. As suggested by its subtitle, Williams’ memoir focuses on the experience of being both young and female in the contemporary U.S. Army. Her narrative provides an interesting “outsider” perspective as both a female and as an Arabic translator in the contemporary armed forces. Williams has also written a sequel, Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War (2015), which details the aftermath of her service in Iraq, but which I will not analyze here. She served in the United States Army as an Arabic linguist and translator for a year during the Iraq War, which started with the invasion of Iraq by the United States in

2 Peebles mentions that “it is worth noting that Williams’ memoir is mediated by a male ghostwriter” and points out that “in the acknowledgements, Williams credits Staub with “coming to me with the idea of this book and working so hard to keep it as accurate as possible”” (Williams 289, qtd. in Peebles 95).

2003 and formally ended with the withdrawing of their troops in 2011, although the civilian war it resulted in is still ongoing. While Williams also experiences periods of extreme boredom like Swofford, her capacity as a translator meant being constantly tossed around various companies and branches of the military to act as a middle man (or rather middle woman) between armed forces and the local civilian population. As I will illustrate, Williams’ trauma is a result of institutional sexism, feeling left out of the typically masculine military culture and its comradeship, and disillusionment with her incompetent superiors, all expressed in gendered terms.

1.2 Youth and Early Motivations

1.2.1 Swofford: Proving His Manhood

Swofford’s incentive for becoming a marine was at age fourteen in 1984, when a marine barracks in Lebanon was bombed and 241 U.S. servicemen were killed, most of them marines. He mentions that “the number of dead was buried into my consciousness” (127) and that shortly after the bombing he ordered a USMC3 iron-on from a recruitment ad in Sports Illustrated (129). As young Swofford prepares for his newspaper route by folding the front-page images of the wounded marines, he is struck with a sense of duty: “the carnage crept into my brain, and also the sense that my country had been harmed and that I was responsible for some of the healing, the revenge. My country had been attacked, and I was a part of my country” (128). Both his father and grandfather had gone to war: he feels “linked to the warrior line” because of his “unalterable genetic stain” (128). Wearing his father’s “boonie cover” from Vietnam while delivering his paper route, Swofford sees his military future right in front of him:

Each morning I threw my ninety papers, with expertise, using the same aiming technique that would later help me while tossing grenades, and as the papers spun through the air toward my customers’ porches, I saw – in the front-page photos of the bombed marine barracks – the kaleidoscopic trajectory of my future. (Swofford 128)

However, Swofford’s motivation for joining the Marine Corps is not exclusively patriotic. It is part of a larger process of becoming a man – or rather becoming what society expects a man to be. A lot of years have passed since the public school boys’ books and poems by Tennyson mentioned in Showalter, but the same expectation of males to be “tough” in society still hold true in 1984. At the easily impressionable age of fourteen, young Swofford is transfixed by the media’s reporting of the Lebanon bombing, especially the image of manly marines:

As the marine bodies were carried from the rubble, I stood at attention and hummed the national anthem as the rough-hewn jarheads, some in bloody skivvy shirts, carried their comrades from the rubble. The marines were all sizes and all colors, all dirty and exhausted and hurt, and they were men, and I was a boy falling in love with manhood. I understood that manhood had to do with war, and war with manhood, and to no longer be just a son, I needed someday to fight. (Swofford 128)

3 For brevity’s sake, I will often refer to the United States Marine Corps as simply “USMC” or “Marines”.

What is interesting is that for Swofford, at least when looking back, this “initial impulse” had nothing to do with the central act of killing and injuring in close combat like in the theories of Scarry. Rather, it is explicitly linked with proving his manhood and family line through severe military discipline:

This initial impulse had nothing to do with a desire for combat, for killing, or for a heroic death, but rather was based on my intense need for acceptance into the family clan of manhood. By joining the Marine Corps and excelling within the severely disciplined enlisted ranks, I would prove both my manhood and the masculinity of the line. (Swofford 203)

1.2.2 Williams: History of Being Liminal

In the chapter Who I Was, Williams describes her youth and several motivations for joining the military, one of them being that she feels the need to prove herself like Swofford. She mentions feeling like she had something to prove and struggling against fear of pain and failure every day of her life, being most afraid of passing up a chance to overcome her fears (24-25). This would be a good link to her motivations of joining the Army, as she notes herself: “[h]ence the Army? Not so fast” (25). Instead, she goes on to describe in detail how her favorite drug was LSD instead of marijuana because she “loved to think” – presumably to distance herself from the average grunt as well as the average stoner (25). Swofford employs a similar strategy: he stresses his drug abuse before joining the military, and his preference for literary classics such as Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Camus, presumably to separate him from the average grunt (Swofford 54). Williams also goes into detail about being raised in a divided household and her following difficult youth: not an unimportant point, since she and many others may have looked towards the Army as a place to belong, a substitute family – a point that is also mentioned by Swofford. Her father and mother had been divorced already (once and twice, respectively) before marrying, and a year after Kayla was born, her mother left her father. She still saw her father, who was prone to physical tantrums, and her mother “seemed intent on having us slide down the social ladder as much as possible” which made them end up living on public assistance (26-27). Her difficult youth seems to have enabled her to identify with liminal figures and communities – in a way, her youth prepared her for the outsider’s position she experiences as a woman and a translator in Iraq. When she mentions going to an outstanding private school while living in a sketchy neighborhood, she “moved between these two worlds – privileged and poor” (27). When she moves to a public school, she becomes a punk and is promptly shocked by the prejudice she experiences, which made her “develop a sense of kinship with black people” (29). Resembling the role of the Army in her life later on, she feels like the punk scene gave her “a community, like a family” – albeit one which makes her run away from home and live in a “neo-Nazi filth palace” with a Jewish girl (29-30). A couple of years later, when she has her first stable job, she finds herself travelling between worlds again: “I was hanging around homeless punks at night and on weekends, many of whom were doing hard drugs, and I was going to an office during the week” (31). Anticipating her reaction to institutional sexism in Iraq, she mentions feeling disgusted with the sexism in the punk rock scene after taking some women’s studies courses at university (31). When she ends up with a stable job and her own house, she discovers one of the main reasons she joined the military: escapism. Peebles claims that “Williams sees the Army as an escape from the looming threat of domesticity and the traditional feminine role” (86):

I felt I’d never learned how to fail. I’d never lost my fear of failure. I was at a point in my life when I felt that if I didn’t do something drastic, I was going to wake up in a house with a white picket fence and a minivan and kids who hated me. (32)

Another important factor for her liminal status in Iraq is her relationship with Tariq, Rick for short. Rick is also a figure between two worlds, balancing being a “real” Muslim and a “real” American. He doesn’t drink during the day, yet he works in a liquor store; he doesn’t want to have sex in a room with a Koran in it, so he and Kayla simply move it out (32). Williams’ relationship with “Rick” makes her appreciate the Arabic language and sense of community: “it wasn’t until I joined the military that I experienced anything like this again” (34). Talking with his mother about the Beirut civil war made her think about “how we – as Americans – are so willing to bomb other people’s countries” (33-34). She notes that Rick was a big part of her decision to enlist, because he gave her confidence that she could handle it – he wouldn’t have wanted her to do it, but he had “so much confidence” in her in general (38- 39). Another reason for enlisting she specifically mentions is to prove another boyfriend wrong:

So, five years later, I thought of Douglas when I enlisted. And even later still, during basic training, when I wanted so badly to quit, I thought of him yelling at me. Taunting me how I could never make it in the military. And I’d think: Fuck you, Douglas. And I kept at it – to prove him wrong. (41)

One final reason that made her join was the financial incentive: “enlisting meant I would not be geographically stable, but I would be financially stable” (41). She signed for five years, getting “fifteen thousand dollars cash for signing plus fifty thousand dollars for grad school” (41-42). She joins the Army reserves in January 2000 “in what was still Bill Clinton’s America” so “the thought that I might go to war was pretty distant” (41).

1.3 Boot Camp

Several theorists have noted the importance of boot camp in shaping the mind and body of a prospective soldier into a militarized one fit for combat. Commenting on the “Urban Warrior” military exercise of 1999, Der Derian notes that it didn’t take much aggravation from a refugee (actor) to make the participating Marines violate the rules of engagement, since the “hardwiring of boot camp” seemed to overpower their initially humanitarian intentions: “you shouldn’t expect combat soldiers, especially marines, to make good peacekeepers” (144). Gibbs comments on “the conventional-generic character of the boot camp episode” which according to him “has become a staple of war narrative” (177). He argues that “the projection of victim status onto members of the American armed forces” is in tension with “a military training and profoundly masculine discourse of war narrative that demands agency” (161)4. This agency is apparently not to be used for humanitarian purposes, but for killing and injuring.

4 For Gibbs, Swofford is in “a liminal position, part of the violence-perpetrating organization, but also victimized and exploited by it, as the opening boot camp scenes serve to emphasize” (176).

Gary Olsen claims that a key element of military conditioning is overtly anti-emphatic5: “if empathy is putting oneself in another’s shoes, the indissoluble combination of core masculinity with brainwashing, degradation, and stripping away any sense of self aims to foreclose this response” (qtd. in Gibbs 180). Stacey Peebles points out that

Creating order out of the chaos of war often necessitates many forms of binary thinking. If one does not define oneself against the enemy, for instance, one will not be an effective soldier – that is, one will not be able to kill. And that need for binaries creeps into other aspects of the soldier’s experience and identity. (Peebles 50)

The “need for binaries” does indeed creep into other aspects of the soldier’s experience, since the “hardwiring of boot camp” relies on traditional conceptions of gender and the process of reification. Gibbs mentions that “numerous writers have observed how the military manipulates particular forms of masculinity in order to produce aggression” (185). Brian Jarvis claims that “military power structures seek to colonize the soldier’s gendered identity and develop a militarized body that must be permanently hard and function with mechanical efficiency” and that “the hyperbolic masculinity imposed by military discipline ensures that trauma is inseparable from the corporeal cartographies of gender identity” (137, qtd. in Gibbs 185). Gibbs points out that “this functionality comes at an extreme cost” since “male soldiers are forced to stifle any attribute perceived as feminine” (185). It is therefore no coincidence that the colonized identity is gendered, not unlike the gendered identity of soldiers in World War I as described by Showalter. Feminine characteristics such as empathy and passivity are evaluated negatively, while aggression and other supposedly masculine traits such as courage and endurance are deemed desirable or even necessary, regardless of the recruit’s gender. Gibbs deduces that “the very processes that manipulate the individual soldier into the military unit traumatically appropriate and distort his gendered identity” (185). He links the conception of the militarized body in military training – mechanized and no longer individual, part of the larger machine that is the Army – to Jameson’s theories of alienation and reification. He uses Phillips as an example, who describes how “military powers manipulate masculinity by portraying universal feelings of fear as somehow womanly, and therefore to be shunned” which results in a preference for numbness during combat6 (qtd. in Gibbs 185). Phillips concludes that this “ideological manipulation of the individual’s masculinity in order to transform them into fighters” results in inevitable trauma (178, qtd. in Gibbs 186). Reprising Jameson’s concept of reification, Gibbs stresses that the military does not attempt to hide this “ideological manipulation”:

At a deeper level, the training which prepared the men for war – both physically and in terms of forging a mental attitude of homosocial camaraderie and submission to authority – represents a clear example of reification, the transformation of people into usable things. Often, there is surprisingly little effort made to conceal either the processes of reification or their purposes. (189)

5 Gibbs mentions that Swofford’s attempted empathy with Iraqi soldiers “stands in direct opposition to his military training” because “empathy and passivity are diametrically opposed to the masculine aggression demanded of soldiers” (180). He notes that this construction of empathy with Iraqi soldiers is a “key rhetorical trope whereby Swofford tries to subvert perpetrator trauma in Jarhead” (180). 6 This is reminiscent of the emotional repression expected of British soldiers in World War I, as noted by Showalter (169). Peebles also notes a similar preference in James Jones’ The Thin Red Line (1962), where “the soldiers fight to achieve what Jones calls “combat numbness”, a desirably blank emotional state that enables them to temporarily forget their fear and anxiety” (2).

1.3.1 Swofford: Drill Instructors and Jarheadese

In Jarhead, language is a clear example of the “overt reification of human subjects as tools of war” (Gibbs 189) in military training, as illustrated by the Drill Instructor scene7. On the second day of boot camp, Swofford meets Drill Instructor Burke, who “like most DIs, didn’t speak as much as growl”, agitates and insults his fellow recruits, and tells “Beirut bedtime stories about digging dead buddies from the rubble” (27). Swofford will later refer to this kind of verbal assault as “DI-ese, the language of our oppression” (149). When one of the recruits responds to a barrage of insults about his mother with “Sir, my mother was not a bitch, sir. Sir, I am not a cunt and I can handle your Marine Corps, sir” Burke punches the recruit square on the forehead (28). Swofford explains that

“The recruit had made the mistake of personal pronouns, which the recruit is not allowed to use when referring to the drill instructor or himself. The recruit is the recruit. The drill instructor is the drill instructor or sir.” (28, italics in original)

Addressing them all, Burke establishes his superior status (“I will tell you when to piss and when to shit and how to eat and how much to eat and when!”) while stressing the importance of killing in war (“I will teach you how to kill and how to stay alive!”) and the group mentality in the military (“I will forge you into part of the iron fist with which our great United States fights oppression and injustice!”) (28). The ban on personal pronouns, the denigration of recruits, and the stress on both killing and group mentality can all be considered as typical of the process Peebles calls “soldierization” (51). This process includes material goods as well as verbal assault: besides a uniform, “the initiation into the military includes the requisite haircut, assignment of a service number, and issuing of equipment and, of course, standard clothing” (51). Indeed, one can hardly call himself a jarhead without having their distinctive haircut. Equally important for a real jarhead is “Jarheadese”, the Marines’ unique way of talking. Swofford’s claim that it is “pure profane smack” (166) is not exaggerated: it features numerous instances of explicit and often sexually loaded jarhead slang, such as “dickskinners” (hands) and “cum receptable” (mouth)8. When they are deployed and censored before being interviewed by some journalists, Swofford remarks the following:

I want to come to the defense of free speech, but I know it will be useless. We possess no such thing. The language we own is not ours, it is not a private language, but derived from Marine Corps lore and history and tactics. […] When you are part of that thing, you speak like it. (14)

1.3.2 Williams: Masculine over Feminine Qualities

For Williams, basic training was “like going to the movies when the picture is totally out of focus […] but no one moves. The audience just sits there. Everyone just kind of adjusts to the situation”: she understands “that basic training was indoctrination, that the aim was to break us down and rebuild us into what the Army wanted” but she is “not too amenable to the concept” (42-43). She paints a somewhat

7 As Gibbs and others have noted, this scene is “strongly reminiscent” of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The torrent of expletives and degradation unleashed on recruits by Drill Instructor Burke resembles Full Metal Jacket’s well-known opening speech by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman 8 For a non-exhaustive list, see page 30 of Jarhead. Elaine Scarry (66) notes that injuring can disappear through “the active description of the event”: “the act of injuring, or the tissue that is to be injured, or the weapon that is to accomplish the injury is renamed.” “Jarheadese” seems to focus on the renaming the tools used for injuring, rather than obscuring the fact of injuring.

ambiguous picture of boot camp. She found the drill sergeants to be “mainly okay” since they respected her as a slightly older, more mature soldier-in-training, while some others were ridiculous (43). One memorable moment for Williams is when a drill sergeant claims that females do better on the firing range because they know how to follow instructions (44). She is surprised to find that a lot of people in boot camp “appreciated the same alternative music I did, and felt the same cynicism I did about fitting the Army mold” (44). She meaningfully remarks that it was “the guys in particular” who were “basically good guys” but another memorable moment occurs when “they gave us endless shit for the differential female standards on PT tests”, which prompts her to train harder because “guys couldn’t bitch if we passed the male tests” (44). It seems that for Williams, the most memorable moments of boot camp are those where she is explicitly reminded of her gender. Peebles claims that “in her description of basic training, Williams further clarifies her identification with masculine rather than feminine qualities. She enjoys discovering her endurance, stamina and willpower” (86). Williams shows a clear preference for the company of males over that of females – at least at boot camp. She admires the older, more experienced women while showing contempt for the younger girls, who “were more of pain” (45). She remembers a particular moment (also based on gender norms) where a girl cries because her recruiter said she wouldn’t have to handle a weapon in the Army. Williams’ resentment towards crying females, especially superiors, is a repeating occurrence during her deployment. She also generalizes – not unlike the sexist observations that she detests so much – by claiming that “girls fixated on appearances” (45). Williams claims that she did not see women bond, because “forced into close quarters, we just got catty” and that she “hated living with females” (46). Peebles notes that “for Williams, unfortunately, acting like a man also entails defining herself against the negative qualities associated with other women” (87). Her unfortunate strategy is reminiscent of the appreciation of male virtues as opposed to feminine weakness in World War I, as mentioned by Showalter and Scarry. Her attitude towards the different genders is probably a successful result of what Jarvis describes as “the colonizing of soldier’s gendered identity” and what Philips calls “ideological manipulation” in military training.

1.4 Male Comradeship in the Military

Essential for entering the masculine collective that is the military is the acceptance and endorsement of what Gibbs calls “the internally structured homosocial bonds of the military” (180). Peebles claims that “in the military, the man is most often truly made by the presence and acceptance of other military men” and that “comradeship, the bond of trust forged between men fighting together, would seem to be as old as fighting itself” (52). She goes on to argue that

That bond provides the impetus to fight as well as a sense of identity, and can be even more powerful than patriotism or a sense of righteous cause. If a love for “king and country” can seem a bit abstract under fire, then a love for the soldier next to you, with whom you have shared hardships and searing experiences, can be a much more tangible reason to keep going. (52)

Many theorists have noted the significance of comradeship and its superiority over what Peebles calls “king and country” – i.e. patriotism, the reason most men enlist. Firstly, Holmes points out that “for the key to what makes men fight – not enlist, not cope, but fight – we must look hard at military groups and the bonds that link the men within them” (291, qtd. in Peebles 52). The distinction between “what makes

men fight” and “what makes men enlist” is an interesting one. It seems that “the Marine Corps” or “the United States Army” as ideological concepts are what makes men enlist, while comradeship makes them fight once they are in “the blood and muck” of actual warfare, far away from shiny recruitment brochures. Peebles comments that in enlisting “the masculine icon of yesteryear still has a great deal of persuasive power and cultural currency” (66) which is evident when looking at Swofford’s reaction to the Lebanon bombing and its reporting by the media. Evan Wright, an embedded journalist and author of Generation Kill, reports that a lot of the marines he spoke with remember the exact moment they decided to enlist:

A lot of them were sparked by a specific TV commercial. In it, a cartoon Arthurian hero slays a fire-breathing dragon, then promptly morphs into a Marine in dress blues standing at attention with a silver sword at his side. (26, qtd. in Peebles 66)

Gibbs notes that “combatants’ homosocial bonds are characteristically interpreted as superseding any concern with causes, both in war in general, and the Iraq wars in particular” (186). He uses Jarhead as an example, where shortly after arriving in the desert (not shortly before deployment, as Gibbs thinks) Swofford and his fellow marines “joke about having transferred from the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps, or the Petrol Battalion” (11, qtd. in Gibbs 186-187). David Grossman points out that

Numerous studies have concluded that men in combat are usually motivated to fight not by ideology or hate or fear, but by group pressures and processes involving (1) regard for their comrades, (2) respect for their leaders, (3) concern for their own reputation with both, and (4) an urge to contribute to the success of the group. Repeatedly we see combat veterans describe the powerful bonds that men forge in combat as stronger than those of husband of wife. (89-90, qtd. in Peebles 52)

Jarhead and Love My Rifle More than You offer differing perspectives on the concepts of comradeship and gender roles in the military. For both Swofford and Williams, the men they fight with are as good as family or even better. However, both of them are also disillusioned: Swofford with the Marine Corps as a homogenous entity made up of identical grunts as opposed to his elite sniper platoon, Williams with her failure to gain acceptance into this male “inner circle” of comradeship.

1.4.1 Swofford: Hates the Grunt Corps, Loves His Elitist Platoon

Swofford’s stance on the USMC in general is ambivalent, and related to the distinction between infantry and sniper units. The appreciation for his brothers in arms seems to end at the borders of his elitist STA sniper platoon, while he dislikes the Corps as an institution – he hates being associated with other “typical” Jarheads, especially grunts. Swofford mentions that “like most good and great marines, I hated the Corps” and that he “hated being a marine because more than all of the things in the world I wanted to be […] I was a marine. A jarhead. A grunt. I hated the Marines and I hated being a marine.” (Swofford 33). After “being birthed through the bloody canal of boot camp”, where he “realized that joining the marines had been a poor decision”, Swofford is sent to Barracks Duty School, where he “further decided that [his] enlistment was a poor decision” (33). However, due to his history of drug use he is sent to the Fleet Marine Force, the part of the Marine Corps that is readily deployable for combat:

Now, rather than standing guard duty in my handsome uniform, in front of a navy nuclear or missile facility, I’d be doing what I was supposedly made for – humping up steep mountains or

through thick jungles with a hundred pounds on my back, sweating and cussing in my wrinkled fatigues, with a large target on my chest: USMC GRUNT. (43-44)

When he arrives at the Seventh Marines in Camp Pendleton, Swofford remarks that “this was the real Marine Corps” where “Marines ran all around the place, saluting and shouting and spitting and cussing” which was very different from the “posh, velvet-lined concertina wire” of Barracks Duty School (46-47). He is placed in a platoon “full of drunks and half-wits” (50), but sees this as a chance to prove himself as a “real man” in a long tradition of warriors:

I was in the stink and the shit, the gutter of the Marine Corps, the gutter of the Marine Corps, the gutter of the world, and I knew I had made a mistake, but perhaps I’d discover ME in the gutter, perhaps I’d discover ME in the same way centuries of men had discovered themselves, while at war, while in the center of the phalanx, drowning in the stink and the shit and the rubble and the piss and the flesh. (51)

While in this gutter, he meets Frontier and Bacon, “decent young men, ruined early by the Marine Corps” who are “dedicated to debasing the standards and policies of the institution that had struck them nearly dead in the moist tracks of youth”, and refer to the Corps as “the Suck”9 because “it sucks dicks to be in it and it sucks the life out of you” (52). A few weeks afterward, he deploys to Okinawa on his “West-Pac”, which can be considered a turning point in Swofford’s outlook on the Marine Corps. He learns from a certain Graycochea that “just because you’re a marine, it doesn’t mean you must like other marines or even care about them” and that he can only trust his platoon: “[t]his the Fleet, motherfucker, this ain’t high school. These guys will backstab you in a second. Third Platoon, that’s all you can trust, no one else. No one else in the whole Suck” (53). A month into his deployment, he is visited by a corporal from the Surveillance and Target Acquisition (STA) platoon, and this is the real turning point in Swofford’s attitude towards grunts. He acquires training materials for this STA platoon and learns the history of snipers and their legendary stories. He gradually becomes enraptured with the idea of an elite warrior who kills from the distance as opposed to a grunt “in the center of the phalanx” (54-58). He then goes through STA “indoc”, a grueling trial where he is teargassed and starved and stripped, and where it was apparently preferred that none of the grunts pass, since their failure “would confirm the elite status of the unit” (58-60). When he completes his tests and is accepted, he has to return to his grunt platoon but already feels superior:

It didn’t matter that I was a line grunt for sixty more days, I thought of myself different already, and so did my line platoon peers. Soon my training would exceed theirs, and I would learn how to kill better, and faster, with more precision, and if a war started, being a STA marine would increase the danger of my missions. (60)

Once deployed, he is forced to live together in the desert with the same members from “his” platoon, unlike Williams who is constantly tossed around different branches as a useful tool. Whenever he expresses disillusionment or anger, it is directed towards incompetent superiors, the Marine Corps, or the war in general. His platoon is there to provide comradeship and moral support, albeit in a fashion typical of jarheads, i.e. filled with verbal and physical threats:

Despite our various disagreements […] we are a tight platoon, and it doesn’t matter whom you train with every day in your team […] you can look anywhere and always have a friend. […] And

9 Surprisingly, Peebles seems to think that “the Suck” is “soldier’s lingo” for (the American soldier’s experience in) the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War (2).

if need be, because of your stupidity or vanity or selfishness, you also have someone near who will slap you or field-fuck you or spend a few days telling you what a worthless piece of shit you are, until you realize that whatever bug you have up your ass is about a week late in being removed. It’s not original to say that the combat unit works like a family – but the best combat unit works like a dysfunctional family, and the ways and means of dysfunction are also the ways and means of survival. (110)

1.4.2 Williams: Seeking Entry into the Inner Circle

While Swofford is merely disillusioned by the Marine Corps as an institute and is able to find solace in the “dysfunctional family” of his platoon, Williams has no such luck. She repeatedly tries to gain access into what Gibbs calls the “homosocial bonds” (180) of the military: the exclusively male inner circle of comradeship. She just wants to be “one of the guys”, but ultimately fails at being recognized as such and feels like an outsider. As I will discuss in the next chapter, one of the other causes for Williams’ disillusionment is the institutional sexism she encounters. In her prologue, she mentions the complications arising from getting sexist remarks from men she has to work with on a daily basis, and how they nevertheless “become your guys”, especially when another female soldier tries to enter this inner circle:

Another girl enters your tent, and they look at her the way they looked at you, and what drove you crazy with anger suddenly drives you crazy with jealousy. They’re yours. Fuck, you left your husband to be with them, you walked out on him for them. These guys, they’re your husband, they’re your father, your brother, your lover – your life. (14)

Peebles notes that “Williams means to assert her participation in a kind of brotherhood” and that “her casual use of obscenity as amplification would certainly qualify.” (85) While I agree that her use of obscenity throughout the book makes her less effeminate, I would like to point that it is still far from Swofford’s Jarheadese. Peebles also points out that Williams is trying assert her participation in this exclusively male brotherhood, but that she “frames that participation […] as a woman’s traditional subservient relation to the patriarchy – a woman gives up what she wants in order to serve the father, the husband, the brother, the lover. Their life is your life” (86). However, the question remains to which degree Williams is in fact part of this inner circle – be it based on the patriarchy or not. Peebles claims that this question “exists at the center of Love My Rifle More Than You” (86). She mentions that Williams and the other analyzed authors “struggle with their conceptions of masculinity and military masculinity in particular” and that Williams’ narrative in particular “demonstrates her desire to reach across gender boundaries and be considered a true brother in arms” (50). Further on, Peebles notes some examples where Williams tries to reach across these boundaries by “defining herself against the negative qualities associated with women” (87) and by mimicking the sexist behavior often employed by male soldiers. Resembling the goal of eliminating feminine traits during the reification of soldiers’ bodies in military training, Williams’ attitude also mirrors attitudes towards gender in World War I as seen in Showalter’s analysis. These examples include negative remarks about other females and adhering to male PT standards in boot camp, describing her friend Zoe in “apparently unironic perfect patriarchal style” (“Small tits. Great ass.” (49)), deriding her then-husband for crying in public, and reacting furiously when female commanding officers cry in front of everyone, especially when one of them blames it on PMS (87-88). A prime example of Williams’ attempts to enter the “inner circle” of male comradeship occurs when she is assigned to an observation team that has suggestively called themselves the “FISTers”: “[t]his

group is the central masculine collective in Williams’s narrative, and the struggles she describes are – more often than not – to be accepted or at least respected by these men” (Peebles 88). Since their interactions have been analyzed in detail by Peebles, I will limit this to a recapitulation of her arguments rather than replicate them entirely10. She seems to be accepted in a way when she drives a Hummer up a steep incline, calling her fellow soldiers who flee the vehicle “fucking pussies”, but her “sexual body is still front and center” when one of the FISTers “alters his vocabulary”: he mentions “look, this one’s got boobs” instead of the expected “balls” (Peebles 88). She joins the FISTers when they are telling sexist jokes, “appropriating them as her own and using them as an entrée into the group” while presenting herself as masculine and aggressively opposed to the feminine (88). She considers the banter in which she participates as form of verbal sparring which is completely normal since “in the real world, guys bond through competition” and she claims that “the FISTers would only talk trash with me to bond with me” (180). Peebles puts it as follows:

Masculinity, in her estimation, is expressed through competitive bonding, in which she can participate if intelligence, rather than mere physical aggression, is accepted as currency. […] But the others don’t operate on the same terms, and ultimately her status as female […] excludes her from the group, and that exclusion leads her to question both the military and her own identity. (89)

Her exclusion from the group on the basis of her gender becomes more apparent as time passes and events escalate. The banter exchanged with the FISTers grows unsettling when one calls her a “hatchet wound” and during a night of heavy drinking, one of them pretends to drunkenly stumble into her, groping her breasts while the rest just looks on doing nothing (90). Williams begins to feel increasingly isolated because “she simply doesn’t belong” even though “she may be contributing to the larger mission and interacting closely with other soldiers” (91). Ironically, interactions are the cause of her feeling of isolation, both when she is respected (they won’t touch her in a friendly manner like they all do each other) and when she is disrespected (she is sexually assaulted by members of the team on two separate occasions). Peebles concludes that

If war is considered a place where the ideal masculine collective can at last be achieved, without concern for race or class or the strictly gendered expectations for behavior of civilian life, then here it is still a collective that is both masculine as well as male. This seemingly utopian community – perhaps one of the last available to contemporary American men – is still off-limits to Williams. She has proved herself to be perfectly capable of meeting the standards for this military masculinity: she is brave, she is stoic, she can handle a weapon, she is dedicated to the group. But she is not male. (91)

In the next chapter, I will show the ways in which Williams and Swofford are disappointed with their war experience, one of them being that they do not consider themselves to be “real”, fully realized soldiers. Williams does not feel like a real soldier for two reasons: because she is not allowed in the inner circle of the masculine collective, and because of the institutional sexism she encounters.

10 For a detailed analysis of the interactions between Williams and the FISTers, see Peebles 88-93.

1.5 Actual War: A Series of Disappointments

What happens when Swofford and Williams – who are both tempted to join the Army, “militarized” by booth camp, and supposedly part of the masculine military collective – arrive in Kuwait and Iraq? Peebles mentions that often “soldiers go to war and find that their own experiences are quite different, sometimes maddingly so, from representations of previous wars that have informed their conception of and conscription into military service” (29). This is the case for Anthony Swofford, whose platoon prepares for deployment by buying all the beer they can get their hands on and watching originally anti- war Vietnam war movies. He claims that

The supposedly anti-war films have failed. Now is my time to step into the newest combat zone. And as a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam War, I want ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers. (7)

It seems that for Swofford’s generation, the public school boys’ books and poems by Tennyson mentioned in Showalter have been replaced by the films of the Vietnam War. Holmes points out that “[t]he soldier’s preconception of battle is shaped, not only by his upbringing, education, and training, but also by the influence of the art, literature and film to which he has been exposed” (59, qtd. in Peebles 28). Swofford is still full of bravado while greedily anticipating his deployment, but when he is faced with the corporeality of war in Kuwait, his reaction is far different. He may want to “kill some Iraqi motherfuckers”, but when he encounters decaying Iraqi corpses, he vomits (224). Peebles points out that

For a soldier directly encountering the violence of war, that violence is suddenly and often traumatically made real by the perception of pain or the presence of the dead and wounded – what Elaine Scarry calls the incontestable reality of the body. (29)

A similar event happens in Williams’ memoir: she is not as prejudiced as Swofford because of her long relationship with “Rick” and because she is an Arabic translator, but she is also traumatized when shockingly confronted with the corporeality of war. After an explosion, she tries to help a severely wounded civilian, but he dies right in front of her eyes – and, typically for Williams, she does not allow herself to show emotion in front of her male peers: “I just want to cry, but I don’t. I can’t. I have to be hard, strong, in front of these soldiers, these guys” (136, italics in original). Other than trauma resulting from “the incontestable reality of the body” in warfare, Swofford and Williams are disillusioned by their experience of war when compared to what they were promised and what they were expecting. I will focus on two aspects in this chapter: disappointment with the self, and disillusionment with their superiors. For both Swofford and Williams, the disappointment with themselves is because they do not feel like the “real” heroic soldiers they saw in movies and shiny recruitment brochures. Interestingly, this disappointment with the self is both times expressed in gendered terms. Swofford feels like less of a man because he did not kill anyone, and Williams considers herself an incomplete soldier because she is refused access into the masculine “inner circle” and because she frequently encounters institutional sexism while deployed. Besides being disappointed with themselves, they are disillusioned with their superiors because of incompetent leadership. Swofford is also disappointed by a misleading, virtuous representation of “his” Gulf war.

1.5.1 Swofford: Impotence as a Soldier

When Swofford and his platoon mates, indoctrinated by military training and still high on Vietnam war movies, eventually arrive in Kuwait, they experience something far different from their expectations. Peebles mentions that in Swofford’s account, their “sense of power begins to unravel when the men travel overseas and their war experience begins in earnest” (30). She mainly analyses this unraveling of power in regards to sexual impotence, by mentioning Katrina’s letters, the “Wall of Shame”, the homemade sex tape, and the infamous “field-fuck” scene (30-33). I will focus on a different kind of impotence, namely what Peebles calls “combat virginity” (35): the frustrating effects of boredom and not being able to fight, injure, kill – i.e. everything that Scarry, Clausewitz, and society deem essential if one is to be recognized as a “real” soldier. Peebles points out that

For soldiers, killing in the context of war is presented as a pragmatic, political, and even moral necessity, a complete inversion of the legal and moral tenets of civilian life. Soldiers can kill, do kill, must kill, and the possession of that lethal power can at times be intoxicating. (21)

Gibbs notes that in Swofford’s memoir, his trauma is not the result of inflicting violence upon others, but “predominantly the result of overwhelming boredom” (182) and mentions “the ubiquity of the crushing boredom experienced by so many writers during the Gulf War” as one of the strongest features of trauma in this conflict (175). Swofford says that his days “consist of sand and water and sweat and piss” and that sitting in the desert is, however boring, is still his duty: “This is our labor. We wait” (11- 12). He comments on the both monotonous and invasive qualities of the desert environment, mentioning that “The Desert” will even become the moniker of choice for the Gulf War, imagining a conversation in which someone tells him that “[t]hose jarheads didn’t do shit in the Desert but sit on their asses and chow down on pogey bait” (15). During the infamous “field fuck” scene, Swofford mentions that they are fucking their confusion and fear and boredom and their recruiters because they lured them into “this life of loneliness and boredom and fear” (22). Swofford mentions that there are also times when the possession of lethal power proves too tempting:

There are also the accidental on purpose discharges, when the marine decides it’s about time he fires his rifle or blows something to hell because there he sits with all this firepower and who knows when he’ll be allowed to use it. (161, italics in original)

Not being able or not being allowed to use this firepower can be frustrating. In one of the final chapters of the book, Swofford and his sniping partner “Johnny” seem to finally get a chance at killing: they are staking out an Iraqi airfield from a distance, and plan on dispatching one of the commanding officers and one of his lieutenants in order to get the entire airfield to surrender. However, permission is denied, according to Swofford because the captains and their infantry want to see some combat action as well:

The captains want war just as badly as we do. And also, the same as us, the captains want no war, but here it is, and when you’re a captain with a company to command and two snipers want to take a dozen easy shots and call it a day, of course you tell them no, because you are a captain and you have a company of infantry and what you need is some war ink spilled on your Service Record Book. (230)

Being denied his chance of finally getting unleashing this firepower and scoring some kills (unbeknownst to Swofford at that moment, it his final chance of the war) results in frustration. When the above order comes in, he merely replies with “roger, roger”, but wants to reply with “fuck you, sir,

copy” (230). When some of the Iraqi forces surrender, Swofford spends “half an hour hopping from head to head with [his] crosshairs, yelling, Bang, bang, you’re a dead fucking Iraqi” (231, italics in original). His frustration is understandable, given the emphasis placed on injuring and killing by the indoctrination of military training and military culture in general: he mentions that “[t]o be a marine, a true marine, you must kill” (247). He even admits to wishing he had killed an Iraqi soldier sometimes because “[y]ou consider yourself less of marine and even less of a man for not having killed while at combat” (247). This gendered attitude (based on masculine role models in both the military and society) towards what one could call “combat impotence” has also been noted by Peebles and Gibbs. While I find Peebles’ phrasing somewhat exaggerated when she talks about Swofford’s “combat virginity” resulting from the lack of “the lethal penetration of another person” and the “climax” of a kill in “sexual range”, I agree with her statement that “[i]n the end, Swofford’s attempted identification with the violent, seductive images that enraptured him fails, reflecting broader concerns about the role of media in shaping the public’s view of the conflict” (35). Gibbs similarly argues that “a sizeable part” of the trauma endured by Swofford “appears to derive” from his “feeling of having been somehow cheated of an experience of war” (172). He mentions Kathy Philips, who writes about the Vietnam war but whose claims are certainly applicable to Jarhead:

An ideological misconception of gender employed in patriarchal society in order to encourage men to fight, Philips argues, “elevates fighting – in the abstract, for no cause or even for a known bad cause – into the one irreplaceable “proof” that a man is not that lowly creature, “sissy” or “pussy””. Thus the desire to prove one’s masculinity overrides an awareness of the emptiness of the cause, even in literature and educated men such as Swofford and Turnipseed. (142, qtd. in Gibbs 173)

Interestingly, Philips and Peebles do not only pay attention to Swofford’s gendered attitude about his lack of killing: both also link it to the “emptiness of the cause”. This empty cause (fighting for oil companies) is omitted in the unrealistic representation of war as virtuous and sanitized by the MIME- NET, which I will discuss in the last part of this chapter.

1.5.2 Williams: Institutional Sexism

The bonds forged between men in combat may be stronger than those of husband and wife, but an entirely different picture is painted when actual women join the male-dominated society in areas surrounding sustained combat. Gibbs remarks that women experience “a plethora of additional problems” in this “institutionally misogynistic environment” including “threats of rape and other variously sexist behavior” (191). He points to the theories of Alan Petersen, who comments on

[T]he extreme expectation of heterosexuality in the military, as a kind of hyper-masculinity that can be seen in the tolerance (if not encouragement) of prostitution and in forms of sexual discrimination, harassment and exploitation (for example, sexist jokes and rape). (53, qtd. in Gibbs 191)

Peebles claims that Williams’ experience of war “is colored more primarily by an incessant awareness of her sex and sexuality” than the infliction of violence (84). As she puts it, “William’s opening gets right to the point” by starting with the sentence “Sometimes, even now, I wake up before dawn and forget I’m not a slut” (Williams 13). Fifteen percent of the U.S. military is female at the time Williams is writing, and “that whole 15 percent is trying to get past an old joke”:

What’s the difference between a bitch and slut? A slut will fuck anyone, a bitch will fuck anyone but you. So if she’s nice or friendly, outgoing or chatty – she’s a slut. If she’s distant or reserved or professional – she’s a bitch. (13)

In fact, Williams’ prologue touches on most if not all important aspects of her experience with institutional sexism in the Armed forces. She mentions that “a woman soldier has to toughen herself up”, but not only for the enemy or battle or death like male soldiers:

I mean toughen herself up to spend months awash in a sea of nervy, hyped-up guys who, when they’re not thinking about getting killed, are thinking about getting laid. Their eyes on you all the time, your breasts, your ass – like there is nothing else to watch, no sun, no river, no desert, no mortars at night. (13-14)

However, the situation is more complicated than that, because while a female soldier has to toughen herself up, she also “softens herself up”:

Their eyes, their hunger: yes, it’s shaming – but they also make you special. I don’t like to say it – it cuts you inside – but the attention, the admiration, the need: they make you powerful. If you’re a woman in the Army, it doesn’t matter so much about your looks. What counts is that you are female. (14)

Not only Williams’ looks are of lesser importance when she is female: her entire identity is reduced to merely female, regardless of her skillset and personality. Gibbs refers to her use in the interrogations of Iraqis later on in the book – not because of her linguistic skills as an Arabic linguist or even as a simple soldier, but as an instrument for degrading the Iraqis because they loathe being interrogated by a female. As Peebles puts it by mimicking Swofford’s “Jarheadese”:

This is the lesson that Williams uses to begin her story: to be a woman in the military is to be perpetually defined by your sexuality. Regardless of whether you choose to fuck or not to fuck, as Anthony Swofford might put it, you’re fucked either way. (85)

Williams underlines the importance of sex and sexuality in her first chapter, titled “Queen for a year”11: “[r]ight into it: sex is key to any woman soldier’s experiences in the American military. No one likes to acknowledge it, but there’s a strange sexual allure to being a woman and a soldier” (18). As a woman at war, Williams points out, “you’re automatically a desirable commodity, and a scarce one at that” (19). She explains what she calls the “deployment scale for hotness”:

On a scale of ten say she’s a five. You know – average looks, maybe a little mousy, nothing special. But okay. Not a girl who gets second glances in civilian life. But in the Army, while we’re deployed? Easily an eight. One hot babe. On average every girl probably gets three extra points on a ten-point scale. Useful. (19)

Useful indeed, as Williams herself indicates: “for a girl there were lots of little things you could do to make your load while deployed a lot lighter. You could use your femaleness to great advantage” – which apparently means getting more assistance, doing less work, and even receiving special favors

11 This chapter has a seemingly dictionary definition of the term as a heading, perhaps as a contrast. On the same page, Williams points out that “you won’t find the phrase in the dictionary or any compilation of military terms. But say it among soldiers, and they’ll know immediately what you mean.” The definition is as follows: “(1) any American female stationed overseas in a predominantly male military environment; (2) a female soldier who becomes stuck-up during her deployment due to an exponential increase in male attention – used disparingly [sic].”

(20). However, as Peebles points out, Williams does not seem to realize “the irony that this power can only come from a commodified sexual identity, or that the designation of royalty only lasts for a year” (85). Williams claims that she did her best to resist, and so did her friends and the girls she respected, but it is telling that she doesn’t elaborate further on how much she used the advantages of her gender: she merely points out that “many girls became fully fledged Queens for a year” and leaves it at that (20). What she does mention, but what is suspiciously missing from Peebles’ and Gibbs’ otherwise meticulous analyses, is the fact that “the guys are there for the taking too. And we took. I took” (21). There is a lot of ambiguity: sometimes when she enters the chow hall in the airfield, she feels “like running a gauntlet of eyes” and “it felt like I was a fucking zoo animal. Guys hitting on us or saying inappropriate things – just constant” (22). But sometimes, Williams says, she’d “get in the mood” and enter that same chow hall “with a swing in her step” (22). She mentions that “the girls joked too” about some of the guys in Iraq who were “no prime specimens” but that they “also looked better. Always. So it worked both ways. Location, location, location. It played with all our minds. It was like a separate bloodless war within the larger deadly one” (22). However, even in this separate bloodless war there is no gender equality: Williams mentions that if a guy got caught “it was okay”, but if a girl got caught “everyone lost respect for her. Like she was some slut” (21).

1.5.3 Incompetent Leadership and Virtuous Representation

Swofford and Williams are not only disappointed with themselves for not adhering to the societal standard of a “real” soldier by either not killing opponents or not being part of the masculine military collective: they are also disappointed with their war for not meeting their personal standards. Swofford is let down by Desert Shield’s “overwhelming boredom” and anticlimactic ending, and Williams is disappointed with the Iraq war because of its rampant sexism. Both are also disappointed in the incompetence of their superiors, since their decisions often lead to life-threatening situations and easily avoidable accidents. Swofford is even further disappointed when the media’s reporting of “his” war turns out to be very different from his own experience. Because of the incompetent behavior of his commanding officers, Swofford experiences several potentially life-threatening situations. He is caught in friendly fire and almost hit when his platoon is mistakenly attacked by the tanks of another platoon. When an Iraqi airport is assaulted by infantry instead of relying on snipers due to a captain’s decision, he sees several grunts dying when it was entirely avoidable. His superiors also limit his ability to express himself or to make personal decisions: he is denied the right to free speech and given a list of acceptable answers when his platoon is interviewed by journalists, and he is forced to take a certain kind of anti-nerve agent pill, whose effects on the human body were at the time still unknown12. Williams’ life is similarly endangered by the decisions of her incompetent superiors. When another unit’s commander does not want them to stay the night, William’s unit is almost forced to drive around in a pitch-black hostile environment, something that sparks her to claim that “like death, like taxes, military incompetence is something you can depend on” (98). She discovers halal and kosher meals while staying with this unit, which helps her avoid starvation since she

12 The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs has evaluated exposure to these pyridostigmine bromide (PB) pills as a “possible cause of chronic multisymptom illnesses”. They concluded that “the evidence did not support an association”, however they still “presume certain medically unexplained illnesses are related to Gulf War service without regard to cause”. For an overview of their research on PB pills, see https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/gulfwar/sources/pyridostigmine-bromide.asp. For an overview of their research on burning oil wells, see https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/gulfwar/sources/oil-well-fires.asp.

is a vegetarian. However, she is denied access to these by her platoon leader and chaplain because of religious reasons, and has to resort to her supply sergeant:

So why the fuck could our supply sergeant do this, but our platoon leader couldn’t? […] Because in Iraq, doing the right thing isn’t always the right thing. Because Lieutenant Malley, like the good West pointer she is, fucking followed the rules. You cannot always do that. (100)

As I have pointed out in the previous chapter, Williams’ frustration with the incompetent behavior of her superiors is based on gender roles and conceptions of gender in society. Her analysis of the behavior of her female commanding officers is especially unforgiving. It strongly resembles the negative attitude towards characteristics thought to be typically feminine, in favor of a positive attitude towards masculine traits such as perseverance that is found in the indoctrination of military training. Female commanding officers are deemed incompetent by Williams when they cry or show weakness in front of their troops, even more so when they blame their “feminine weaknesses” on PMS, because they make it more difficult for future women to be allowed in the “inner circle” of masculine military culture. Besides his disappointment in and frustration with incompetent leadership, Swofford is let down by the representation of his war. Scarry notes how often in war “participants’ national motives can be replaced by antagonistic goals” (124), but surprisingly this is not the cause of his disillusionment. Swofford and his platoon mates already “joke about having transferred form the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps, or the Petrol Battalion” immediately after arriving in Kuwait: there is no need for an extended stay in the desert for this realization to kick in:

[W]e laugh to obscure the tragedy of our cheap, squandered lives with the comedy of combat and being deployed to protect oil reserves and the rights and profits of certain American companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House and oblique financial entanglements with the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, and the commander in chief, George Bush, and the commander’s progeny. (11)

He is not frustrated with the cause for war, but with the discrepancy between the way he experienced it and the way it was represented on TV. Peebles mentions that “the government would prefer to portray war as clinical and even compassionate” (11) and quotes a female Iraqi blogger who thinks that “Western news networks are far too tame” since they “show the Hollywood version of war” (15). From Swofford’s perspective, the Gulf War consisted of a long, useless and boring period of waiting, followed by an extremely short offensive campaign during which he repeatedly came under friendly fire and saw grunts marching towards entirely avoidable deaths. His experience is certainly a far cry from the image Douglas Kellner has of the Gulf war as a “carefully orchestrated high-tech massacre”, not an actual full-fledged war but a “cyberspectacle in which the pitifully overmatched Iraqi troops were overwhelmed by the most massive and awesome military force ever assembled” (217, qtd. in Gibbs 174). Peebles claims that “[t]he stories of soldiers […] give us the grunt’s eye-view of the events and consequences of the conflict at hand, often in opposition to reports from military leaders, politicians, and the media” (4). The unrepresentative image of the Gulf War shaped by Kellner is strongly reminiscent of what Der Derian would call the sanitization and virtuous representation of war by the MIME-NET, especially its media branches. Even though Gibbs is commenting on this sanitized vision of the Gulf War as a “cyberspectacle”, I agree with his assessment that it is “hardly surprising that this simulation of a war allowed little chance for the servicemen to validate their masculinity” (174).

1.6 Conclusion

In this part of my thesis, I have looked at two recent war memoirs which take place in what Der Derian calls prototypically virtuous wars: the Gulf War (Jarhead) and the Iraq War (Love My Rifle More than You). I have looked at the ways in which they are atypical soldiers when compared to the heroic male ideal discussed in the theories of Scarry and Showalter. Anthony Swofford is an atypical soldier because his war consisted more of boredom and waiting than combat action, he did not kill, and he has literary interests. He feels inadequate, not only as a marine but as a man in general, because he does not live up to the expectations of a traditional soldier. He did not participate in a contest of out-injuring enemy combatants, even though he was motivated to join the Marines and he went through the “militarization” or “soldierization” processes of boot camp. He is also disillusioned with his war in general because of the incompetent behaviour of commanding officers and because of the divide between his experience of the Gulf War and its representation in the media. Kayla Williams is also atypical when compared to the traditional image of a soldier for one simple reason: the fact that she is female. A liminal figure since her youth, Williams desperately tries to fit in with the masculine military collective and its exclusively male “inner circle” of comradeship, but ultimately fails. Her status as female also deeply influences her experience abroad: as “Queen for a Year”, she is a scarce commodity which she sometimes finds empowering. However, her gender also causes her significant problems, since she experiences multiple instances of institutional sexism, including verbal threats and sexual assault. She is also disappointed with female commanding officers when they show incompetence or cry in front of their troops, presumably because it lowers her own chances of being accepted as a “real” soldier regardless of gender. In the next part of my thesis, I will also look at two narratives that contain soldiers that are atypical, but in a whole other way. I will discuss Grounded and Unmanned, a theater play and a video game that deal with the daily life of drone operators: soldiers who kill from a distance using weaponized drones without risking injury themselves, but who are expected to return home to their families each day.

2 The Lethal Eye in the Sky: Drone Warfare in Grounded and Unmanned

In the conclusion to his chapter on Gulf War memoirs and perpetrator trauma, Gibbs discusses what he calls “cubicle warriors”. These “pilots”, generally referred to as operators, remotely control weaponized Predator drones that are thousands of miles away, patrolling the deserts of the Middle-East. They generally work for the CIA or the Army, most of them out of Creech Air Force base in Nevada, in missions that are closer to surveillance and assassination than traditional aerial warfare. In this chapter, I will look at some defining features of life as a “cubicle warrior”, their representation in two narratives, and how this perspective differs from that of Swofford and Williams, who are atypical warriors (one that does not kill and one that is female) but still traditional in the sense that they fight on the ground while deployed abroad. In my introduction and theoretical framework, I have mentioned Drone Theory by Grégoire Chamayou, a “rigorous polemic” in which he considers the principal feature of drones to be what he describes as “unilateral injuring”. This is defined as an absence of any possibility of reciprocity, but also as self- preservation by way of drones and a way of projecting power without projecting vulnerability. For military commanders, drones may indeed seem like “the fulfilment of the ancient desire that inspires the whole history of ballistic weapons”, since they “increase one’s reach so as to hit the enemy from a distance before the opponent can launch its own attack” (Chamayou 12). At the same time, they are indicative of and successful at what the MIME-NET does best: obfuscating and sanitizing the violence of war and “conflicts”. For the operators remotely controlling these drones, however, the situation is far from a fulfilment of desires. Faced with shifts of up to twelve hours in an air-conditioned trailer where they scan the desert for hours on end with what can be seen by traditional soldiers as “a weapon of cowards” (Chamayou 17), it is perhaps not surprising that they, like Swofford and Williams, do not feel like “real” soldiers. Gibbs also mentions the “remoteness from battle” and points out two other key features that separate the work of these “cubicle warriors” from that of regular soldiers in the battlefield. The first of these features is the extreme boredom and monotony involved with work as a drone operator. Gibbs points out that these cubicle warriors “initially conduct ‘study of life’ patterns13 which involve long periods of surveillance in order to confirm the identity of their targets” which may or may not result in “clearance to launch remote missile attacks on these targets” (198). In other words, drone operators spend far more time surveilling possible targets or patrolling the desert than they do on the assassination of targets. Chamayou describes the jobs at Creech Air Force base as “extremely boring” where “men pass whole nights watching a screen on which, for the most part, appear unchanging images of another desert on the other side of the planet” (2). The second feature is that drone operators are employed in a seemingly regular job. When they are done staring at the desert or counting body parts14, operators must return home to their families in the suburbs of Las Vegas and are expected to resume life as usual on a

13 Chamayou provides a detailed discussion of the applications of these life patterns in drone warfare in his fifth chapter, Pattern-of- Life Analysis (46-52). The use of life patterns and other networked information is emblematic of the United States’ COIN (counterinsurgency) strategy, as noted by both Der Derian (273) and Chamayou (60-73). 14 Gibbs notes that when drone operators are given clearance, afterwards “the operators are required to revisit the site with remote video devices and assess the impact of the attack, including the counting of bodies” (198).

daily basis. There is little time to adapt to the civilian world after a day (or night) spent in the context of war and killing, virtually none when compared to “regular” soldiers who return home from the war. These “hybrid identities” of both soldier and civilian often lead to conflicts with loved ones (especially spouses) who do not have to cross the boundaries between these two worlds every day, and as such are less understanding of its consequences. Their perspective on “war” is quite different from that of Williams and Swofford: at least they can assure themselves because of the context that they are continually participating in a war, however sexist or boring it may be. Royakkers and van Est claim that drone operators have to live in two worlds at the same time: both a “normal” life in the civil world, and a virtual life of combat. As a result, these virtual warriors constantly experience radical shifts in contexts: from battlefield to private family life. (293, qtd. in Gibbs 198) In what follows, I will look at these four features that separate the experience of war for drone operators from the “regular” soldier in two narratives that deal with their unique and relatively recent perspective. The first of these is Unmanned, a short video game developed by Molleindustria games and written by Jim Monroe about drone warfare, which was released in 201215. It features split-screen gameplay where dialogue and tedious tasks like shaving and driving typical of daily life are juxtaposed with work as a drone operator, and where the player is offered multiple text choices to represent his or her view on the thoughts of the protagonist (and later on in the game, dialogue). I will also discuss Grounded, a one- woman play by George Brant which was performed for the first time in 2013. It tells the story of a female Air Force pilot, who is forced to change career paths to that of a drone operator when she gets pregnant. During my analysis, I will also briefly look at notions of gender and masculine military culture in Grounded, and at the similarities between virtual violence in drone warfare and virtual violence in video games in Unmanned.

2.1 Boredom and Monotony

2.1.1 Unmanned

Unmanned represents the monotony and boredom of operating drones through several references in its dialogue and a surveillance mission. One could also argue that its several tedious tasks such as shaving, driving and counting sheep are meant to represent boredom. In my opinion, its intention probably was to emphasize the tediousness of tasks in daily life as opposed to those of “traditional” soldiers abroad, or to comment on the often-repetitive tasks found in video games. In a blog post on gaming website Gamasutra, titled ‘Molleindustria’s Unmanned: Excellence Through Boredom’, Greg Costikyan claims that Unmanned is a boring game, but that “this is not a criticism; it’s part of the point” since “the

15 More of a digital collective than a game development studio, Molleindustria is known for its politically subversive flash games which aim to shock their audience, as opposed to “mainstream” game developers: their slogan is “Radical Games Against the Tyranny of Entertainment”. On the ‘About’ page on their website, Molleindustria describe themselves as producing “homeopathic remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of free, short-form, online games”. Notable examples of their work include McDonald’s Video Game, Operation: Pedopriest and Queer Theory.

designers are purposefully shaping a boring experience to bring out a sense of the anomie of life, and the distancing that drone warfare brings to combat”. In another blog post on the independent website PopMatters16, Jorge Albor argues that this separates Unmanned from more conventional video games:

Molleindustria divides Unmanned from games that beautify warfare through game design. Boredom serves a dual purpose of conveying the actual tedium of modern warfare (artfully portrayed in Sam Mendes’s Jarhead) and expressing how “fun” can become a tool by which we again divide ourselves from the world around us.

In the shaving scene at the beginning of the game, the player is faced with the first of many text selections. The prompt “another day…” has “another dollar” as one of its three answers, whose narrative “branch” focuses on the repetitive character of life as a drone operator. When the player is subsequently prompted with the comment “eye on the prize…” and chooses “a promotion” as his answer, the protagonist explicitly links the menial tasks of his job to a video game concept known as “grinding”17: “Grind, level-up, grind… like Warcraft, without the craft”. Further on in the shaving section, the protagonist contemplates his nightmare where he tries to run away from enraged Middle Eastern citizens: if the player succeeds in avoiding these civilians long enough, the protagonist starts flapping his arms before turning into a UAV and flying away. When the player disregards the option to blame the nightmare on the “Taliban time zone” and instead chooses the introspective option “dreams reveal a lot…” the protagonist continues with “maybe I want…” and the player is given three options: “to be punished”, “to escape”, and “to face the enemy”. When the player chooses the escape option, the protagonist comments that he wants to be “the guy in those recruiting commercials, not this middle- class schmuck”. Like in Grounded, the drone operator’s generally boring job is evaluated especially negatively when it is compared to the dangerous but exciting life of a “regular” soldier. In the next scene, the protagonist is commuting to his work, a journey which serves as a transitionary section between the worlds of civilian and military life. The drive is also indicative of the monotony of a drone operator’s average shift: one long road in the middle of desert where there is barely any other traffic or reception on the radio, leaving the driver alone with his or her thoughts. When the player chooses the option “easy to drive” when prompted to comment on his “ol’ Route 95”, the protagonist remarks that the solitary straight road feels “like I’m on autopilot” since there are “no people, no tricky turn-offs”, which resembles the mental “auto-pilot” often engaged by drone operators during long surveillance shifts. When the protagonist arrives at his job, there are two missions that each resemble one of the two main assignments for a drone operator: surveillance and elimination. The first mission requires nothing but following a target while he moves across the screen and eventually installs an IED, requiring the player to click on the right screen to adjust the camera every few seconds while selecting dialogue on the other screen. This mission resembles the monotony of the extended periods of surveillance in the so- called “pattern-of-life analysis” noted by Gibbs and Chamayou. During the missions, the protagonist and his colleague Jane engage in conversations which, dependent on the player’s choices, can range from small talk to almost philosophical discussions. When she asks how the protagonist has been, one of the possible answers is “[b]een pretty boring. Aren’t robots supposed to do the boring jobs now?”. On his cigarette break, the operator is called by his wife, and one of the possible choices is asking about

16 On their ‘About’ page, PopMatters describes itself as “an international magazine of cultural criticism and analysis which has been independently owned and operated since its inception” and as “the largest site that bridges academic and popular writing in the world”. 17 Grinding is the repetitive killing of the same creatures or completing of the same assignment for extended periods of time, often the most efficient but also the most boring way to quickly level up your character in certain games like World of Warcraft.

the doctor visit of his son, who has ADHD. When his wife mentions that the doctor lowered the son’s dose of Ritalin, one of the choices is for the protagonist to suggestively respond that “that’s good, he’s probably just bored at school… and he’ll sure as hell have to learn to deal with that. Even good jobs are boring at times”. Later on, the protagonist is playing games18 with his son and when asked about his equipment, the protagonist remarks that he has better weapons since he is “higher up the kill chain”. One of the options is boasting about using a Hellfire missile, the other is remarking that “surveillance information is the best weapon we have” to which the son unenthusiastically responds “yeah yeah, you told me, eye in the sky”. When the soldier character controlled by his son dies in one of the games, he points out to the protagonist that “that can’t happen to you at your job, right?”, one of the possible answers is that “work is boring, buddy, that’s all you need to know”.

2.1.2 Grounded

The protagonist of Grounded (who remains unnamed and is simply referred to as “The Pilot”) is frustrated when she is relocated to Vegas to work as a drone operator instead of being a fighter jet pilot. She does not yet realize the boredom of working in what she degradingly calls the “Chair Force”, instead focusing her anger on what she considers to be a loss of prestige resulting from changing her job (30) as I will show in the next chapter. When she drives to Creech Air Force base in Nevada (“Some name / Like a monster from a shitty movie”)19 for the first time when her training starts, she describes the isolation felt like the protagonist in Unmanned: “The Pyramid disappears / And I am alone / Alone in the desert / An hour of quiet / Of Static” (33). In her first day on the job, she has to provide support for a convoy and look for potential dangers, but “I don’t see anything / And that’s good / Just grey20 putty / Nothing / Nothing / Nothing / Nothing” and when she changes shifts with another pilot, she remarks that “[h]e will state at nothing now” (39). When she gets home, she is exhausted and does the same thing she has done all day: “I eat dinner and I watch another screen and I go to bed” (40). Her days quickly become a boring routine: “Extra-special morning time and then I cross the desert to look at a screen / Convoy / Nothing / Grey” (40). The ubiquity of drones and grey screens even affects her sex life when she wants to celebrate her husband’s promotion: “I call him the Predator / I’m on top of him and I close my eyes and I see grey for a second / Eric asks what wrong I say nothing / I jerk him off and we watch the screen and call it a night” (40). The monotony even causes her to fall asleep on the job: it turns out her colleagues were taking bets on how long it would take, since “everybody does it sooner or later” (41). She is excited and “white-knuckled” when she scores her first kill in an elimination mission, but afterwards her work returns to monotonous surveillance: “A month of grey / Of nothing / Of camera eye searching searching” (47). When she witnesses the deaths of some friendly troops, she wants to find the

18 Besides the distancing and virtualization of violence in drone warfare, Unmanned is critical of the glorification of violence in video games, especially shooters, exemplified by its less-than-subtle references towards the genre’s most well-known titles. When starting the first game, the protagonist’s son remarks that “this game is so much better than Contemporary Warfare 2!”, an obvious reference to what is often called the blueprint of the modern military shooter: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009). Additionally, the environment in this minigame is an exact replica of what is probably the most popular map in the history of online shooters: de_dust2 from Counter-Strike (2000) and its many iterations. The second game is titled “Duty Call 2” in an obvious parody of one of the most popular shooters taking place in World War II: Call of Duty 2 (2005). 19 Brant’s “staccato script” consists of one long monologue, made up of short utterances following each other rather than sentences in what seems to be an attempt at representing the character’s thoughts and internal dialogue. In order to conserve space and keep quotations readable, I will designate the line breaks in the script with a forward slash (/). 20 Since Grounded’s script is written in British English but this thesis in American English, I have adapted the spelling “grey” rather than change every instance to “gray”.

ones responsible but “my orders are to linger / Linger / It’s a long day” (51). When the protagonist and her team are finally given an important mission to trail “The Number Two”, they are only allowed to engage after a surveillance period of several days, in order to establish target certainty since there have been mistakes before: “I trail the non-pissing prophet / Trail him through his grey desert / Twelve hours a day” (57).

2.2 Hybrid Identities

2.2.1 Unmanned

Drone operators live in two worlds at the same time: the virtual world of a desert filled with insurgents seen in greyscale from a top-down perspective, and the civilian world with their families waiting for them in the suburbia of Las Vegas, with a lonely drive through the desert connecting these two worlds. In my opinion, Unmanned’s way of presenting itself in split-screen is meant to demonstrate this hybrid identity of drone operators, juxtaposing the deadly implications of drone warfare and the boring aspects of daily life. Jorge Albor points out that

For most of the game, players interact with Kirk’s world on the right screen and make conversation on the left. The game’s difficulty lies in carrying out both acts simultaneously. In its most basic form, Unmanned explores the way we divide our lives and the world around us. As a drone pilot, this division is particularly unsettling. Kirk tries to follow a “person of interest” on one screen, holding the person’s life in his hands, while also holding a conversation with his partner. It is frightening how easily Kirk separates the displeasure of long-distance warfare from his daily life.21

One of the game’s most clear examples of dividing and distancing, as noted by Albor, is the driving section, where the player is forced to constantly adjust the steering of the protagonist’s vehicle on the right screen while picking through his introspective dialogue on the left side. A song pops into the protagonist’s head, which starts a timed mini-game not unlike Guitar Hero in which the player has to select the correct lyrics to Queen’s “One Vision”. In an interview with Kyle Orland of technology website Ars Technica, Molleindustria’s Paolo Pedercini points out the intended resemblance with music games like Guitar Hero, and comments on the meaning of Queen’s lyrics:

In Unmanned you may interpret these words as an allusion to American exceptionalism ("One world / one nation / one true religion"), as a reference to the technological warfare ("No blood, no stain / All we need is one worldwide vision"), or as a reinforcement of the commute scene in which there's nothing to do except for driving straight ahead ("One man / one goal / one mission").

While the player is busy selecting the correct lyrics on the left screen, the camera pans out: from his car to the continent to the globe with a satellite, perhaps the very same satellite that allows the protagonist to control his drone. Albor notes that “[i]n this moment, the two screens beautifully illuminate the divide that we create between ourselves and the systems in which we live”.

21 It is unclear why Albor refers to the protagonist of Unmanned as Kirk. I have not encountered this name on any reviews or during any of my playthroughs, so I will only refer to him as “the protagonist”.

Another example of distancing and the feeling of existing in two worlds at the same time in Unmanned is the difficult relationship between the protagonist and his family. He feels distanced, perhaps even estranged, from his wife and son: literally because of the desert and figuratively because of his job and its implications. His son has ADHD and is totally disconnected from his father: he can only see war in the context of video games, asking him which weapons his father fights with and if they resemble those found in military first-person shooters he plays. Additionally, the protagonist can be considered estranged from his wife. During the surveillance mission, he and Jane complain to each other about their lack of sleep and the lack of understanding by their spouses: “[i]f they’re not military, it’s hard to understand”. The conversation he has with his wife during his smoke break is telling. Between hours-long shifts consisting of tracking and killing insurgents thousands of miles away, the only two possible subject topics are asking how his son’s doctor visit went or asking her if she did the groceries. He is angered when his wife asks where he is flying “his toy”: one of the options is to respond angrily with “You seriously have NO IDEA, do you? Woman, I am the GUARDIAN in the SKY. I am the EYE and the CLAW”. Instead of his wife, he feels attracted to Jane because she can relate a lot more to the hybrid identity of a drone operator. One of the game’s arbitrary medals (which are made up by the game’s characters and are Pedercini’s “ironic take on gamification and external motivators”) is called “Valorous Flirting in Combat” and is given for correctly choosing the flirtatious dialogue options, notably during the assassination mission. Jane and the protagonist can kill insurgents and flirt with each other with remarkably little effort, so it seems that Albor has correctly guessed Molleindustria’s intentions with Unmanned by claiming that it “explores the way we divide our lives and the world around us”. In the interview with Ars Technica, Paolo Pedercini admits that

disconnection is a theme that runs all the way through Unmanned. It is embedded in the split screen and dual gameplay that reflects the schizophrenic life of the protagonist, and in the characters' lives as well: in the father and son's difficult bonding, in the protagonist's potentially challenging relationship with his wife. It's even hinted in some conversations about the transformation of the battlefield and the changing relationship with the enemy.

2.2.2 Grounded

In Grounded, the protagonist has a hybrid identity in two ways: on the one hand, she still feels like a fighter jet pilot in the Air Force (referred to as “jet jockeys” by the protagonist and Jane in Unmanned) instead of a drone operator, and on the other hand she is trying to resolve the tensions between her job and her family, including a daughter that needs a mother figure. In this part, I will attempt to show that both of the pilot’s struggles with her hybrid identities are connected with gender role issues. In the ‘characters’ section of the play, requirements for the actress that plays the pilot are associated with those of becoming a jet fighter pilot: among others, she must have “distant vision of at least 20/200 but corrected to 20/20”, possess “no more than 32% body fat”, and she “should be able to complete a 1.5 mile-run in 13 minutes and 56 seconds or less”. Before the pilot becomes a drone operator and a mother, she feels part of the masculine subculture of the military as “one of the boys”. Anticipating later events in the play, she introduces herself by mentioning that she did not want to take off her flight suit since she had earned this “through sweat and brains and guts” (21). However, “[i]t’s more than a suit”: it also the speed, the ride, her jet (who she lovingly refers to as “Tiger” and “my gal”), the respect, the danger: she loves being in “the blue” (21). Her perspective as a fighter jet pilot also causes less guilt and perpetrator trauma, if it all. Instead of having to linger over the sites of impact while counting the aftermath including body parts as a drone operator, she “rains down” Sidewinders and Mavericks, or

“[a]t least I think I do / I’m long gone by the time the boom happens / Tiger and I are on to another piece of sky” (22). When “Saddam’s dipshit army goes boom”, she is sent home on leave and meets her future husband Eric in a clear example of how she perceives gender roles. She goes drinking “with my boys” in a typical pilot bar and Eric comes to her which “takes balls” as well as “some offensive flying of its own” (22). She tells him straight off “who I am what I am” since “[m]ost guys don’t like what I do / Feel they’re less of a guy around me / I take the guy spot and they don’t know where they belong” (22). However, Eric is different: “[t]his one kisses me in the parking lot like I’m the rock star I am” but she can’t even stop thinking about planes during sex: she suggestively remarks that he is “hard as a Sidewinder” when she puts on the flying suit (23). She can tell that “somethings shifts / Something’s breached” because when she is sent back, she is sad for the first time that leave is over, which frustrates her in a reversal of traditional gender roles: “[s]hit / Like some 50s movie / I’ve got my little woman at home know who I’m fighting for / All that true corn / True cheese” (23). She is glad to be back “alone in the blue” but it seems that her little adventure on leave has had some unforeseen consequences: she is pregnant (24). She takes one last flight, in the hopes that it will influence her fetus of not becoming another “typical” girl who adheres to gender roles and their conventional occupations:

I take one last flight / The both of us / So she can have a taste of what it means / Get it in her blood / Let her know that there is this / That this could be hers one day / That she will not be a hair-tosser / A cheerleader / A needy sack of shit / There is this / There is blue (24-25)

While she is concerned with traditional gender roles, she is also worried about her appearance like one of the “girly girls” she hates: when she visits Eric for the first time since she got pregnant, she is “[r]eady to see his face fall to see whatever flygirl fantasy he’s got going dispelled by the civilian whale before him” (26). When she returns to service after some time, she is enraged to find out that she has been moved from the Air Force to the “Chair Force” since she is a “real pilot a fighter pilot” and that “[y]ou don’t spend a million dollars so I can fly a remote control plane” (30). After talking with Eric, they move to “a small place in the suburbs” of Las Vegas and she sees the advantages of life as a drone pilot and a mother: “I will see my daughter grow up / I will kiss my husband goodnight every night” (32). After her first day of training, when she has barely adjusted to her new identity as a drone operator, she anticipates the difficulties of switching identities while balancing her family and work life:

Home will be training too / Getting used to the routine / Driving to war like it’s shift work / Like I’m punching the clock / Used to transition home once a year / Now it’ll be once a day / Different / Definitely different (36)

However, on the plus side (or as the pilot puts it, “on the true corn hand”) she has a daily reminder of what she is fighting for, “[n]ot some dream Sam and Eric in my head half-remembered” (36). As she gets used to her new routine, her daughter mentions missing her at dinnertime, so “I tell her it’s too late but we’ll make mornings extra-special / I talk like a mom now / A bullshit one” (37). She is not satisfied with her “identity performance” as a mom, although it is not clear if this is because she refuses to comply with gender roles in several ways or because she simply feels inadequate as a mother. She is similarly frustrated when she graduates from the drone operator training course:

Training over / I’ve earned a pin / The Chair Force pin / This lame-ass lightning bolt piece of shit / They stick it on my suit / Puncture my suit with the pin so it becomes part of it part of me / I try not to look in the mirror (37)

In her “[f]irst day on the job / The war / Whatever”, she is frustrated to discover that she has to work in “[a]n air-conditioned trailer that seals me off completely from all sky all blue / Fuck” (37). She is

frustrated with her new identity as a drone operator: she has no more access to “the blue”, instead being relegated to the domain of the grey. A similar moment of disillusionment happens when she meets her team and she realizes that she is no longer part of the “lone wolf” ideal like in Top Gun:

I have a team now / A headset full of backseat drivers / Analysts advisers JAGs / My lone wolf days are over I don’t call the shots anymore / I’m like the back-up singer for Neil Diamond (38)

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the pilot is disappointed with the monotony and abnormal hours of her job. She becomes more frustrated when Eric gets a new job at a casino that includes shifts during the night and early morning, which “[m]eans I have to drop Sam off at care now / An extra- special drop off / Kiss her goodbye and go to war” (40). Her daughter catches on to the new situation quickly: “Sam’s suspicious / Wonders what makes a morning extra-special all I do is drop her off / Smart kid” (45). After a while, the pilot seems to accept her role as a civilian and mother, but the dreams about her days of being a fighter pilot are never far away:

[…] I realize the Commander was right we are the top shit we get to kick ass and screw our husbands and kiss our kids’ forehead goodnight and that’s something a fighter pilot never had never / I dream of it though / I dream of blue all the same (47)

However, things are not as good as they seem, and her job has more of an impact on her other life than she expected. She is frustrated with the fact that she cannot tell her husband how her day was because of security measures: “[h]e can tell me how his day was / Every detail free to share” (49). When she finally gets a few days off, she wants to spend it on “special time” with her daughter, but when they visit the mall she becomes paranoid because of the cameras in the changing rooms: “JC Penney or Afghanistan / Everything is Witnessed” (48). After one day of leave she crashes because of fatigue, which makes her feel guilty: “I wake up with ponies on my pillow / Surrounding me / Pink ponies everywhere / Guess we had special time after all” (50). These pink ponies are a source of frustration since she did not want her daughter to become a typical girl, and it is revealed that both she and her husband are attempting to force gender roles on their daughter:

We get home / She want me to play with her ponies / Ponies all over the place / Pink ponies / We keep trying to wean her off them / “Don’t you want to play with some planes Sam?” / We both try / Eric more than me / But no luck / Just as well / Don’t know what we’d replace them with / They don’t make drones in Fisher-Price / Not yet anyway / But give it time / Five years max (49)

When she gets back to work, the pilot becomes weary of her hybrid identity as a soldier and a mother and the fact that she has to constantly switch between these roles: “[t]hen I pull up and the door opens and the happy family greets their hero home from the war / Every day / Every day / Every day they greet me home from the war” (51). Indeed, as the pilot remarks, The Odyssey would be a very different book if Odysseus came home every day from the war (51). Her job leads to further problems when it influences her family life again. When she sees her daughter sleeping, she is terrified that she is not breathing because she looks grey, like her screen at work (55). She lashes out at Eric, which prompts him to suggest specialized Air Force counseling (56). She is frustrated with the therapy, perhaps because feeling inadequate as a wife reminds her of the ways in which she feels inadequate as a soldier. She thinks Eric has a crush on the female therapist and her frustrations are expressed in one long run-on paragraph, from which the following is a brief excerpt:

[…] I don’t really want to talk about anything anyway because if I was in a war, a real war, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, I wouldn’t be fucking exhausted, my head full of grey sitting

on a couch talking to an Air Force-approved shrink with my husband, no, I would be having a beer with my boys, I would be shooting pool, I would be cranking music […] (56)

When her daughter asks her to play together, she is furious because her daughter is a seemingly “normal” girl, adhering to traditional gender roles: she feels that she has not only failed as a soldier and a wife, but now as a mother as well.

Sam wakes up during dinner Sam wants to play with her ponies / Those fucking ponies / I pick her up / Are you a hair-tosser after all Sam? Are you a hair-tosser? / Sam’s confused / Eric takes her from me / Fine / But she should remember / She should remember the sky (58)

Her husband senses trouble, and gives her a package “for the way back”: a mixtape of his own making, with the significant title “decompression”. The track listing is also highly relevant: the CD starts with AC/DC (which she inexplicably hears almost all the time on the radio when there is no static) and ends with something called “The Pony Song” (61). Ponies and planes are not only significant because of their relation with traditionally gendered toys; they are also markers of the pilot’s feelings. One of her few happy moments is when her daughter says that she can make her pony fly: she happily declares that her daughter “flies that pony all over the room that fucking pony flies that pink pony soars”; she remarks that she loves it, that it makes her heart soar and that she’ll “try to carry that into the grey” (64). While the image of this “Pegasus” and her daughter may seem comforting to the pilot at the time, it will also be the reason she loses her job. At the end of the play, the pilot is court-martialed and sentenced to prison for treason because she intentionally crashed her Predator drone. The cause of her treason is identification with her victims triggered by the image of Sam and her Pegasus: when she is following the “Number Two” mentioned in the previous chapter, he suddenly stops at a house and a young girl comes running out to greet him. She is about to push the button to “send the Prophet to Hell”, but when the girl stops running she thinks that “[i]t’s Sam / It’s not his daughter it’s mine / It’s Sam / She has Pegasus in her hand she wanted to show him / Pegasus” (67). She cannot convince herself to push the lethal button because she thinks that it is her daughter. In other words, her daughter made her give up her life as a fighter jet pilot, but one of the few happy moments the pilot experiences in her capacity as a mother makes her lose her life as a drone operator as well. Since the result of her treason is being sentenced to prison, one could argue that she has ultimately failed as a mother (and a spouse) as well, not only because she tried to force gender roles on her daughter and needed to work long days, but also because she will now not be able to see Sam grow up.

2.3 Unilateral Injuring

2.3.1 Unmanned

In Unmanned, the protagonist is very much aware of the fact that he is capable of injuring others while remaining safe from harm himself, at least when the player selects the appropriate text options. During the shaving scene, one of the options for “another day…” is “another step closer to my grave”, which leads the protagonist to comment “at least it won’t be as quick as stepping on an IED”, which on its own prompts either “though at least then I’d die a hero” or “rest in peace, Markus”. In this “version” of the protagonist chosen by the player, he clearly feels guilty because he cannot die like a hero, he cannot be

killed in combat like his friend Markus. When he is contemplating his nightmare and wonders what he wants, one of the options is “to face the enemy, instead of dispensing death from above”. When he is on Route 95, one of the options is “Stayin’ alive on Route 95” which leads the protagonist to comment “nope, not a lot of IEDs on my morning commute”. If the player crashes the car, Jane notices his injuries, to which the protagonist sarcastically replies “war is hell, ma’am”. When the player performs poorly in the shaving section and Jane comments on the wounds on the protagonist’s face, the reply is an equally sarcastic “[s]ympathy wounds. Helps me relate to the boys on the ground”. In one of the possible conversation threads during the assassination mission, it is revealed that Jane’s father is retired after being injured in the Air Force and ending up in a wheelchair, a stark reminder of the corporeality of warfare on the ground. When Jane and the protagonist are talking about working for the Agency, the player has the choice of expressing his doubt about their actions. One of the three choices of which part he worries about includes “the illegal killings” – perhaps by drones since they also operate in areas officially not at war – which leads Jane to the revealing comment “[y]awn, laws of war are so 20th century”. In the assassination mission, Jane says that she reads that “the insurgents think we are afraid to face them on the ground”. One of the possible responses is “better a live coward than a dead hero”, which prompts Jane to respond “and who’s to say what’s fair in this asymmetrical clusterfuck”. The perspective of a drone operator is also explicitly linked to that of someone playing a video game: both stare at a pixelated screen for hours on end, cannot be hurt if their avatars on the screen are damaged, and often consider the ones on the other side of the screen to be inferior. When Jane asks about his plans for the weekend, the protagonist can reply that he will probably be playing video games with his son, and her response is “funny. Do you guys play war games?”. One of the possible answers is telling: “yeah, that’s how he understands what I do here”. The similarities between operating drones and playing video games are made explicit in the dialogue that occurs when the protagonist plays these games with his son. When his son asks about his weapons at work and the operator responds that he “took down a bad guy with a Hellfire missile today”, his son’s response is “[w]hoa! Cool. Death from above”. Successfully completing the assassination mission the operator is referring to by killing an insurgent with a Hellfire missile awards the medal “Death From Above Merit”). When his son fails to complete a level, one of the possible conversations is the following:

SON: Damn, I got killed. That never happens to you at work, huh? DAD: Ha! No, we can’t get killed. SON: Oh, so you got a cheat code? DAD: It’s not cheating. We have better technology, it’d be stupid not to use it.22 SON: How come you won’t let me use invulnerability hacks then? DAD: These games don’t mean anything if there’s no chance of dying.

When they play another game (another military shooter, but this time placed in what seems to be WWII instead of modern-day Middle East), his son asks the operator what his grandpa’s favorite weapon was during the war. One of the possible responses is the sniper rifle, to which his son responds “[y]eah, it’s the best for head-shots. Plus you don’t lose any health”. The father revealingly and seemingly proud answers “[t]hat’s m’boy. No need to get your hands dirty”. It seems that for the protagonist in Unmanned, not being able to get hurt is a source of both shame and pride, largely dependent on the player’s choice of dialogue.

22 The other possible answer here is “unlimited lives. If a drone goes down we buy a new one” which prompts the response “Oh yeah, same as paying for levelling up on Warcraft”, further solidifying the claim that they can bond by playing together, but the operator’s son can only see war and his job in the context of video games.

2.3.2 Grounded

In Grounded, the pilot initially evaluates the impossibility of getting hurt as a negative aspect of her new job. This is probably because it reminds her that she is not in the Air Force anymore, since one of the exciting aspects of being a fighter jet pilot for her was “the danger” (21). So, when she is moved to the “Chair Force” and she and Eric move to Las Vegas, she (probably) sarcastically remarks “[n]o tracer fire / No RPGs / The threat of death has been removed / The threat of death has been removed from our lives / Viva / Viva / Viva Las Vegas” (32). When she gets confirmation to initiate her first kill, she finds it ridiculous that her pulse quickens and that her “pits” and hands start sweating since “[i]t is not a fair fight”. Her intense reaction is represented by another of the script’s few run-on paragraphs (the other exception being her frustration at marriage counseling):

I’m not there I can’t be killed the threat of death has been removed there is no danger to me none I am the eye in the sky there is no danger but my pulse quickens why does it quicken I am not in combat if combat is risk if combat is danger if combat is combat I am not in it (46)

As the pilot starts to get used to her invulnerability and the all-seeing perspective of what she calls the “Gorgon Stare”23, it starts to give her a superiority complex. She begins to feel like a divine being issuing judgment from above on mere mortals: “You can’t hide from the eye in the sky my children / We look down from above we see all and we have pronounced you guilty” (44). She starts calling her team “the headset gods of the sky” and “drone gods” and she states that “Olympus is a trailer in the middle of the desert” (46). As the narrative progresses, the pilot realizes that her position as “eye in the sky” does not equal the capacity for moral judgement of a god. She begins to suffer from the long hours and constant grey of her job, especially when she is forced to balance a life as a drone operator with that of a civilian, mother and spouse, as I have shown in the previous chapter. Gradually, she starts to see the consequences of her actions and starts identifying with the people on the other side of the screen, which culminates in her identification with the daughter of “Number Two”. Her response is to directly defy the chain of command and fly her drone upside down, making the all-seeing Gorgon Stare see nothing but the grey sky, followed by black when she herself crashes the 11-million-dollar machine that was supposed to make her invulnerable.

2.4 Conclusion

In his introduction, Gibbs claims that the extreme monotony, what I have called “hybrid identities” in this chapter, and what he calls “remoteness from battle” (which I have broadened to Chamayou’s “unilateral injuring”) do not cause less trauma to drone operators than “regular” soldiers, who are deployed abroad for months on end. On the contrary, it appears that “some Predator pilots suffer from combat stress that equals, or exceeds, that of pilots in the battlefield” which suggests that “virtual killing, for all its sterile trappings, is a discomfiting form of warfare” (Mayer, qtd. in Gibbs 198). Gibbs links the increased use of drone operators to “the reifying processes involved in turning humans into

23 This “Stare” consists of “Infrared, Thermal, Radar and Laser” cameras and sensors which she describes as “[a] thousand eyes staring at the ground” (35).

mechanized agents of war” like those employed in military training, and notes that “the technology which puts them in touch with the battlefield also exposes them to similar levels of emotional fatigue, and roughly equivalent consequent stress and trauma to those soldiers actually on the ground” (198- 199). In this chapter, I have attempted to investigate Gibbs’ claim through my analysis of these three distinguishing features in two narratives that deal with the daily life of drone operators. In the case of Unmanned, the dialogue options chosen by the player determine the amount of trauma suffered by the protagonist to a large degree. Depending on the answers and dialogue threads chosen by the player, the protagonist can quickly dismiss or even ignore a sense of guilt and trauma, or meditate on the consequences of his actions by feeling guilt in varying degrees. The first prompt in the game, the “another day…” of the shaving scene, is an excellent example: depending on the player’s choice, the protagonist can either reflect on the monotony and boredom of his job (… another dollar), feel guilty about not being a soldier in the field (… another step closer to my grave), or simply skip over any semblance of guilt (… another terrorist dead. Hell yeah! bring it on…). Nevertheless, there are some constants: regardless of the choices made by the player, the game starts with the protagonist having a nightmare about being chased by Middle Eastern people before turning into a drone, and ends with him counting sheep so he can get to sleep. Besides causing a lack of sleep and a smoking addiction, the protagonist’s virtual life as a drone operator also interferes with his personal life as a civilian. He can only connect with his son through the violence military shooters, boasting about his weapons and invulnerability, while seemingly overlooking their troubling resemblance with his job. The relationship with his wife is strained at best: unlike his attractive colleague Jane, she does not understand his irregular working hours or the implications of flying around with his “toy”. Since Grounded is a play with a fixed script, its analysis is more straightforward. It confirms Mayer’s claim since the pilot suffers from trauma as a direct result of her job as a drone operator, whereas she did not note any trauma during her time as a pilot on the battlefield. She initially regards her invulnerability as a negative aspect, since it separates her from the danger she loved as a jet fighter pilot. After a while, however, her position as an invulnerable, all-seeing eye in the sky leads her to develop a superiority complex, at least until she starts identifying with the people made up of “grey putty” on her screen. The constant grey on her screen, symbolizing the sheer monotony and boredom of her job, is another cause for trauma: she even starts to suffer from hallucinations, like when she thinks her daughter has turned grey or that she is about to assassinate her daughter instead of someone else’s. The main cause of the pilot’s trauma, however, is her failure to succeed in living at two worlds at the same time. These are related to gender roles: she struggles with her newfound identity as a drone operator instead of a fighter jet pilot, just like she struggles with being married and a mother of a girl that likes to play with ponies, living in the suburbs instead of drinking beers with “her boys” from the Air Force. Additionally, she has trouble balancing these two newfound identities: her military life as a drone operator interferes with her civilian life as a mother and a wife, causing strained relationships, fatigue, and finally hallucinations. The pilot’s inability to distinguish these two worlds culminates in a single traumatic event where she thinks she is about to assassinate her own daughter and therefore commits treason by crashing her drone. This makes her end up in prison, where she is even more isolated from her husband and child than before.

Conclusion

In this thesis, I have discussed some of the ways in which recent memoirs and narratives challenge the conventional, historical image of war through their representations of unconventional, contemporary warfare. War is traditionally thought of as a fair and honorable fight where two groups of male soldiers are capable of risking their lives and injuring each other in relatively close quarters while demonstrating ideals like bravery and fortitude. As these recent narratives have shown, the experience of the modern- day soldier in the United States Army is quite different from this traditional perspective in a number of ways. Instead of exclusively consisting of males, women now constitute over fifteen percent of its forces, which raises concerns about masculine military culture and its institutional sexism. Instead of a chance to display their bravery, contemporary soldiers often find their wars to be extremely boring and disillusioning, among other reasons because they do not resemble the virtuous and exiting wars in the media and on recruitment posters. Instead of being fought hand-to-hand in the battlefield, wars are increasingly waged from a distance and from above using weaponized drones whose operators are safe from harm. It is only when taking these new aspects into consideration that one can get a correct image of the psychological reality of modern warfare and their representations in recent war memoirs.

My introduction and general theoretical framework can be divided in two parts. In the first part, I have used the theories of Elaine Scarry and Elaine Showalter to show how the traditional image of a soldier is based on the importance of mutual injuring in war and the prevalence of masculine ideals such as bravery and fortitude in what I have termed masculine military culture. In the second part, I have used the theories of James Der Derian and Grégoire Chamayou to show how modern warfare differs from this traditional image, by representing its wars as virtuous and sanitized through the MIME-NET and by employing drones in distanced killing that only allows unilateral injuring.

Disillusioned Atypical Warriors

In the first part of my thesis, I have analyzed two memoirs of recent wars: Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead about the Gulf War, and Kayla Williams’ Love My Rifle More than You about the Iraq War. I have looked at their youth and early motivations for joining the armed forces, their experience with the reifying processes of militarization in boot camp, the way they engage with the homosocial bond of camaraderie found in the military, and the ways in which they are disappointed with their wars and with themselves as a soldier. Besides the theories summarized above, I have used the close readings of Stacey Peebles and Alan Gibbs to support my argument. Both of these modern-day warriors can be considered atypical when they are compared to what is traditionally expected of a soldier: one of them is a combat virgin, the other is female. They are both disappointed with their own performances as soldiers, the incompetent behavior of their superiors, and their wars in general.

Swofford seems like a typical jarhead at first when considering his reasons for joining the Marines, his acceptance of being reified into a military machine at boot camp, and his reaction to Vietnam war movies prior to being deployed. However, he is well-read, even somewhat of an intellectual, who eventually feels more at home in the elitism of his sniper platoon than in a company of line grunts, which he first admires but also considers to be “the gutter of the Marine Corps”. He is disappointed with himself as a soldier, because he did not live up to the masculine standards set by Vietnam war movies, the military training he achieved, and the masculine military culture in the Marine Corps. He mentions that he feels like less of marine and even less of a man because he did not kill, at times even wishing that he had killed in Iraq in order to feel complete. Swofford’s frustration with his performance in the Gulf War is largely a result from the nature of the conflict: in a ground campaign that lasted a mere hundred hours, it is “hardly surprising that this simulation of a war allowed little chance for the servicemen to validate their masculinity” (Gibbs 174). The ubiquity of crushing boredom in the months of Operation Desert Shield leading up to this disappointing ground campaign is another source of disappointment for Swofford. Besides being disappointed with himself for not killing and with the war for being boring and not giving him a decent chance to kill, he is disappointed by the incompetent behavior of his superiors, especially when a captain denies him this chance to kill. Finally, he is also disillusioned with the discrepancy between his experience of the Gulf War and its virtuous representation by the MIME-NET as a “cyberspectacle in which the pitifully overmatched Iraqi troops were overwhelmed by the most massive and awesome military force ever assembled” (Kellner 217, qtd. in Gibbs 174). Just like Swofford, Williams and her memoir are atypical, and she is both disappointed with herself as a soldier and with her war experience. While it is true that in some memoirs about the Iraq War trauma is a result of its “gradually worsening situation and, in particular, the steady attrition of the US forces’ Rules of Engagement” (Gibbs 182), Williams only stayed in Iraq for a year and it is not the main cause of her disappointment. Like Swofford, the main cause for her disappointment with herself and her war is that she does not feel like a fully competent soldier. Unlike Swofford, this is not caused by a lack of killing but by a lack of being male. Even though she has been a liminal figure since her youth, she ultimately fails at crossing the border into the inner circle of male comradeship. In boot camp, she tries to compensate for her gender by negatively evaluating the typically “girly” behavior of some of her fellow female recruits and by meeting the (higher) male standards for some of the physical training tests. When she arrives in Iraq, she discovers that by being a woman deployed overseas, she becomes a “Queen for a Year”: a scarce and wanted commodity, rather than a skilled soldier. Throughout her deployment, she encounters rampant institutional sexism in the form of abusive comments, sexual solicitations, and even two counts of sexual assault. Even though she mentions that the situation is not that simple since being wanted gives her a sense of empowerment, and she sometimes engages in soliciting sex herself, her overall experience is overwhelmingly negative. She evaluates her gender and its associated traits especially negatively in the context of military masculinity, which is evident in her evaluation of female commanding officers and their behavior. For Williams, they are not allowed to cry or show signs of weakness or incompetence in front of in their troops, and they are especially despised when they blame PMS. The interactions between Williams and the so-called “FISTers” are indicative of Williams’ experience abroad: she does her utmost best to fit in with the homosocial bonds of the masculine military collective, and she meets all the required standards to be accepted into the group, but she is ultimately rejected because she is not male. Sex, sexuality and gender are clearly front and center in how Williams perceives herself and her war.

Bored Cubicle Warriors

In the second part of my thesis, I have analyzed atypical warriors in a different sense: drone operators, who work daily shifts in an Air Force base in Nevada instead of being “boots on the ground” abroad. In other words, Williams and Swofford may be atypical soldiers in the sense that they are respectively female and a well-read “combat virgin”, yet they are still traditional soldiers compared to drone operators because they are physically present in the battlefield. Besides this “remoteness from battle”, Alan Gibbs notes two other defining features of work as a drone operator: the extreme monotony and boredom resulting from staring at a grey screen for hours on end, and the fact that these operators have to return home to their families in the suburbs after each shift. I have analyzed these three features in two narratives, while broadening Gibbs’ “remoteness from battle” to Chamayou’s “unilateral injuring”, to verify Gibbs’ claim that they do not cause less trauma than that experienced by “regular” soldiers on the ground. The two narratives I have chosen are atypical on their own, in the sense that they are not novels but a theater play (Grounded) and a video game (Unmanned). In the case of Unmanned, the degree to which the protagonist is traumatized by his work is largely dependent upon the player, since each piece of text in the game has multiple choices which result in very different threads. In my conclusion to the part about cubicle warriors, I mentioned the shaving scene as an example: depending on the choices made by the player, the protagonist can either reflect on the monotony and boredom of being a drone operator, feel guilty about not being able to get harmed in the line of duty like the “boots on the ground”, or disregard any guilt and celebrate the fact that he kills terrorists. Besides these choices, there are some constants: the game starts with a nightmare and ends with the protagonist having trouble sleeping, suggesting that drone operators suffer from guilt and trauma regardless of their outlook on their job. The protagonist’s occupation interferes with his personal life besides this lack of sleep: he is addicted to cigarettes, presumably due to the stress of his job, and the relationships with his wife and son suffer as a direct result of his “hybrid identity”. It seems that regardless of the player’s choices, a certain degree of trauma and guilt is unavoidable. Since Grounded is a play, the degree to which the pilot suffers from trauma is fixed. Notably, she does not mention any trauma experienced when working as an Air Force jet fighter pilot, but her time as a drone operator has far-reaching consequences. The negative effects of boredom and constant monotony of life as a drone operator are symbolized by the ubiquity of the color grey, as opposed to the blue of the sky she adored as a pilot. The discrepancy between an occupation as jet fighter pilot and drone operator causes the pilot considerable trouble, and is expressed in gendered terms: at times, she regrets living as a spouse and mother in the suburbs of Las Vegas instead of being able to drink some beers with “her boys” in the Air Force while deployed abroad. Besides this hybrid identity as a jet fighter pilot and a drone operator, her job causes another hybrid identity: that of being a drone operator and thus military on the one hand, and being a mother and wife and thus a civilian on the other. Like in Unmanned, the drive to and from her base often serves as transitionary period of isolation and mental “decompression” to switch between the civilian and military mentalities. Besides causing hallucinations and identification with her victims, the effort involved with keeping these two mentalities apart eventually proves to be too much for the pilot to handle. When she is about to assassinate an important target she and other drone operators have been following for days, she believes his daughter to be her own (with her pink flying pony called Pegasus) and intentionally crashes her 11-million-dollar Predator drone. However, this act of what some may call redemption for her guilt only causes her more trouble: she is court-martialed for treason and sentenced to prison, which means she will have even more trouble maintaining the relationship with her daughter and husband.

Closing Notes

When looking at the texts analyzed in this thesis, it is plausible to assume that being an atypical soldier in any sense – be it a combat virgin, female, or a drone operator – does not mean that one is less likely to suffer from trauma. In fact, all of the protagonists are disappointed with themselves precisely because they do not live up to the standards of masculine military culture and society’s view of the ideal soldier in various ways. Besides this disappointment, there are some common threads to be found between the analyzed texts. In Jarhead and Love My Rifle More than You, the protagonists end up in dangerous situations due to the incompetence of their superiors, and they are disillusioned by how different their war is from those seen in movies and military recruitment brochures. In Jarhead, Grounded, and Unmanned, the protagonists are frustrated with the unexpected boredom they face, which clashes with their expectations of life in the military as exciting (and in the case of Jarhead, dangerous). In Grounded and Love My Rifle More than You, the female protagonists also struggle with gender roles and the negative attitude towards characteristics deemed to be typically feminine. The pilot has trouble adjusting to the typical role of a mother and spouse in the suburbs, as opposed to being an atypical fighter jet pilot who is female, but has no (mentioned) trouble with fitting in with “her boys”. Kayla Williams, on the other hand, repeatedly tries to gain acceptance into the inner circle of male comradeship, but her gender ultimately prevents her from being a fully accepted member, even if she meets all the required standards. I would like to end this thesis by suggesting additional research. Since drone warfare is a relatively new phenomenon, and the selection of narratives dealing with the specifics of their occupation analyzed here is both atypical and limited, further research is needed on the unique perspective of drone operators and the implications for perpetrator trauma, preferably in longer narratives that are better suited for in- depth character analysis such as novels.

Works Cited

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