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“Occupying War: US Militarism and Representing War since 1989”

Who Is the Soldier?: Documenting American “Grunts” from D​ ispatches t​ o R​ estrepo

Abstract: T​ his chapter compares the ways Michael Herr in D​ ispatches​ (1977) and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger in ​Restrepo ​ (2010) represent American soldiers in the context of military professionalization following the establishment of the AVF. These works are seminal landmarks of the grunt’s-eye view genre, but they produce the average soldier’s subjectivity and identity very differently and, in turn, foster different relationships between their American audiences and this figure. Herr, I argue, represents the “grunts” of Vietnam as w​ e all ​ while R​ estrepo​’s directors portray the Army platoon in Afghanistan as a collective w​ ho?​. I show how the subtle aesthetic changes to documenting the average infantryman reflects and enforces the logics of professionalization as well as the intensifying distance between the American public and those who fight America’s wars.

Keywords: ​ Grunt’s-eye view, documentary, New Journalism, aesthetics, liminality, soldier figure, US military, professionalization, persistent warfare.

Introduction “I got it. I got it, man. I’m the narrator!” says Juan “Doc” Restrepo before introducing his fellow soldiers. The bright-eyed recruit picks up a hand-held camera and aims it at the guys sitting around him​—​“O’Brizzel,” “Peebes,” and “Kim”​—​whose tee-shirts and stubble make them indistinguishable from civilian twenty-somethings. The grainy and unsteady footage matched by the guys’ ensuing inside jokes and goofy faces cause the opening scene of Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s documentary ​Restrepo (2010) to resemble a home movie, a record meant solely to incite laughter and nostalgia in its subjects. And this footage which bookends the film—​ ​footage of a seemingly private yet mundane moment among buddies “loving life and getting ready to go to war,” as Restrepo narrates​—​embodies one of the documentary’s underlying tensions: Who is the narrator? Whose story does ​Restrepo​ tell? Is it the collective story of the platoon stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley in 2007, told “through the eyes of the soldiers themselves,” as the film’s directors contend?1 Restrepo​’s formal conventions foster the illusion that the film is a neutral and direct channel between the soldiers and viewers, a seeming antidote to the ways popular war reportage, according to Judith Butler and other critics, has distanced America’s contemporary wars from the public and made

1 Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, “Story,” ​Restrepo,​ 2009, http://restrepothemovie.com/story/. Cawley | 2

them ​ i​ ncreasingly difficult for civilians to apprehend.2 But a closer examination of R​ estrepo​ reveals that the film has more in common with this trend than the intimate identification implied by the directors’ claim “their lives were our lives.”3 One example of R​ estrepo​’s alternative perspective surfaces early in the film. Captain Dan Kearney speaks to a group of local Afghan men as part of the platoon’s strategy to sustain the security of a local road project. While Kearny explains, if you cooperate “we can ... make you guys richer, make you more powerful,” the camera zooms in on the worn hands of one Afghan elder, patiently struggling to insert a straw into a Capri Sun juice pouch. This shot set against what could be Kearney’s pitch to a boardroom of investors presents a profound disconnect between the soldiers’ perceptions, training, and attitudes and the reality of the war. Crucially, viewers are made privy to this dissonance, placing us in a privileged seat of judgment. Viewers do not look w​ ith​ Captain Dan Kearney, we look ​at ​ him​—​a defining feature of the film. We are constantly invited to view​ t​ he men of the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team with pity, confusion, adulation, and horror. In what follows, I explicate this ambivalent portrait of today’s soldiers as part of a larger story of how the representation of American combat soldiers has changed since the Vietnam War. War narratives that do not center on soldiers are rare. However, who the soldier is and how this figure is culturally imagined continually changes, serving as, according to Alain Badiou, an exceptional barometer of our political climate. Badiou acknowledges that we are “after the point of the aristocratic warrior, and after the period of the democratic soldier,” but he never identifies the poetic container of contemporary society’s “obscure slaughter.”4 I want to suggest that beginning in the Vietnam War, “the average infantryman—or ‘grunt’, as [they] were impolitely called—in Vietnam” has been this container, and studying his cultural evolution throws into relief how military professionalization and the logic of liminality facilitate warfare in the “era of persistent conflict.”5 To trace the differences between the average infantryman of Vietnam and that of America’s post-Cold War campaigns, I compare Hetherington and Junger’s Oscar-nominated documentary and

2 For more on contemporary war reportage and the public see Judith Butler, ​Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2009); W.J.T. Mitchell, ​Cloning Terror: The War Images, 9/11 to the Present (​ Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); J​ eff Lewis, ​Language Wars: The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence ​ (London: Pluto Press, 2005). 3 Hetherington, “Story.” 4 Alain Badiou, “The Contemporary Figure of the Soldier in Politics and Poetry,” UCLA, Jan. 2007, http://www.lacan.com/badsold.htm/. 5 Usage of grunt reported in ​“Grunt, n. 2.b.” ​OED Online,​ June 2017, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/82037?rskey=iSd4xF&result=1 (accessed Sept. 13, 2017); The popular designation “era of persistent conflict” was coined by G​ eneral George W. Casey. See George W. Casey, “Persistent Conflict: The New Strategic Environment,” address given to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, 27 Sept. 2007, and "America's Army in an Era of Persistent Conflict," ​Army Magazine,​ October 2008, 28. Cawley | 3

Michael Herr’s seminal New Journalist account of the Vietnam War, ​Dispatches ​ (1977). Both are acclaimed touchstones of the grunt’s-eye view genre, a subgenre of cinematic and literary texts that focusses on “the narrow personal experience” of soldiers in war, a designation often used synonymously with “grunt doc,” which Patricia Aufderheide codified in 2007 to describe the tradition of documentary films that portray life and death on the battlefield through the perspective of soldiers, structured by a “voyeuristic quest” and cinéma vérité techniques.6 It is worth noting that in addition to his work as a filmmaker, Sebastian Junger has authored a number of ambitious books that may seem like better candidates for this comparative study. In particular, War (​ 2010), the chronicle of Junger’s experience imbedded in Afghanistan, shares ​Dispatches​’ literary medium and fundamental objective​—​in Junger’s words, to convey “what it’s like to serve in a platoon of combat infantry.”7 ​ But unlike ​Restrepo a​ nd ​Dispatches​, the book lacks the critical and commercial success as well as the artistic value and influence that would warrant its treatment as a landmark of the subgenre. Moreover, in W​ ar​, Junger often trades in his point of view as correspondent and documentarian for that of biologist, anthropologist, psychologist, and military historian. Fellow war correspondent Dexter Filkins critiques this approach, noting, W​ ar​ aims to be not only a “boots-on-the-ground narrative … of American fighting men but a discourse on the nature of war itself” that uses “every moment in the Korengal as the occasion for an extended riff.” Junger’s digressions, Filkins importantly senses, cause the characters of Second Platoon to “disappear.”8 This perspective is highlighted by the book’s considerable bibliography and marks a significant departure from the formal and artistic torch ignited by the Vietnam era’s New Journalists as well as the movement’s historical import, a torch held most firmly by today’s documentary filmmakers. In short, D​ ispatches​ and R​ estrepo a​ re emblematic of the grunt’s-eye view genre and its trajectory. What crucially distinguishes these texts, then, is how they figure the American soldier’s subjectivity and identity. Most simply, in ​Dispatches​, soldiers are a recognizable w​ e all ​ while in R​ estrepo,​ they constitute an illegible w​ ho?.​ To explain this distinction, I bring together two lines of criticism. First, the older debates over the politics of literary postmodernism, specifically Linda Hutcheon, Aijaz Ahmad,

6 R​ enny Christopher, ​The Viet Nam War The American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives ​ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 6; Patricia Aufderheide, “Your Country, My Country: How Films About The Iraq War Construct Publics,” ​Framework ​ Vol. 48, No 2 (2007), 59-60; Other grunt docs and grunt’s-eye view narratives include “​ M” ​(1966), T​ he ​ ​Anderson Platoon ​(1967),​ J​ arhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (​ 2003), ​Gunner Palace ​ (2004), ​Baghdad Express: A Gulf War Memoir ​(2003), O​ ccupation Dreamland ​ (2005), ​Generation Kill ​ (2008), ​Armadillo​ (2010), and ​The Good Soldiers (2010). 7 Sebastian Junger, ​War​ (New York: Hatchet Book Group, 2010), 25. 8 Dexter Filkins, “Nothing to Do but Kill and Wait,” ​New York Times,​ 14 May 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/books/review/Filkins-t.html.​ Cawley | 4

and Fredric Jameson’s disputes regarding the relationship between identity politics and postmodern or deconstructive aesthetics, illuminate how D​ ispatches​’ “New” narrative perspective enforces identification with American GIs in Vietnam. Second, the anthropological concept of liminality, as applied in media and identity-based studies, helps conceptualize the ambivalent identification​—​or absence of identification​—​with and of the soldiers of R​ estrepo​. In anthropology, liminality designates a stage during rituals and rites of passage in which subjects are “‘betwixt and between’ all the recognized fixed points in space-time of structural classification.”9 More recently, however, critics have used the concept to describe any threshold subject position or medium characterized by social and structural contradictions, ambiguity, and invisibility. This understanding of liminality helps tease out the ways ​Restrepo’​ s aesthetic features, counter to popular assumptions about the documentary form, inhibit identification with and of the film’s soldiers. This chapter also makes a case for thinking about the soldier’s cultural transformation through the recent history of military professionalization. The post-Cold War period is known as the era of global terrorism as well as the age of persistent conflict, but it is also the acme of America’s professional military establishment. For over two decades, the military has capitalized on the creation of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) by doggedly pursuing policies, practices, and discourses aimed at professionalizing the armed forces. Analyzing this phenomenon reveals how contemporary militarism depends upon and deepens a logic of liminality, a crucial point of overlap between the representation of soldiers in ​Restrepo ​ and the film’s post-Cold War context. Understanding the contemporary soldier’s liminality through the convergence of the phenomenon of professionalization and the ways ​Restrepo​ documents the average infantryman advances existing critiques​ o​ f how the American public has become distanced from today’s wars.​ ​ It also​ f​ oregrounds the questions at the heart of this study: How do American civilians hear, see, and apprehend those who fight?

We all:​ The Grunts of D​ ispatches During the Vietnam War, documentary realism and the subject of the “grunt” infantryman came to dominate America’s war narratives. Far from the stoic Hemingway heroes that emerged from WWI as well as WWII’s absurdist anti-soldiers like Joseph Heller’s Yossarian and Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, the Vietnam soldier often resembles the subject of an ethnographic study​—​a subspecies with a unique counterculture and habitat. Unofficially known as “dumb grunt,” he is conceived as the product of class, race, and demographic inequalities in America a​ nd​ coheres with the interjection of New Journalism’s

9 V​ ictor W. Turner, ​The Forest of Symbols ​(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1967), 48. Cawley | 5

10 subjective, mediating voice. Just as fellow New Journalists Ken Kesey dropped acid alongside the subjects of his ​Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ​(1968) and Hunter S. Thompson inhabited and made pals with what the N​ ew York Times​ delicately called “a world most of us would never dare encounter” for ​Hell's Angels (​ 1966), Michael Herr, John Sacks, and other “New” war correspondents were participant-observers living the story they were trying to tell.11 As such, their embedded ​narratives hinge on an us/them tension, a tension Robert Scholes calls New Journalism’s “double perspective” of being “simultaneously inside and outside the object of its investigation.”12 This “double perspective” defines New Journalism’s unique point of view. It also gave way to a new narrative conflict. In D​ ispatches​, for example, Herr compulsively rehearses the tension between himself (“I”) and the soldiers (“them”): “I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet.”13 The preoccupation with identification and journalism’s claims to verisimilitude distinguish these narratives from their predecessors. Long before the 1960s, America’s war canon reflected an investment in the average soldier's experience. From Whitman’s D​ rum-Taps​ (1865) and Crane’s T​ he Red Badge of Courage ​ (1895) to Hemingway’s F​ arewell to Arms​ (1929) and Trumbo’s J​ ohnny Got His Gun (​ 1939), the lay soldier’s perspective has been a means of circumventing the articulation of war by institutions and conventions of authority. But New Journalism redefined the cultural politics of the soldier’s-eye view narrative. By merging storytelling and reportage, character and sociological subject as well as pursuing modes of distribution outside the established news media and publishing industries, New Journalism further politicized the tradition and distanced it from the literary establishment. Michael Herr was at the forefront of this movement. ​ ​In 1967, at just twenty-six years old, he became a correspondent for E​ squire ​ magazine and spent eighteen months embedded with American troops stationed throughout South Vietnam. His ​series of features covering this period—“Hell Sucks” (1968), “Khe Sanh” and “Conclusion at Khe Sanh” (1969), “The War Correspondent: A Reappraisal” (1970), and “High on War” (1977)—culminated in ​Dispatches​, “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our

10“N​ ew Journalism” was coined by Tom Wolfe in 1973 to describe a literary movement that ​emerged mid-century and became a popular style in 1960s American prose​. New Journalism is characterized by​ a highly expressive, participative style of reportage, scene-by-scene reconstruction, realistic dialogue, and a first or third person point of view. See Tom Wolfe, ​The New Journalism ​ (New York: H​ arper and Row, 1973); J.C. Hartsock, ​A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form​ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 200), 152-203; John Hollowell F​ act and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel ​(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). 11 L​ eo E. Litwak, “Hell’s Angels,” N​ ew York Times​, 29 Jan. 1967, http://www.nytimes.com/1967/01/29/books/thompson-1967-angels.html 12 R​ obert Scholes, "Double Perspective on Hysteria," S​ aturday Review​, 24 Aug. 1968, 3​ 7. 13 Michael Herr, D​ ispatches ​ (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 67. Cawley | 6

time,” according to the writer John le Carre, and the inspiration behind the iconic Vietnam films Apocalypse Now​ (1979) and F​ ull Metal Jacket​ (1987). The humble gentleman's magazine origins of Herr’s great war book is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of ways D​ ispatches​ inaugurated a new war narrative and soldier figure. ​ I​ n the opening pages, Herr distinguishes between himself (the war correspondent-narrator) and the main subjects of his writing (the American “grunts” serving in Vietnam). He recounts an interaction with a commanding officer: At one lz the brigade chopper came in with a real fox tail hanging off the aerial, when the commander walked by us he almost took an infarction. "Don't you men salute officers?" "We're not men," Page said. "We're correspondents."14 The seemingly straightforward distinction between “men” and “correspondents” becomes central to the war story Herr tells,​ ​and it is advanced throughout the book by juxtapositions ripe with class and racial signifiers. They have short hair; he has long hair. They’ll “blast your fuckin’ head off”; Herr “wouldn’t carry a weapon.”15 They speak in slang, Ebonics, and cold, unwitting truths; he is the R​ olling Stone​’s introspective poet. They have no idea that Sean Flynn is an influential photojournalist; Flynn is Herr’s colleague and close friend. Lastly, Herr has a choice; they do not. Or as Herr puts it, “And the grunts themselves knew: the madness, the bitterness, the horror and doom of it … And sometimes they’d look at you and laugh silently and long, then laugh on them and on you for being with them when you didn’t have to be.”16 This final juxtaposition, perhaps obviously, underwrites all the former. It presents Herr’s agency and the soldiers’ subjugation as a fundamental binary. Moreover, it aligns the reader with Herr and his privileged power, for we look with him at the grunts. But the us-versus-them perspective is constantly complicated by Herr assuming the role of protagonist and blurring the line between being a soldier and a non-combatant. Herr honors his claim that, unlike conventional correspondents who would ask “what the fuck we ever found to talk to grunts about, who said they never heard a grunt talk about anything except cars, football, and chone,” he knew, “But they all had a story.”17 D​ ispatches ​features the voices, experiences, and descriptions of countless grunts, an approach Herr never stopped affirming. Twenty-four years after the book’s publication, he reflected, “​ It’s their voices … My book is full of them. You know, that’s really what my book is​.”18 But despite this commitment to narrating “them,” Herr was well-aware that ​Dispatches​ is also about

14 Herr, D​ ispatches​, 7.​ 15 Ibid., 129, 4. 16 Ibid., 103. 17 Ibid., 29. 18 M​ ichael Herr, interview by​ C​ oco Schrijber, F​ irst Kill,​ directed by Coco Schrijner (Netherlands: Lemming Films, 2001), DVD. Cawley | 7

himself and his experience: “I was right there with them … a lot of journalists think I’m a war correspondent … I’m an observer, I’m not even part of this, I’m just watching. It doesn’t work that way. That line is a complete concept that people draw to protect themselves.”19 Herr often writes in first person plural: “when we went up against [VC] terrain we usually took it definitively,” “we knew for sure we had a reinforced division,” “we saw the black smoke rising over the barbed wire,” “we were running some of the wounded onto the back of a half-ton truck.”20 Moreover, there are moments when Herr’s effort to tell the grunts’ story leads to seemingly total psychic identification: And in my head, sounding over and over, were the incredibly sinister words of the song we had all heard for the first time days before. “The Magical Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away,” it promised, “Coming to take you away, dy-ing to take you away . . . ” That was a song about Khe Sanh; we knew it then and it still seems so … Everything I see is blown through with smoke, everything is on fire everywhere.21 For readers, unlike Herr and the infantrymen signified by “we,” The Beatles hit is not “incredibly sinister” or obviously about a remote Vietnamese outpost. In this moment, like so many, readers are no longer looking with Herr at the grunts, we are looking at Herr, specifically Herr’s psyche, which transcends the temporal distinctions of past (“then”) and present (the “still so” now). This total identification disrupts realist boundaries of subjectivity and, more important, negates the racial and class-based demarcations that serve elsewhere to distinguish Herr from the grunts. In short, by identifying as “grunt,” Herr obscures the socio-political identity of this population. This complex maneuvering approaches identity politics but abandons it in favor of a position that Aijaz Ahmad argues underwrites postmodernist aesthetics: “​the very end of the social, the impossibility of stable subject positions, hence the death of politics as such.” Ahmad, responding to the line of postmodern theory that deconstructs the idea ​ of a unified subject, ​finds this slippery subject position problematic because it makes a “politics of discrete exclusivities and localism” impossible.22 More precisely, the postmodernist “prohibition against subject-centered inquiry and theory,” according to feminist critic and activist Christine di Stefano, “undermines the legitimacy of a broad-based organised movement dedicated to articulating and implementing the goals of such a constituency.”23 Linda

19 Ibid. 20 Herr, D​ ispatches​, 4, 24, 75, 77. 21 Ibid., 108. 22 A​ ijaz Ahmad, I​ n Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature ​(London: Verso, 1992), 9​ ; Jameson offers a counterargument regarding the politics of postmodern subjectivity, arguing that despite facilitating “countercultural” groups, ​“the intensity of social fragmentation …​ ​ has made it historically difficult to unify Left or ‘antisystemic’ forces in any durable and effective way.”​ See Fredric Jameson, T​ he Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act​ (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 54. 23 Christine di Stefano, “Choreographies,” D​ iacritics ​ Vol. 12 (Summer 1982), 66-76, 76. Cawley | 8

Hutcheon, on the other hand, defends the political potential of cultural works that represents subjectivity “as something in process, never fixed, never autonomous or outside history.” Postmodern art’s reflexive and unstable rendering of subjectivity​—​the “strategically placed wall of mirrors fac[ing] the audience”​—p​ revents “any self-distancing and any denial of complicity on our part.”24 As this summary highlights, the disagreement over what constitutes effective political action also reflects a remarkable critical consensus: postmodern aesthetics posit and perform decentered subjectivity. This shared understanding illuminates how ​Dispatches​ renders the soldiers ​we all.​ Widely cited in criticism on postmodernism and the Vietnam War as well as postmodern literature more generally, Dispatches​ is famous for its deconstructive narrative strategies. However, what this feature means for the book’s soldiers has gone undertheorized. Evelyn Cobley powerfully argues that Herr’s self-conscious narrator “situates his discourse rhetorically and ideologically,” a technique that enacts the post-Saussurean, postmodern awareness that “[meaning] must be uncovered on the same slippery foundations as all fiction-making.”25 For D​ ispatches​’s narrator and readers, Cobley concludes, “there is no mimesis, only poiesis.”26 Fredric Jameson similarly insists that Herr’s stylistic innovations perform the intertextuality and discursive instability of postmodern experience: [D​ ispatches]​ impersonally fuses a whole range of contemporary collective idiolects, most notably rock language and black language: but the fusion is dictated by problems of content. This first terrible postmodernist war cannot be told in any of the traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie—​​ indeed that breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown of any shared language through which a veteran might convey such experience, among the principal subjects of the book and may be said to open up the place of a whole new reflexivity.27 Considering these critical accounts alongside the Beatles scene helps illuminate how the book’s deconstructive style supplants its aesthetics of “discrete” identification. As limned above, Herr often characterizes the grunts in the terms of identity politics (“kids from the South and the Midwest, from farms and small rural towns,” “a suave black grunt from Detroit,” etc.) and maintains the boundaries of subjectivity, such as self/other and inside/outside.28 But the book’s famously postmodern perspective upends these legible forms of socio-political subjectivity in favor of decentered, collective identification. By recognizing the textual presence of these two, competing perspectives, the critical agreement over Dispatches’s ​ postmodern style can be brought to bear on its representation of soldiers. The “breakdown” Jameson identifies is as much a breakdown of identification as it is a breakdown of language, and what

24 Linda Hutcheon, ​The Politics of Postmodernism ​ (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 37-38​. 25 E​ velyn Cobley, “Narrating the Facts of War: New Journalism in Herr's ‘Dispatches’ and Documentary Realism in First World War Novels,” T​ he Journal of Narrative Technique​ Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring 1986), 97-116, 98,101. 26 Ibid.,111. 27 Fredric Jameson, P​ ostmodernism, or, the Logic of Late Capitalism​ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 25. 28 Herr, D​ ispatches​, 154, 189. Cawley | 9

Cobley calls the narrative’s “slippery” discursive foundation is part and parcel of its slippery modes of subjectivity. The diffusion of the reader's point of identification in the Beatles scene, like the narrator’s impersonal fusion of 1960s idiolects and reflexive obsession with discursive (dis)location, disrupts the possibility of​ s​ table subject positions. In turn, the socio-political identity of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam is eclipsed by the book’s larger enquiry into subjectivity and the subsequent blurring of the boundaries between Herr the narrator, the grunts, and the reader. The equivocation between the war and the counterculture, particularly through the figure of the war correspondent, also enforces collective identification. “Out on the streets I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The Sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse.”29 Herr echoes this sentiment from the first page to the last. Not only does he compare the war zone and its soldiers (“Vietnam veterans”) to the home front and American civilians (“rock and roll veterans”), but his cultural references and singular voice render them one in the same. In other words, D​ ispatches​ represents ​ t​ he American counterculture and the Vietnam War as reciprocal experiences. The chapter “Colleagues,” dismissed by Cobley as the “ego-tripping” and “self-congratulatory section on war correspondents,” is the clearest expression of this logic.30 The section ends with an anecdote about Tim Page, the British photographer who made his name covering the war and inspired the Dennis Hopper’s character in A​ pocalypse Now​. Page along with Sean Flynn and Dana Stone are Herr’s fellow journalists and closest comrades. As Page reminisced in a 2016 tribute to Herr, “​It’s a rare quality of friendship when you acquire an instant nickname for a new mate. We were instantly ‘Nub’ and ‘Plum’. Me Nub, for my mangled left index finger; Plum for Mike and his always slightly reddened face​.”31 H​ err’s colleagues and best mates​ appear throughout the book, first coming into focus in Saigon’s Continental Hotel where Page, fresh from being tear gassed while out photographing combat took the record that was playing on the turntable off without asking anybody and put on Jimi Hendrix: long tense organic guitar line that made him shiver like frantic electric ecstasy was shooting up the carpet through his spine straight to the old pleasure center in his cream-cheese brain, shaking his head so that his hair waved all around him, Have You Ever Been Experienced?32 “Colleagues” galvanizes this first impression. It renders Page both a “Vietnam veteran” and “rock and roll veteran” and intertwines these identities.

29 Ibid., 258. 30 ​Cobley, “Narrating the Facts,” 107. 31 Timothy Page, “Words that Will Forever Pursue Us: Tim Page on Michael Herr, Rock’n’roll Voice of the Vietnam War,” ​The Guardian​, 4 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/05/words-that-will-forever-pursue-us-tim-page-on-michael-herr-the-r ock-and-roll-voice-of-the-vietnam-war 32 Herr, D​ ispatches​, 38. Cawley | 10

Herr recounts learning that Page had been hit, once again, in the field. A mine explosion sent a piece of shrapnel through his forehead “deep into this base of his brain.”33 But this time, Page wasn’t expected to live. The incident is presented as a consequence of both the war and the counterculture, for the photographer’s figurative addiction to war and literal addiction to drugs leave him exposed to the violent realities of combat.​ ​ In his prudence and wisdom, Herr is already stateside, but he visits Page once he’s transferred to a hospital in New York, describing their time together with the same mixture of pity and reverence, distance and intimacy, helplessness and intention with which he represents the grunts: He lay there grinning his deranged, uneven grin … He was emaciated and he looked really old, but he was still grinning very proudly as I approached the bed, as if to say “Well, didn’t Page step into it this time?” as though two inches of shrapnel in your brain was the wiggiest goof of them all, that wonderful moment of the Tim Page Story where our boy comes leering, lurching back from death, twin brother to his own ghost.34 As Page recovers, he transforms his hospital room into a reflection of himself, a site where the mythic tracks of Greenwich Village and the jungles of South Vietnam intersect. Page creates “an altar with all his Buddhas, arranging prayer candles in a belt of empty .50-caliber cartridges” and hangs “toy choppers from the ceiling, put up posters of Frank Zappa and Cream and some Day-Glo posters which Linda had made of monks and tanks and solid soul brothers smoking joints in the fields of Vietnam.”35 The hospital room is a site where the boundaries of geography, time, and culture are reinscribed through Page’s imagination, and even though Herr’s gaze is palpable in these scenes, working hard to resist the allure of the “Tim Page Story,” ​Dispatches​ participates in an analogous reconfiguration of Vietnam. Like the room and Page himself, the book deconstructs a stable or singular understanding of the Vietnam War. Vietnam is represented as a site accessed through a host of experiences, real and imagined, that don’t necessarily involve fighting in the war, a trope and strategy that Thomas Myers takes up in his excellent study of American Vietnam War literature, W​ alking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam​ (1988). Myers​ i​ dentifies “solidarity” as an important consequence of Herr’s new approach: “The reporters’ willingness to accept the same risks as those threatening the grunts—the immediate dangers of personal immersion—is often the key to finding at least a temporary solidarity.”36 The idea of solidarity based on the flexible criteria of personal immersion, as opposed to the more exclusive and definitive criteria of military service, finds its most extreme expression in Page. However, as Myers suggests, the idea is foundational to Herr’s method. Herr’s appeals to collective identification, to an understanding of “Vietnam” based on personal immersion and historic reciprocity, is another way his narrative works

33 ​Ibid., 246. 34 Ibid., 247. 35 Ibid., 248. 36 Thomas Myers, ​Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam ​ (​ New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 167-68. Cawley | 11

against a neat us (civilians) versus them (grunts) perspective. The deconstructive aesthetics culminate in the ​Dispatches​’s famous conclusion, “And no moves left for me at all but to write down some last few words and make the dispersion, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we’ve all been there.”37 The line is hauntingly enigmatic, but one thing is clear: Herr’s “Vietnam” does not follow a straight historical or materialist logic. Lucas Carpenter simply deems the line “cryptic,”38 while others argue it defines “Vietnam” “as much a state of mind as it is a place or event.”39 In other words, the “fragmented, frenetic, psychedelic” experience of trauma is universal, one that Herr undergoes while reporting in Vietnam but is not defined by Vietnam.40 Other critics emphasize the line’s discrete historical dimensions. They read the “we” as suggestive of Herr’s American audience who, whether or not they fought, were exposed to the war’s “images and stories of loss” and thereby experienced “Vietnam.”41 All these readings, despite their nuances, point to the conclusion that Herr obscures the distinction between the three million Americans who served and those who did not, a gesture, I argue, that defines Herr’s new narrative perspective. In addition to Herr’s artistic commitments to New Journalism, this gesture has much to do with the young correspondent’s sense of social responsibility and, more specifically, his sense of the public’s shifting relationship to America’s wars.​ ​In August of 1968, Herr wrote to E​ squire​’s editor-in-chief, Harold Hayes, and begged Hayes to let him continue covering the war: “There are two Vietnams, the one that I’m up to my ass here and the one perceived in the States by people who have never been here. They are mutually exclusive.”42 Herr was arguably successful in his deeply sympathetic endeavor. He used New Journalism’s porous modes of identity to get people “here,” but in that process, he eclipses the identities of the people who were actually there.

37 Herr, D​ ispatches​, 258. 38 L​ ucas Carpenter, “‘It Don’t Mean Nothin’: Vietnam War Fiction and Postmodernism,” C​ ollege Literature​ Vol. 30, No. 2 (Spring 2003), 30-50, 40. 39 Peter McInerney, “‘Straight’ and ‘Secret’ History in Vietnam War Literature,” C​ ontemporary Literature​ Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring 1981), 187-204, 191. 40 Mark ​Heberle, A​ Trauma Artist: Tim O'Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam ​(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001)​, xvi. 41 David Wyatt, ​Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation​ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1​ 83. 42 “About Michael Herr,” E​ squire​, Aug. 1968, http://classic.esquire.com/hell-sucks/. Cawley | 12

Figure 1.​ Lowenberg, Terry. “Welcome GI’s from Vietnam/National Guard from Battle of Berkeley” sign, photograph. “The Protest Movements at the University of California, Berkeley, 1964-1970” collection, Bancroft Library Archives, UC Berkeley. ​10 Oct. 2016. ​Figure 2. CCI​ correspondence. 26 June 1970. "Vietnam​ War Protest” collection, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University. 12 Sept. 2013.

Herr’s choice—to represent Vietnam’s grunts as, for better and for worse, ​we all—​ is also indicative of the unspoken context of his desperate plea to E​ squire,​ made just a year before the draft and anti-war movement reached their high watermark.​ ​B​etween 1964 and 1973, a​ ​lmost every American was either eligible to go to war or knew someone who was. However, t​ he Selective Service deferment system in tandem with the mid-century education system and job market produced a military dominated by minorities and working-class boys. To summarize historian Christian Appy, the fact that this demographic shouldered the brunt of the fighting was lost in translation. The anti-Vietnam movement, the largest and most influential anti-war movement in US history, imagined the war in its terms of love vs. war, hippies vs. hawks, liberals vs. conservatives, us vs. them, and so on. On one hand, this narrative obscured the socio-political identity of the individuals who actually served, forcing veterans “to confront the war in social and moral isolation, an isolation exacerbated by the class inequalities of the war.”43 On the other hand, the movement deepened the way the draft brought the war front home and made the possibility of soldierhood an experience shared by a wider American public. Additionally, draft resistance was a centerpiece​ o​ f anti-Vietnam activism. Conscription was imagined as part and parcel​ o​ f an unjust war and, thereby, everyone subject to the draft system was part of “Vietnam.” ​ “​ GI’s from Vietnam/National Guard from Battle of Berkeley” (Figure 1) is one of many slogans that equated acts of war in South Vietnam with civil protest, a logic that further dispersed the designation and status of Vietnam. In sum, the draft, especially as it was understood by the anti-war movement, enforced collective identification and was one grounds for the unprecedented outpouring of war resistance in the late 1960s. But the draft was only the basis for an even greater “failure” by the engineers of “America’s

43 C​ hristian G. Appy, W​ orking-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam ​ (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 321. Cawley | 13

longest war”:​ t​ he failure to effectively control and remove American GIs from the realm of public scrutiny. The​ u​ niquely pervasive ​ ​and seemingly relatable idea of soldierhood became grounds for contesting the war. During the late 1960s, US soldiers were famously targets of anti-military hostility, but they also became self-determined sites of anti-war sentiment by breaking with the professional distance and autonomy that had long characterized armed service. While s​oldiers were very much included in early professions, Vietnam was a disaster for the tradition of military professionalism. The war eroded the military establishment’s credibility and created a force that infantry officer and field historian Reed Robert Bonadonna describes as “unworthy of the armies of Washington, Grant, Marshall, and Eisenhower.”44 ​T​he National Committee for a Citizens Commission of Inquiry on US War Crimes in Vietnam (CCI)​—​whose notable members included N​ oam Chomsky, Jeremy Rifkin, and and Tod Ensign—​capitalized on the average soldier’s new visibility and waning professionalism. The CCI u​ sed soldiers’ testimonies as weapons against the state, transforming these state actors into pillars of state dissent (Figure 2)​. In November of 1984, Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan, gave a speech alluding to this weakness. In “The Uses of Military Power,” Weinberger connects the military’s failure during Vietnam to the status of America’s troops: Policies formed without a clear understanding of what we hope to achieve would also earn us the scorn of our troops, who would have an understandable opposition to being used​—​in every sense of the word​ —​ ​casually and without intent to support them fully. Ultimately this course would reduce their morale and their effectiveness for engagements we must win. And if the military were to distrust its civilian leadership, recruitment would fall off and I fear an end to the all-volunteer system would be upon us, requiring a return to a draft, sowing the seeds of riot and discontent that so wracked the country in the '60s.45 Both the source of “scorn” and the site of civil “opposition,” the soldiers of Vietnam became a model of failure for warmakers and, as Weinberger’s proposal reflects, an invitation to reimagine the troops for a post-Cold War era. Professionalization was one answer to this invitation, and it became a privileged and successful path to restoring America’s ability to wage war.

Hoorah!: The Liminality of Professionalized Soldiers Liminality is a defining feature of the professionalized post-Cold War military. The term, from the Latin word ​limen​, meaning “threshold,” was coined by ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in ​The Rites of Passage (1909) and developed by anthropologist Victor Turner in “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in

44Reed Robert Bonadonna, S​ oldiers and Civilization: How the Profession of Arms Fought and Thought the Modern World into Existence ​(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2017), 262. 45 Caspar Weinberger, “The Uses of Military Power” (speech, Washington, D.C., 28 Nov. 1984), ​PBS​, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/force/weinberger.html. Cawley | 14

Rites de Passage” (1964). Turner established liminality as a significant category of the unrecognizable, defining liminal subjects as “neither here nor there; or may even be nowhere (in terms of any recognizable topography), and are at the very least ‘betwixt and between’ all the recognizable fixed points in time-space of structural classification” (48). In the 1990s, liminality came to diagnose more than a transient stage associated with rites of passage rituals. Theorists used the concept to describe permanent subject positions, such as immigrant, colonial subject, monster, queer subject, and terrorist.46 Though a less obvious candidate, America’s professionalized infantry soldier belongs to this threshold class. Unlike the Vietnam soldier, who has been variously imagined as a discrete socio-political identity (an exploited minority), an exotic other (a Rambo-esque hawk), or a decentered ​we (​ Americans), the post-Cold War soldier is characterized by a complex otherness of the in-between.​ ​ This figure eludes and transgresses the network of social, legal, and cultural classifications, resisting the self-other binary associated with colonial othering as well as the categories associated with identity politics. This new configuration invites the question: Who or what pushed the soldier to the threshold of American society? The establishment of America’s All-Volunteer Force (AVF) after Vietnam initiated a two-fold transformation. More than an interruption, service, or duty, war-making was restored to its former status as a profession or, at minimum, an occupation. In turn, soldiers became depoliticized professionals situated between a recognizable civilian world and an abstract war realm. ​ ​Richard Nixon ​campaigned to end the draft during his 1968 run for the presidency, a​ strategy largely intended to undermine the anti-war movement by diminishing the stakes of Vietnam for affluent youths. Nixon saw this tactic realized in March of 1973 when the Selective Service agency announced no further draft orders would be issued. The policy “marked the shift from a partly to completely professionalized US Armed Forces.”47 It revolutionized military labor markets and precipitated organizational and strategic reforms that further professionalized the military sector.48 And while the AVF was the primary catalyst for what might best be called the reprofessionalization of the armed forces, the shift was buttressed by concentrated efforts to repair the damage done during Vietnam. “The prestige of the military and the attractiveness of military service were at a low ebb after Vietnam,” inspiring a new generation of military leaders to found organizations and

46 Leo R. Chavez, ​Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society ​ (​Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998); Lucy Kay, Zoë Kinsley, Terry Phillips, and Alan Roughley, eds. M​ apping Liminalities: Thresholds in Cultural and Literary Texts ​ (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007); Stephen T. Asma, ​On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears​ (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011); Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds. ​Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain ​ (London: Routledge, Repr. 2000); Arthur Saniotis, “Re-Enchanting Terrorism: Jihadists as ‘Liminal Beings’,” S​ tudies in Conflict and Terrorism ​Volume 28, No 6 (Nov. 2005): 533-545. 47 S​ askia Stachowitsch,​ Gender Ideologies and Military Labor Markets in the U.S. ​ (London & New York: Routledge, 2012), 3​ 2. 48 Ibid., 30-32. Cawley | 15

programmes dedicated to “matters of policy and professionalism.”49 Sociologist Charles Moskos and vice admiral James Stockdale are especially germane examples of the early stages of this movement. Beginning in the late 1970s, they championed educational initiatives intended to deepen the military’s professional ethics and philosophy as well as organizational provisions to support military “careers” through extended training and long-term tenures, a number of which are still used today.50 The United States has maintained an all-volunteer armed forces since Nixon’s victory, and the government has continually advanced this strategy, with its recourse to professionalism, as evinced in “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq” (2007), an advisory report used by the Bush administration: “It is possible and necessary to maintain a volunteer military while fighting this war and beyond. It does however, mean abandoning peacetime bureaucratic routines within the Pentagon and throughout the defense establishment.”51 Military historians Andrew Bacevich and Lance Betros affirm the cogency of this tactic. They argue that the volunteer force transformed soldiers “from amateurs to professionals” and gave way to a military capable of fighting what General George Casey, Army Chief of Staff from 2007-2011, calls our “era of persistent conflict.”52 As Bacevich and Betros imply, military professionalization—​ ​loosely defined as the military’s efforts to develop its organizational identity and doctrine; provide specialization, extended training and benefits to servicemembers; and adopt higher standards for member conduct and knowledge—​ ​answers the demands of “persistent conflict.” When soldiers resemble civilian professionals (a distinct sect of qualified, skilled, and voluntary workers), ​ ​the military becomes a less politicized and more de-facto state 53 institution, making the persistent mobilization of troops easier and less contentious than ever before. Fredric Jameson summarizes the connection between military professionalization and persistent warfare in An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army​ (2016): Rumsfeld further privatized this already specialized and salaried private army … This very significant moment in the history of the modern army had a political purpose above and beyond its adaptation of current late-capitalist business practices: that purpose was to remove this small

49 Bonadonna, S​ oldiers and Civilization, 2​ 62. 50 ​Ibid., 262-3; Charles Moskos, “The All-Volunteer Military: Calling, Profession, or Occupation?” ​Parameters​ Vol. 7, No. 1 (1977): 2-9. 51 ​Frederick W. Kagan, “C​ hoosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” ​American Enterprise Institute​, 5 Jan. 2007, 37, http://www.aei.org/publication/choosing-victory-a-plan-for-success-in-iraq/. 52 ​Jeff Shear, “America in the Hands of a Professional Military,” ​Pacific Standard​ Vol 22 (15 April 2011), https://psmag.com/social-justice/america-in-the-hands-of-a-professional-military-30240. 53For more on US military professionalization, see ​Robert Connor and Sam Sarkesian, T​ he US Military Profession Into the 21st Century: War, Peace and Politics ​ (New York and London: Routledge, 1999); Bernard Rostker, ​I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force (​ Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corp., 2006); John Bolton, “The Price of Professionalization,” S​ mall Wars Journal,​ 25 Dec. 2015, http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-price-of-professionalizationhttp://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-price-of -professionalization. Cawley | 16

professionalized group possessing Weber’s proverbial monopoly of violence (currently only .05 percent of the population) from any possibility of mass democratic action.54 According to Jameson, Rumsfeld’s strategy of privatizing and professionalizing military service removes this “group” from the political sphere or, in Hannah Arendt's terms, the public realm of appearance. When soldiers are no longer representative of the public, as they were in Vietnam (if not literally, then symbolically), they become exempt from mass democratic action. In a 2015 piece for T​ he Atlantic,​ James Fallows​ ​registers another outcome of this strategy. He describes the unique alterity of contemporary soldiers: Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public ​…​ As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.55 Retired Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, equates the exoticism Fallows aptly identifies with the professionalized military. The armed forces are “professional and capable,” Mullen argues, “but I would sacrifice some of that excellence and readiness to make sure that we stay close to the American people. Fewer and fewer people know anyone 56 in the military.” Mullen’s interest in bringing America’s servicemen and women closer to the American public represents a meaningful point of agreement between both supporters and detractors of America’s military campaigns in the Middle East, a point I take up in the conclusion. What is crucial to note here, though, is how​ t​ he AVF has produced an invisible gap between between the average American and average American fighting our wars. While the cause of this distance is obvious enough, the way professionalization produces the soldier’s liminal status is more complex.

Figure 3.​ Corvias Military Living. Corvias housing development in Fort Bragg, NC. Web. 2016. Privatized housing developments are one of the most striking expressions of this relationship. In the early 1990s, housing was identified as a vital professional incentive and benefit. Counter to the

54 Fredric Jameson, A​ n American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army​, ed. Slavoj Zizek (London and New York: Verso, 2016), 28. 55 J​ ames Fallows, “The Tragedy of the American Military,” ​The Atlantic (​ January/February 2015), 18-21, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-tragedy-of-the-american-military/383516/. 56Ibid. Cawley | 17

Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (commonly known as the GI Bill), intended to help soldiers reassimilate to civilian life through benefits including low-interest mortgages, the 90s housing initiative was one of the marketplace incentives used to help the military compete with the civilian labor market, for the lack of “quality/affordable housing” was hindering the Army’s “recruitment, readiness and retention.”57 Of course, separate military housing was nothing new in the 1990s. Prior to WWII, the country’s standing force traditionally lived in military quarters, and in-kind base housing served as a career incentive. However, by the end of the Korean War, most military families lived in private housing in civilian communities located outside military bases.58 This trend continued through the 1980s, with the DoD receiving Congressional support to expand affordable private military housing in “high-risk” civilian areas.59 Despite these efforts, quality housing, especially for junior enlisted members, remained a vexing problem for the military, and the substantial closure and consolidation of bases in the 1990s brought the housing crisis to a breaking point.60 The Military Housing Privatization Initiative (MHPI) Act passed in 1996, and residential communities for active duty, unaccompanied, and retired personnel proliferated. By 2010, the Residential Community Initiative (RCI) boasted forty-four locations with 85,711 homes and “over 98% of U.S. Army family housing own[ing] inventory.”61 The authors of the report “Privatizing Military Family Housing: A History of the U.S. Army’s Residential Communities Initiative, 1995–2010” (2012) highlight the collaboration between the private sector and “Army culture” (a reference used over ten times in the document): “it was important that developers be familiar with Army culture and that the Army commit itself to partnering principles.”62 Put differently, the collaboration between the Army and the private sector is a key victory of the RCI program, a “victory” conferred by the nature of these developments. The developments situate soldiers, in the words of Victor Turner, “betwixt and between” in more ways than one. Corvias Military Living​ is ​the private contractor responsible for fifteen military housing communities, including North Carolina’s Fort Bragg and Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base.​ But Corvias ​is

57 ​US Army, “Information Paper,” R​ esidential Community Initiative​, July 2010, http://www.rci.army.mil/programinformation/infopaper.html. 58 J​ ames A. Martin and Pamela C. Twiss, “Conventional and Military Public Housing for Families,” S​ ocial Service Review​ Vol. 73, No. 2 (June 1999), 240-260, 2​ 42-45. 59 Ibid., 245-46. 60 A number of senior Army officers and strategists voiced concern over the consolidation and closure of bases, such as Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, in the 1990s-2000s. In particular, the movement was viewed as a potential threat to the Army’s efforts to compete with private sector professional trends. See T​ he U.S. Army Material Command Oral History Papers, 1989-2012,​ Box 1, Folders 3-17, ​U.S. Army War College Library and Archives,​ U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center. 61 US Army, “Information Paper.” 62 Matthew C. Godfrey, Nicolai Kryloff, Joshua Pollarine, Paul Sadin, and Dawn Vogel, ​Privitizing Military Family Housing: ​A History of the U.S. Army's Residential.Communities Initiative, 1995–2010 ​ (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2012), 24. Cawley | 18

not just in the business of providing housing to military personnel. The company offers community resources, including pools, playgrounds, and community centers, that “rival those of private-sector communities.”63 Some Corvias developments even boast their own school systems, a “public” education that removes military families from the public. Spatially, socially, and ideologically, these communities situate military personnel within yet firmly outside the civilian realm, hovering at the boundary between the American public and America’s wars. Like the push to provide housing benefits to service members, the effort to develop the military’s organizational identity, training, and doctrine further positions soldiers at the threshold between civilian citizens and non-civilian combatants.​ ​ The military chants “Hooyah!” (Navy), “Oorah!” (Marines), and “Hooah!”(Army), which became staples after the Gulf War, are surprisingly telling ​ e​ xpressions of this process.​ ​ The chants are highly illegible. With no discernable meaning or known origin, they connote a soldier’s organizational identity and specialization as well as an elusive psychological, social, and cultural alterity, an alterity that is further evinced by the way the chants appear outside the military establishment. In August of 2013, President Obama addressed a group of ​Marines at California’s Camp Pendleton. In the White House transcript of the speech, “Hoorah!” appears repeatedly.64 “Hoorah” is not used by any military branch (“Oorah” is used by Marines). The White House’s mistake, like the chant itself, illuminates the illegibility of this professional class. Our commander in chief’s resolute “Hoorah!” borders on parody, “a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity.”65 The speech’s unintended imitation of the Marines, like parody, marks the disjuncture between the United States armed forces and the rest of the country. Moreover, the embodied and ideological distance between President Obama, the consummate politician, and the Marines of Camp Pendleton, the 66 consummate soldiers, makes anything but imitation or parody seem unattainable.

63 Jeffrey Steele, “Celebrating Two Decades of MHPI,” M​ ulti-Housing News​, 1 March 2016, https://www.multihousingnews.com/post/celebrating-two-decades-of-mhpi/ 64 Dan Lanthomose, “​White House Botches Marine Corps ‘Oorah’ in Transcript of Obama Speech,” M​ arine Times​, 7 Aug. 2013, http://battlerattle.marinecorpstimes.com/2013/08/07/white-house-botches-marine-corps-oorah-in-transcript-of-oba ma-speech/ 65 Linda Hutcheon, ​A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms​ (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), ​ x​ ii. 66 ​The distance is also evinced by the public’s attitude toward the draft. Since the 1990s, the draft has been viewed as an anachronistic, unreasonable, and infeasible policy, and t​he model of the AVF has not received serious criticism or protest. The one exception, Congressman Charles Rangel, who has proposed legislation to reinstate the draft since 2003, has been largely dismissed and derided. Liberal figures such as Jon Stewart, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore have called for the draft to be reinstated, but this appeal is mobilized to critique war and/or socio-economic inequality rather than as a serious end in itself​. Cawley | 19

Figure 4.​ McCann Erickson. “Army Strong” commercial, scene still. 2006. Web. Figure​ 5. ​GSD&M. Air Force “New Frontiers” commercial, scene still. 2014. Web.

Recruitment marketing is a final instance of how the movement to professionalize military service produces the soldier’s liminal subjectivity. The Army’s “Be All You Can Be” (1980 to 2001) and “Army Strong” (2006 to 2015) campaigns present the armed forces as a profession ​and a​ n abstract personal quality or identity. ​ M​ cCann Erickson's 2006 “Army Strong” commercials, which inaugurated the Army’s new slogan and a five year marketing campaign with an estimated $1.35 billion budget, juxtapose imagery of civilian occupations, including farming, teaching, and nursing, against military service (Figure 4). The campaign imagines the Army as simultaneously an extension of and aberration from the civilian labor market, visually situating soldiers between a recognizable civilian world and an abstract war realm signified by stock images of camouflage, mud, stationary tanks, indistinct fields, stoic postures, and displays of physical strength. Further, the campaign’s narrative, “I am an expert, and I am a professional,” a fittingly professional version of “trust us,” expresses the robust efforts across all five branches to publicly define military service as a profession rather than an occupation—​ ​an ongoing strategy intended to secure 67 the defense establishment’s autonomy. The Air Force’s “New Frontiers” commercial campaign, which aired on ​ESPN ​ in late 2014, also advances the archetype of the professional soldier and, subsequently, blurs the line between the categories of civilian and combatant. ​ T​ he campaign’s logic is best summarized by the questions the image invites (Figure 5): Is the woman a soldier or an IT specialist? What is the difference? The woman is certainly 68 different, but naming that difference is exceedingly difficult. The voiceover, “Look inside, you are the

67 A​ 2010 White Paper from the Army’s Commanding General identifies distinguishing between an occupation and a profession as crucial goal: ​ “​Because of this trust, the American people grant significant autonomy to us to create our own expert knowledge and to police the application of that knowledge by individual professionals. Non-professional occupations do not enjoy similar autonomy.” See “An Army White Paper: The Profession of Arms,” US Army, 8 Dec. 2010, 2, http://cape.army.mil/repository/white-papers/profession-of-arms-white-paper.pdf 68 ​“Join the People Who Have Joined the Army” (1973 to 1980) is the slogan that immediately preceded “Be All You Can Be.” This slogan and its accompanying campaign represent enlisting as a civilian responsibility more than a professional identity, resembling “I Want YOU For US Army” (WWI and WWII) more than contemporary slogans. For more on US Army branding, see Stephan Klaschka, “Next-generation ERG Learn from U.S. Army R​ ecruitment,” Cawley | 20

new frontier,” also evokes a vague form of identification. ​ ​It imagines joining the Air Force as a professional calling akin to teaching, medicine, or law, yet the key term “frontier” keeps the profession one is called to join profoundly ambiguous. “Frontier” exemplifies the type of political language that George Orwell, writing while Allied troops liberated the last of the Nazi death camps and the outside world began to learn the extent of the war’s suffering and atrocities, describes as “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”69 Unlike “warfare” or any other concrete term connoting the USAF’s actual labor, “frontier” is hackneyed, imprecise, and abstract, qualities, Orwell explains in his enduring argument, that transform language into an instrument of war. This ambiguity is also particular to or, rather, deepened by military professionalization. As the IT specialists/professional soldier represents, the professionalized post-Cold War soldier is at once a civilian and non-civilian, a definitive identity category and the absence of definitive points of identification. This matrix, I argue, constitutes the liminal subjectivity of today’s soldiers.

Who?:​ The 2nd Platoon of R​ estrepo The Vietnam era’s New Journalist as well as the deconstructed subjectivity he performs began their death rattle alongside the fall of Saigon, but nothing marks their passing as conclusively as R​ estrepo's ​ point of view. ​ T​ he qualities that made the New Journalist approach to Vietnam so radical and appealing —its reflexive, participatory, poetic, and performative qualities—became the grounds for revising the aesthetics of the grunt’s-eye view genre. In 2006, during an interview promoting their Iraq War grunt doc Occupation: Dreamland, d​ irectors Garrett Scott and Ian Olds summarized the shift: “​I think everybody is hungry for as unmediated a look as possible at how the war is carried out.”70 The documentary mode known as reactive observationalism has been a privileged response among filmmakers and critics to the hunger for “unmediated” war.71 The approach is characterized by fly-on-the-wall cinematography, testimony and overheard exchange rather than expository or narrative modes, minimal production values and stylistic elements, and the absence of a political register or motive, among other features intended to produce an objective experience for viewers. More accurately, however, these features conceal how the viewer’s encounter is produced and structured, for as leading ethnographic filmmaker and scholar David MacDougall reminds us, documentary always constitutes a way of looking

OrgChanger​, 12 April 2011, at https://orgchanger.com/2011/04/12/next-generation-erg-learn-from-u-s-army-recruitment/ 69 ​George Orwell, ​The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage ​ (​ New York: Harcourt, 1956)​ , 366. 70 “W​ ake Up America! Iraq is no Dreamland: The ​Satya ​ Interview with Garrett Scott and Ian Olds,” ​Satya​, Dec. 2005/Jan. 2006, http://www.satyamag.com/dec05/dreamland.html. 71 John Corner, ​The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary (​ Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 28. Cawley | 21

by “putting the viewer into a particular relationship to a subject.”72 Restrepo​ is perhaps the best-known film to come out of this movement. ​In late 2007, Hetherington and Junger spent five months embedded with an American company defending a remote but intensely hostile outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. ​Restrepo​ is the product of the 1​ 50 hours of video they recorded in the Korengal as well as post-deployment ​interviews with various platoon members. Unlike Michael Moore, Steve James, and other “activist” documentarians, Hetherington and Junger do not use a direct narrator or voiceover. This choice is not surprising, though. Such a narrator would subvert the film’s first-hand, you-are-there tone as well as its self-professed aim to give soldiers a voice. What is striking is that Hetherington and Junger’s presence goes nearly undocumented. We never hear them ask a question. They never “accidentally” appear in a scene, nor do we see the men directly acknowledge the directors’ undeniable presence. In this way, we are always observing the soldiers. Unlike D​ ispatches​, questions regarding the film’s subject and the boundaries of soldierhood are off the table. But always observing the soldiers does not mean the soldiers are always in control of the story. The “real-time” footage of combat and daily operations is punctuated by talking head interviews with platoon members. During one interview, Sergeant Aron Hijar describes an enemy attack. Seemingly overwhelmed, he says, “Time out,” but the camera stays focussed on his face. Seconds later, he utters in an aside to himself, “I’m trying to keep my train of thought.” The camera stays focussed on him for a few more seconds as he stares off to the side in painstaking silence. The scene abruptly cuts out and returns to the real-time action. Here, as in other instances, the camera seems to linger a moment too long, featuring what Hijar does not intend to present. These crucially awkward moments​—​when the soldiers ostensibly break character and we see them “outside” “the film”​—​beg the question, if the directors are not after what the soldiers intend to present, what are they after? Jason Middleton’s account of the rise of awkwardness as a documentary trope in the 1990s illuminates one answer: Awkward moments occur when an established mode of representation or reception is unexpectedly challenged, stalled, or altered; when an interviewee suddenly confronts the interviewer, when the subject who has been comfortable on camera begins to feel trapped in the frame ​…​ awkward moments can be understood as documentary moments – that is as encounters with “the real” in unexpected and unruly forms.73 In the scene with Hijar, the film’s established mode of representation​—​an “experiential” chronicle told by the platoon themselves—​ ​is challenged, producing an unexpected counter-perspective.74 The value of Hijar’s interview is not, as he assumes, in clarifying the events leading up to Sergeant Rougle’s ​ ​death or

72 David MacDougall, T​ he Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses ​(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6. 73 James Middleton, D​ ocumentary's Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship ​ (London: ​Taylor & Francis Ltd,​ 2014), 3-4. 74 Hetherington, “Story.” Cawley | 22

even sharing his experience of the events. It lies in this “real” moment, which transcends the established story and reveals the documentary’s critical frame. It situates the US Army’s 2nd Platoon as the object of the camera’s gaze rather than the narrators of their own story. Perhaps a symptom of their distributor (​National Geographic)​ or Junger’s undergraduate background in anthropology (foregrounded in his most recent book ​Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016)), Hetherington and Junger construct an ambivalent portrait of the platoon ​ t​ hat documents the men with what Rey Chow refers to as the “anthropological gaze.” Chow sees the anthropological gaze at work in many texts, including the novel ​Jia (​ ​Family​, 1931). In J​ ia​, the Chinese female mourners “amount to something of an exotic ethnographic find, whereupon an indigenous custom receives the spotlight not for the significance it carries in its conventional context, but rather for a displaced kind of effect,” which produces the women and their culture as a “residual object” and reaffirms the colonial origins of anthropology.75 The effect of the scene with Hijar is not an understanding of the significance his testimony “carries in its conventional context.” Rather, the scene puts Hijar on fleeting display, and his story and identity become residual objects, silenced in the face of R​ estrepo​’s larger project of providing an impression of war’s indigenous people: the illusive American soldier.

Figures 6A & 6B.​ Restrepo​​ . Platoon members, montage scene stills. 2010. A montage toward the end of the film builds on this covert perspective, as well. Clips of five different platoon members staring into the camera, presumably waiting for their interview to start or breaking between sessions, are strung together. At first glance, the montage aligns with the classic effort of putting a face to war. But viewers are not as much invited to think about the men as individuals as we are to read their collective expression​—​in large part because their expressions are striking similar yet illegible. Their faces are not clearly happy or sad, stoic or weak, present or detached, controlled or deranged. ​ E​ mbodying the opacity Rachel Blau DuPlessis ascribes to liminal subjects, each man’s gaze, mouth, and demeanor shift with incredible subtlety yet seem to vacillate between expressions of force and

75 Ray Chow, N​ ot Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience​ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 63. Cawley | 23

passivity, intention and confusion. Moreover, while four of the men are recognizable “characters” at this point in the film, one seems to be appearing for the first time, an inconsistency foreclosing the possibility that ​Restrepo​ might lapse into a classic troop profile of individuated narratives like ​The Things They Carried or ​The Thin Red Line.​ ​ ​ In sum, this unintelligible montage, depicting the men literally and figuratively between definitive points, crystallizes the ways the film renders the soldiers a liminal collective. The notion of the guys’ collective identity is clear. While Restrepo, specifically his ghostly absence, provides a focal point point, no single character is featured. The subject of the film is the platoon. Moreover, like the montage, the film is edited so each soldier’s identity is completed or reinforced by another’s. For example, the interviews are often edited so that the testimony of one soldier is repeated by another, and quotes are cut together to form a single comment, creating a sense that the individual platoon members constitute a coherent whole. One segment features three men presumably answering the question w​ hat was the scariest moment during your deployment? Most scared, yeah, I’d have to say Rock Avalanche. If I had to pick a moment, I’d probably say Rock Avalanche. Operation Rock Avalanche was the low point for me personally. I saw a lot of professional tough guys get weak in the knees. Cutting from one response to the next, the three brief testimonies are used to frame Rock Avalanche as the climax of the deployment and the film. This technique emphasizes the men’s singularity rather than their difference. In fact, it leaves no room for difference, treating the three soldiers as stock representatives of the entire platoon. T​ he soldiers’ liminality, unlike their collective identity, is more complex—​ ​not least because collective identity presumes legible “boundaries which mark the difference between a social group and those it must exclude in order to maintain its unity and coherence.”76 The film often reminds us that the guys are like us: they can’t wait to get home to friends and family in rural towns and urban neighborhoods, they pass time listening to music and taking jabs at each other, and they are professionals just doing their job. “We done our job. We did what we were supposed to have been doing and we out of here,” Sergeant LaMonta Caldwell explains as the men prepare to leave. In an early scene, Sergeant Misha Pemble-Belkin describes his childhood in the Pacific Northwest, a background that aligns the young soldier with a civilian audience: Growing up in Oregon, I wasn't allowed to have sugar 'til I was, like, 13, because my mom was a fucking hippie. And she'd always have us doing, like, little hippie children things, I guess–​ ​making, like, homemade paper or painting something or going, like, on nature walks. It was a nice childhood. I just wasn't allowed to have toy guns or anything like that, like boys should have, I guess​–l​ ittle toy guns or, like, violent video games or watch any violent movies at all. Like l had a

76 P​ atrick G. Coy and Lynne M. Woehrle, eds. S​ ocial Conflicts and Collective Identities​ (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 37. Cawley | 24

toy squirt gun that was a turtle, and my parents took it away because it said "squirt gun” ​– i​ t had "gun" on there. The narration is used as a voiceover against footage of Misha shooting a machine gun. In addition to its heavy-handed irony, the moment is exceptional in that it is arguably the only scene that offers a socio-political portrait of a soldier. In many grunt’s-eye view accounts, such as D​ ispatches​, the social, political, material, or psychological conditions that cause men to serve are central to the narrative. Soldiers are basically invited to answer ​why are you here? ​ In fact, ​the omniscient narrator of the Oscar-winning documentary ​The Anderson Platoon ​ (1968) commences the film with an answer: “Many of these men were minorities from lower income communities.” And as its title hints, W​ here Soldiers Come From ​ (2011) is, above all, a Marxist analysis of enlistment and service. But R​ estrepo’​ s engagement with this question is tellingly absent. Just as Mischa’s scene is an anomaly that, moreover, dwells in the disconnect between his background and current profession, the film as a whole disconnects the men from their socio-political coordinates. ​Restrepo​ is not the story of exploited minorities and working-class boys. It is not the story of the exotic others, the beautiful yet violent natives of war. And unlike ​Dispatches​, it is not ultimately the story of ​we all.​ So what distinguishes the soldiers in ​Restrepo​? What is the marrow of their collective identity? Who are “they”? While the documentary invokes these questions, it emphatically denies viewers obvious and neat answers. Crucially, it does this by making the men’s liminality, the very absence of their social and structural legibility, their defining quality.​ ​ N​ YTimes​ critic A.O. Scott notes that “the filmmakers are circumspect in what they show, taking care to avoid focussing on the wounded and the dead.”77 But Hetherington and Junger’s “care” is not limited to death and graphic violence, it extends to the soldiers themselves. Critics have argued that the contemporary grunt doc’s trademark formal chaos, aimlessness, and suspense mirrors a deployment in Afghanistan or Iraq and, therefore, f​ osters identification with soldiers: “​we ​ accompany the squad members on nerve-racking patrols and hang out with them in cramped living quarters”; “here’s a documentary that embeds y​ ou ​ deep in the war in Afghanistan”; it “​give[s] the sense of what it’s like to live, and die, as a contemporary U.S. soldier”; ​“this utterly immersive documentary puts you ​ on the frontline.”78 B​ ut this conclusion doesn’t square with many of ​Restrepo’​ s defining features: the

77 A.O. Scott, “​Battle Company: Loving Life, Making War,” N​ ew York Times,​ 24 June 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/movies/25restrepo.html. 78 Jeannette Catsoulis, “Occupation: Dreamland,” N​ ew York Times,​ 23 Sept. 2005, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E0D61730F930A1575AC0A9639C8B63;​ Peter Travers, “Restrepo,” R​ olling Stone​, 25 June 2010, http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/restrepo-20100625;​ Steve Zeitchik, “Casualties Seen and Unseen,” Los Angeles Times,​ 19 June 2010​, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/19/entertainment/la-et-docs-20100619. Cawley | 25

inclusion of field specific jargon and unexplained references to missions, strategies, and policies; the scene in the barracks that offers a fleeting sense of the platoon’s well-developed social dynamic; the silences and omissions during interviews that produce more questions than answers. Like laughing when you don’t get the joke, the film forces viewers to accept our distance and ignorance. Put another way, the glaring gaps between the platoon’s experience and what viewers are able to access and understand generate ambivalent distance rather than, as critics have hastily assumed, intimate identification. The documentary’s fragmented or partitioned “story” works hand in glove with the soldiers’ illegible social, cultural, and psychological identities. As I suggest above, the men’s race, religion, class, civilian background, and so forth are carefully avoided. But their interior lives and attitudes toward serving—​ ​points of identification that seem crucial to any effort to represent “the experience of combat ​… through the eyes of the soldiers themselves”—​ ​are avoided, as well.79 The now expected provocation of a psychologically traumatized soldier, for instance, gets folded into the fragmented portrait of the platoon.80 Late in the film, two soldiers reflect on the events of Operation Rock Avalanche, a combat mission that costs the lives of multiple men. “I prefer not to sleep and not dream about it than to sleep and see the picture in my head. It’s pretty bad,” says Miguel Cortez with a painfully strained smile. Hijar follows with a more stoic account of his suffering: “I’m never going to forget it. I don’t want to not have that as a memory because that was one of the moments that makes me appreciate everything that I have.” In one of the clearest examples of how R​ estrepo​ departs from ​Dispatches,​ these testimonies are followed by clips of indistinct soldiers patrolling a snowy mountain in silence and a shot of bustling life at the outpost. The succession of these disparate, seemingly unconnected sounds bites and images keeps Cortez and Hijar at arms length, further transforming their expressions of interiority into one of the many fleeting and vague impressions that constitute a collective portrait. In ​Dispatches​, Herr adamantly trades professional distance for displays of personal involvement and scenes of bearing witnessing that require the reader’s careful attention. ​ ​ O​ n the other hand, as this sequence exemplifies, Hetherington and Junger forego aesthetic practices that might call for the viewer’s close looking and listening, let alone sustained empathy or intervention.

79 Hetherington, “Story.” 80 For more on the relationship between the PTSD diagnosis and the cultural representation of US soldiers see Roy Scranton, “The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to ‘Redeployment’ and ‘American Sniper’,” L​ A Review of Books,​ 25 Jan. 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trauma-hero-wilfred-owen-redeployment-american-sniper/; Joseph Darda, “The Literary Afterlife of the Korean War,” ​American Literature​ Vol. 87, No. 1 (2015), 79-105, and “Post-Traumatic Whiteness: How Vietnam Veterans Became the Basis for a New White Identity Politics,” ​LA Review of Books,​ 21 Nov. 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/post-traumatic-whiteness-how-vietnam-veterans-became-the-basis-for-a-new-whi te-identity-politics/#!.

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The men’s liminal subjectivity is further produced by their consistent inability or unwillingness to locate themselves geographically, historically, or otherwise. For example, Cpt. Dan Kearny’s description of the Korengal Valley​—​“This is, uh, I guess you could call it, this is the war zone. This is where it’s all happening”—​ ​is arguably the most direct recognition of the film’s setting. Toward the end of the film, various platoon members allude to the transient nature of their service: “you move on”; “we were going to die here, and now we’re leaving instead”; “I’m never coming back”; “goodbye OP Restrepo, I’m never going to have to be here again. Not that I didn't enjoy my time here, but it's time to move on.” These claims are profoundly ironic. Hetherington and Junger spend the entire film defining the platoon members by and through “here,” rendering the prospect that the men might simply “move on” ridiculous if not impossible. Even the film’s structure rejects this sentiment by confining the platoon to the Korengal Valley war zone, opening with their arrival and ending with their departure. The closing footage cements the dominant w​ ho?​ counter-perspective. The end of R​ estrepo​ returns to the beginning, and it only makes sense. Hetherington and Junger return to the same footage of the documentary’s ​ ​self-professed narrator and namesake. It is the only footage in which Juan “Doc” Restrepo appears, totaling 4:23 minutes of the 93 minute film, for he is dead by the time viewers arrive in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. This circularity and the irony of a narrator who is dead before the story begins reworks the sentiment “only the dead have seen the end of war,” an idea accredited to Plato that has reverberated through war narratives for centuries, including ​Dispatches​: “Didn’t you ever meet a war reporter before?” I asked him. “Tits on a bull,” he said. “Nothing personal.” But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard, it took me a year to understand it: “Patrol went up a mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.” I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story; when I asked him what had happened he just looked like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he’d waste time telling stories to anyone as dumb as I was.81 Michael Herr’s exchange with a 4th Division Lurp represents the limitations of war stories: they are unable to resurrect the dead or capture their story (which, for the soldier, is the real story of war). The anecdote from D​ ispatches​’s opening pages also distinguishes between the dead and the living. It is a seemingly obvious and inconsequential distinction, but the gesture speaks to Herr’s investment in those for whom the war is still unfolding. Herr validates the soldier's point in more ways than one and, thereby, invites readers to question whether ​Dispatches​ is as useless as “tits on a bull.” In doing so, he also inaugurates the book’s most basic strategy and impulse: to engage the reader, to be useful. Put another

81 Herr, D​ ispatches​, 6. Cawley | 27

way, “These warnings invite us to read ​Dispatches​ actively, to enter into a dialogue with the narrator about the significance he attributes to events.”82 In R​ estrepo,​ a narrator who is dead before the story begins serves as an affecting reminder of the human cost of war. Paradoxically, it also galvanizes the ways the film effaces the remaining, living soldiers and their stories. The opening and closing footage of Juan Doc Restrepo, the “narrator” who haunts the men and the film, formally and conceptually aligns the platoon’s story with Restrepo’s, as if they too are ghosts who exists somewhere between absence and presence, here and there, the past and present, the real and imagined.

Conclusion: Who Is the Soldier? Restrepo​ advances a powerful way of not seeing and not hearing soldiers. This “unmediated” grunt’s-eye view ​ ​documentary​ p​ laces viewers at a considerable distance from the soldiers and forcefully renders the platoon a liminal collective. The film does not facilitate the recognition of soldiers as individuals, one of us, or socio-political subjects. Rather, R​ estrepo ​ encourages its viewers to accept ambiguity over identification, distance over intimacy, ambivalence over understanding. ​ S​ o much so that by​ t​ he end of the film, we’re left asking, w​ ho ​ did I spend an hour and a half watching? ​Who ​ is the American soldier today? Representation, the philosopher Jacques Rancière reminds us, can be interpreted and taken up in any number of possible ways. The ongoing effects of representation are not a singular transmission or any one understanding. In line with Rancière, I do not wish to suggest that R​ estrepo ​ and military professionalization are inherently bad ​ or ​ that there is some ideal way to represent and identify soldiers. In fact, liminal subjectivity has been widely theorized as the most politically fertile and utopic position, a position with the greatest potential for social transformation. In Victor Turner’s foundational words, liminality is “anti-structure,” a realm of pure opening defined by “that which is neither this nor that, and yet both.”83 Moreover, as I argue of ​Dispatches​, the ​we all ​ perspective comes with its own limitations and political problems, which mirror the strengths and shortcomings of the anti-Vietnam movement. What I’ve tried to do, instead, is mark the ways in which soldiers are rendered distant, illegible non-subjects and identify what participates in this effacing. Liminality​—​as a dominant logic in military professionalization and aesthetic consequence of grunt documentaries like ​Restrepo​—​is one such participant. Rancière​ also stresses the way representation gets articulated contextually and historically. Examining D​ ispatches​ and R​ estrepo ​ in light of their distinct military contexts affirms Ranciere's understanding. The material and political conditions from which these representations emerged

82 Cobley, “Narrating the Facts…,” 107. 83 Turner, ​The Forest of Symbols​, 99. Cawley | 28

determine how we might perceive their political significance as well as the politics that they give potential. This understanding, for one, usefully encourages us to position readings of the “grunt” figure in the larger crisis of apprehending war in the post-Cold War era. “We are not a nation at war. We are an Army at war … The rest of the nation is not feeling it,” Edward Blair remarked with cynical frankness during a 2008 oral history inteview.84 Blair, who served as the Executive Officer for Army Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors from 1999-2007, reflects a popular grievance within the post-Cold War military, an internal grievance that Admiral M​ ike Mullen has attempted to present as a central public concern. Mullen has been one of the leading critics of the disconnect between the American people and our men and women in uniform. The public’s understanding of “who we are ​…​ isn’t there,” Mullen told House lawmakers in 2011, for soldiers are an increasingly invisible and unwittingly overlooked population: One of the things I've worried about is the increasing disconnect between the American people and our men and women in uniform. We come from fewer and fewer places. We're less than 1% of the population. I've had conversations with community leaders who want to help, but they don't necessarily know how. They're not very familiar with a soldier who's been through five or six deployments.85 Judith Butler explicates a fundamentally analogous phenomenon in ​Frames of War (​ 2009). While Mullen describes the distance between US civilians and soldiers as a statistical reality, Butler explains the distance between the American public and America’s “enemies” as a consequence of our government’s media strategies and the media most broadly. According to Butler, popular forms of war reportage render many lives unseen and ungrievable. Practices such as restricting certain images and transposing or flooding the public with others help produce a citizenry of passive visual consumer who experience war and its non-Western victims as distant and unrecognizable: The problem concerns the media, at the most general level, since life can be accorded a value only of the condition of certain evaluative structures that a life becomes perceivable at all ​…​ The tacit interpretive scheme that divides worthy from unworthy lives works fundamentally through the senses, differentiating the cries we can hear from those we cannot.86 Restrepo​ is a testament to the troubling ways in which Mullen and Butler’s critiques cohere​—​the ways in which the lives of US soldiers, like the lives of America’s non-Western “enemies,” have undergone affective erasure. The counterintuitive coupling of US soldiers and America’s so-called enemies, a coupling I hope this chapter initiates and encourages, helps propel the cultural study of contemporary soldiers beyond its current home in trauma theory and ​ ​military historicism into the wider theoretical

84 Interview with Edward Bair by Wendy Rejan. ​The U.S. Army Material Command Oral History Papers, 1989-2012,​ Box 1, Folder 4, U.S. Army War College Library and Archives, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, 23. 85 Geoff Colvin, “Adm. Mike Mullen: Debt Is Still Biggest Threat to U.S. Security,” ​Fortune,​ 10 May 2012, http://fortune.com/2012/05/10/adm-mike-mullen-debt-is-still-biggest-threat-to-u-s-security/. 86 Judith Butler, ​Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (​ London and New York: Verso, 2009), 51. Cawley | 29

debates over the forces that have made it increasingly difficult to oppose America’s military actions. Who is the soldier? ​ H​ ow we answer the question is, perhaps, as urgent and powerful as the realities of combat. T​ he answers provided by D​ ispatches​ and R​ estrepo​ attest to how ​representing this figure can challenge and resist or corroborate and facilitate the machinery of war. In turn, these works call us to ask how documenting the grunt’s-eye view and our documentary aesthetics at large can partake in the vital work of letting soldiers speak and appear in ways that affirm their lives and the conditions of persistent warfare.

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