The Desert of Experience: Jarhead and the Geography of the Persian Gulf War Geoffrey A

124.5 ] The Desert of Experience: Jarhead and the Geography of the Persian Gulf War geoffrey a. wright “[T]here is no getting out of the land. No stopping. The desert is everywhere. The mirage is everywhere. I am still in the desert.” —Anthony Swofford,Jarhead Introduction EPICtIONS OF tHE PERSIAN GULF WAR IN CONtEMPORARY AMER- ican combat narratives differ dramatically from public dis- Dcourse surrounding the war. Media coverage of the war has been widely documented for its preoccupation with emergent mil- itary technologies. During the war, the Pentagon teamed up with cable networks to inundate the American public with spectacles of Stealth bombers, Scud missiles, Patriot missiles, Tomahawk missiles, and smart bombs in action. The highly censored media coverage ob- scured the region’s geography and erased the suffering of combatants as well as civilians.1 In contrast, the literature and film on the war emphasize the human rather than the technological dimension of the fighting. Veterans and veteran correspondents employ a language of sensory experience to tell their stories about infantry life and combat, stories abounding with the minutiae of training, sleeping, eating, patrolling, and fighting. These deeply personal experiences are anchored to the landscape in numerous and peculiar ways.2 This essay sets forth a geographic semiotics of Persian Gulf War combat narratives, which entails the GEOFFREY A. WRIGHt is assistant pro- fessor of En glish at Samford University, study of an array of geographically oriented codes for making mean- where he teaches interdisciplinary film- ing out of wartime experience. The topography of the war zone, not and- literature studies. this essay is part of the human enemy, acts as the primary antagonist in these stories and a larger project devoted to the geographic serves as the source of the characters’ physical struggles and psycho- semiotics of American combat narratives. logical crises; the landscape absorbs or even stands in for the human [ © 2009 by the modern language association of america ] 1677 1678 the Desert of Experience: Jarhead and the Geography of the Persian Gulf War [ PMLA enemy; geographic features ranging from that the desert is a material object, a priori to sand to the contours of the horizon inflect American technology and ideology. the writers’ and filmmakers’ self- conscious attempts to communicate their stories; and Geography and Memory the processes through which the characters understand, morally as well as politically, the Swofford constructs the geography of the world of the war and their place in it depend Middle East, the landscape of his wartime ex- on interacting with the environment. perience, through a process of remembering The study of geographic signs in Per- by writing. As he writes, the contours of the sian Gulf War combat narratives revolves desert—its flatness and openness—and its ma- around images and descriptions of the des- terial substance define not only the shape his ert as it resonates in such literary and filmic memory takes but also his evolving sense of accounts of the ground fighting as Anthony an embodied self. He begins with a nostalgic Swofford’s memoir Jarhead (2003), Sam Men- trip down into his basement, where he forces des’s film adaptation Jarhead (2005), and Da- himself to unpack mementos from the war: vid Russell’s Three Kings (1999).3 These texts “I pull out maps of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. depict the war from a ground- level perspec- Patrol books. Pictures. Letters. My journal tive rather than from the technological and with its sparse entries. Coalition propaganda bird’s- eye point of view of a smart bomb. Re- pamphlets. Brass bore punch for the M40A1 flecting on the production of the film Jarhead, sniper rifle. A handful of . 50- caliber projec- Mendes asserts, “What we remember about tiles.” These jumbled artifacts contain the past the Gulf War were these clean little images of of the war, and the descent into the basement these tiny little bombs perfectly hitting these frames a descent into the past, into the writer’s toy towns, bereft of any sense of human life psyche: “I am not well, but I am not mad. I’m at all. To me, the interesting thing now is to after something. Memory, yes. Years pass. enter it through a person on the ground, be- But more than just time. I’ve been working cause that’s where we weren’t allowed to go in toward this—I’ve opened the ruck and now I this particular war” (Jarhead [booklet] par. 1; must open myself” (1). Writing the memoir is my emphasis). He focuses on the infantry’s not an act of compiling a catalog of bygone experiences in the ground campaign in order days so much as it is an uncertain attempt to to uncover this unrecognized dimension of find a way back to a coherent sense of self.5 the war. By drawing on the desert as a central The corrosive cynicism pervading the book motif, the film suggests that the environment suggests that any reconciliation he may obtain in which American men and women fought from writing it will be troubled at best. is as significant as the electronic instru- The memorabilia Swofford uncovers mentation with which the war was waged.4 contain traces of past psychological wreck- Swofford’s Jarhead, Mendes’s Jarhead, and age. He admits, “So my ruck didn’t have to Russell’s Three Kings locate the chaos and be here, in my basement . I could’ve sold violence of the war in the landscape, not in it for one outrageous bar tab or given it to computers. These texts construct the desert Goodwill or thrown it away—or set it afire, topography as a tactile structure confronting as some Jarheads did” (2). He records a list both the bodies and minds of American sol- of options that have already run out. Unable diers and Marines whose boots are literally on to rid himself of this long- repressed material, the ground. Though the geographies in these he returns to it in the form of his memoir. In texts are narrative constructs, products of one sense, the artifacts that he uncovers and language, history, and culture, the texts insist recovers (the maps, books, letters, pictures, 124.5 Geoffrey A. Wright 1679 ] pamphlets, fatigues, and rounds) are pages: logical forces shaping his sense of self. What he reads them for what they have to tell him Swofford discovers by gazing at these literal about himself. The textures of these physi- and figurative maps is “neither true nor false cal objects become the text, the fabric, of his but what I know” (2). Rereading the geography memory, bearing and baring the trauma he of his experience enables him to determine not suffered before, during, and after the war. the truth of what happened in the Persian Gulf It is critical to recognize the way Swof- War but rather what happened to him in the ford describes these artifacts and makes them war. He is concerned not with abstract, histori- present in the text. Their defining character- cal knowledge of the war but with understand- istic is the mark they bear, the mark of his ex- ing his war, and he seeks to piece together what posure to fear and destruction in war and to he knows from his subjective perceptions of the extreme environment in which he encoun- what he experienced on the ground.6 tered that violence. As the enigmatic signifier for the Persian Gulf War, the desert inscribes The Desert his past on the surfaces of these artifacts. His fatigues are “ratty and bleached by sand and Jarhead and Three Kings take their places in sun and blemished with the petroleum rain a long line of American war films set in the that fell from the oil- well fires in Kuwait” (1). desert. John Ford’s World War I filmThe Lost The geographic residue, the sand as well as the Patrol (1934) is a seminal text in this tradition Kuwaiti oil, infuses the uniform with peculiar of films relying on that landscape as a narra- shades of meaning so that the fatigues indi- tive device. The primary conflict in the film cate more than his former membership in the is not between the British soldiers and their Marine Corps. Faded by constant contact with human enemies but between the British and the desert sand and stained by the oil that he the desert, which substitutes for the Arabs, suspects is the real reason for the war (11), the who are heavily stereotyped and remain un- uniform maps the confusion and futility he seen until the conclusion. David Lean’s World experienced while wandering the desert. War I classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) casts These artifacts spark other memories: “I the desert as a character. Numerous pan- open a map of southern Kuwait. Sand falls oramic shots construct the space of the des- from between the folds” (2). Serving as a tes- ert on a massive scale that reflects the epic tament to his experience, the sand clinging to story. Several World War II films dramatize the souvenirs in his trunk recalls the war zone desert settings. In Immortal Sergeant (1943), that the map is intended to represent but ulti- a naive young soldier played by Henry Fonda mately cannot. Together, the sand and the map proves himself an heir to the tough- minded form a palimpsest that does not make his past veteran for whom the film is titled.7 He sur- legible so much as it represents the past’s il- vives exposure to the harsh desert elements legibility.

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