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A “Phrase Too Cute to Do Our Ugliness Justice” Portraying “Wounded Warriors” in Contemporary War Fiction

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A “Phrase Too Cute to Do Our Ugliness Justice” Portraying “Wounded Warriors” in Contemporary War Fiction PETER C. MOLIN A “Phrase Too Cute to Do Our Ugliness Justice” Portraying “Wounded Warriors” in Contemporary War Fiction he only physically disabled character in Ben Fountain’s excellent Iraq War novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012) is not a combat veteran but the protagonist Billy Lynn’s father Ray, who is confined to a wheelchair Tfollowing a stroke. Though the brooding, remote Billy Lynn and his squadmates are mentally rattled by the sequence of events beginning with the death of two of their own in battle and now culminating in a garish “Victory Tour” that has brought them to Texas Stadium to be feted at a Dallas Cowboys game, at least they have their physical health to be thankful for. On the other hand, Ray Lynn, portrayed in a subplot involving Billy’s dysfunctional family, does little to inspire sympathetic understanding of the impaired. Confined to a battery-powered wheelchair, a “dark purple motorized job with fat whitewalls and an American flag decal stuck to the back” (74) and unable to speak clearly, Ray inspires comments such as the following from his daughter Kathryn: “‘He’s an asshole…. Won’t do his physical therapy, never goes out, just sits in that damn chair all day watching Fox and listening to fat-ass Rush Limbaugh, won’t even talk unless he wants something, and then he just grunts. Expects us to wait on him hand and foot’” (75). Billy Lynn the war hero, whatever the source of his alienation, is nonetheless physically whole, sexually attractive to women, and envied by the fat-cat Dallas Cowboys owner and the hyper-masculine Dallas Cowboys players he meets in the course of the novel. Ray Lynn’s disability, on the other hand, symbolically complements and intensifies the lameness of his arch-conservative political views, the blindness of his hypocritical morals, and the impotence of his control over his family, his life, and the world. “Lameness,” “blindness,” “ impotence.” Theorists of disability would say that my use of these words to describe Ray Lynn indicates how infested is our language with figures of speech that stigmatize the handicapped. But what if lame, blind, and mutilated veterans are not even stigmatized, but just ignored? So far, our most popular and acclaimed works of fiction about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have mostly done just that. The United States’ post-9/11 wars have focused attention on the plight of combat veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), emotional and mental maladies that have rendered many veterans too damaged to effectively and happily reintegrate socially and in the workplace after deployment. Imaginative literature about the war reflects and helps shape the national absorption with the subject; works such as Phil Klay’s Redeployment, Roxana Robinson’s Sparta, and Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, along with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, are set largely back in the States after a traumatizing deployment that has rendered their protagonists struggling to reconnect with a society that is mystified by the internal conflicts that seem to afflict so many veterans. While I salute all efforts to provide health and services to veterans suffering from PTSD and TBI, I’m curious about the relatively little consideration paid to another kind of wounded veteran: the permanently physically disabled victim of combat injuries. In neither our national consciousness nor our national literature have we paid nearly as much attention to maimed veterans, be they amputees, badly burned or disfigured, or blinded. The discrepancy is interesting, one, because in past post- war periods, it has been the physically disabled veteran who has most compellingly represented the war’s lingering costs, and, two, physically disabled veterans are among us in numbers and deserve focused national attention to ensure the services we provide them are generous and effective. It is beyond the scope of this essay to delineate the issues and make recommendations about policies and programs for post-9/11 disabled veterans, but a survey of the literature that portrays severely injured soldiers as they try to get on with their lives clarifies issues at stake, opens possibilities for new ideas, and takes seriously the concerns of the few authors who have seen poignant potential in crafting stories featuring disabled veterans.1 1 Rebecca Ruiz reports in a February 6, 2013 online Atlantic magazine article that, “Of the more than 50,000 service members wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan who are considered polytrauma patients, 1,600 have moderate to severe brain injuries, 1,400 are amputees, and 900 were severely burned.” Duncan Wallace, in the April 2012 Australian scholarly publication Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health writes, “By theatre of operations to 2 War, Literature & the Arts Portraits of badly-wounded and disabled veterans in post-9/11 narratives are, in my survey, few. One of the first such representations came in Siobhan Fallon’s short story “The Last Stand” from her 2011 collectionYou Know When the Men Are Gone. We can also examine Iraq veteran Brian Van Reet’s short story “Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek,” published in 2012 in the anthology Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War and several stories in Katey Schultz’s 2013 collection of short stories Flashes of War. The most extended portrait, interestingly enough, comes via Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s The Cuckoo’s Calling, published in 2013 under the nom-de-plume of Robert Galbraith. To make sense of what these stories are trying to tell us, several critical approaches aid apprehension of patterns and sources of tension. An historical comparison with representative examples from other wars establishes continuities, rupture points, and new developments. We can also take note of visual representations of war-related disability in photography and film and the critical commentaries on the same; examples of both are more numerous than narrative representatives of combat disability and critical writing on the same. Finally, we can draw on the theories and practical examples offered by disability studies, a burgeoning scholarly field that has much to offer in regard to both literary study and the real-world business of recognizing the rights and needs of the physically impaired. Canvassing the ideas and implications of the historical, visual, and critical record establishes a framework for a more focused and generative examination of Fallon’s, Schultz’s, Van Reet’s, and Rowling’s stories.2 However rare they may be today, contemporary portraits of permanently wounded veterans are deeply rooted in the Western literary tradition. Sophocles’ Philoctetes, for example, first performed in 409 B.C., features a character disabled by a mysterious foot wound and abandoned by the Greek army in its quest to conquer Troy. The play has attracted attention in recent years for its portrait of Philoctetes’ anguish and outsider status, as well as the strained efforts of healthy, September 2010, 1,158 US military personnel suffered major or partial limb amputations as a result of the conflict in Iraq, 249 in Afghanistan, and 214 in ‘unaffiliated conflicts’34 in Yemen, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.” Wallace also states, “Between April 2006 and December 2011, at least 20 British military personnel suffered traumatic limb amputations in Iraq, and 237 in Afghanistan.” In an online Soldiers magazine article dated March 8, 2014, Elizabeth M. Collins writes, “[T]he Department of Veterans Affairs provided inpatient treatment to 180 severely disabled blind Iraq and Afghanistan service members and veterans as of July 2013.” 2 Too late for inclusion in this study, I discovered Annie Proulx’s 2008 short story “Tits-Up in a Ditch”, which features a young woman veteran who loses an arm in Iraq while serving in the U.S. Army. An International Journal of the Humanities 3 whole, normative characters to understand him.3 Shakespeare’s canon is full of enraged warriors whose martial spirit sits uneasily within peacetime society— Macbeth, Coriolanus, Othello, and Richard III head the list, but the most specific reference to physically wounded veterans comes in Henry V, where the English king Henry’s famous Agincourt speech asserts that scars earned in battle with the French will make anyone who fought the envy or those who did not: Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s Day….” (4.3.47-48) And gentlemen in England now abed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. (4.3.64-67) The ploy works within the play to motivate the English army to victory, while establishing one pole in a field of representational possibilities: the wound as badge of honor. But a scar is not a disability; much like “the red badge of courage” in Stephen Crane’s novel of the same name and the “million dollar wound” that allowed soldiers in Vietnam to be evacuated before the end of their tour without suffering the lifelong debilitating effects of amputation, disfigurement, or blindness, the non-disabling wound functions positively in the life of veterans and society as a sign of sacrifice, service, and hard-earned authority. The permanently disabled veteran, however, rarely is accorded such unequivocal respect. Instead his (and now, sometimes, her) damaged body troubles the national imaginary just as it impedes upon day-to-day life and fills the wounded veteran with doubt, shame, and regret. Historians and literary critics have identified the Napoleonic Wars as a site of crucial epochal change in the artistic and cultural representation of disabled veterans within the Anglo-American tradition.
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