My rifle is human, even as I am human, because it is my life.
—The Creed of a United States Marine
About an hour before President Bush gave his Oval Office address on September 11, ABC ran a segment it had filmed earlier in the day at a high school. Students were following the news on television, and ABC wanted to know what they thought. “I always thought America was my superhero,” one girl said. “I mean, nothing could harm America. America is everyone’s defender.”[1] Four years later, the Hollywood director Christopher Nolan, who to that point had directed two knotty psychological thrillers about guilt, truth, and the unreliability of memory, started making Batman movies.
The first, Batman Begins, was released in 2005, at the height of the Iraq War. It is about Batman’s struggle to save a city that is tearing itself apart because of fear (terrorists have slipped a panic-inducing neurotoxin into Gotham’s water supply).[2] In The Dark Knight, from 2008, Batman confronts the Joker, a lone-wolf terrorist whose crimes are motivated solely by his desire to “watch the world burn,” mirroring the standard account of al-Qaeda’s irrational hatred of freedom that prevailed in the early years of the war on terror. Batman only catches the Joker by inventing a machine that turns every cellphone in Gotham into a surveillance device, a necessary move that he knows is morally indefensible.[3] In the trilogy’s final installment, The Dark Knight Rises, the villain Bane promises to redistribute Gotham’s wealth and holds show trials for the city’s elites, but his master plan, which he thinks will snuff out “hope” once and for all, is simply to destroy the city with a nuclear bomb.[4] The trauma of September 11 echoes through all three of these movies. Toward the end of The Dark Knight, Batman surveys the wreckage of one of the Joker’s attacks, with twisted metal, smoldering fires, and the arcing jets of the firefighters’ hoses intentionally recalling images of Ground Zero in the fading light of that first evening. The film’s poster, with a flaming Batman logo cutting across the side of an office building, replicates the gashes left in the sides of the Twin Towers before they came down.[5] The third film introduces Bane with a plane hijacking, and then he announces his arrival in Gotham by bombing a football field while a game is in progress. Tens of thousands of spectators watch in horror, like people looking across the river to Manhattan from their rooftops, as the earth opens up and swallows their team.
Nolan said in 2012 that his Batman movies “genuinely aren’t intended to be political.” When his interviewer pressed him on the subject, noting that “a lot of people would argue that all art is political,” Nolan said, without elaborating, “But what’s politics?”[6] The way to understand inanities like this is to take them at face value: Nolan doesn’t have any specific understanding of what politics is, and professionally he doesn’t need one. He is not a polemicist, nor do his movies advocate for causes. As a Hollywood director, he simply needs to convince viewers that the money they spent purchasing a ticket wasn’t wasted. That requires its own kind of genius, though, and Nolan has it. He is like a weather station, picking up on things in the atmosphere—stories in the news, images that stick in people’s minds, consumer goods or turns of phrase that are completely new one day and ubiquitous the next—and then using hundreds of millions of dollars to put them into movies. It would be overstating things to say that The Dark Knight Rises is a movie about Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party. It’s too incoherent for that, and Nolan doesn’t have a party line he is trying to push. The Dark Knight Rises is just a normal Batman movie that was made specifically for audiences that had spent the past several years hearing about Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party all the time. What makes it effective is that Nolan’s atmospheric pressure readings are more sensitive and detailed than those of most other Hollywood directors. Taken as a set, his three Batman movies constitute a vision of the first ten years of the war on terror as seen through the fever dreams of a teenage comics fan. Americans of all ages found Nolan’s dream compelling. The Batman movies made $1.2 billion at the domestic box office, and they were nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning three.[7]
Hollywood rebooted dozens of comic book heroes during the twenty years after September 11, but it was Batman—not the plucky teenager Spider-Man, and not the alien deity Superman—who allowed superhero movies to take a more serious turn and become vehicles for the country’s anxieties about war, surveillance, freedom, and dread. To see why this was possible for Batman and nobody else, it may suffice just to describe him and then see if that description reminds us of anything. Unlike other superheroes, Batman is an ordinary human man. He does not have any supernatural abilities. He can’t fly or shoot lasers out of his eyes, and he wasn’t subjected to any scientific experiments that made him unusually fast or strong. His superpower, if we can call it that, is money. Known to most people as Bruce Wayne, Batman is the scion of Gotham’s wealthiest and most powerful family. The public views him as decadent, dissipated, and lazy, albeit handsome. He shows up late to five-star dinners with a supermodel on one arm and a prima ballerina on the other, and he is also the not-very-engaged owner of the family business, Wayne Enterprises, a globe-spanning conglomerate that invests heavily in technological research while outsourcing its manufacturing to Asia. It is Wayne’s limitless wealth that allows him to build Batman’s gadgets: the armored suit, the combat tools, the hip-holstered rappelling gear, the bombproof car, the motorcycle, the small airplane/hovercraft. The city police are suspicious of Batman’s vigilantism. They’re trying to keep order by using a traditional set of rules that everybody understands, and they’re reluctant to accept the help of this anonymous man who delivers justice while refusing to answer to laws other than his own. They can never decide whether to put him in handcuffs or give him a medal. Eventually, though, they wise up: The threats are too great, and only Batman has the money and the military hardware required to deal with them.
Presenting himself to the public as a vapid playboy so as to avoid suspicion, Bruce Wayne is actually all that keeps Gotham from collapsing into chaos, violence, and tyranny. Without Batman’s high-tech arsenal and bottomless reserves of self-sacrificing generosity, Gotham would be nothing more than a playground for gangsters and madmen. Maybe you see where I’m going with this? Batman appealed to Americans after September 11 because in Nolan’s films, Gotham is the world, and Batman is the United States.
It was September 11 that really made the analogy work, because the other important thing about Batman is that his heroism is the product of boyhood trauma and victimization. Many of the war on terror Batman movies have reminded their viewers that “Master Bruce,” as his English butler calls him, was once attacked by bats after tumbling down a well on the grounds of the family estate. He lay there cowering until his father, a doctor constantly imparting lessons about the importance of putting your wealth to good use by helping the poor—for the purposes of the analogy, think of this as “international aid”—climbed down into the well and brought his son back into the daylight. These lessons were cut short, however, when a mugger, an ungrateful member of the very class the Waynes had spent millions trying to aid, killed both of Bruce’s parents right in front of him. The adult Bruce vowed to fight crime in Gotham because crime is what deprived him of parental love, and in becoming a fighter in his own right, he hopes to exorcise the shame he feels at not having been able to save his mom and dad. That was just the kind of hero America wanted to see as it grappled with its own failures to save the thousands who died in New York and Washington. Wayne is even more admirable in that he embraces his shame rather than running from it, taking on the bat identity because bats are what he fears most. And finally, so as not to visit his own formative trauma on any other innocent children, no matter how repulsive their criminal parents may be, Wayne decides that for all his weaponry and training, Batman will never kill anyone. Thus is limitless technological and financial power tempered by wise restraint.
For a country that had invaded Iraq despite the disapproval of most of the rest of the world, a figure like Batman was extraordinarily appealing. At the end of The Dark Knight, Batman agrees to let the people of Gotham think that he murdered their crusading district attorney in cold blood. He didn’t, but he and the police commissioner both understand that the real story—the DA had a psychotic break and tried to kill a little boy in front of his parents—is too awful to ever be made public. As a wounded Batman flees the scene, knowing that all the cops in Gotham will soon be hunting for him, the little boy he saved asks why he is running: “He didn’t do anything wrong.” “Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves,” Commissioner Gordon says, “but not the one it needs right now.” Sometimes, in other words, a hero needs to be unpopular, even despised, in order to save those who don’t know enough to be grateful for his sacrifice and devotion. In 2008, that sentiment would have been comforting to citizens of a country that was bogged down in an unpopular war of its own making.
But Batman wasn’t popular just because he came up with a flattering explanation for the unpopularity of America’s foreign policy. Along with all of the other comic book heroes who crowded into cinemas like circus performers in a clown car during the war on terror, Batman helped to answer some of the war’s most pressing questions: What kinds of fighters would America need to mobilize in order to win? What would the mythological frontier hunter need to do, and what equipment would he need to bring with him, in order to ensure that the terrorists never threatened the homeland again? What did the ideal American soldier look like in the twenty-first century, and how did he fight? Batman, Iron Man, and the rest of the gang at Marvel and DC Studios provided an entertaining and glamorous answer to those questions, but other answers could be found by switching on CNN and Fox News. While Batman patrolled Gotham in multiplexes across the country during the first decade of the war, America’s Special Forces units—Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, Green Berets, and the like—fanned out across the globe. They carried with them not just technologically sophisticated arsenals of their own but the country’s distilled fantasies of national superiority. The main thrust of these fantasies, which Batman and other superheroes embodied on the screen, was that the special ops soldier’s synthesis of training, human ingenuity, and cutting-edge technology would make the United States all but invulnerable in the fight against terrorism. Whether this vision of invincibility could survive the realities of war depended largely on just how vulnerable America’s soldiers turned out to be.
In 2003, an academic journal published a study covering the early stages of America’s war in Afghanistan. It was titled “A Different Kind of War?”[8] Seven years later, an Army research center published a report with the same title, except that the question mark had been removed: A Different Kind of War.[9] That was the earliest consensus to coalesce around the war on terror, that it would be unlike any prior conflict in the country’s history. “This was not Desert Storm, in which victory could be proclaimed once Iraqi troops were driven from Kuwait,” one journalist wrote under the headline “What Would ‘Victory’ Mean?” “This was not a struggle against a conventional guerrilla force, whose yearning for a national homeland or the satisfaction of some grievance could be satisfied or denied.”[10] “This is different,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said. “The enemy is in many places. The enemy is not looking to be found. The enemy is hidden. The enemy is, very often, right here within our own country. And so you have to design a campaign plan that goes after that kind of enemy.”[11] Donald Rumsfeld cautioned that such a campaign would not be able to rely on the old strategy manuals, according to which one prevailed by attacking areas with the highest concentrations of enemy personnel or infrastructure. “The terrorists don’t have targets of high value,” he said. “They don’t have armies and navies and air forces that one can go battle against. They don’t have capital cities with high-value assets that they’re reluctant to lose.”[12] (If you squint hard enough, this could also read as a description of Vietnam, but Bush administration officials generally avoided raising the specter of that particular defeat.) “This will be a different kind of conflict against a different kind of enemy,” President Bush said in a radio address, “a conflict without battlefields or beachheads.”[13] Al-Qaeda, Vice President Cheney said, was not a conventional military force with conventional ranks of conscripts and recruits. It was more like “an Internet chat room,” a place where people could “come and participate…for one reason or another,” even though they sometimes had “different motives and ideologies.”[14] Such an unfamiliar enemy would require an unprecedented response. “It’s a new kind of war,” Rumsfeld said. “It will be unconventional, what we do.”[15]
Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration had already spent years preparing for new and unconventional conflicts, as well as a new role for the United States in world affairs. They hadn’t needed to explain their thinking to the public at the time, nor did they envision that something as horrible as September 11 would set their plans in motion, but now they had everyone’s attention, and they weren’t going to let the opportunity go to waste. Their boss had campaigned for president as a foreign policy moderate. In debates with then–Vice President Al Gore, Bush disavowed what he called “nation building,” praised the Clinton administration for not sending U.S. troops to intervene in the Rwandan genocide, and voiced concern over the U.S. military being overextended.[16] The United States had been the world’s lone superpower for a decade, just long enough to get used to it, and its foreign policy grandees understood the country’s role as privileged but essentially managerial. America would step in when this or that rogue state got too far out of line, as Saddam Hussein had in 1990, but its primary task was just to keep the wheels of the global free market turning, a job that could mostly be handled by the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Once in office, however, Bush staffed his White House with foreign policy advisers who had a more expansive vision. Absent September 11, these neoconservatives might well have spent the Bush years nibbling at the edges of the Washington consensus, pushing at small opportunities to advocate for a more interventionist stance, and otherwise grousing to one another behind the scenes about the stubbornness and mediocrity of Congress or the State Department. But because September 11 did happen, they were able to realize their vision on the largest possible scale, all at once.
Their foreign policy program was motivated by the same anxieties that September 11 had brought to bear on the country as a whole. In 2000, Robert Kagan, a former State Department official with the Reagan administration, and William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, published a collection of essays titled Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. The volume included contributions from several thinkers who would eventually take positions under Bush, including Richard Perle (adviser to Donald Rumsfeld), Elliott Abrams (National Security Council), and Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense). These men had spent their careers helping to steer the most powerful ship of state in world history, but in Present Dangers all they could see on the horizon were “growing threats to the American peace established at the end of the Cold War.” Elliott Abrams, for instance, thought that America’s pursuit of a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton had been the product of “naive optimism.” Rather than fooling themselves into believing that Palestinians were ready for democratic self-rule, he wrote, America’s policymakers should decelerate their pursuit of a Palestinian state and focus instead on what really mattered: “[avoiding] the creation of another radical Arab state that would weaken Jordan and Israel and perhaps Egypt while it draws close to Syria, Iraq, Libya, or Iran.” Democracy, human rights, and addressing the Palestinians’ so-called legitimate grievances would have to take a backseat to bolstering Israel’s defenses and making sure the Middle East’s more troublesome rulers understood that America was not going to cede its position of regional preeminence to an alliance of fundamentalist governments without a fight.[17]
Kristol and Kagan wanted the country to adopt “a foreign policy of ‘benevolent hegemony’ as a way of securing that peace and advancing American interests and principles around the world.”[18] By “benevolent,” they meant that America’s interests were the world’s interests. “Americans should understand,” they wrote, “that their support for American pre-eminence is as much a strike for international justice as any people is capable of making.”[19] And by “hegemony,” the authors meant that the United States should be so powerful that no other country would even think about challenging it, much less actually try. One contributor argued that the United States needed to maintain a “two-war standard,” meaning a military sufficiently large to wage full-scale wars with two powerful opponents at the same time. “What good would an American [security] guarantee be,” he wrote, “if our allies knew that once the U.S. military became embroiled in a crisis elsewhere, it would not be able to come to their defense should they face attack? Any strategy that seriously aimed at deterring both current and future challenges had to be based on at least a two-war capability.”[20]
Present Dangers brooded over old humiliations, as well as potential humiliations to come. The United States had easily defeated Iraq in the first Gulf War, but it had “failed to see that mission through to its proper conclusion: the removal of Saddam from power in Baghdad.”[21] It warned that Hussein was “on the verge of breaking free from the international constraints imposed upon him”[22] (a fanciful idea), and it fretted about “a disturbing principle in the post–Cold War world: that dictators can challenge the peace, slaughter innocents in their own or in neighboring states, threaten their neighbors with missile attacks—and still hang on to power. This constitutes a great failure in American foreign policy, one that will surely come back to haunt us.”[23] And while the Indian war cries grew louder at the edge of the woods, the United States was mired in “passivity and drift,”[24] a complacent stupor: “The simple fact is that today’s U.S. armed forces are smaller, less well prepared for combat, and operating older equipment than those of a decade ago.”[25] The appropriate response to these dangers could no longer be the halfhearted attempts to patch up a crumbling international stability that had characterized prior years. “What is needed,” the authors wrote, “is not better management of the status quo, but a fundamental change in the way our leaders and the public think about America’s role in the world.”[26] Kagan wrote that he hoped for “a broader and more forward-looking conception of the national interest.”[27] His goals, if realized, would amount to a revolution in international affairs. When the United States sent its first Special Forces into Afghanistan in the middle of September 2001, weeks before the larger invasion began on October 7, the revolution was under way.
The neoconservative project was not without its own internal contradictions, however. These contradictions looked surmountable at the outset, but in the end they helped doom the United States to failure in Afghanistan and Iraq. First, while the Bush administration was proposing a massive expansion of the military’s role around the world, it could not effect that expansion in the traditional way—adding hundreds of thousands of soldiers—without a draft. This was a nonstarter. The trauma of defeat in Vietnam had poisoned subsequent generations of Americans against compulsory military service, and politicians were also wary of the opportunities a draft provided for protest should the war not go as planned. Second, Americans were not going to accept the sort of war that resulted in high casualties or disrupted daily life in a sustained, material way. Indeed, the government had started promising just the opposite within days of September 11, with Bush urging Americans to see their summer vacations as expressions of patriotic defiance (“Get down to Disney World”).[28] Bush was trying to rebuild the country’s shattered faith in the safety of commercial air travel, but his remarks also harmonized with the more general sense that to change daily life in any real way would be to “let the terrorists win.”
The third contradiction was the most consequential: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had taken office promising to transform the military by making it smaller while still extending its reach. He adhered to a set of theories and reforms that went under the name revolution in military affairs, or RMA. Proponents of RMA believed that recent technological advances, especially those relating to information and communications, were transforming conflict. Because the U.S. military already enjoyed such an enormous technological advantage over any of its rivals, it followed that it should fully embrace these transformations. By leaning further into an area it could already count as a strength, the United States would extend the gap separating its armed forces from those of other countries and compound its advantages on the battlefield. Instead of columns of soldiers crashing into and steadily destroying each other, modern warfare would be characterized by speed, precision, and up-to-the-second situational awareness. The famous fog of war would be reduced to one of history’s curios.[29] This kind of combat meant satellite communication, twenty-four-hour drone surveillance, light armored vehicles racing through the landscape in search of enemy combatants, massive air support called in on targets marked by lasers, and, crucially, fewer ground forces. The appeal of such theories to Rumsfeld and his Republican colleagues was obvious: Fewer ground troops would mean fewer casualties, every one of which constituted a small but real public relations disaster for an administration trying to sustain polling support for the war effort. Rumsfeld pushed his cheerleading for RMA reforms far past what his army’s commanders were comfortable with, but he was in charge, so they would have to make do. In preparing to invade Iraq, General Tommy Franks requested a force of about half a million U.S. troops. Rumsfeld gave him 170,000.[30]
Technology was the linchpin of the whole program. Just as technology made it possible for Batman to take on the entirety of Gotham’s criminal underworld by himself, it was technology that allowed the Bush administration to claim with a straight face that the United States could fight a war spanning the globe without conscripting a large number of its citizens into service. It was technology that made it possible for the United States to topple one of the world’s most stable military dictatorships over the course of just a few weeks in the spring of 2003, and it was technology that let the country’s civilians believe that their lives at home would not change at all while people around the world bore the brunt of America’s fury and vengeance. The media emphasized the military’s technological prowess at every opportunity. The Iraq War began on the evening of May 19, 2003, in the United States, with a televised countdown to invasion leading up to President Bush announcing a full-scale military assault. The United States then launched several cruise missiles from warships floating in the Persian Gulf, attempting a series of “decapitation strikes” that would take out Saddam Hussein, members of his inner circle, and important figures within the Iraqi military hierarchy. The strikes only managed to kill dozens of civilians[31]—as in the run-up to the war, Americans struggled to distinguish good intelligence from bad—but that wasn’t known in real time, and on CNN the strikes looked like a prelude to the massive bombardment that was to follow, live and literally in prime time. When the full “shock and awe” campaign then failed to begin that evening, the network’s anchors, audibly puzzled and disappointed, passed the time by describing the precision and sophistication of America’s weapons. Digital images of planes and missiles appeared on the screen, accompanied by excessively detailed information on their technical capabilities. The Nighthawk stealth fighter, viewers learned, had a top speed of 650 miles per hour and a range of 690 miles, and it was equipped with “various laser-guided bombs and GBU-27 ‘Bunker Busters.’ ” The Tomahawk cruise missiles that had just been launched into Iraq used “terrain contour matching, digital scene matching, and GPS to reach targets.” And the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber had a range of more than 7,000 miles to accompany its “$2.1 billion price tag.” No planes had been used at all in the evening’s attacks, and CNN didn’t explain what “terrain contour matching” meant, but the point was to impress, not to inform. In the digital renderings, the planes and missiles were literally haloed in golden light.[32]
Digital and information technologies were developing at a rapid pace. The dot-com bubble was in the process of bursting on September 11, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange falling by more than 75 percent between March 2000 and October 2002.[33] But the five years of euphoria that preceded the crash had injected wild amounts of capital into Silicon Valley, and both the military and the defense manufacturers who built the weapons were eager to adopt the tech companies’ new toys as quickly as they could. Less than a month after the attacks, with the Pentagon preparing to receive billions of dollars’ worth of emergency funding from Congress, the Defense Department’s shopping lists were making the rounds. Bombs would be “smarter,” surveillance systems “more sensitive,” and communications networks “more sophisticated” than before. “Small groups of foot soldiers”—that is, Special Forces units—“sent into Afghanistan on commando missions” would strap themselves into “prototype soldier helmets” that featured “a built-in video camera, an infrared camera for night vision, a microphone for voice communications and a display unit linked to global positioning satellites to show the soldiers’ location, that of fellow soldiers and of suspected enemy positions.” As these beta testers for Google Maps closed in on the enemy, they would be armed with “modified M-4” rifles equipped with “lasers for calculating distance and a thermal imaging system for seeing a heat-producing target through smoke or foliage.” And that’s not to mention the many forward leaps in “covert communications systems” or “easily concealed sensors” that the military wasn’t willing to discuss for fear of losing the element of surprise. “All I’d say is that there have been big improvements,” one defense industry CEO said. “We’re a lot more prepared than most people realize.”[34] Even more tantalizing than the new military hardware the public could see was the hardware that beckoned just out of view. The country was excited to see this twenty-first-century military deployed against Afghanistan’s “ancient traditions of guerrilla warfare.”[35]
The new technologies also enabled fantasies of a more humane kind of war. In the new century, precision targeting would make civilian casualties, which the military had long since euphemized as “collateral damage,” a thing of the past. Three months after the invasion of Afghanistan, The New York Times recounted a “pivotal moment in the siege of Kunduz.” A commander with Afghanistan’s opposition forces had “pleaded” that the United States launch air strikes against a mass of Taliban fighters who were assembling along a ridge outside the city. He asked that the attack take place within twenty-four hours. The Americans needed less than twenty minutes:
A Special Operations ground spotter immediately radioed an American command center in Saudi Arabia, which ordered a nearby B-52 to rain 16 cluster bombs on the enemy forces. Flying at 30,000 feet, the bomber never saw its prey. But the spotter used a laser pointer to guide the bombs, which carried new devices that kept them on course through buffeting winds, enabling them to spew antiarmor bomblets with deadly precision.
This was just one episode of many. America, the Times wrote, was conducting “a relentlessly accurate bombardment…day and night, under clear and cloudy skies alike.” The effects on enemy morale were said to be devastating. Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners had “confirmed that the precise bombing from planes they often could not see or hear broke the will of battle-hardened troops.” At the same time, the campaign’s uncanny accuracy was keeping civilian casualties to a minimum, helping the United States “maintain the support of friendly Islamic nations.” “This is a new pattern of warfare,” an Air Force historian explained. “There’s not that image of uncaring, rampant destruction.”[36]
Peering further into the future, cheerleaders for the technological revolution could envision a time when Americans themselves would suffer no casualties at all. As robots started to replace human workers in the manufacturing and services industries, it was thought that they could also relieve human bodies of war’s many burdens. The machines were coming to the battlefield. P. W. Singer, the author of a 2009 book on new military technologies, quoted a Times article on the work performed by robots assisting with the rescue mission at Ground Zero. The headline read “Agile in a Crisis, Robots Show Their Mettle”:
These rescuers are unaffected by the carnage, dust and smoke that envelop the remains of the World Trade Center. They are immune to the fatigue and heartbreak that hang in the air. They are, literally, robots: small, mobile machines that whir, blink and burrow alongside the emergency workers and rescue dogs, combing the debris.[37]
Looking at the explosive growth of the military and homeland security budgets since September 11, Singer thought it was only a matter of time before robots took up combat positions. He wrote about a four-legged robot that could “run a four-minute mile for five hours, while carrying 100 pounds,” yet was “agile enough to fit through a doorway and go up stairs,” speculating that its manufacturer “may well be on its way to becoming the Ford or GE of the twenty-first century.”[38] Profiling a second company, which he found to be “even more revolutionary” than the first, Singer described a robot called SWORDS, “akin to a Transformers toy made just for soldiers.” SWORDS was capable of carrying “pretty much any weapon that weighs under three hundred pounds, ranging from an M-16 rifle and .50-caliber machine gun to a 40mm grenade launcher or an antitank rocket launcher.”[39] Soldiers of the future, “much like a football quarterback,” would “call the ‘play’ for robots to carry out, but like the players on the field, the robots would have the autonomy to change what they do if the situation shifts.”[40] All of this would keep American humans out of harm’s way. “Our major role is to sanitize the battlefield,” one airman told Singer, to “make sure our own guys aren’t walking into danger.”[41]
In the early 2000s, however, robot armies were just a twinkle in a defense executive’s eye. For the time being, real soldiers would still have to put their bodies on the line. As the invasion of Afghanistan commenced and the pursuit of bin Laden pushed toward the Tora Bora cave complex in the White Mountains, the media increasingly turned its attention to one kind of soldier in particular. From the doughboys of World War I to the Top Gun fighter pilots of the 1980s, the American public had a long tradition of distilling the country’s vast military apparatus down into representative individual types. In the war on terror, it was Special Forces—the Army Rangers, Marine Force RECON units, and Navy SEALs, among others—who came to stand for the military as a whole. The Special Forces represented everything Rumsfeld and his fellow RMA believers wanted the U.S. military to be. The machines might be taking on some of the war’s grunt work, but there were certain crucial tasks that still required an incredibly skillful human touch. Trained to within an inch of their lives (deaths during training exercises are rather common), each Special Forces soldier represented an astonishing investment in a single unit of human capital. They worked in small groups of a dozen or so, and they moved quickly and in silence. They were the first units into Afghanistan, deployed in secret several weeks before the bombing campaign began, and when the Army withdrew its conventional troops in 2015, it was the Green Berets who stayed behind.[42] Journalists embedded with the chatty recruits of the Army’s regular units could feel the quiet intensity of Special Forces soldiers emanating from the darkened corners of barracks and mess halls. Tucking into a dinner of macaroni and ground beef at the Army base outside Kandahar, one reporter was able to identify a table of operatives “by their dusty beards and deep suntans. Shunning press attention, those soldiers were back from extended operations in faraway villages, largely to gather intelligence.”[43]
As to the details of what the Special Forces did once their helicopters took off and disappeared, who could say? Either the public found out after the mission was complete, as when SEAL Team Six raided bin Laden’s compound and killed him in 2011, or it didn’t find out at all. Journalists more accustomed to the government announcing the deployment of regular troops or reservists found themselves arriving in Kurdish-controlled Iraq or rural Afghanistan and learning that some platoon of Army Rangers had already been in country for weeks. Less than a month after the beginning of the Iraq War, there were nearly ten thousand Special Forces operating “in nearly every corner of the country and penetrating even the streets of Baghdad.” With little to no access to these elite soldiers and their commanders, reporters were at the mercy of the military’s public relations machine, but Special Forces so fascinated audiences back home that it wasn’t hard for the Army to get its press releases published in major newspapers essentially unchanged. A long article published in The New York Times in April 2003 under the headline “Covert Units Conduct a Campaign Invisible Except for the Results” must have pleased the top brass. It was still early days in Iraq, yet the Special Forces were well ahead of the curve, doing everything from “organizing Kurdish militia in rugged northern Iraq” to “scouting for suspected Scud missile launchers in the vacant west” (these were Boone-like figures from the outset, lone hunters confronting a hostile wilderness). Though their campaign was “largely invisible,” it was “remarkable for its breadth and complexity.” The RMA obsession with information and networks made its de rigueur appearance, with “information from the spies, analysts, surveillance planes and satellites of the intelligence agencies…linked more directly than ever before to commandos on the ground.” Masters of their terrain, commandos had “conducted reconnaissance,” “cleared mines,” “carried out precise strikes in urban settings,” and occasionally played their “huge trump card: American air power.” They trained Kurdish forces in the north as well, using their “mortar specialists” to help the Peshmerga “tighten down their shot groups,” in the words of one commander. In sum, according to one brigadier general, these units were “doing things that have never been done on such a large scale and have produced phenomenal results.”
In a sense, they were better than robots. Special Forces combined the best of human courage, training, and adaptability with the sorts of advanced digital technology that wouldn’t make it into civilians’ consumer goods for years. That’s why so few of them could accomplish so much. “We are able to use a fairly small force to leverage an incredible amount of technology,” one military officer said, “to bring that technology to bear on the battlefield.”[44] This is part of what made them unnerving. Even in street clothes, Special Forces soldiers intimidate. Unlike America’s regular troops and reservists, many of whom flew off to combat out of shape and with no more than basic training,[45] Special Forces, to a man, were awesome physical specimens: tall, bearded, and heavily tattooed, with muscles like wrapped steel. At home, they were notorious for starting (and finishing) bar fights. Sheathe men like that in the most elegant and lethal technology there is, and you have a truly frightening spectacle, a band of Greek heroes moving through the night, bristling with deadly weapons and encased in flexible black armor, with night-vision goggles protruding out of their faces like alien eyestalks. The Times reporters picked up on the fear these soldiers inspired, although they didn’t address it directly. They described the commandos working in “furtive teams,” “creeping in larger numbers toward Baghdad,” on a “hunt” for key members of Saddam’s regime. The military itself called them “the black side” of its campaigns.[46] These were not people one would want to encounter in a bad mood back home, but that was part of the appeal. They wouldn’t have been the warriors America needed unless they also exuded menace everywhere they went.
Not content to rely on the goodwill of journalists to publicize the appeal of the twenty-first-century soldier, the military also put its considerable resources to work on getting the message out directly. Since 1980, “Be All You Can Be” had been the Army’s primary recruiting slogan, a good choice for that decade’s obsession with individual achievement. In 2001, however, that slogan was changed to better reflect the way that technology could now amplify a single recruit’s powers beyond all previous reckoning. The first commercial produced to advertise this new version of America’s military debuted during a broadcast of the network sitcom Friends. It opened on a lone soldier running across the desert. “Even though there are 1,045,690 soldiers just like me, I am my own force,” the soldier said. “With technology, with training, with support, who I am has become better than who I was….The might of the U.S. Army doesn’t lie in numbers. It lies in me.” The new tagline flashed on the screen at the end: “An Army of One.”[47] At one point during the soldier’s sprint across the Mojave, he ran past another group of recruits going in the opposite direction, like Batman tracking the Joker while the bumbling Gotham police scurry in the other direction in pursuit of some bogus lead. The Army would lean into the superhero associations as time passed, eventually producing an ad campaign in which different kinds of soldiers were reimagined as a camo-clad Avengers squad. A woman working on encryption appeared as “The Code Fighter,” a communications specialist became “The Wavelength,” and a chef, with a halo of knives rotating behind him and flying onions falling under his blade, became “The Replenisher.”[48]
The stories that appeared on-screen in between the commercials also bore the military’s direct influence, to the point that some of them functioned as advertisements in their own right. The Department of Defense consulted on Hollywood films and network TV productions during the war on terror, lending its equipment and expertise to producers in exchange for the ability to demand changes to the script if a given film didn’t paint the military in a sufficiently rosy light. The scale of this involvement could be breathtaking; the Pentagon provided more than a billion dollars’ worth of equipment, shooting locations, and uniformed extras for director Michael Bay to use in Transformers, an action blockbuster based on a line of children’s toys from the 1980s.[49]
Among the military’s most successful collaborations during this period was its work on Iron Man, the first installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is now the most profitable movie franchise in history. Iron Man is where the technologically enhanced Special Forces super-trooper took on his most hyperbolic form. Played by Robert Downey Jr. in three separate movies released between 2008 and 2013, Iron Man is Tony Stark, a billionaire genius playboy who runs an international technology conglomerate focusing on weapons and security. Stark first appears on the screen in Afghanistan, drinking whiskey in the back of a Humvee while rolling through Kunar province. He is celebrating the successful demonstration of his firm’s new super-missile, the Jericho, so named because, like the Israelites in the book of Joshua, it can bring the walls of a great city crashing to the earth. Stark’s audience of Army officers had been thoroughly impressed, especially when he sweetened the deal by promising to throw in a refrigerated bar cart with every purchase of $500 million or more. In the Humvee, he is flirting with the female soldiers up front and fielding selfie requests when the convoy is ambushed by terrorists, who take Stark prisoner. Trapped in an underground cave complex, Stark escapes by building a prototype Iron Man suit out of the scrap metal he finds lying around, though not before discovering that his company’s weapons have fallen into the terrorists’ hands. The suit is heavy and cumbersome, but it is also powerful, immune to the terrorists’ machine guns, armed with flamethrowers, and capable of flight. When he is safely returned to the States, the first thing Stark requests is “an American cheeseburger.”[50]
Then he builds the real suit. Made out of gold and titanium and painted with red highlights, the suit can shoot lasers out of its hands and precision-guided missiles out of its shoulders. Its visor includes an augmented-reality display that keeps Stark informed on enemy positions, damage sustained, power levels, and biometrics. It moves at blinding speed and lends Stark superhuman strength. Iron Man includes a thin plot about the dangers of weapons proliferation, but the movie’s focus, the reason people watch it, is Tony’s relationship with the suit. Although it encases Stark entirely and clanks loudly against anything it touches, the suit does not weigh him down or restrict his movement in any way. It never gets hot inside, nor is there any risk that some malfunction could injure its human pilot. The operating fantasy here—and I mean “fantasy” in the crude sense, as in “something that doesn’t exist in reality”—is one of a perfect, seamless integration of technology and flesh, of technology that only augments its user’s human capabilities while eliminating his vulnerabilities. This is the RMA fantasy too, the idea that the right mix of equipment could remove danger, injury, weakness, and death from the American soldier’s experience of war. The three Iron Man movies are fascinated by how easy it is for Stark to inhabit his invention. Each one pauses at some point to watch him put it on: Dexterous robot arms emerge out of the floor, or a walkway, or even just a briefcase, and build the suit around his outstretched limbs.[51] Armor plates lock into place, screws tighten, and Downey’s expressive face disappears behind a stern mask with two glowing eyes and a horizontal slit for a mouth. Inside, Stark is both protected and deadly. As he will say later while testifying in front of a skeptical congressional panel, “The suit and I are one.”[52]
Batman and Iron Man were perfect vehicles for America’s militaristic fantasies because they weren’t real people. But every time the media or government tried to imbue an actual soldier with those same fantasies, something went wrong.
In May 2002, Pat Tillman, a talented safety playing football for the Arizona Cardinals, declined a $3.6 million contract offer and enlisted to train as an Army Ranger. “My great-grandfather was at Pearl Harbor, and a lot of my family have…fought in wars,” he said. “I haven’t really done a damn thing as far as laying myself on the line like that.”[53] He was a gift to the war effort, an ideal American who ticked every box. He was white, handsome, square-jawed, married to his teenage sweetheart, strong enough to deal out “bone-rattling hits” on the field of play, and smart enough to maintain a high grade point average in marketing at Arizona State University. “All the girls loved him,” a classmate said of Tillman’s high school days, “and all the guys wanted to be him.” He had once been charged with felony assault as a teenager, but that could be excused on the grounds that he was “defending a friend,” and he did not hesitate to take responsibility for his actions, pleading guilty and serving time on a “work farm” the summer before he started college.[54] Though Tillman refused interviews about his decision to enlist “for fear that [his] decision will be interpreted as a publicity stunt,”[55] friends said that September 11 had spurred him to action.[56] That he wanted to join an elite Special Forces unit only made it better. The media reported admiringly on the “nearly intolerable” training endured by aspiring Rangers “in conditions of swamps, jungles, mountains….Rangers are sent to places where the danger is the worst.”[57]
Tillman went to Iraq for the initial invasion less than a year after enlisting, and soon after that he was redeployed to Afghanistan. He was killed on April 22, 2004. The military said that while Tillman had been “patrolling one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan,” a region near the border with Pakistan that “al-Qaeda and Taliban forces [were] known to infiltrate,” his unit had been “ambushed by anti-coalition forces.” The Rangers had been on “special alert” in the weeks leading up to the ambush, but the terrorists had found Tillman anyway, leaving his wife to mourn rather than celebrate their second wedding anniversary in a month’s time.[58] Having now sacrificed his life on top of the comforts of his athletic career, Tillman became a national martyr, a secular saint. Here is the beginning of one obituary published shortly after his death:
When nobody was around, Arizona State University football star Pat Tillman would climb the 10-story light tower at Sun Devil Stadium, certainly without permission, just to gaze at the buttes, the desert, the glow of Phoenix—and ponder the state of the world. A roughneck with a philosophical bent, Tillman never followed convention.[59]
One finds every element of the mythical frontier hero in that paragraph: the homegrown philosophizing, the communion with nature and the universe, the quiet individualism, and the refusal to ask for permission to do what needs doing. The obituary describes the American Southwest but just as easily summons up the image of Tillman surveilling the Khyber Pass from a mountain overlook, scanning a different landscape for signs of danger with his gun at the ready. His death sanctified the tale that journalists and his former employers at the National Football League started building around him the day he enlisted. No longer able to fight himself, Tillman was now an example to future soldiers who would retrace his path to the battlefield.
It wasn’t until after the family held its nationally televised memorial service for Tillman that the Army admitted its story was false. Tillman’s platoon had been patrolling along a canyon road when a Humvee broke down, forcing the unit to split into two groups. The first, which included Tillman, had made it down the canyon road “without incident,” but the second group following behind encountered enemy fire. Tillman’s group circled back and took up a position from which they could support their comrades as they attempted to get out of the ambush, but as the second group exited the canyon, it mistook Tillman’s group for the enemy and opened fire. Tillman was killed by Americans, shot in the head three times from less than thirty feet away.[60] Making matters worse, the Army had known the real circumstances of Tillman’s death almost from the very beginning but hid the truth from Tillman’s family and the public. Tillman’s fellow soldiers had burned his armor and uniform in an attempt to cover up what happened, and senior officers had recommended Tillman for a posthumous Purple Heart and Silver Star, as well as promotion to corporal. Officers even ordered the other members of Tillman’s unit to lie to his family about what happened at the funeral.[61] What started as a propaganda coup for the government and the war effort turned into a shameful, drawn-out embarrassment for an Army that had killed one of its own and then lied about it for favorable press coverage.
This kind of thing happened several times as America’s fantasies about its super-soldiers collided with reality. Journalists, Pentagon flacks, or politicians looking to keep pro-war sentiment at a rolling boil repeatedly latched on to some story of grace under fire or patriotic sacrifice—almost always involving one or another branch of the Special Forces—only to watch those stories crumble under the pressure of even mildly curious scrutiny. In the spring of 2003, the nineteen-year-old Army private Jessica Lynch was seriously injured in a car crash near Nasiriyah and then captured by Iraqi forces. A week later, the Pentagon announced that special ops teams had recovered Lynch in an operation the military described as a daring triumph, the first successful rescue of an American POW since World War II. At its press conference, the Pentagon screened a five-minute video of the rescue. Reporters saw the special operations team huddling over maps as they planned the operation and then loading up their trucks and rolling off into the desert. A night-vision camera then captured those same trucks pulling up at the hospital entrance and disgorging soldiers, who hurried inside as a man got on the radio to say, “This is impressive.” The video then cut to inside the hospital, where soldiers crowded around the trembling Lynch’s bed, gave her a flag to hug, and then whisked her back to safety.[62]
The Pentagon spokesman said that Lynch had been stabbed and shot in the attack, and that while captive she had been slapped and interrogated.[63] Eventually, speculation about the interrogations turned into a belief that Lynch had been tortured. “Those people—the Iraqi captors—were barbaric,” an anonymous source told People magazine. “I have no doubt that with her injuries, and with what they had planned for her, she was going to die.”[64] Tiny, blond, and white, Lynch looked like exactly the kind of American who might get tortured by savages, and the media emphasized her helplessness at every opportunity, glossing over the fact that she was a trained soldier as quickly as possible. As Susan Faludi wrote of the coverage, “She was said to be ‘clutching a teddy bear.’ She was said to favor applesauce and steamed carrots. She was said to be dreaming of washing her hair and styling it with the curling iron she ‘calls her magic wand.’ She was said to be ‘asking for her mother.’ ”[65] Lynch’s biographer went so far as to claim she had been anally raped, although the “records” he examined didn’t specify whether the Iraqis had “assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead.”[66] Lynch had no memory of any such assaults, and she told her biographer that she “definitely did not want that in there.”[67] He included the claim anyway, and he explained Lynch’s inability to remember her sexual trauma by hypothesizing that her conscious mind, overwhelmed by the horror of the ordeal, had repressed it.[68]
The real story of Lynch’s captivity was more mundane than her biographer’s lurid fantasy of savagery and violated innocence. She was neither shot nor stabbed. The injuries Lynch sustained were consistent with exactly the kind of serious car wreck she had experienced. She was not mistreated but cared for. Her Iraqi doctors set her broken bones, used up some of the hospital’s meager supplies of specialized equipment to treat her, and found her American-style food to eat when she didn’t like the standard hospital fare. Lynch remembered one of her nurses, who sang to her, with special fondness. At one point, her doctors had even tried to physically return Lynch to the Army, loading her into an ambulance and driving over to a nearby U.S. military outpost. The soldiers there opened fire on the car as it approached, and the driver had to turn around.
While the revelation of the truth about Lynch’s completely gratuitous “rescue” didn’t provoke the same level of outrage as the Tillman cover-up, several other wrinkles that eventually came to light were controversial. Foremost among these was the fact that Lynch was one of two women soldiers who had been taken hostage that night. The second, Shoshana Johnson, was a single mother and the first Black woman to become an American POW. She, too, was returned safely home, but she received none of the media fanfare that attended Lynch’s rescue. Also ignored was Lori Piestewa, a soldier who died fighting in the ambush that ended with Lynch’s capture. She was the first Native American woman to die fighting for the United States in combat, as well as the first woman killed in the Iraq War. Lynch made a point of repeating that Piestewa was the real hero of the ambush, but that had little effect on a news media drawn to the story of an innocent white woman thrown into the lions’ den. Ultimately, Lynch testified before Congress and roundly criticized the distortions to which her story had been subjected, and another effort to shoehorn the inglorious realities of war into a mythological template (helpless blond white woman saved by strong men) ended with a queasy, uncomfortable ambivalence.
As the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman stories filled newspaper columns across the country, another legend, more or less unknown outside the military, was constructing itself in Iraq. Chris Kyle was a sniper for the Navy SEALs. He served four tours of duty in the Iraq War, during which he racked up 160 “confirmed kills.” In the words of his 2012 memoir, American Sniper, this made him “the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history.” Kyle’s memoir was one of several published by Navy SEALs and other former military officers around the same time, as a handful of veterans tried to kick-start their postwar lives with infusions of cash and fame. American Sniper spent the better part of a year on the New York Times bestseller list, and unlike Tillman or Lynch, Kyle was an enthusiastic participant in his own mythmaking. If Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch found their respective analogues in Daniel Boone and the pious Mary Rowlandson, Chris Kyle was Davy Crockett, cheerfully meting out death across the wilderness. Crockett, one literary historian wrote, “was a hunter rather than a farmer, and the lust for killing was in his blood. With his pack of hounds he slaughtered with amazing efficiency….His hundred and five bears in a single season, his six deer shot in one day while pursuing other game serve to explain why the rich hunting grounds of the Indians were swept so quickly bare of game by the white invaders.”[69]
Kyle didn’t become a legend because of his lethality as such. Any American who shoved bombs out of a plane during World War II or Vietnam likely had greater quantities of blood on his hands. But Air Force bombers are unskilled labor in comparison to snipers. Kyle appealed to the public because he was recognizably a hunter, and in Iraq he hunted Iraqis, or “savages,” as he insisted on calling them. “Savage, despicable evil,” he wrote. “There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.”[70] To much of the American right wing, he was the ideal soldier, a one-man army always ready to discuss the intricacies of his gear. “In 2004,” he wrote, “I brought over a Springfield TRP Operator, which used a .45-caliber round. It had a 1911 body style, with custom grips and a rail system that let me add a light and laser combo. Black, it had a bull barrel and was an excellent gun.”[71] A Christian with a crusader tattoo on his arm (“in red, for blood”), Kyle did not hesitate to describe the war in religious terms.[72] Though he had “never known that much about Islam” before the war, he “also knew that Christianity had evolved from the Middle Ages. We don’t kill people because they’re a different religion.”[73] Where other soldiers might recite catechism about personal sacrifice and liberating the Middle East, Kyle’s understanding of the job was simpler: “My country sent me out there so that bullshit wouldn’t make its way back to our shores. I never once fought for the Iraqis. I could give a flying fuck about them.”[74]
In Clint Eastwood’s film about Kyle’s life, the climactic battle scene ends with the hero calling home in tears. He misses his family, and he has finally had enough of war. “I’m ready to come home,” he says.[75] This, however, appears to have been an invention on Eastwood’s part, perhaps one designed to make Kyle more sympathetic. In the memoir, Kyle’s battle hunger is never sated. “I loved what I did,” he wrote. “I still do. If circumstances were different—if my family didn’t need me—I’d be back in a heartbeat. I’m not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun.”[76] He meant “fun” literally, in the manner of games. “We had so many targets,” he wrote, “we started asking ourselves, what weapons have we not used to kill them? No pistol kill yet? You have to get at least one.”[77] The Iraq War killed roughly 250,000 civilians,[78] but Kyle insisted that he’d never killed someone who didn’t have it coming. “Everyone I shot was evil,” he wrote. “They all deserved to die.”[79]
So long as he was on the battlefield—or at least within several hundred yards of it, peering down the sight of a long rifle—Kyle felt as though nothing could touch him. “I always seemed more vulnerable at home,” he wrote. “After every deployment, something would happen to me, usually during training. I broke a toe, a finger, all sorts of little injuries. Overseas, on deployment, in the war, I seemed invincible.”[80] This feeling turned out to be prescient. Kyle became vulnerable in several different ways once he returned to the States. Separated from the fellow soldiers who saw him as a warrior king—his nickname in Iraq was Legend—Kyle had to deal with journalists who started to point out that some of his stories were either highly unlikely or verifiably false. Kyle once claimed, for instance, that he and another man had driven down to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They’d seen reports of looting on television, and they wanted to help keep the peace. Kyle said that while standing on top of the Superdome, the stadium where the NFL’s New Orleans Saints play their home games, he and his companion set up their rifles and shot dozens of people who they thought were making trouble down on the ground. No reports of a sniper going on a killing spree at the Superdome ever emerged to corroborate this story.[81] If it is some consolation that a decorated Navy SEAL didn’t actually murder victims of a natural disaster, that consolation is tempered by the question that naturally follows: What kind of decorated Navy SEAL thinks it would reflect well on him for people to think he did?
This kind of reputational vulnerability might be par for the course for someone publishing a bestselling memoir, but Kyle was also physically vulnerable in ways he failed to anticipate. After his final return home, he took to spending time with other veterans who were struggling with the adjustment to postwar life. In February 2013, one of these veterans shot and killed Kyle at a Texas gun range. He was hit from behind, and his gun was still holstered when he died. The funeral service was held nine days later at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington. People waved flags over the interstate as Kyle’s body was taken to an Austin cemetery.
That Kyle was killed by a fellow veteran rather than an insurgent from Sadr City made his death disturbing rather than simply tragic. What are you supposed to think when the hero and his murderer are both products of the same institutions, the same training, the same system? Whatever the answer to that question was, it was not to seek revenge on the mentally ill veteran, because during the war on terror criticizing veterans has been more or less forbidden. This was a crucial part of America’s post-9/11 militarism. If soldiers, particularly Special Forces soldiers, had been turned into symbols of the war effort as a whole, and if criticizing those soldiers was prohibited, then criticizing the war itself was prohibited as well. Politicians, shortsighted or stupid officers back in Washington, and the Army’s indifference toward the welfare of its soldiers were all legitimate targets, but veterans themselves are the closest thing the country has to a sanctified class (as one slogan has it, “Love the warrior, hate the war”).[82] In the early 2000s, critics of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could be disarmed by accusations that they did not “support the troops,” and as of this writing in 2023 most commercial airlines still allow U.S. military personnel to board planes early, just after the disabled and parents with little kids but before everyone else. Too excessive to just be a simple expression of gratitude, the praise and thanks showered on veterans also helped to fend off the specter of Vietnam. Injured and mentally ill veterans of that war were often either left to rot in the fetid conditions of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, or else abandoned to addiction and homelessness. The country felt ashamed of Vietnam—of both the war itself and how the country treated those who fought it. After September 11, Americans made an anxious and mostly tacit pledge that its soldiers would not be mistreated this time around. (When The Washington Post revealed in 2007 that veterans were still being neglected at Walter Reed, it prompted an outcry and congressional hearings.)[83]
Towns held parades when their soldiers returned. Politicians invoked their courage at the slightest opportunity, with the invocation becoming almost mandatory if they were giving a speech about foreign policy. Television networks interrupted the Super Bowl and other sporting events to show live video feeds of troops gathered around their own televisions, tuning in to the big game from overseas. The troops had not forgotten about life back home, and life back home was not going to forget about them. There was always a formulaic quality to these expressions of gratitude, an element of recitation or ritual. The most well-known formula, of course, was “Thank you for your service.”
Curiously, one of these stock expressions used the vocabulary of finance. On Memorial Day in 2008, President Bush spoke at Arlington National Cemetery and invited the country to “pay tribute to all who have fallen—a tribute never equal to the debt they are owed.”[84] On Veterans Day five years later, President Obama appeared at Arlington and affirmed that “we join as one people to honor a debt we can never fully repay.”[85] This phrase is so common that it is easy not to think about it, but it takes only a brief pause to realize how strange it is: In the words of one ethnographer who interviewed soldiers on a military base, “to insist that we cannot repay a debt is, essentially, to default on it.”[86] And as a second ethnographer pointed out (ethnographers spend a lot of time thinking about debt), what kind of debt are we talking about when the debtors are the only ones insisting it exists?[87] Over and over, the United States told war on terror veterans that it would never give them what they were owed, with the unsettling implication that it knew it would default on the debt when it took out the loan in the first place.
Veterans themselves were uncomfortable with this praise, and sometimes they tried to undermine it. Having to field constant expressions of gratitude from strangers while you’re picking up groceries or sitting down at a restaurant is annoying. One soldier who was rehabilitating from his injuries at Walter Reed told a researcher about a conversation he’d had with a man his family was visiting. The soldier recalled, “I said to him, ‘You’re a carpenter, right? Well, imagine that you went out to a job and built some cabinets and all of a sudden on your way home, everyone was lining up and waving flags and saluting.’ ”[88] The same researcher also looked through a storage room holding gifts that grateful citizens had sent to Walter Reed for the soldiers. The gifts could be divided into two categories. First, there were daily essentials: diapers, toothpaste, socks, bottled water, Girl Scout cookies. These the soldiers were happy to have, and the closet’s supplies often needed replenishing. “But the objects that most clearly exuded others’ expressions of patriotic gratitude,” the researcher wrote, “the painstakingly crafted red, white, and blue lap blankets and the saddle bags made of down-homey denim that could be Velcroed onto crutches, these things languished in their boxes and bins.”[89]
One soldier, a veteran named Peter, took a more direct approach when a tour group walked up to him one day at Walter Reed. The VA man leading the group asked Peter if he would answer some questions. Peter agreed, but his answers were clipped and unfriendly, barely answers at all:
The man from the VA finally seemed to take the hint. He tried to close the awkward interaction, smiling politely and saying, “Well, you’re fighting for our freedom, so thank you for your service.” But before he could move on to Alec, Peter jumped in: “And your job.” He said, “If we didn’t get blown up, you wouldn’t have a job.” A nervous laughter rippled through the group of onlookers in the pause that followed. The man from the VA replied, “Well, yes, we prefer if you didn’t get blown up.”[90]
Peter wanted to make the group uncomfortable, and he did so by shining a spotlight on the thing they most wanted to ignore. He pointed to the fact that the tour group’s gratitude and friendly curiosity and little presents, all of which did more to help them feel good about themselves than it did to help the patients at Walter Reed, depended on his being vulnerable—to injury and death, of course, but also to mental illness, drug addiction, and permanent physical disability. In just the first four years of the Iraq War, the military spent more than $23 million on prescription drugs for traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), two of the most common diagnoses given to those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s now estimated that about a fifth of returning soldiers experience PTSD, and by 2010 suicide rates in the military had surpassed those in the rest of the United States.[91]
Superhero movies and splashy newspaper pieces about advances in military technology made it seem as though America’s soldiers were invulnerable, and in a relative sense they basically were: From 2004 to 2009, more than twenty-seven Iraqis died for every American killed in the war.[92] But America did not fight the war on terror in a relative sense. Starting on September 12, 2001, it was fought overseas, thousands of miles away, which meant Americans could not look at the casket of a dead Marine, see the twenty-seven dead Iraqis in the background, and understand that the United States was getting the much better end of the exchange. All Americans could see when a soldier came off the flight home in a box was that an American was dead.
The body armor, reinforced Humvees, and other technological advances that were supposed to guarantee soldiers’ safety at the war’s outset actually made them more vulnerable in some ways. The armored vehicles sent to Iraq and Afghanistan in the early stages of those wars were good at protecting soldiers from small-arms fire coming from the street or a balcony, but their wide, flat undersides meant they absorbed the full force of any improvised explosive device (IED) that detonated underneath them, with devastating results for those inside. More soldiers survived these kinds of attacks than in prior wars, thanks to both improved body armor and advances in the logistics of military medical treatment. Medics could reach soldiers and begin treating their wounds more quickly than ever before, which saved many lives. The flip side of these improvements, however, was that soldiers became more likely to come home with awful and complicated injuries requiring months or even years of treatment and recovery that in many cases came with the risk of opiate addiction. In Vietnam or Desert Storm or even the Balkans, a significant percentage of these soldiers simply would have died. They came home from the war on terror, but their mangled bodies testified to what it was that war did to people.
Civilians consuming a steady diet of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and action dramas about covert ops had a hard time reconciling this reality with myths about the invincibility of the country’s armed forces. But soldiers themselves, who lived with their own vulnerability day to day, had a more practical understanding of what it meant. Don White, a Marine who served three tours in Afghanistan, was once asked whether he felt that his high-tech equipment really did keep him safe. He answered quickly, and his tone was matter-of-fact: “No.” There was a pause, and then he burst out laughing:
So, to start, you get issued your protective gear, your personal protective gear. You get issued a whole gamut of that stuff. You get flame-retardant gloves, you get a flame-retardant uniform (depending on where you went). You get a flame-retardant face mask, you get a helmet that’s designed to absorb impact if you bang your head against something. But the helmet that you wear is only rated to stop a 9-millimeter bullet. The Afghans are shooting at you with a 7.62 rifle bullet. It’ll go right through that helmet. And then you’re in this armored Humvee, so people would get the sense that, “Oh, these guys are in this Humvee with three-quarter-inch armor all around it, and it’s invincible,” when the reality is a five-gallon jug full of some HME [homemade explosives] would blow one of those things fifty feet up into the air and kill everybody inside of it….You would get issued safety goggles; nobody wears safety goggles because it’s one hundred and twenty degrees in Afghanistan….You were given groin protecters, and no one ever wore that thing either, because it was made to stop shrapnel, but it was just this piece of Kevlar that hung down in front of your pelvis. And everybody knows that IEDs come from the ground up, so it literally does no good but cause chafing, so why would I wear it?
This perspective made White somewhat disdainful of the way civilians back home fetishized the technology that didn’t really keep him safe overseas. He returned to the United States and saw that Toyota was selling a “desert tan” version of its Tacoma pickup truck, “the same color scheme that we used in Afghanistan and Iraq.” He went to outdoor supply shops and saw hiking gear based on the same MOLLE system—for Modular Lightweight Load-Carrying Equipment—that troops used to customize how they carried their equipment on patrol. He saw men at shooting ranges with ludicrous accessories attached to their rifles. “They have things they don’t even know what they’re for,” he said. He had a special contempt for civilians who put canted sights on their guns:
A canted sight goes on the side of your rifle at a forty-five-degree angle. The purpose of that is if you’re using a scoped weapon, if that breaks, I have a secondary method to aim at my target. Or, if you have a multi-platform type of mission, like maybe you’re going to be doing something kind of long-range, but then eventually you’re going to need to clear a building, maybe you want a long-range sight and maybe you want a short-range sight. But the average person that says, “I have my AR-15 to protect my house,” why do you have this gun decked out like you’re gonna go kick down the door with Delta Force?
White understood that these accessories sold well because they were filling a psychological need. “There’s tactical baby bags,” he said, “I guess for guys who are too insecure in their masculinity to carry a normal diaper bag? They need to look like they’re going into a war zone.”[93]
Soldiers like Don White understood that civilians had turned them into bit players in a larger fantasy about the country’s invulnerability, and they resented it. The gifts and yellow ribbons and tributes at football games were always presented as simple acts of generosity, but the people making those gestures were taking at least as much as they gave. Civilians got the psychological reassurance they needed; so long as they could watch their countrymen storm through Baghdad on television and listen to people like Chris Kyle talk about how war made him feel invincible, they could get on a plane or go to the mall without having to worry about falling victim to al-Qaeda’s next attack. But the soldiers got nothing comparable in return; boarding an airplane before everyone else in coach wasn’t going to stop their nightmares or headaches, nor give them back their limbs. Back in 2003, when the prospect of a quick, clean victory in Iraq was still within the realm of plausibility, it might have been reasonable to hope that the war would end before the gap separating fantasy and reality became too obvious to ignore. But by the end of Bush’s second term, the war on terror was going badly on all fronts, and the cognitive dissonance was getting hard to ignore. Bin Laden had disappeared into the mountains, and more than four thousand Americans were dead in Iraq. The vulnerabilities of the country’s armed forces—and, by extension, of the country itself—were becoming more visible with each passing year. By the spring of 2008, more than 60 percent of Americans thought the invasion of Iraq had been a mistake.[94]
The final installments of the Batman and Iron Man trilogies were released in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Both movies saw their heroes struggling under the weight of their tasks. The Dark Knight Rises finds Bruce Wayne still spending his evenings patrolling Gotham in search of criminals. The job is taking a toll. His injuries are adding up, his family estate has burned to the ground, and his lifelong friend Rachel, with whom he was in love, has been killed. The city government continues to treat its savior with a mix of suspicion and small-minded ambivalence. “You’re not living,” his butler tells him. “You’re just waiting, hoping for things to go bad again.” He wants Master Bruce to leave Gotham, to give up Batman, to stop wasting his life defending a city that will never embrace him. But Bruce can’t find a good reason to leave. “There’s nothing out there for me,” he says.
Meanwhile, Tony Stark is also feeling bad. A major battle in New York City has left him with PTSD. He has anxiety attacks and screams in his sleep. “Nothing’s been the same since New York,” he tells his girlfriend, Pepper. “I can’t sleep. You go to bed, I come down here. I do what I know—I tinker. A threat is imminent, and I have to protect the one thing I can’t live without. That’s you.” But it’s precisely Tony’s vigilance that is driving Pepper away, and she is fed up. If Tony is going to keep putting himself in danger, she’s leaving. Soon after, Tony is attacked at home, without his Iron Man suit on. It is the first time in any of the Iron Man films that Stark appears to be genuinely, physically vulnerable, the first scene filmed so as to be frightening rather than exciting. Bruce and Tony have reached the limits of what technology can do to protect them. If they are ever going to have the normal lives and happy endings they deserve, they need to escape from their own alter egos.
Both films then arrive at the same ingenious solution. In The Dark Knight Rises, the faux-populist villain starts the countdown clock on a nuclear bomb hidden somewhere in Gotham. Batman locates the bomb in time but is unable to disarm it; one way or another, it is going to explode. Running out of time, Batman hitches the bomb to his Batplane, jumps in the cockpit, and flies out over the water, where the bomb detonates. Gotham is saved, but Batman is dead. A funeral is held on the Wayne family grounds, and the city, finally able to appreciate Batman now that he is gone, builds a statue to honor his sacrifice. Only at the very end is it revealed that Batman wasn’t in the plane when the bomb exploded. He turned on the autopilot and bailed out in time, and now he travels Europe with his girlfriend, Catwoman, in contented anonymity. Gotham’s final savior wasn’t the Batman at all, but a small, unmanned aircraft.
Over in the world of Iron Man 3, Tony Stark makes some modifications to his suit while processing his trauma on a journey through rural America. Having reflected on his life, he then jumps back into the fray to save a dozen people who have been sucked out of a hijacked plane and are falling to their deaths. He gathers them up like ducklings and safely deposits them back on the ground. Then he gets distracted for a moment and gets smashed to bits by an 18-wheel truck. But Stark wasn’t in the suit at all. It’s a drone now, not an exoskeleton, and Stark is its pilot, perfectly safe in his remote command center. In the film’s final battle, Stark summons the dozens of prototype suits he has built over the years, all remotely piloted by artificial intelligence, to fight for him. Like Bruce Wayne, he is able to put his fighting days behind him and enjoy his wealth and his woman in peace. If technology couldn’t protect the good guys while their bodies were physically present on the battlefield, it could still do the next best thing: Keep them off the battlefield altogether.
Both of these films were released during Barack Obama’s presidency. During his time in office, Obama steadily decreased the number of U.S. troops deployed around the world. Although he sent 70,000 additional troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, all but 10,000 had returned home by the beginning of 2015, and even the initial increase was more than balanced out by the drawdown of America’s military presence in Iraq. Troop levels there decreased from around 140,000 at the beginning of his first term to just 40,000 by the fall of 2011. As he pulled soldiers out of the line of fire, he replaced them with remotely piloted Predator drones, carrying out ten times as many drone attacks as his predecessor. Under the war on terror’s second commander in chief, drones bombed Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia more than five hundred times, with thousands of strikes in Afghanistan as well.
U.S. casualties dropped precipitously as a result of Obama’s shift, falling from an average of nearly two thousand per year between 2004 and 2008, to about fifteen hundred between 2009 and 2012, to fewer than a thousand after 2013.[95] In some respects, this shift lessened the degree to which the Obama administration could make a patriotic spectacle out of America’s militarism. While drones gave off the dark gleam of a techno-warfare future that had suddenly turned into a present-day reality, the original myths from which Americans derived their ideas about how the ideal soldier fought required that he be physically present on the battlefield, risking life and limb in theory even if his armor, weaponry, and air support made him all but invincible in practice. Drone pilots, by contrast, reminded people of nothing so much as gamers. But the shift had important benefits as well. Flag-draped coffins were the kind of thing that reliably made headlines, and in lowering the number of those boxes that newspaper editors could splash across their front pages each year, Obama made the war easier to ignore at home even as the fighting intensified in many parts of the world. That might have been cold comfort to those on the receiving end of a Predator drone’s payload—it hardly made a difference to an Afghan farmer whether their son was killed by a missile or a Green Beret with an M4A1 rifle—but at home, drones helped to save the lives that actually mattered.