Soon after it intervened in Afghanistan, the U.S. realized that another country in the Middle East could, for various reasons, pose a threat to the U.S. and arguably the whole world, namely Iraq. To ward off any danger that might come from Iraq, the U.S. invaded the country in 2003. This was the second war fought by the United States in Iraq, yet although its involvement in the First Gulf War seemed justified (particularly from a humanitarian perspective), this was not the case for the Iraq War. The invasion had the following goals: to remove Saddam Hussein from power (which was not done during the First Gulf War) and thus free the people of Iraq from their leader’s tyranny; to help secure Israel’s position in the region, at least so that it would need not to fear military attacks from Iraq; to build a model democratic state in the Arab world that could become an example for other Arab countries; to create a lasting peace in Iraq that would allow the U.S. to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia and thus stop the spread of anti-American ideology in the Middle East;1 to get access to oil. However, none of these aims can account for why the U.S. felt such urgency to invade Iraq in 2003. The U.S. government eventually listed two other, weightier reasons for starting the war: it claimed that Saddam’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that Iraq, acting with al Qaeda, was involved in the spread of terrorism. These assumptions turned out to be untrue.2 Moreover, “only after occupying Iraq” did President George W. Bush admit that Iraq had not been linked to 9/11.3 However, because 9/11 was considered too large an attack to have been planned and carried out by a limited group of terrorists, many in the U.S. administration were sure that Iraq was involved: “Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages [with Iraq] does not mean they don’t exist.”4 Following this view, U.S. intervention in Iraq was an act of “preemptive self-defense”—a measure taken to prevent possible future attacks and thus guarantee the security of U.S. citizens.5 Yet while the official term used in relation to the new policy was “preemption,” it was rather a policy of “prevention.” Barak Mendelsohn provides an important distinction between the two terms: “A preemptive strike takes place when a state has information about an imminent enemy attack. Once violent conflict has become inevitable, the role of a preemptive strike is to give the defender the initiative. On the other hand, prevention implies a case of general hostility between states that makes a violent conflict likely. Since it has no information on a specific plan to attack, the initiator of a preventive strike relies on the existence—or often, on his perception—of hostile intentions.”6 Not having provided a convincing justification for the intervention, the Bush administration adhered to “a new rule long favored by the United States,” according to which the country could carry out “attacks on countries that harbor terrorists.”7 As Bush formulated the policy, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”8 The U.S. considered Iraq its greatest threat and thus initiated one of its most senseless wars. To borrow from Bert: “The risk to go to war without pausing to investigate . . . was one of the key landmarks in the long list of mistakes in Washington’s Iraq policy.”9
The American public widely supported the invasion of Iraq for one reason: the trauma that 9/11 had caused the nation, as well as fear of future attacks, was so immense that the American people largely approved of the government’s decision to send troops to the Middle East to eradicate terrorists. One can therefore argue that the government simply took advantage of the situation and, as Bert puts it, “played this advantage to the maximum.”10 Moreover George H. W. Bush’s comparison of Saddam to Hitler in 1991 had only reinforced the image of the Iraqi president as evil, so the goal to free the oppressed from Saddam’s tyranny found wide support.11 George W. Bush proclaimed that the aim of the U.S. was to spread democracy throughout the world, eventually “ending tyranny.”12 But writers like Jacob Weisberg have argued that the president’s repeated references to the spread of American values throughout the world did not correspond to his actions: “His eight-year administration hardly showed excessive concern with parsing and enhancing those values domestically.” The same applies to the president’s references to religion and America’s religious (specifically Christian) imperative to help the world: both “Bush’s faith and his liberal democratic values are part of a ‘constructed persona’ rather than a framework through which he looks at the world.”13
Despite the disbelief of some concerning “the ability to transform Iraq into a democracy in any realistic period of time,”14 the invasion took place. Yet even when Baghdad was occupied, “the United States was not sure what it wanted to do there.” Instead of discovering WMDs, U.S. soldiers found “violent and widespread opposition to the US presence.”15 The war became incomprehensible both to the invaders and the locals; whereas U.S. soldiers saw their aim only as freeing the country from oppression, the Iraqis considered the Americans to be intruders who wanted to impose their views and way of life and extract profits from their country. And while the liberation of the oppressed was, to borrow Kennan Ferguson’s phrase, “a gift” because the United States did not demand anything in return, the Iraqi people remained generally negative toward the presence of Americans in their territory. They obviously did not want Saddam to be their leader anymore, but neither did they want their American “saviors” to be in Iraq.16
At the beginning of the intervention, the Iraqi population was “approximately evenly divided on whether the United States was an invader or a liberator,” but after only half a year a mere 15 percent of Iraqis considered the U.S. a liberator.17 And the American public reconsidered its enthusiasm for U.S. involvement in Iraq; while the war was widely supported at its beginning, five years later 63 percent of Americans were calling the war a “mistake”—the “highest recorded opposition in an active war in American history.”18 The British were also very skeptical toward U.S. actions: “By 2006 a poll found that 69 per cent of British respondents believed US policies since 2001 had made the world less safe, 75 per cent considered President Bush a threat to world peace and 71 per cent stated that the war in Iraq was unjustified.”19 Unlike the Afghanistan War, the war in Iraq was understood by many “as producing not a public good but a major public bad.”20 And it seems plausible to argue that the unjustified involvement in Iraq not only was bad for the direct participants, that is, the U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians who were either killed in the war or were physically and psychologically mutilated by it; it also inflamed hatred toward the United States as well as contributed to the spread of anti-Americanism among those who had suffered in the war that was, as they viewed it, provoked by the Americans.
It is possible to contend that the invasion of Iraq was a humanitarian intervention, especially if one bears in mind such goals as the fight against terrorism and the prevention of the use of WMDs, but the fact that none of the stated violations were proven ultimately points to the war’s being little else than a reckless invasion. Alex Bellamy remarks, “Rightly or wrongly, a large majority of the world’s states believe that the coalition abused humanitarian justifications to suit their own purposes. This will set back attempts to galvanize a global consensus on the necessity of action when basic human rights are violated on a massive scale.”21 And whereas some scholars consider the war in Iraq a humanitarian intervention because, even though no WMDs were found, the population was liberated from Saddam’s oppression, others shrewdly point out that a political regime change has nothing to do with humanitarian intervention.22
It is worth noting that the war, which ended in 2011, after almost nine years, inevitably caused many Iraqis to migrate; millions were forced to seek refuge in other countries. Such factors as the lack of food and medical help as well as economic instability caused people’s health to deteriorate and ultimately provoked the deaths of many.23 It is impossible to provide an exact number of Iraqis who died in the war. BBC News reports an estimate of 461,000 people.24 According to the Huffington Post, 4,486 American soldiers died in the war.25 The war turned into one of the greatest traumas of the twenty-first century. It undoubtedly became one of the largest military failures of the United States. And although the intervention was aimed at doing good, the only result it produced was disapproval, global and domestic. The intervention in Iraq, unsurprisingly, became one of the most preoccupying themes for many film directors and writers and thus generated a wide cultural response, best described as a protest against it.
The absence of specific goals made U.S. involvement in Iraq perplexing to people around the world and at home in America, as well as to the direct participants, the soldiers. Hardly any film on the Iraq War neglects this issue. Before proceeding to the film analyses, however, it is important to mention that the War on Terror has been widely reflected in fiction and documentary film. Yet when one compares the coverage of the two major American interventions in the Middle East in the twenty-first century, it is the Iraq War that has received much more attention. This is due, one can speculate, to the general disapproval of the war—the widespread protest against the war that had more flaws than virtues. Terence McSweeney writes that the U.S. administration sought generally to “help market the war on terror through the medium of film” and had announced this intention to some of the key figures in Hollywood. A similar action had been taken during World War II, when President Roosevelt attempted to “mobilize” Hollywood, and it obviously was at work again, as Hollywood agreed to display the War on Terror extensively: “We are willing to volunteer to become advocates for the American message.”26 For the U.S. government it was important that the war not be seen as a military operation; the administration wanted to win the support of Afghans and Iraqis, of course, but also of Americans.27 Yet, as my analysis will demonstrate, the plan did not work out exactly as it was supposed to. Of course, the films that deal with the War on Terror censure terrorism and attempt to justify U.S. military actions as necessary steps that had to be taken to eradicate terrorism and prevent future attacks from “evil” organizations. However, most of the films also overtly question the intervention, showcasing that its aims are not clear, the sought-after results hardly reachable, the casualties too heavy, and the war trauma simply intolerable. One can conclude that while the government had hoped that Hollywood would have been able to help win the support of every American citizen, it eventually turned out that the films on the Iraq War only reinforced the American public’s general bewilderment toward the military intervention. Finally, while the U.S. administration planned that the War on Terror would be reflected in film, one can argue that the Iraq War has attracted more attention from film directors than the Afghanistan War, which again can be explained by the puzzling nature of the intervention in Iraq and the general desire to understand that war.
Another interesting peculiarity of the Iraq War (as well as the Afghanistan War) films is that most of them were released around 2006–7, when the war was still going on. Scholars have observed the tendency of those films to be unpopular among viewers; this was not because the films are bad or the audience was not interested, but because both wars were not even close to conclusion: “Disorientation, ambivalence, a lack of clarity—these are surely part of the collective experience [these films] are trying to examine. How can you bring an individual story to a satisfactory conclusion when nobody has any idea what the end of the larger story will look like?”28 The situation that these films’ directors found themselves in perhaps can serve to explain the issues they preferred to raise in their works: perplexed themselves, witnessing the general bewilderment, and (like everybody else) not really having a plausible guess about when and how the war would end, they created films that depict American involvement in Iraq as an operation that is equivocal in every sense.
Perhaps the most famous documentary accounts of the Iraq War are James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments (2006) and Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes (2006).29 These films are interesting to analyze together because they present opinions from the two very different sides: Iraqis and Americans, respectively.
Iraq in Fragments is stylistically somewhat reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness, on the First Gulf War. Longley’s film also demonstrates how destructive war is, opening with scenes of an occupied city that, once peaceful, has become a dangerous environment. The viewer observes collapsed buildings, destroyed roads, fresh smoke coming from bombings, and soldiers—the intruders who, as the film suggests, forced this undesired change on the local Iraqis. The cityscape is filled with helicopters, tanks, weapons, and other attributes of war that submerge the audience into a horrifying yet mesmerizing, artificially created environment of modern war. It is also significant that the main character in the film is a child—a local boy—who is living through the occupation. On the one hand, the boy personifies the innocence of the Iraqi nation, whose territory is now occupied by the United States. On the other hand, the boy’s age points to his inexperience and thus unawareness of what is going on and why; symbolically the Iraqi people—just like a small child—have to learn the reasons for their involvement in this war. The viewer witnesses how unprotected the people are, as they now consider death to be an everyday part of their lives. In addition, the war has caused a significant economic decline: poverty eats up the country, and no one seems to care. All the U.S. thinks of, according to the local Iraqis, is oil. They believe the American soldiers may kill anyone who seems suspicious to them, including children. The local population therefore perceives the war not as an act of help but as a grab for financial gain (oil), and thus the intervention is not an act of liberation for them but purely an occupation. The main problem in this war, as the local Iraqis see it, is that the U.S. applies force but is not willing to understand what the local people want, and this misunderstanding comes, first and foremost, from a lack of cultural knowledge and the language barrier. In Iraqi eyes, the U.S. has shed its role as a liberator and now is Iraq’s greatest enemy, a tyrant that has symbolically substituted for Saddam.
The War Tapes, on the contrary, provides the viewer primarily with the occupying soldiers’ viewpoint on the war. Although the film also briefly touches upon the impact of the war on Iraqis, particularly in the scene when two elementary school children are returning home from school, walking along a road controlled by U.S. soldiers. War is part of their everyday reality, and what would normally seem to be polar-opposite themes, such as childhood and violence, coexist in war-torn Iraq. Yet the film’s main concern is the American soldier. The War Tapes reveals how for some soldiers—specifically one of the main characters—participation in the Iraq War was unquestionable after 9/11, since they took the terrorist attacks to be personal tragedies.
In the midst of the war, U.S. soldiers wonder why they cannot improve their tactics and ultimately win the war, having “the most technological army in the world.” In addition to the Americans’ bad planning, the film foregrounds the problem of “the language barrier” as one of the chief obstacles in this war, since there is practically no communication between Americans and Iraqis. Dealing with the problems faced by the soldiers in Iraq, The War Tapes also provides two reasons for American involvement. The first one is oil. (When one of the soldiers says they could “build a wall around the country and leave,” he then laments: how can they “leave” if there is still oil that the U.S. cares for so much?) The second reason is “safety in the U.S.” With respect to the question of safety, it is symbolic that one of the key episodes in the film involves an accident on the road, when soldiers do not notice a local woman and run her over. The accident serves to censure U.S. involvement, which, as the scene shows, caused many random deaths. The U.S. presence in Iraq is also criticized in an earlier scene, when trucks carrying waste are emptied and one of the soldiers comments, “We are bringing democracy and good vegetation to Iraq.” The soldier’s sarcastic tone clearly indicates that while the goal of the intervention, as explained by the U.S. government, is to turn Iraq into a democratic state—a decent enough rationale—in reality, what the soldiers do is worse, and the human feces emptied by the truck figuratively stand for all the damage that the U.S. has caused Iraq. The words “It will be a better country . . . in twenty years . . . because we were there” seem more like a cry of hope than a statement: the soldiers cannot really believe it, no matter how much they may want to. It is also significant that the film concludes with scenes wherein Iraq War veterans speculate about the reasons for U.S. involvement in Iraq. One claims that oil was not the only reason for the invasion and occupation, or even the primary aim; the other soldier is determined that it is:
Why the fuck are we there? We better get that oil, right? The U.S. army is not the fucking Peace Corps! The marines are not the Peace Corps! That’s not why we’re in Iraq! We’re in Iraq for money and oil! Look at any other war in the history of the world and tell me it’s not about money. This better be about money. And if we don’t get that oil and that money then all the lives that are gone right now—What’s it? Eighteen hundred? Something around there?—they are all in vain. Boy, you don’t put a hundred and fifteen thousand troops from all over the country in there and say we are there to create democracy. Man, you create money, yeah! They’re making money for us, you know. Somebody other than Dick Cheney better be getting their hands on it pretty soon.
The documentary does not provide an optimistic message—and that is not its aim. It intends instead to search for a possible explanation for U.S. intervention, and though it occasionally tries to refute the idea that oil was not the key factor motivating the political decision to go to war, the film ultimately seems to suggest that it is, as there is hardly any other reason. Or at least The War Tapes provides no other plausible rationale. It mocks the idea of bringing democracy to Iraq, and it presents the pursuit of material gain as the only explanation for the intervention.
Nondocumentary—though not purely fictional either—examples that deal with the Iraq War are numerous. Among the most famous: Peter Markle’s Saving Jessica Lynch (2003), Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007), Peter Berg’s The Kingdom (2007), Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah (2007), James C. Strouse’s Grace Is Gone (2007), Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008), Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss (2008), Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008), Luke Moran’s Boys of Abu Ghraib (2014), Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), Susanna White and Simon Cellan Jones’s miniseries Generation Kill (2008), and the television series Homeland (2011–), directed by, among others, Lesli Linka Glatter. I consider these examples to be docu-fictions because they largely base their plots on a war that indeed took place, focusing on its specific events, policies, and ramifications. Whereas one cannot precisely determine to what extent the events described in the films and series authentically reflect what actually occurred, I argue that by entwining the political, historical, and moral aspects of the Iraq War and U.S. participation in it, these examples do reflect some truth about the intervention.
LaRocca argues that we can consider a miniseries “a long film.” Comparing miniseries to a “true television ‘series,’” or a “maxiseries,” the scholar posits that unlike the usual serial structure, which is “webby, diffuse” and “reaches out to a range of subplots and subcharacters,” a miniseries “merely elongates and enriches a linear three-act structure”: “A television show, or maxiseries, is capable of following obscure narrative routes and digressions and pursuing the development of secondary and tertiary characters and themes, as well as experimenting with the presence of guest stars, engaging with social commentary, and even allowing for false paths.”30 This characteristic can never be applied to a miniseries due to its limited duration. The precision, compactness, and straightforwardness in its plot development make the miniseries a cinematic form akin to film. In line with LaRocca, I consider a miniseries a longer film, and, in the section that follows, I examine Generation Kill as a docu-fictional narrative akin to a docu-fictional film.
The series Homeland is only briefly cited in this work because it primarily deals with the War on Terror and the problem of terrorism in general. The genre of a series (and not of a film or miniseries) aptly underlines the endless war that the U.S. and its allies fight against their elusive enemy throughout the world. Homeland inevitably comments on the problem of U.S. military interventions in the Middle East, providing the audience with its own view on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because of this, the series can be considered a docu-fictional account on the two interventions. Its longer duration (compared to that of a film or miniseries) should not be viewed as a disadvantage since the story itself moves at a very fast pace. The truth about the interventions that the series has to say is never hidden behind a convoluted or protracted plot but is always made explicit to the audience.
Discussing the issue of truth in the cinematic examples that follow, I again refer to Lacan’s theory of truth, according to which there is no unified truth but only multiple truths. The competing representations of the war (from the portrayals created by numerous media to the soldiers’ stories and the interpretations made by scholars and politicians) and views on the war (varying, for instance, from one political party to another, from one country to another) reinforce Lacan’s theory of truth, on the one hand, and Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum and Barthes’s notion of myth, on the other hand.
For example, Redacted uses an interesting technique: the film starts with an inscription; part of the larger text reads, “This film is entirely fiction, inspired by an incident widely reported to have occurred in Iraq.” Already the first line of the film complicates the genre of the narrative, overtly questioning the fictional status of what is claimed to be “entirely fiction.” What this line means to say is that through a fictional story, the film attempts to tell its audience the truth about the Iraq War; this truth is indeed only a fragment of a larger picture, yet this should not lessen the cultural and historical significance of what is presented in Redacted. The film’s central story is the brutal rape of an Iraqi girl by American soldiers. And whereas the film’s initial remark does not allow the viewer to fully believe that what is shown on screen is truthful, it is exactly the addition of real pictures at the end of Redacted that depict bombings, child murder, and war violence that makes one realize that even if the characters in this film are fictional and some of the events did not take place in exactly the way they are described, war violence, and particularly soldiers’ violence, is a phenomenon in the Iraq War that no one can refute. Saving Jessica Lynch “is based on a true story.” Boys of Abu Ghraib “is inspired by true events.” In In the Valley of Elah, also “inspired by actual events,” it is impossible to say whether the story that is narrated in the film took place or whether the “actual events” are the Iraq War, the problems experienced by war veterans, and soldiers’ violence, but it is clear that whether by raising each of these issues or by stressing only particular ones, the film deals with U.S. involvement in Iraq, attempting to understand the intervention and vividly re-create a sense of it. An even more interesting tactic is used in American Sniper, as the audience finds out only in the end that the film is based on real events. Thus, while one watches the film as a fictional story, the concluding realization that the characters and some of the plot lines are true makes one reconsider what one has seen and understand that the brutality of war shown in the film is an authentic face of the conflict. Many of the analyzed examples incorporate various video recordings that serve to suggest that these films are “real life,” in contrast to the recorded materials created in the film by the characters. Stacey Peebles speculates that the inclusion of videos creates “a more personal, and therefore more realistic and effecting, representation of war.”31 Despite the richness of the material, all the films about the Iraq War touch upon similar issues: they attempt to demonstrate that the intervention was a humanitarian mission aimed at ridding the world of terrorism, yet they also call into question the humanitarianism of the war, focusing on the damage—whether physical, moral, or economic—that it caused.
Thus, in Stop-Loss, a soldier suggests that the U.S. “drop a ten-thousand-pound bomb on one of those cities every time they hit us. No more this urban-combat-bullshit. I’m tired of going, killing hajji in his kitchen and his bedroom.” Although this is drunk-talk, and most of the people listening seem to be skeptical about his proposition, the soldier’s words reveal an important fact: the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of catching the enemy, for U.S. soldiers in Iraq cannot easily identify who is a civilian and who is a terrorist. Because of this, they have to die in action, performing countless missions. This is later supported by the protagonist, Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), who explains to his friend how dangerous yet perplexing the war is, because “nobody knows who is who.” Whereas the soldiers in Stop-Loss joined the army because they wanted to “protect [their] country, [their] family” as well as to “pay back for 9/11,” as soon as they were in Iraq, they realized that “the war wasn’t even about any of that.” Not that the film is trying to make a larger point, proposing that imperialist or economic interests brought the U.S. to the Middle East; the only thing the film suggests is that the U.S. got involved in a war that it did not fully understand and had no plans on how to win it.
The motif of 9/11 and the revenge that American citizens wanted to take on terrorists is present in practically every film about the Iraq War. The titular character of American Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), first watches a news report about the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, then decides to join the SEALs; later, having watched the breaking news on CNN about 9/11, he joins other American soldiers fighting in Iraq. Boys of Abu Ghraib opens with a voice-over in which the main character explains that 9/11 made him join the army and fight in Iraq. Symbolically the film opens with a party devoted to the celebration of the Fourth of July—Independence Day—and the main character’s send-off to Iraq. The combination of the two events suggests that just as Independence Day was the result of a national achievement, so the Iraq War represents the will of the American people to help the oppressed and to fight against terrorism so that Iraq (and eventually the world) can have its own Independence Day, that is, freedom from oppressors.
Grace Is Gone—a film that tells the story of Stanley Phillips (John Cusack), whose wife dies while serving in Iraq and leaves him with two daughters—attempts to explain why American soldiers are fighting in Iraq through the conversation between Stanley and his teenage daughter Heidi (Shélan O’Keefe):
Heidi: Do you ever think that mom should’ve stayed home?
Stanley: All the time.
Heidi: Why did she have to go?
Stanley: She was doing her duty, Heidi, you know that.
Heidi: I know. But what exactly does that mean?
Stanley: We talked about this. We have people all over the world looking out for our safety. When they discover a threat, they have to act on it. That’s the way the world is.
Heidi: On the news they’re saying that we went to war with the wrong people, that it was all a lie.
Stanley: Well, you can’t always believe everything you hear on television, can you? Sometimes you just got to trust that you’re doing the right thing. We got to believe . . .
Heidi: Well, what if you can’t?
Stanley: Then we’re all lost.
The scene touches on the problem of soldiers’ deaths, particularly underlining the fact that many American families lost their relatives and friends in the Iraq War; the war has given rise to thousands of personal problems that play out painfully in many American homes. But the scene also implicitly raises the question: What if what the Americans are doing in Iraq is wrong? It is significant that the film was released in 2007; the doubts that many Americans started to have about the intervention and its ultimate goal were very real at that time and offered the unsettling thought that if the war was for nothing and the U.S. was unable to win it, then all the soldiers’ deaths were for nothing. In 2007 these questions were raised only as doubts, but later, in 2015, the series Homeland was more certain about the fallacy underlying U.S. policy: “We are supposed to build a functioning society in the middle of that. What don’t they get in Washington: you can’t shove democracy down people’s throats.” These words are from a conversation between two CIA agents in Baghdad in 2005, yet the understanding of the problem, and particularly of the U.S. attempt to democratize Iraqi society, sounds fresh, as if emerging only toward the end of U.S. occupation.
The films also tend to depict the tactical tradition that took shape in the new war. This is especially apparent in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and HBO’s miniseries Generation Kill, directed by Susanna White and Simon Cellan Jones. My contention is that in The Hurt Locker, just as in Zero Dark Thirty (released four years later, in 2012), Bigelow accurately outlines and visually constructs the concept of a new type of war. In turn, Generation Kill, released like The Hurt Locker in 2008, views the U.S. role in Iraq from another angle, persistently emphasizing the futility and groundlessness of U.S. intervention. At the same time, The Hurt Locker and Generation Kill both communicate similar emotional messages; each intends to make the spectator meditate upon the savagery of the war.
The Hurt Locker slowly but firmly plunges its audience into the monotonous but deadly dangerous events that took place in Baghdad in 2004. The film’s first scene, when Staff Sergeant Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce) has to defuse a bomb, is one of the key scenes in the whole film. The robot assigned to disarm the explosive gets broken on its way to the site, so the task is passed on to Thompson. What is surprising about the scene is that the audience does not yet expect anything bad to happen. Thompson obviously has a wealth of experience and his playful mood makes one think that this is just another bomb that will be defused in a few minutes. Sergeant J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Elbridge (Brian Geraghty), who supervise Thompson’s actions, seem not to take the assignment as particularly dangerous either, until Elbridge notices an Iraqi bystander with a phone in his hand. The soldiers sense a threat and order the Iraqi man to put down the phone, to no avail. Thompson hears their shouting and tries to run away from the bomb. The Iraqi presses buttons on the phone, and the bomb explodes. Thompson is killed by the blast wave.
The scene does not illustrate combat and the heavy casualties that result from large-scale military actions. Rather it focuses on a quiet street in Baghdad with no Iraqi soldiers and only three U.S. soldiers, where the only possible danger comes from the bomb. However, the setting leads to the emergence of two important elements salient to the Iraq War. First, as I have argued above in several instances, the War on Terror is characterized by a depersonalization of the enemy; in this scene, the soldiers cannot fully control the so-called battlefield simply because they do not know who exactly will set off the bomb. Additionally, the Iraqis observing the defusing are civilians and the U.S. Army does not expect any threat from them (although the soldiers have to observe everyone, since they suspect there is a disguised enemy among the civilians). Second, the scene succeeds in transmitting, as Caetlin Benson-Allott puts it, “the horror of military violence.”32 Significantly, this is done not with the help of countless dead bodies but rather with a precise and detailed demonstration of the explosion. Whereas the soldiers rush to prevent the bomb’s activation, the explosion is depicted in slow motion. And while a moment before the explosion the audience can hardly cope with the speed of the action as the camera quickly switches from one character to another, thus increasing the tension, the explosion itself minutely focuses on the stones lifted from the ground because of the blast wave, and then on the dust and rust coming off an old car. Only after that does the camera focus on Thompson, who falls down; the stones lifted by the explosion smash down to the ground too.
In Thompson’s place comes Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), who becomes the central character in the film. He stands out due to his fearless attitude, even though he is in Iraq to defuse bombs. He refuses to communicate with Sgt. Sanborn during an operation, and once does not wear a protective suit while defusing a bomb. James does everything to make the audience think that he is either a highly skilled professional or simply does not care about his life. His behavior is clarified at the end of the film, when he is back in the United States. With his family in a supermarket, he is asked by his wife to get cereal. At first he seems to be unsure where the cereal aisle is, but as soon as he finds it, he is overwhelmed: there are too many kinds of cereal. He desperately stares at the boxes, trying to choose one, and finally grabs the closest box. The scene suggests James can more easily defuse a bomb than choose a box of cereal;33 the war provided a more comfortable environment for James than his civilian life in the U.S. Indeed James Naremore writes, “[James’s] hometown Walmart looks more surreal than Baghdad.”34 Later, James removes dead leaves from the gutter of his house and helps his wife in the kitchen while telling her about his experience in Iraq and explaining that the U.S. Army needs soldiers like him. His wife does not display much interest in his stories and smilingly asks him to chop carrots. Later, while playing with their baby, he tells the child that when people get older, there are only a couple of things left that they still love. James, though, clearly articulates that there is only one thing that he personally still loves. After these words, the action is transferred back to Iraq, where the audience sees James wearing his protective suit and determinedly walking toward another bomb that needs to be defused. Guy Westwell makes the interesting observation that James’s return to war can be explained by the fact that the Iraq War had still been going on when The Hurt Locker was released, so the director did not have a possible way out for James. Westwell stresses the difference between the journey back portrayed in The Hurt Locker and those in films about earlier wars, specifically in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War drama, Apocalypse Now (1979), arguing that whereas Apocalypse Now demonstrates “the neurotic journeying . . . that marked the continued irreconcilability of the experience of Vietnam,” The Hurt Locker focuses on the soldier’s eagerness to return to his military duty to “finish what has been started.”35 One can perhaps explain this difference as the emergence of a new soldier in the twenty-first century, driven by the feelings of patriotism and deep love for his nation that were strongly intensified after 9/11. The new soldier wants to get back to war not because he craves the perverse pleasures of violence and danger but because he perceives war to be obligatory work. In case of James, one might also speculate that he is seduced by war. Bomb disposal brings James a kind of existential clarity—he can cut the right wire and live or the wrong one and die—as well as an escape from the messiness of relationships.
The final important point to address here is the way The Hurt Locker portrays U.S. intervention in Iraq. Although the film does not tell its audience why the U.S. military has intruded into Iraq, why there are so many bombs that U.S. soldiers must defuse, and why one can witness Iraqis fighting not only against Americans but also against other Iraqis,36 it focuses on a significant difficulty that accompanied U.S. intervention in Iraq: the inability to define the enemy. Over the course of the film, the viewer observes James’s friendship toward a local boy, called Beckham (Christopher Sayegh). They play football together and James buys DVDs from Beckham. Later, when U.S. soldiers find the body of an Iraqi boy stuffed with explosives, James incorrectly thinks that the boy is Beckham. It falls to James to defuse the bomb in the dead body. This seems to be his first emotionally difficult mission. The scene is important for several reasons. As McSweeney claims, the brutal murder of the boy “becomes a symbol of the need for American intervention.” But the tight emotional bond that grows between the soldier and the Iraqi boy, and the ultimate death of the boy, put the American into the position of a victim and do not develop the narrative in a direction that would demonstrate that the Iraqi people are those who are suffering. Thus, whereas the intervention is depicted “as a distinctly humanitarian, even altruistic” action, the focus is distorted. Specifically, the intervention and the fight against terrorists are needed in order to avenge James’s loss (i.e., the death of the Iraqi boy) but not the Iraqi deaths that result from the actions of terrorists. McSweeney comments on the image of the boy stuffed with explosives: “The fact that there is no recorded evidence of such a scheme ever being used reveals more about the film’s desire to imagine monstrosities that continue to demonise Iraqi insurgents while at the same time glorifying James’s singular humanity and heroism.”37 One can speculate that the film’s desire to exaggerate the violence of the Iraq War is due to its eagerness to justify U.S. intervention as a necessary action to help stop innocent deaths, yet Iraqi violence is employed to justify or perhaps even minimize the violence that Americans committed: compared to what some Iraqi people do—stuffing a boy’s corpse with explosives, for example—American war violence is no longer so horrifying.
When the bomb is defused, James covers the boy and gives him to nearby Iraqis to bury. Meanwhile Sanborn and Elbridge discuss whether the dead boy is Beckham. Sanborn at first says that it is definitely Beckham, and then adds with hesitation that he is not sure, because “[Iraqis] all look the same.” These words are included in the scene not to demonstrate the arrogance of the Western soldiers who have come to an East populated by indistinguishable people, but rather to underline the inability of the soldiers to distinguish between enemy and nonenemy—the problem that is central to the film’s plot. The mission in Iraq concludes with a scene in which James and Sanborn are driving on a Baghdad street and a group of children starts to throw stones at their car. Although the kids can harm neither the soldiers nor their car, they symbolically represent the enemy, thus revealing the friendship between James and Beckham as illegitimate because, as Robert Sklar argues, Beckham belongs to “Iraqi youth,” which is defined in this scene as “the Enemy.”38
The chaos and obscurity of the Iraq War is a common issue raised by films that deal with it. The miniseries Generation Kill, defined as a war drama and characterized by a “failure of plot,” very vividly considers the problem of the “unnarratability of the Iraq adventure.”39 The first episode starts with a scene showing a group of U.S. marines training before a mission. Over the course of the first four episodes, the audience watches soldiers discussing tactics, complaining about their lack of batteries, singing songs, pestering one another, and chiefly not participating in any military actions at all. At that moment, the only distinct reason for the American presence in the Middle East given to the viewer is to fight terrorists. One understands this justification from the letters that the marines receive from schoolchildren in the first episode. Cpl. Josh Ray Person (James Ransone) reads one of the letters out loud:
Dear Mr. Army Man,
I am proud that you are being brave in defending our country against the terrorists. They are bad and I am glad that you are going to catch them and punish them. I am glad that you are so brave and I pray for you.
The soldiers react rather inadequately to the text, being mainly interested in how the letters smell, and how “hot” the young schoolgirl looks in the photograph she attached to the letter. Another reference to the soldiers’ mission to exterminate terrorists can be grasped later, in a scene where a soldier trims his moustache according to army regulations. Another soldier declares that to be sure the size of the moustache is correct it is better to trim it the way he did—Hitler-style. This scene accentuates the brutality of the actions that U.S. soldiers will take against terrorists, metaphorically claiming that the marines will be as merciless toward terrorists as Hitler was against those he declared to be his enemies during World War II.
Yet the audience does not witness many scenes in which soldiers murder terrorists. Instead the miniseries stresses the great number of casualties that are occurring among the civilian population. In the second episode a group of U.S. marines are driving through Iraq, agitated about filming their surroundings, when the driver points at the “dude right there,” a mutilated corpse on the roadside, and the soldier with the camera responds, “It’s not a dude.” The driver becomes serious and asks the soldier to switch off the camera, but the audience sees the mutilated corpse of an Iraqi girl. In the third episode, an Iraqi woman brings her son, with gunshot wounds, to a U.S. military doctor, who ascertains that a U.S. marine has shot the boy. When Evan “Scribe” Wright (Lee Tergesen), a journalist embedded with the soldiers to report on their attack on Baghdad, asks the translator, “Why aren’t [the locals] angry?” the translator explains, “They are grateful to be liberated and welcome the Americans as friends.” That the main goal of American involvement differs strikingly from the Iraqis’ understanding of the U.S. role in the war is articulated in the sixth episode by Lance Cpl. Harold James Trombley (Billy Lush), who discredits Wright’s beliefs in the rightness and solidity of the U.S. mission. Wright questions the intervention, saying, “If we’re not in our MOPP suits [Mission Oriented Protective Posture equipment used in toxic environments], that means there’s no WMDs. If there’s no WMDs, then why are we here in the first place?” To which Trombley replies firmly, “The point is we get to kill people.” Significantly, who the U.S. soldiers have to kill is not clarified, and one assumes that both terrorist and civilian casualties are part of the normality of this war. The soldiers do not seem to differentiate between the casualties either, which is why the war in Iraq, as it is represented in Generation Kill, is a senseless ongoing massacre covered with the soldiers’ obsessive desire to exact revenge and install democracy. This argument is vividly illustrated in the seventh episode, when Wright tells Cpl. Gabe Garza (Rey Valentin) that an Iraqi man was shot. He gets this cynical response: “It’s too bad. He probably would have liked democracy.”
The attitude of the local Iraqis toward the U.S. soldiers is another controversial theme in the miniseries, given that the episodes are filled with killed and mutilated children. Toward the end of the fourth episode, the viewer witnesses U.S. soldiers staring in shock at the backseat of a car, where they have found a dead girl, around five years old. The girl was killed because the soldiers opened fire after the car’s driver did not stop after a warning shot. Eventually the father of the dead girl apologizes for not stopping; the soldiers do not even apologize for killing his child. The soldiers come to understand, though they hardly ever articulate it, that their actions in this war are mostly wrong. In the sixth episode, Sgt. Antonio Espera (Jon Huertas) confesses his anxiety to Sgt. Brad “Iceman” Colbert (Alexander Skarsgård): “You realize the shit that we’ve done here? People we’ve killed? Back in the civilian world, Dog, if we did this, we would go to prison.” Colbert responds, “Poke, you’re thinking like a Mexican again. Think like a white man. Over there they’ll be laying on medals for what we did.” The attitude portrays the intervention as the right thing to do by the white West toward the inferior East, echoing the perspective of the colonial era.
The tragedy of the war is further underlined in the last episode, when a U.S. military doctor comforts an Iraqi boy, whereas no Iraqi is interested in the child. Instead, the Iraqis steal candy from the sick children. Later in the same episode, Brad tries to remove ordnance near where children are playing, though he understands this might cost him his life. The apotheosis of military savagery and intellectual vacancy is an incident narrated by the soldiers, in which “some newly arrived grunts slaughtered some Iraqi kids who were playing on blown tanks.” The killing is justified by the children being “on top of the tanks,” which made them appear “technically armed.” The miniseries persistently emphasizes that Iraqi children are the main victims of the war, as they suffer at the hands of both the marauding locals and the U.S. soldiers.
The civilian population, however, reacts mostly positively to the presence of U.S. troops over the course of the miniseries; they treat Americans as their saviors. It seems that the Iraqis are ready to cope with the deaths of their own children because this is an integral part of war—collateral damage. Yet in the sixth episode, when a group of U.S. soldiers let a group of Iraqi people pass through their block, one of the women from the crowd speaks: “Thank you, soldier. Thank you for letting me pass on my own road in my own country. . . . Why are you Americans here? . . . You know I come from Baghdad. It is a beautiful city and you are bombing it. This is to make my life better? . . . You know, this is a very beautiful county and our president is very stupid. Maybe you are here for liberation, I don’t know, but because of oil, it feel like war of aggression.” The woman’s lamentation is already the second time the reference to the hidden cause of U.S. involvement in Iraq is made in the miniseries. The Iraq War, or the Second Gulf War, is linked to the First Gulf War as early as the first episode, when a marine says to Sergeant Espera, “You believe this shit? These people still haven’t picked up the trash from the last war.” Espera does not seem concerned with the sorrow and loss that the ongoing war in Iraq has caused the local people: “People’ve been fighting over this bitch since ancient times, Dog. How many graves we’re standing on?” At this phrase, the camera focuses on the ground that the soldier is urinating on, signifying the disrespect and indifference he feels toward the Iraqis who have died (and will die) in war. Espera continues, “Think about all the wisdom and science and money and civilization it took to build these machines, and the courage of all the men who came here, and the love of their wives and children that was in their hearts. And all that hate, Dog. All the hate it took to blow these motherfuckers away. It’s destiny, Dog. White man’s gonna rule the world.” Not only are the soldier’s words full of racism (which is characteristic of Espera, who endlessly complains about the dominance and rule of the white man and the oppression of other races), but they also transmit ideas about American patriotism combined with good intentions to liberate the territory that began in the early 1990s. Now it is the “destiny” of the United States to fight this war all over again, to win it and thus demonstrate American might. Later, in the second episode, Espera “elucidate[s] on the white man’s burden”: “The U.S. should just go into all these fucked up countries—Iraq, Africa—set up American government and infrastructure—McDonald’s, Starbucks, MTV—then just hand it all over. I mean, how else we gonna make these hungry motherfuckers want to stop killing everybody? Put a McDonald’s on every fucking corner. If we gotta blow up the corner, then build the McDonald’s—so be it.” All these failures in U.S. policy and, consequently, in the intervention shown throughout the miniseries are important to consider in relation to the main aim of the U.S. mission in Iraq, articulated in the first episode by Sgt. Maj. John Sixta (Neal Jones) in his appeal to the soldiers: “Your president is watching! America is watching! But more important, Godfather is watching! Make no mistake! There . . . will . . . be . . . no . . . fuck-ups!” Toward the end of the miniseries, these words echo in mockery of the short-sightedness of U.S. intervention, the unsuccessful operations, and the overall improvidence of the American military actions.
The fifth episode of Generation Kill is crucial, because this is the first time the miniseries focuses on real combat. Right before the combat is shown, the audience hears a dialogue between Lt. Nathaniel Fick (Stark Sands) and Sergeant Espera. Fick encourages the group: “We all know we’ve killed a lot of bad guys already.” Espera remarks, “Sure. Must be some bad guys in all those women and children we’ve been stacking along the roads.” The scene once again underlines the problem of civilian casualties that result from insufficiently planned operations. Soon after the attack, another important scene takes place, when the soldiers find out that one of the men they killed in combat is of Syrian origin and, as it is stated in his passport, he was in Iraq as a jihadi. Capt. Craig “Encino Man” Schwetje (Brian Wade) comments, “They’re coming here to fight us. I wonder if President Bush will ever find out about this. This is what the president’s been talking about with the war on terrorists. This is why we’re here.” With respect to this incident, Fick makes a very controversial observation: “Those jihadists who attacked us? Isn’t this the exact opposite of what we want to have happen here? It’s all on that guy’s passport. Two weeks ago he was still a student in Syria. He wasn’t a jihadi until we came to Iraq.” This pivotal remark in Generation Kill foregrounds a suspicion that U.S. intervention—though frequently considered an act of liberation—could be the main reason for the growing violence, aggressiveness, and savagery in Iraq, which clearly undermines the humanitarianism of the U.S. mission, especially in the eyes of some of the inhabitants of the Middle East.
The miniseries also draws parallels with the war in Afghanistan, when in the fifth episode Sgt. Eric Kocher (Owain Yeoman) says that the bombing of villages in Iraq was never something that took place in Afghanistan. Earlier, in the third episode, staking out a village full of children and women, the soldiers recollect how in Afghanistan they had children running toward them. All in all, U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is characterized in the miniseries as a better planned and strategically more accurate operation than the Iraq occupation, an intervention that incurred many fewer casualties among civilians than in Iraq.
The ending of Generation Kill makes quite a prominent statement, as soldiers watch a video they shot during their military service in Iraq.40 They are excited, riled up, commenting happily on what they see on the screen. But as the video goes on, showing casualties and devastation, the soldiers realize how horrifying their actions were and how terrible the intervention was. The consequences of the U.S. failure in the Iraq War become most apparent in the video, which offers a comprehensive summary of the mistakes made by the U.S. soldiers. The soldiers slowly start to leave, unwilling to see the video through to the end: only Trombley (the soldier who shot the Iraqi boy and showed no remorse about it) remains, smiling and clearly enjoying the video, then maliciously looking around when he realizes he is alone in the room. He takes his rifle and determinedly leaves. He appears to be the only soldier in Generation Kill who has not come to understand the folly of U.S. intervention.
All the films that deal with the Iraq War reveal the general confusion of the intervention and ultimately show disapproval. In the Valley of Elah, for example, opens with an image of the American flag flying upside down. It is put into its proper position by the military police veteran Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), who worries that somebody will see the upside-down flag and correctly interpret it as “an international distress signal”: “It means we’re in a whole lot of trouble, so come save our ass cause we don’t have a prayer in hell of saving ourselves.” At the end of the film, however, having found out that his son was brutally murdered in Iraq by his own comrades, Deerfield returns to the flag, and this time turns it upside down, suggesting that the United States is sinking in the quicksand of war violence and needs somebody to help it get out.
Some films contend that the circle of violence cannot be stopped because whenever the U.S. avenges 9/11 and tries to prevent further attacks, the terrorists will consider any retaliatory or preemptive intervention to be an assault and will seek their own revenge. This complex issue is a primary focus in Body of Lies, as terrorists openly announce, “We will avenge American wars on the Muslim world. We will come at them. Everywhere. We will strike at random, across Europe and then America, continually. We have bled. And now . . . they will bleed.” In The Kingdom the opening scene narrates a brief history of U.S. relations with the Middle East, openly suggesting that U.S. involvement in the Arab (Muslim) world is precisely what made the terrorists turn against the U.S. Of course, none of these films supports terrorists; none creates a good image of them or depicts them as the victims of the U.S. Army. Rather, in showing both sides of the conflict, the films’ main concern is to reveal the amount of violence that the war has generated as well as the complexity of the problem that provides no easy solution. Yet these films also make the viewer think about the violence committed by some American soldiers; instead of taking 9/11 as the start of the war, they demonstrate a broader view of the problem, suggesting that the U.S. made mistakes that led to 9/11 and has continued making them during the War on Terror. In this respect, Boys of Abu Ghraib is a vivid example of American violence in Iraq, where the actions of particular soldiers are overtly compared to those of Saddam Hussein: both the Iraqi dictator’s men and the American soldiers tortured their captives who were against the “regime”—whether that took the form of Saddam’s tyranny or fledgling democracy in the American style—in the prison Abu Ghraib.
Matt Gallagher’s Kaboom—a novel that is based on the blog that Gallagher wrote during his military service (which explains the choice of the first-person point of view), describes what he and his comrades had to go through while in Iraq: from the everyday routine on the military base to their actual missions and combat actions. This docu-fictional narrative raises a large number of poignant issues that have become inseparable from the war in Iraq. From the discussion of the instability in Iraq that is mainly grounded on the ongoing confrontations between Shias and Sunnis, it moves to describe the experience of U.S. soldiers, whose aim in Iraq is to stabilize the region. Working in cooperation with the local forces, the soldiers aim to bring peace and democracy to this country so that Iraqi children can enjoy their lives without being scared that they might die any moment and, thus, can have a future.
Like many other narratives of the twenty-first-century U.S. interventions in the Middle East, Kaboom explicitly states that the main character volunteered to fight in Iraq because of 9/11. The attacks have changed every American: “Something had happened. Something new. Something historic. Something profound. And it hadn’t been created in a Hollywood studio, either. America had been attacked, innocent people had died, and there was going to be a reckoning my children and grandchildren would read about some day.”41 For the protagonist—and arguably for thousands of other American soldiers—it was important to become “a part of” that “reckoning” (372). Yet while the actions of American military men and women were aimed at freeing the country from terrorism—and also avenging the deaths of innocent Americans—and helping to develop Iraq, the plan did not work out smoothly for one simple reason: Iraqis did not want such help. This is the key message that the novel tries to transmit to readers. There were, of course, cases of collaboration: many Iraqis risked their lives working as interpreters or informing soldiers about suspicious activities. Nevertheless many other Iraqis wanted the Americans out of their country. In short, most local Iraqis were “either unable or unwilling” (15) to aid the Americans. One reason, observes the protagonist, was that the Iraqis believed that the Americans had come for oil, whereas—and this is what Kaboom articulates most explicitly—the aim of the soldiers was, in fact, to bring democracy to and improve the lives of the local population. Pivotal lines in the book declare, “Goddamn it. Remember why you’re here, I thought to myself. It isn’t for your dreams. It’s for theirs. Stay sharp” (115; my italics). The desire to build a peaceful future for the Iraqi children most horribly victimized by the war—“They didn’t even know what they didn’t have, but they did know they didn’t have it” (391; italics in original)—is one of the premises of the intervention.
However, the plan to liberate the Iraqi people and eventually bring democracy did not work out: “Telling them we knew what was best and that they needed to start relying on their own government and police so we could leave, that everyone would win that way and any help we could and did provide in the meantime at least offered a new spring in a land of endless, destitute winters, often didn’t have the effect I thought it would. Or should” (103). The mission of bringing freedom and democracy turned into a morass of mutual misunderstanding and hatred because the locals did not want U.S. military patrolling the streets and checking houses, whereas the U.S. soldiers could not understand why the locals were not willing to help them and would not accept what America had to offer. “I hated being hated” (105), says the protagonist, aptly summarizing the attitudes of Iraqis toward American soldiers. At the same time, the local Iraqis never ceased demanding benefits. For example, the novel describes the “complaints” voiced by every Iraqi in the city of Saba al-Bor: “‘We don’t have clean water.’ ‘We don’t have jobs.’ ‘We only have fifteen minutes of electricity per day because the Sunnis take it all.’ But the Sunnis say the Shias take all the electricity, I remembered. ‘They Ali Babas. We think America very good. Gimme water, mistah. Gimme job, mistah. Gimme power, America.’ Gimme, gimme, gimme” (112).
Unable to immediately provide the locals with all these benefits, the Americans, as the novel makes quite explicit, risked annoying Iraqis with their military presence even more and thus provoked more hatred. Indeed the part of the operation aimed at improving living conditions in Iraq failed, and the U.S. presence in the country eventually turned into a straightforward occupation, especially in the eyes of the locals. Thus only more hatred was generated. It is pivotal in this respect that the novel addresses the problem of Iraqi children, claiming that they are “future terrorists” (109). The purpose of this strong comparison is certainly not to label every Iraqi a terrorist but rather to criticize U.S. intervention that resulted in an occupation that manufactured strong resentments. This occupation is exactly what will make the future generations of Iraqis view Americans as the enemy: “They will grow up hating America! . . . And they will be wrong, but that will not change anything” (148–49). These prophetic words are aptly proved when an eight-year-old Iraqi girl refuses to collaborate with the protagonist and his Iraqi interpreter because the former is American and the latter is “American now” (186).
The novel continues to meditate upon the problem of bringing democracy and liberty to Iraq. Kaboom first elucidates why the U.S. had to intervene: “We’ll fight the fights not because we necessarily want to but because no one else will. We were bred to protect” (201–2; italics in original). The words obviously go hand in hand with the ideology of American exceptionalism; they also intend to justify U.S. intervention as a humanitarian mission, whose only goal was to protect the people of Iraq, denying that any other material or economic benefits were sought after, as these are frequently taken to be the main reasons for U.S. involvement. Next, Kaboom attempts to explain the futility of the intervention:
Hurt. There’s just so much of it. Especially here. It’s an abyss. I can’t help these people. No one can. They can’t help themselves, and neither can the great American sympathy.
There it is again. The siren’s song of gone. A freedom bird that doesn’t land anywhere at all. It just hovers there, waiting. The ultimate escape. Enticingly empty and hollow and spotless and smooth. Oh, so smooth. (203; italics in original)
The problem of imposing democracy is one of the most persistent issues in the novel. Apart from using the metaphor of the “freedom bird,” the narrator compares the act of bringing democracy to Iraq to the vivid example of “a lizard and its tail”: “We wanted to slice off the chaos tail without smashing in the lizard’s head, hoping a democracy tail would grow in the meantime. We learned firsthand that wasn’t how lizards or their tails worked” (392; italics in original). The novel does not simply criticize the approach chosen by the U.S. to impose democracy; first and foremost, it censures the lack of any historical understanding of the region the U.S. is now dealing with. “Government? This is Iraq, not America. We are tribal society, not democracy. Don’t you Americans read any history books? The sheiks are government in Arab culture!” (242; italics in original). The narrator laments that while the cause of the intervention was just, it was not achievable because it is impossible to change what has been the norm in that society for centuries. Hence the skeptical and, at times, hostile attitude of the locals toward the invaders took shape not because all Iraqis are terrorists but simply because they considered the intervention and intrusion from the outside a threat to their customary way of life.
For the American people at home, the war did not seem very clear either, and the novel criticizes their failure to understand the war from their domestic vantage: “Thank you for what you do; please return home safely; we’ll pray for you. Empty words from an empty people—they wanted to show that they cared, but our experience was so unlike anything in their realm of understanding, only trodden clichés could fill their vacuum of confusion” (168). Can one blame the nation’s people for not being able to comprehend the war, when no one was providing a clear explanation for U.S. involvement and, what is even more important, it was impossible to foresee the end of the war?42 The Iraq War, considered a “forever war” in the novel (350), was the “war no one cared about, let alone understood” (139); thus the bewilderment of American civilians “wasn’t their fault . . . something [Gallagher] didn’t yet understand when [he] was still in Iraq” (168).
The novel eventually moves to a discussion of war veterans and their reintegration back into U.S. society, revealing the hardships of resuming a normal life after one has seen killings and other forms of loss and death in Iraq. Hence Kaboom presents a cluster of problems caused by the intervention: first, the overall failure in Iraq, which was the result of badly planned military and political strategies; second, the presence of a generation of the Iraq War veterans who, upon returning to the U.S., had trouble reintegrating into society; third, the hatred of Iraqis toward the U.S. for invading their country. Gallagher comments on that hatred toward the end of the novel: “When American forces pulled back from the cities fully in June 2009, the Iraqis celebrated with fireworks. I found their choice of festivity slightly ironic, yet fitting. A few months certainly hadn’t changed their love for all things that blast and go boom” (441). This illustrates that the locals were happy when the U.S. troops withdrew and the intervention was effectively over; it also reveals that during the long years of war the Iraqis simply got used to the constant sounds of shooting and bombing; hearing fireworks explode, they were not scared but rather considered those sounds to be an integral part of their environment. On the other hand, casting the Iraqis as a people who love things that explode can be interpreted as comparing them to terrorists, which proves that the image of Iraqis as terrorists did not change even after the U.S. military ended its occupation of Iraq. The intervention, according to Kaboom, was a failure because it neither brought democracy to Iraq, nor did it change the American perception of people from the Middle East, whom many Americans still regard as a threat.
Klay’s short-story cycle Redeployment provides a multidimensional view of the Iraq War: it tells the reader what it means to be in war, in real combat; it describes life on a military base and the routines imposed on soldiers; it raises the issue of the veteran’s reintegration into civilian life in his homeland. The problem of war veterans is most distinctly present in the cycle, but the following analysis will only briefly focus on it; my major concern here is to give an overview of the American soldiers’ wartime experience, considering the issue of U.S. interventionism via the Iraq War. Just as in Dear Mr. President, the stories in Redeployment are revealed from the first-person point of view. While this makes the stories unreliable, the I’s turn them into the soldiers’ diaries—the numerous experiences that the reader learns about from the short-story cycle that presents multiple views on the Iraq War.
Redeployment offers a very controversial view of that war, though it does not distinctly reveal whether it supports the intervention. This lack of clarity, however, illustrates the controversial nature of the war itself. The collection was published in 2014, by which time the author obviously had an overview of the conflict and the policies that informed it; nonetheless it is written by a war veteran concerned with conveying (and, therefore, reflecting) his personal experiences in Iraq and his life after his return home. His priorities were to confront the war’s concrete reality and to tell the reader honestly how it was.
The stories explore various problems faced by the soldiers while in Iraq. For example, regarding the soldiers’ feelings during their service, the narrator points out that:
Somebody said combat is 99 percent sheer boredom and 1 percent pure terror. They weren’t an MP in Iraq. On the roads I was scared all the time. Maybe not pure terror. That’s for when the IED actually goes off. But a kind of low-grade terror that mixes with the boredom. So it’s 50 percent boredom and 49 percent normal terror, which is a general feeling that you might die at any second and that everybody in this country wants to kill you. Then, of course, there’s the 1 percent pure terror, when your heart rate skyrockets and your vision closes in and your hands are white and your body is humming. You can’t think. You’re just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do. And then you go back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, and you go back to thinking.43
The passage vividly describes how the soldier, placed in the midst of the Iraq War, yields his purported role as a liberator to a new role, that of a target: he is considered the enemy in this country where he is not wanted. He has to adapt to this attitude and simply do his job, perform his duties.
Another issue that the stories touch upon, linked to the previous one, is killing, which is “not easy”: “Out of boot camp, Marines act like they’re gonna play Rambo, but it’s fucking serious, it’s professional” (3). In this connection, the cycle’s central killing scene, described in the story “After Action Report,” occurs when one of the soldiers, Timhead, shoots an Iraqi boy. That is not a random murder: the boy posed a threat to U.S. soldiers, aiming a weapon at them. However, his being a child raises a question of ethics and, what is more, the matter of child murder in war. The soldier perceives this killing differently than he would have had the victim been an adult man. His moral struggle and guilt can be understood from his comment: “I signed up to kill hajjis” (40). Another soldier counters that Timhead came to Iraq to replace his brother—another marine who died in action—but it is still evident that Timhead cannot forget that he has killed a child. He wonders how old the child was, and his comrade responds, “Old enough to know it’s a bad fucking idea to shoot at U.S. Marines” (40). Thus there is a significant difference in the portrayal of an Iraqi boy in Redeployment than in The Hurt Locker. The former overtly depicts the child as the enemy—a direct threat to U.S. marines. Yet both children can be perceived as innocent victims of war. The boy from Redeployment dies not because of the cruelty of U.S. soldiers but because the war made weapons accessible to him, and the idea of shooting at Americans was inculcated through the example of his family members and neighbors. This argument is supported later in the book, when the protagonist says that the child was not “crazy,” according to “hajji standards” (44), suggesting that Iraqi children are no longer mere witnesses to the war in their country; they have become participants: they take up weapons as the primary activity of their present and future lives. When the reader finds out that the boy’s sister witnessed the murder, one of the soldiers comments, “This might not even be the most fucked-up thing she’s seen” (49). The reader is once again reminded that for Iraqi children, death is an everyday reality. And when Redeployment tries to draw parallels between the Iraqi girl and an American girl (Timhead’s sister), it articulates the difference between the two, suggesting the innocence and moral purity of the latter, and the lack of these qualities in the former: “There’s explosions in this city every fucking day. There’s firefights in this city every fucking day. That’s her home. That’s in the streets where she plays. This girl is probably fucked up in ways we can’t even imagine. She’s not your sister. She’s just not. She’s seen it before” (50). Even the fact that the girl has witnessed the death of her brother but nonetheless seems fine is explained by one of the soldiers: having already witnessed too much death, she is now “numb” (50).
In “Prayer in the Furnace,” there is a similar example. A small boy plants an explosive, but, as the soldiers themselves acknowledge, he “couldn’t know what he was doing” (148). For that reason the soldiers do not kill the child. In the story U.S. soldiers are not plainly bad characters or child murderers. One of the soldiers describes how, when his unit was under fire once, the enemy used children as human shields, and the U.S. soldiers refused to fire back: “They [the soldiers] let themselves get shot at because they didn’t want to risk hurting children” (145). There are, of course, casualties among civilians, including children, but, as the book makes clear, this is not what the U.S. soldiers were trying to do. In “Psychological Operations,” for example, the main character frankly states, “Marines don’t like killing children. It fucks them up in the head” (202). Instead of just censuring the deaths caused by war, Redeployment attempts to analyze the problem not from a position of what is good and what is bad but by placing it in the context of the war, a sphere where the soldier, apart from choosing between good and bad, also has to choose between death and life.
The intervention itself is characterized through its portrayal of U.S. soldiers and their actions. While the killing of Iraqi children undermines the role of the soldiers as liberators and makes them look instead like murderers of innocent civilians, there are also positive references to the marines. The narrator uses an interesting metaphor to describe one of the soldiers, a man who displays a “huge Superman S he got tattooed on his chest before deployment” (21). The man is compared to an American comics character, one who is famous for his superpowers and his desire to fight evil. The metaphor (albeit ironically) helps the reader envisage the U.S. soldiers as potentially positive characters who are in Iraq to perform the important mission of freeing the oppressed and punishing the oppressor.
Redeployment attempts to explain the intervention in Iraq through the soldiers’ opinions. Yet the closest it gets are two elucidations: “We were fighting in Iraq because we were fighting in Iraq,” and “Fighting the fight of good versus evil. Democracy versus Islam” (78). Not being able to provide a clear reason for the conflict, the short-story cycle compares the Iraq War to other U.S. wars: “Success was a matter of perspective. In Iraq it had to be. There was no Omaha Beach, no Vicksburg Campaign, not even an Alamo to signal a clear defeat. The closest we’d come were those toppled Saddam statues, but that was years ago” (77). One can speculate that the story’s main message is that when there are no specific goals, there can be no specific actions that would make Americans feel proud of their soldiers. The story further suggests that the U.S. mission—to bring freedom and democracy—was desired only by Americans, not by Iraqis. For example, one of the cities in Iraq is called “Istalquaal,” which means “freedom” or “liberation,” yet Americans, not Iraqis, had given this place that name (83). The motif of imposition becomes apparent in this context: the U.S. is imposing an order it thinks Iraq should have. It comes as no surprise that Iraqis blame the Americans for their actions, claiming that the Americans “destroyed this country” (85).
One of the stories, “Psychological Operations,” suggests oil as a potential reason for the intervention. A veteran comments on the opinion of his female friend that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of oil: “I was one of those people invading Iraq . . . and I didn’t give a damn about oil. Neither did a single soldier I knew” (171). The woman vehemently responds, “Who cares what the soldiers believe? It doesn’t matter what the pawns on a chessboard think about how and why they’re being played” (171). Relying on this brief dialogue, one can speculate that the story sees oil as the main reason for the invasion and suggests that the soldier’s statement expresses little more than his personal viewpoint on why he is fighting in Iraq. That is, while a soldier might consider his service to be a righteous mission because he is willing to sacrifice his life for the sake of other people’s freedom, in reality he is fighting for purely economic reasons. This is a crucial moment of realization, which also explains the soldier’s saying, “Talking with anybody who thought they had a clear view of Iraq tended to make me want to rub shit in their eyes” (173). It reveals his self-justification about his service in Iraq. Soldiers clearly want to believe in personal or national, just and honorable reasons for their deployment. And in the case of the Iraq War, just as in the case of the Vietnam War, veterans seek the support of the people back home to prove to themselves that their time spent in one of the most dangerous places on earth was not for nothing, and that civilians appreciate their service and consider them to be heroes and liberators. The controversial nature of the intervention and the ongoing debate on the Iraq War, however, mean that there is no single answer to whether the intervention was as right and necessary as the one that, for example, took place during World War II. The main character’s motivation for joining the army, as the reader later finds out, was also influenced by his inability to afford paying college tuition, which, one can assume, was a problem faced by other soldiers too. Additionally, the main character was influenced by his over-the-top patriotic father, who, when his son was already in the army, tried to demonstrate that he was serving in the most honorable way possible: “He’d send me PowerPoints with pictures of soldiers, or jokes and speeches about ‘the troops’ that talked about them like they shat gold” (199). Yet the story also comments on the idea that the soldiers’ understanding of the war could, indeed, be very personal and did not necessarily coincide with the government’s profiteering. But that does not matter when they are back home; only national approval of their service in Iraq matters: “You risked your life for something bigger than yourself. How many people can say that? You chose to serve. Maybe you never will. But it doesn’t matter. You held up your hand and said, ‘I’m willing to die for these worthless civilians’” (203). Their nation’s approval and appreciation for their service is what the veterans seek.
In Redeployment, the mission of the U.S. in the end turns into a parade of meaningless tasks: teaching the locals how to keep bees, and how to play baseball. Beekeeping is eventually mocked when the protagonist imagines “Iraqi Widow Honey in U.S. supermarkets” and a TV commercial inviting, “Try the sweet taste of Iraqi freedom” (87). Baseball is an even more ridiculous thing to do in war-torn Iraq, yet apparently there are people who think that only through baseball can Iraq be vaccinated with democracy:
Here is the idea: The Iraqi people want democracy, but it’s not taking. Why? They don’t have the INSTITUTIONS to support it. You can’t build anything with a rotten foundation, and Iraqi culture is, I’m sure, as rotten as it gets.
I know this sounds crazy, but there are few better institutions than the institution of BASEBALL. Look at the Japanese. They went from Emperor-loving fascists to baseball-playing democracy freaks faster than you can say, Sayonara, Hirohito!
What I’m saying is, you’ve got to change the CULTURE first. And what’s more AMERICAN than baseball. (10; emphasis in original)
U.S. intervention is clearly described in this passage as an imperialist endeavor to impose a regime that the U.S. considers best. Moreover, through the ideas that Iraqi culture is dead and the nation’s traditions are plainly wrong, and foregrounding the American tradition as the only correct one, the story hints at the dogmas of the ideology of American exceptionalism. Yet it is impossible to claim that the story positions this view as the only right one: the protagonist openly rejects the idea of teaching baseball to Iraqis, whose current needs are more vitally important than the American game. One can speculate that the story’s main aim is to contrast the two viewpoints, chiefly to contend that there were different visions of the U.S. mission in Iraq, and, it seems, none was thoroughly thought through. Nevertheless it would be wrong to argue that the short-story cycle completely gives up on the positive side of the intervention. For instance, in “Prayer in the Furnace,” “violence dropped in that city [Ramadi] like ninety-something percent” (166), thanks to the hard work of U.S. marines.
Just as the soldier strives to understand what his mission in Iraq is, so do the American people back home. When the protagonist in the story “Bodies” returns home, he is thanked for his service, yet “nobody seemed to know exactly what they were thanking [him] for” (63). Everybody seems to blindly believe that the Iraq intervention was only positive, but no one bothers much about the details. The soldier’s sarcastic remark while at home—“Come on, cat, . . . I’ve been defending your freedom. At least let me pet you” (64)—reveals his frustration with the collective response to his service, but it also mocks the intervention, whose main aim was to defend the freedom of either the citizens of the U.S. (from terrorist attacks) or the Iraqi people (from Saddam’s and the terrorists’ oppression). The story “Psychological Operations” deals with this problem, too, yet does so from a different perspective: it reveals the reactions of a group of Muslim Americans to the service of their friend’s son (also a Muslim). They send the man notes with supportive phrases like “Good job, thank you for your service”; “Whether this war is right or wrong, you have done an honorable thing”; and even “Whatever you go through, it is the responsibility of those who sent you” (205). While most of the other messages are “real pro-war” (205), these three clearly display the public’s confusion about the war and the disagreement among citizens with regard to the decision to intervene. It is also important that the opinions of the Muslim people—some of whom, as the story suggests, no longer felt comfortable living in the U.S. after 9/11—construct an array of pros and cons, showing that the war is not about religion but, in fact, about terrorists, who should be eliminated no matter whether they are Muslims, Christians, or anyone else.
One of the concluding messages of the short-story cycle is revealed in the dialogue between two veterans in the story “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound,” when one asks, “Iraq . . . What do you think? Did we win?,” and the other responds, “Uhh . . . we did okay” (268). Even the soldiers cannot negotiate this issue and come to a firm conclusion; even those who directly participated in and witnessed the war are not sure about its result and about the ultimate fate of the Iraqi people, or the relations between the United States and the Middle East, particularly Iraq. Was the involvement in Iraq the right thing to do, or was it a brutal, meaningless fight? It seems that Redeployment supports the latter viewpoint. Take the following conversation from its final story, “Ten Kliks South”:
“If we used a howitzer to kill somebody back in the States,” I say, “I wonder what crime they’d charge us with.”
“Murder,” says Sergeant Deetz. “What are you, an idiot?”
“Yeah, murder, sure,” I say, “but for each of us? In what degree? I mean, me and Bolander and Jewett loaded, right? If I loaded an M16 and handed it to Voorstadt and he shot somebody, I wouldn’t say I’d killed anyone.”
“It’s a crew-served weapon,” says Sergeant Deetz. “Crew. Served. Weapon. It’s different.”
“And I loaded, but we got the ammo from the ASP [Ammunition Supply Point],” I say. “Shouldn’t they be responsible, too, the ASP Marines?”
“Yeah,” says Jewett. “Why not the ASP?”
“Why not the factory workers who made the ammo?” says Sergeant Deetz. “Or the taxpayers who paid for it? You know why not? Because that’s retarded.”
“The lieutenant gave the order,” I say. “He’d get it in the court, right?”
“Oh, you believe that? You think officers would take the hit?” Voorstadt laughs. “How long you been in the military?” (274–75)
The scene explicitly articulates that what the soldiers did in Iraq was plain murder. And although the comparison of actions taken in Iraq—a country where war is being fought—to the same sort of actions had they been committed in the peaceful U.S. seems at first sight far-fetched, the main purpose of this conversation is to show that if U.S. soldiers had taken military actions of that kind in the U.S., killing American people in ways that would have been regarded as murder, then why should U.S. intervention in Iraq, with its massive number of civilian deaths, not be considered a breeding ground for murder too? Another important issue that the conversation touches upon is guilt. Talking about the weapon, the narrator describes the whole sociopolitical system that was involved in conducting the intervention. Many tend to blame individual soldiers for their “wrong” actions in Iraq, but it is important to realize that the war was conducted with “crew-served weapon[s]”: there is a chain of people who made the decision to intervene, created the plan (however poorly), and sent soldiers to perform their jobs. Thus if the intervention was a mistake, it was a mistake made primarily by the state rather than by the soldiers doing its bidding.
While Powers’s novel can chiefly be read as a story of an Iraq War veteran (the first-person point of view contributes to the creation of an illusion that this is a memoir) whose aim is to reflect the horror of war and to meditate upon the philosophical nature of war as a destructive force, parts of the novel also describe the U.S. participation in the Iraq War and, therefore, deal with the issue of intervention. The Yellow Birds provides two perspectives on the intervention in Iraq: first, it attempts to explain the rationale for intervention, both justifying and criticizing the war; and, second, discussing war as a philosophical phenomenon, the novel showcases the intervention as an inevitable military action, where American soldiers are left without any alternative but to fight.
The reasons for the involvement are provided explicitly. First, the novel starts with a narration of the events that took place in Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, on September 2004. While there is no overt reference to U.S. involvement in Iraq as a response to 9/11, the fact that the Al Tafar fighting takes place in September can be understood as a link to the 2001 attacks. Thus The Yellow Birds, like other novels on the War on Terror, makes reference to the tragic events on September 11, 2001, highlighting that day as a crucial point in twenty-first-century U.S. (military) history. Second, the soldiers themselves clearly realize and accept their status as an intervening force. “I was an intruder, at best a visitor,” says the main character of the novel, Bartle, revealing his understanding of the intervention as a military intrusion into a foreign territory.44 Bartle thinks of the local Iraqis as people who “waited patiently for us [American soldiers] to leave, for the enemy to leave. . . . When the battle was over they would come back and begin to sweep the shells off the roofs of their houses. . . . They would fill buckets of water and splash them over dried, coppery blood on their doorsteps” (84). The image of the soldier as an intruder only worsens over the course of the narration, and when Bartle returns to the U.S., he characterizes himself as “the murderer, the fucking accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility” (145). In this characterization the intervention is a means of sanctioning murder.
Before one of the missions, a colonel addresses the soldiers under his command with the following speech: “Boys . . . you will soon be asked to do great violence in the cause of good. . . . This is the land where Jonah is buried, where he begged for God’s justice to come. . . . We are that justice” (87). The leitmotif of American warfare as waging a war of justice (importantly, this claim is made by a commanding officer) is braided through the novel, presenting the intervention as a war against evil. The monologue continues, “Now, I wish I could tell you that all of us are coming back, but I can’t. Some of you will not come back with us. . . . I can’t go with you boys . . . but I’ll be in contact from the operation center the whole time. Give ’em hell” (87). The speech is clearly a pep talk for the upcoming fight, but the colonel is not a direct participant in this fight; he is an instructor who only gives orders, without himself taking part in combat operations on the ground. That is, while explaining to the soldiers that some of them will die performing this mission, he declares that some will return “with us,” which means that he is assured of being a survivor. The novel offers an interesting insight into a problem of modern warfare, in which members of the commanding staff are usually not present on the battlefield and the soldiers under their command perform the whole of the “work.” Indeed the ironic comment of the narrator—also the novel’s protagonist, Bartle—on the colonel’s speech reflects this situation: “The speech was the colonel’s pride, his satisfaction with his own directness, his disregard for us as individuals” (87).
There is, however, another pivotal point made by the colonel in his speech: “We’re counting on you, boys. The people of the United States are counting on you. You may never do anything this important again in your entire lives” (89). The colonel’s words characterize the intervention as a highly significant mission, whose success lies completely on the shoulders of its participants—who, in turn, should consider this opportunity a sign of great trust because the interests of the United States are at stake, and the mission’s outcome will show whether or not U.S. principles will be defended and promoted. The attitude of the soldiers—who may die in Iraq—is not so pompous, and when one of them, Murph, asks the narrator, “You think this is really the most important thing we’ll ever do, Bartle?” Bartle replies, “I hope not” (90). Murph’s hesitation, along with Bartle’s skeptical response, illustrates the soldiers’ negative attitude toward the war and suggests that the intervention and its inevitable killing cannot and should not be imposed on the soldier as the most significant thing one can do. Perhaps the achievement of such a goal as liberation can be treated as “the most important thing [one’]ll ever do,” yet the novel, in presenting the intervention in concrete terms as a bloody fight, does not endorse the notion that it is an event that one should feel proud to have participated in. Bartle’s meditation on the mission in Iraq strongly supports this assumption:
I thought of my grandfather’s war. How they had destinations and purpose. How the next day we’d march out under a sun hanging low over the plains in the east. We’d go back into a city that had fought this battle yearly; a slow, bloody parade in fall to mark the change of season. We’d drive them out. We always had. We’d kill them. They’d shoot us and blow off our limbs and run into the hills and wadis, back into the alleys and dusty villages. Then they’d come back, and we’d start over by waving to them as they leaned against lampposts and unfurled green awnings while drinking tea in front of their shops. While we patrolled the streets, we’d throw candy to their children with whom we’d fight in the fall a few more years from now. (91)
The intervention in Iraq is a bounding routine, an endless duty that the soldier has to perform as if locked within a vicious circle. It is obviously on purpose that the novel evokes World War II, in which the narrator’s grandfather fought—America’s “good war” that had both a purpose and an outcome that was desired. The reference to World War II creates a striking contrast, making the war in Iraq look even less planned, less purposeful, and less justifiable. Finally, just like Redeployment and Kaboom, The Yellow Birds underlines the fact that the presence of U.S. soldiers in Iraq only provokes hatred in the locals and that the war will never end: the next generation of Iraqis will grow up despising the U.S. and will want to take revenge for the invasion and occupation.
Not only the soldiers but also some civilians consider the intervention to be an action that the country should not feel proud of; importantly, however, they adopt this view not because they question the war’s aims or actions taken by the military but because they realize that the U.S. Army inevitably incurs losses. “I just hate that y’all have to be over there” (106), says a bartender to Bartle, referring to the fact that American soldiers have to experience savagery that could have been avoided had the country not intervened. Yet the role of the soldiers is by no means belittled when they return home. The country accepts them as “American hero[es]” (107). And although the novel obviously questions this acceptance, describing the criminal actions of the protagonist in Iraq, it is impossible to completely refute the perception of soldiers and war veterans as heroes because there is a clear sense of compassion shown to them in The Yellow Birds, which also respects that their actions can help solve conflicts overseas. Nevertheless, along with this compassion, there is censure of the interventionist U.S. policy, because the country has a rich history of sending “all these boys with guns out roaming the plains of almost every country in the world” (186). Eventually, too, there is the problem of “accountab[ility]” (186) for those decisions and resulting actions.
The turning point in the novel is the murder of Murph. While his death is partially explained by his temporary insanity (caused by war and the atrocities)—he walked through the streets naked and was eventually killed—the further actions committed by Bartle and Sergeant Sterling with Murph’s body raise crucial questions of ethics in war. The two men dispose of Murph’s body so that nobody, including Murph’s mother (Bartle had promised to bring her son back home safe), would see that Murph was tortured and mutilated. This incident, important to the plot, opens pivotal perspectives on U.S. intervention. First, it undermines the intervention because such actions—and, generally, war—provoke such murders, including now the killing of Murph, “who had died and been butchered in the service of his country in an unknown corner of the world” (206). Second, it claims that the further actions taken by the two soldiers are partly caused and dictated by the unavoidable reality of war, which turns good American guys into soulless, heartless, and brutal criminals. It is no surprise, then, that the novel focuses on Bartle’s life before, during, and after the war to fully demonstrate the radical changes he endures because of his military service.
But the novel by no means censures every single action taken by American soldiers in Iraq. Indeed it demonstrates that certain operations were fulfilled and some positive results—sought by the U.S. government, together with the U.S. military—were achieved. For example, the narrator describes the accomplishment of one of the missions: “Our platoon had done well [in the fight] in the orchard, minimized civilian casualties, killed a lot of hajjis and suffered only a few casualties of our own” (151). Such episodes serve an important role, demonstrating that even such a complex and controversial intervention had advantages and brought positive results. Another hint that somewhat justifies the intervention is given by an American soldier: “Sarge, it’s a hundred and twenty degrees. Why don’t we surrender and go home” (154). The verb “surrender” shrewdly underlines the fact that the salient point is not that the United States attacked Iraq, but rather that terrorists from the Middle East attacked the U.S. first and, therefore, the intervention became a response to this attack, which openly characterizes the United States not as a hostile intruder but as a victim, the aggrieved party.
The image of the United States, along with the nation’s reaction to the intervention, occupy an important place in the novel. The country is described as “the land of the free, of reality television, outlet malls and deep vein thrombosis” (101). Such a characterization obviously serves to reveal the contrast between the democratic United States and its opposite: oppressed Iraq. Additionally, when the narrator returns home, his mother hugs him so that he “fe[els] as if [he]’d somehow been returned to the singular safety of the womb, untouched and untouchable to the world outside her arms around [his] slouching neck” (109). This description of being secure and feeling protected can also refer to Bartle’s mother country, the United States, which, as soon as he is back, guarantees him an ordinary, safe life (in contrast to the chaos and danger of Iraq). Bartle also remembers the history of his country—the discovery and settlement of what would later became one of the leading world powers—when he imagines his mother’s house “close enough to the ocean that those early English settlers took it as the farthest point they’d go upstream, the geology of the place preventing them from having any choice other than the one wherein they said, ‘We are lost; therefore we will call this home’” (133). The phrase, however, is ambiguous and can be interpreted as the protagonist’s dissatisfaction with his homeland, which was founded merely because the migrants were “lost.” This is an interesting shift in Bartle’s consciousness that takes place after his service in Iraq and, more important, after his failure at being a good man and soldier, which happened when he agreed to help Sterling dispose of Murph’s body. More than that, Bartle’s sarcastic tone toward the U.S. persists as he thinks about Murph’s death. He underlines that Murph’s mother will only receive “the thanks of a grateful nation,” whereas the guy will “be buried and forgotten by all but her” (207). The mother’s experience to find out the truth about the murder of her son adds a substantial portion of censure: “The army had given up on her eventually, her fight for truth and justice, to know how it was he’d gone from MIA to dead so quickly, why the explanations never fit. But they knew that if they waited long enough people would forget about her pain. . . . Everyone stopped listening to her. . . . America forgot her little story, moving as it does so quickly on to other agonies. . . . Even her friends began to smile at her with condescension, saying, ‘LaDonna, you just gotta find your truth in all of this’” (221–22; italics in original).
The other perspective from which the novel examines the issue of intervention is that of choice. Specifically, the novel claims that for some participants, particularly for soldiers, the intervention is an obligation: there is never any “alternative” (24); one must continue an operation, start a new mission, struggle to survive, and so on. The soldiers have to face death every day; therefore the loss of a comrade is unexceptional. For example, Sterling tells a story about a dying soldier and comments, “Bart, you’re just gonna make it into something bigger than it was” (120). Trapped within war, soldiers are left to enjoy the moments when they remain alive, while their comrades die: “I was really happy it wasn’t me. That’s crazy, right?” (121); “And I too, though sad now, had said to myself, Thank God he died and I did not. Thank you, God” (122). The novel provides an interesting explanation for why there is such cynicism among soldiers: “Grief is a practical mechanism, and we only grieved those we knew. All others who died in Al Tafar were part of the landscape, as if something had sown seeds in that city that made bodies rise from the earth, in the dirt or up through the pavement like flowers after a frost, dried and withering under a cold, bright sun” (124).
Finally, the novel meditates upon the issue of intervention through the prism of faith, showing the intrusion to be ultimately approved by God. The problem is first raised before the soldiers are deployed to Iraq: “Our families watched as we stood in formation while the battalion commander gave a rousing, earnest speech about duty, and the chaplain injected humor into sober tales of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (43). This passage reveals the important role that religion plays in the army, how skillfully it is used there, as some believe that the actions of American soldiers are sanctioned by God, so that the soldiers become God’s ministers. The idea is largely developed in the scene when Bartle, going AWOL in Kaiserslautern, Germany, enters a church and meets a priest there. During their talk, the priest demonstrates his solidarity with the soldier; when Bartle introduces himself as “Private Bartle,” the priest says, “I’m sort of a private, too, in a way” (57). What the priest means is that he is a soldier of God, but one can speculate that this comparison can also be interpreted in reverse, namely that Bartle too is a soldier of God. Indeed the scene underscores that the services of both the priest and the soldier are supreme and thus are guided by the supreme power. Every soldier in the U.S. military serves God in the performance of such a high-value mission. This interpretation, however, only makes sense from the viewpoint of the ideology of American exceptionalism.
Bartle’s visit to the church is perhaps the only truly peaceful moment in the novel. With awe, he looks at the icons, at the majestic and sacred place, whose “entire history [of a thousand years] . . . [took only] three pages [to describe in a pamphlet]” (59). He realizes that people are interested only in the gist, the main events and crucial points, rather than the whole story. The scene somewhat parallels his service in Iraq, which virtually nobody will be interested in or remember. People will only know about the Iraq War as a historical event, the war that took the lives of a certain number of soldiers, the figure most probably rounded up or down. However, Bartle’s personal experience in the Middle East will forever remain his personal war. “I realized, as I stood there in the church, that there was a sharp distinction between what was remembered, what was told, and what was true. And I didn’t think I’d ever figure out which was which” (60). This is the fictitious side of history—history that is sometimes created on purpose, for specific gain, when some facts are neglected and others invented, so that the truth and the lie blend together, creating indistinguishable, wrongly proportioned, and generalized chaos that is absorbed into collective history.
Mainly dealing with the story of one soldier, his personal fears, failures, and disappointments in and after the war, the novel inevitably touches upon the broader issues of war and a specific one: intervention. The narrative explicitly articulates that Bartle’s war experience is a turning point for him: it destroys him morally, ruining his life. The character himself describes his participation in the Iraq War as follows: “Everything happened. Everything fell” (148). The intervention is not so much a political phenomenon as a psychological barrier—something that no participant in war can overcome, staying safe and sound.
The Afghanistan War and the Iraq War were largely commented on in works of film and literature, which eventually amounted to a whole body of docu-fictional narratives. While some examples tend to present a particular side of the conflict, many focus on the problems that the wars caused for both sides, intervening and intervened. They highlight the issues of civilian casualties, military service in foreign lands, the domestic reintegration of war veterans, and many others. Yet one of the key issues that virtually all the analyzed examples raise—which directly influences one’s understanding of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq—is that of the enemy. Indeed historians and political science scholars have extensively commented on the problem of a not-easily-identified enemy that the U.S. went to fight in the Middle East. While terrorism was and still is a menace to world peace, terrorists as specific persons were not determined precisely. Thus, even as many U.S. soldiers joined the military for a humanitarian purpose, to fight terror, the concept of terrorism became rather abstract: an evil that did not have a face. This is one of the main concerns of all the films, series, novels, and short-story cycles that attempt to portray U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Foregrounding the lack of clarity about the enemy, all the analyzed examples tend to argue that the interventions, whose main goal of eradicating terrorism was eventually reworded into a claim to bring democracy to oppressed nations, turned out mostly to be a disaster, both for the U.S. soldiers involved in them and for the locals who endured largely unwanted occupations.
The humanitarian aim of the U.S. to help rid the world of terrorists as well as to create better living conditions for current and future generations of Afghans and Iraqis should not be neglected or underestimated. And, as demonstrated by all the docu-fictional accounts examined here, certain improvements were made in the war-affected regions. However, the means by which those improvements were brought to the countries characterize the interventions mainly as acts of violence and, frequently, injustice. Yet, to stress the point once again, this happened chiefly because the fight against terrorists was not like any other war that the U.S. had ever fought, since in the twenty-first century the enemy became simply unidentifiable. Thus the military interventions and the actions of U.S. soldiers in the Middle East were frequently based on suspicions rather than clear facts. Hence casualties among civilians became unavoidable in that type of war.
As chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate, docu-fictional narratives successfully reflect the problems of the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and avoid reductive characterizations, neither justifying nor criticizing them exclusively. Instead they attempt to mirror the real-life concerns that emerged in relation to the two involvements, which are now among the most controversial military interventions ever undertaken in the history of the United States.