“We Are Winning: Three Genres, Two Wars, Two Colonels, and a General” by Dick Bennett, College English Association, March 25, 2010
We watch the ways the wars are reported, trying to understand empire. From the many, I have chosen examples from
three genres for comment.
First, an Associated Press report of the war in Afghanistan. This cheerleading article describes a US
battalion commander in Afghanistan in 2009 considered to be a success against
the insurgency by General Petraeus himself, architect of counter-insurgency,
who visits with congratulations.
Second, in my
local newspaper a series of 66 page-one “Salutes to American Valor” of
combat medal-winners in the Iraq and Afghan wars. The 66 narratives of fearsome
combat anecdotes signify, at least to the newspaper owner, a country of brave warriors whose patriotic attacks
and defendings, killings and woundings (their own and others) deserve their
nation’s gratitude.:
Third, a book-length, non-fiction
narrative written by an embedded journalist in Iraq in 2006-07. The
Good Soldiers by David Finkel presents
another optimistic US battalion commander and his men over a period of eighteen
months. General Petraeus, indefatigable
booster, appears again in an identical role.
Several themes connect the three,
including those allies in self-delusion and empire: positive thinking, optimism, and winning, victory over others. In Bright-Sided, Barbara Ehrenreich
explores the insistence upon optimism as a cultural and national trait
inextricable from U. S. capitalism and today's $9.6 billion self-improvement
industry. Robert Redford considers his
personal films--The Candidate, Three Days
of the Condor, All the President’s Men, for example—as studies of the US obsession
with winning. I am surprised he has not
made a film about President Bush II, who declared in 2007: “I’m optimistic.” “’We’re kicking ass.’ “We’ll
succeed unless we lose our nerve.”
Part I. Newspaper Report. Lt.
Colonel Gukeisen in Afghanistan 2009: We
Are Winning
AP writer Denis Gray admires Lt. Colonel
Thomas Gukeisen’s optimism for success
in counterinsurgent warfare (acronym COIN) in Afghanistan. Both officer and author, and General Petraeus
too, have embraced the power of positive
thinking. They are bright-sided. They foresee victory. For COIN, quoting Gukeisen, will change
hearts and minds, by “graduate level warfare,” the soldier as innovative
“scholar and statesman” able to think “outside the box.”
Higher ups in U. S. Afghan military
command all the way to General Petraeus, liking the Colonel’s 600 soldiers’
fighting expertise and his COIN rationality, gave him $850,000 in small bills
for such jobs as rebuilding schools and buying rugs for mosques. Combining cash with combat force and counterintelligence, Lt. Col. Gukeisen was
developing “security bubbles,” in which life can improve and will, he hopes,
draw in “the rest of the districts.”
He was so well-respected that General Petraeus himself made a personal
visit.
Gray is a master at reporting the
perspectives and experiences of commanders.
In a minute article he packs in all of the above and much more.
But there’s a major flaw that cannot be
blamed on the genre of the extremely brief, journalistic article. Here’s why.
Gray chose his exclusively officer sources. Consequently, he does not perceive, or does
not report, any of the ironies of his account, and becomes reductive and
prematurely optimistic and even celebratory of General Petraeus’ COIN.
Contextual criticism, some
sociological criticism, and some post-modern criticism, Paul de Man, for
example, teach a powerful reality about texts.
Whereas the formalists showed us how to discover the meaning of a text
by discerning its totality in every
conceivable, macro and micro, linguistic feature (I edited a stylistics journal
for 15 years), contextual criticism stresses the importance of what is not present.
In his report on the success of
counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, Gray omits the facts of Afghan life. Despite the billions spent fighting in
Afghanistan for nine years, the quality of Afghan life has not improved: For examples, more than a quarter of Afghan
children die before the age of five; life expectancy for women is just over 43
years.
Gray omits UN data on civilian deaths
caused by the US/NATO invasion and occupation, that numerous commentators
consider the main cause of Afghan resistance.
The United Nations says more civilians
were killed in 2009 than any other year since the US-led invasion of 2001.
According to the UN mission in Afghanistan, over 2,400 died in 2009, a 14
percent increase from 2008.
On the other side, he omits
what has happened to our troops. He
omits the effects of brutal military culture and war on insecure and aggressive
young men trained to kill--especially the high rate of post traumatic
stress disorders among veterans and the climbing rate of aggravated assault
back home.
But none of these realities disturb the
high command’s confidence in certain victory, nor does large-scale suffering
alter their conception of progress and success. And
in General Petraeus’ security bubbles of overwhelming armed force and
truckloads of cash, the US is winning.
However, the full ironical scope of Col.
Gukeisen’s and General Petraeus’ understanding of winning is yet to be
graphically appreciated..
Part
II. Thumbnail narratives. “Salutes
to American Valor” In Iraq and Afghanistan:
It’s Hell But We Are Winning
The format of the 66 Salutes has three parts: I.
Narrative of the violent event for which the warrior received the
commendation; II. A thumbnail biography, and III. An
explanation of the award: Medal of Honor, Silver Star, and so on, repeated in
each Salute.
Here is an example: 1. USAF
airman Nicole O’Hara and another airman killed six Iraqi insurgents to defeat
an ambush attempt. 2. Facts of family, employment, and why they chose military
service. Medal: Bronze Star.
All of these 66 brave warriors
displayed extraordinary physical courage, and took great risks in carrying out
their orders and responsibilities. Instead
of the abstractions of command planning that so reduce the reality of Gray’s
account to thematic bare bones, the Salutes to American Valor bring to life
momentous moments in the lives of the individual warriors subject to those optimistic
plans for supremacy. And in several of
the thumbnail bios, unintentionally I think, warriors are revealed as products of family
tradition and pressure, or/and patriotic brainwashing, and/or economic
necessity
Yet in this genre too, several profoundly
essential realities are missing that finally undermine the warrior
glorification intended by the newspaper owner.
These stories and these medals
celebrate only an intense, adrenaline-filled moment in each man or woman’s life. The Salutes suppress the subsequent
suffering of combat physical valor, the memory or imagination of road bombs
(IEDs), the projectiles (EFP), the snipers, or of their own killing of
civilians. Soldiers must live the rest
of their lives burned and amputated physically and mentally.
Ronald Glasser, M.D., has studied the
wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan (Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq). Those not returned to duty within a week
(excluding PTSD) now number over fifty
thousand. Physical injuries
combined with Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD puts the number of casualties at
well over a hundred thousand and
those numbers are growing. Amputations
are well over eight percent of those wounded—numbers not seen since our Civil War. The number of traumatic head injuries is well over
thirty percent of those wounded. But of
course the Salutes are about success, progress, winning even in moments of
horrendous violence.
Whereas Gray’s report on high
command success disregarded the troops, the Salutes to lower command and rank
and file ironically diminish them by reducing them to one day or a few hours. In reality, they and their tens of thousands
of fellow soldiers have lives left to live with their remembered and imagined
violence. If so, then the Salutes function, even for the killed Medal of Honor
winners, as adventurous military recruiting hero stories, and we are left
wondering: what is a combat hero?.
Part III. Booklength nonfiction narrative. Lt.
Colonel Kauzlarich in Iraq 2007: We Are
Winning. It’s All Good.
In David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Kauzlarich, is
very like Lt. Col. Gukeisen. When we
first meet him, Kauzlarich is equally confident and optimistic. His favorite, frequently repeated words are:
“It’s all good” and “We’re winning.” He
is physically brave, conscientious, and intellectually resilient. He’s one of Petraeus’s good soldiers
But whereas Gray makes Lt. Col. Gukeisen’s
Afghan war bubble appear rational and orderly (intimidation and funding), Finkel
depicts Kauzlarich’s Iraqi bubble--though following the same scholar and
statesman principles and practices of COIN-- as fearful, violent
(dismembering), explosive, complicated, multi-layered, in motion, and emotionally
unhinging. He lives with mortar attacks, IED bombs, EFP projectiles, and snipers, with the
wounded, the killed--success multifariously bombarded. He experiences the gulf between the Pentagon
and White House plans for the war and the soldiers’ experience of it, the chasm
between belief in winning and the assaults of combat, and the gap between his
belief in progress and the Iraqis he intends to protect, develop, and train.
General Petraeus’ visit to Lt. Col. Kauzlarich
tells it all. Like Lt. Col. Gukeisen,
Lt. Col. Kauzlarich describes his achievements and especially his plans to the
General. There was no point in
describing “the three dying faces of one battle” or “the … search on the
roadway for the correct number of severed limbs.” He knew to congratulate the people of his
area “on a job well done as far as security goes,” instead of more accurately
saying: congratulate the people “for not trying to kill him and his soldiers
for seven entire days in a row.” Tell
the General of his hopes to finish the $30 million sewer system ( stalled by
corruption) and to reduce the 50% illiteracy (although he could not monitor the
$82,500 project because participants feared “being killed if Americans were
present”).
And Gen. Petraeus is pleased in 2007 in
Baghdad, just as he will be in 2009 with Gukeisen in Afghanistan.: “’Great.
That’s super’” he declares. “’Well, you guys keep up the terrific work.’”
He poses for photographs, puts his arm
around Kauzlarich’s shoulders (who “looked the happiest he’d looked in a long
time”), and flies off in his helicopter.
Immediately, Kauzlarich welcomes new troops to
replace his killed and wounded. It was
“the good day,” he said, ‘It’s all
good.’”
And then he hears a great explosion, in
the direction of the fuel stations. A
call comes in that the platoon guarding the station was returning with wounded. At the aid station, he finds one Humvee
destroyed by an EFP projectile, two soldiers crying, “’Fucking war,’” says
Kauzlarich, following a trail of blood inside. Joshua Reeves, twenty-six years old, in the
“failing moments of his life,” “wasn’t breathing, his eyes weren’t moving, his
left foot was gone, his back side was ripped open…his stomach was filling with
blood.”
By the end of The Good Soldiers, still bright-sided Lt. Col. Kauzlarich had
learned something about “success.” As he
rose up in the helicopter that was to carry him away from Iraq, he shut his
eyes. Even though he probably did not
know all the facts about the shocking number of amputations, the one million killed
Iraqis, four million displaced (now 6), hundreds of thousands of orphans and
widows, unemployment up 50 to 70%,, the infrastructure throughout Iraq
devastated, he had glimpsed it all in his bubble. “The army had won,” he thought. “He was sure of it. They were the difference as General Petraeus
had promised. It was all good. But he
had seen enough.”
At
the end of Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich connects
the US obsession with positive thinking with the invasion of Iraq—from the
prosperity gospel of U.S. capitalism to the victory gospel of U.S. empire. And in his film Jeremiah Johnson, in which settlers take Indian land and the US
military intrudes upon a sacred Indian burial site, Robert Redford prepares us
for how he might satirize our wars for empire in the Middle East.
Note on Finkel’s Sources and
Methods
Finkel spent eight months closely with the
battalion in Iraq, and interviewed the wounded at their various hospitals in
the US. He doesn’t claim to have been present at every scene he
describes, but when he was not, “the details, descriptions, and dialogue” were
verified. Everyone who talked with him
knew it was on the record.
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