“We Are Winning: Three Genres, Two Wars, Two Colonels, and a General”

 

 “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.

 

References

Bick, Barbara.  Walking the Precipice: Witness to the Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Feminist Press, 2009. 

Bourke, Joanna.  An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare.  Basic Books, 1999.

Chappell, Paul.  Will War Ever End?  A Soldier’s Vision of Peace for the 21^st Century.   Ashoka, 2009.   www.wagingpeace.org   Rev. Veterans for Peace Newsletter (Winter 2010).  “…military actions are stoking the hatred, fueling angry people who use terrorism as a tactic in fighting for their beliefs and causes.”

Chomsky, Noam.  Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance.  Metropolitan, Holt, 2003.  

Coppola, Chris, M.D.  : Coppola: A Pediatric Surgeon in Iraq.  NTI Upstream, 2009?  Rev. Veterans for Peace Newsletter (Winter 2010).

Dawar, Rasool.  “20 Killed in Pakistan Tribal Area.”  ADG (Jan. 18, 2010).  

Ehrenreich, Barbara.  Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.   Metropolitan,, 2009.

Finkel, David.  The Good Soldiers.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

Gamel, Kim.  “Afghan Civilian Deaths Up in ’09.”  ADG (Jan. 14, 2010).

Gautney,Heather and Akim Reinhardt.  “The Imperial Coin.”  Peace & Change) 35.1I(Jan. 2010).  “The Republicans and Democrats are two bickering sides of the same imperial coin.” 

Glasser , Ronald J., M.D. Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq.  Braziller, 2009.     

Gray, Denis.  “U. S. Army Maverick Part of a New Breed.”  ADG (12-20-09) 2A.

“The Ground Truth,” documentary depicting how war leaves behind a trail of broken bodies and minds.  

Gusterson, Hugh and Catherine Besteman, eds.  The Insecure American.  U Calif. P, 2009.  USA as a culture of fear. 

Hiatt, Fred.  “Soldiers Stories Tell Truth of War.”  ADG (12-22-09) 5B.  Rev. of Finkel.

Kovic, Ron.  “The Forgotten Wounded of Iraq.”  PeaceWork (Dec. 2006/January 2007).

Lyderson, Kari.  “A Military Murder.”  In These Times (Feb. 2010). 

McCain, Cilla.  Murder in Baker Company: How Four American Soldiers Killed One of Their Own.  Chicago Review P, 2010.    The movie In the Valley of Elah (2009) was about the same events. 

Reid, Robert and Rahim Faiez.  “Karzai Foiled in 2^nd Try to Fill Cabinet.”  ADG (Jan. 17, 2010).    “…the insurgency grows more virulent.”

Schroeder, Steven.  “Mother of All Battles.”  PMLA (October 2009).

Shah, Amir.  “Kabul Embassy District Hit by Rocket.”  ADG (Jan. 16, 2010).

Stephens, Warren.  “’Valor’ Relates Tales of Heroism,” Northwest Arkansas Times (Nov. 8, 2009).

“Taliban Attacks Paralyze Kabul.”  ADG (Jan. 19, 2010).

“Yemen Strike Kills 87, Sheik Reports.”  ADG  (9-18-09).   Government planes, financed by the U. S.,  killed mostly women and children as part of its campaign to stamp out the 5-year Shiite rebellion.