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Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq
Our collective memories of World War II and Vietnam have been shaped as much by memoirs, novels, and films as they have been by history books. In Welcome to the Suck, Stacey Peebles examines the growing body of contemporary war stories in prose, poetry, and film that speak to the American soldier’s experience in the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War. Stories about war always encompass ideas about initiation, masculinity, cross-cultural encounters, and trauma. Peebles shows us how these timeless themes find new expression among a generation of soldiers who have grown up in a time when it has been more acceptable than ever before to challenge cultural and societal norms, and who now have unprecedented and immediate access to the world away from the battlefield through new media and technology. Two Gulf War memoirs by Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) and Joel Turnipseed (Baghdad Express) provide a portrait of soldiers living and fighting on the cusp of the major political and technological changes that would begin in earnest just a few years later. The Iraq War, a much longer conflict, has given rise to more and various representations. Peebles covers a blog by Colby Buzzell ("My War"), memoirs by Nathaniel Fick (One Bullet Away) and Kayla Williams (Love My Rifle More Than You); a collection of stories by John Crawford (The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell); poetry by Brian Turner (Here, Bullet); the documentary Alive Day Memories; and the feature films In the Valley of Elah and the winner of the 2010 Oscar for Best Picture, The Hurt Locker, both written by the war correspondent Mark Boal. Books and other media emerging from the conflicts in the Gulf have yet to receive the kind of serious attention that Vietnam War texts received during the 1980s and 1990s. With its thoughtful and timely analysis, Welcome to the Suck will provoke much discussion among those who wish to understand today’s war literature and films and their place in the tradition of war representation more generally.
- GenresNonfiction
200 pages, Hardcover
First published May 19, 2011
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September 25, 2017
In "Welcome to the Suck," Stacey Peebles provides what must be one of the first, if not the first, scholarly studies of the literature and film produced about the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars. In it, Peebles contrasts the art--loosely defined--that has been produced about these wars with the art produced about WWII and Vietnam, and discusses the unifying features of this new genre.
These most recent wars, Peebles claims, and with justification, were experienced differently from previous wars by those who fought them and those who witnessed them, due to the rise of communication and information technology in the past three decades. Soldiers going into the Persian Gulf war were able to work themselves into a battle frenzy watching classic Vietnam movies, which they perceived as pro- rather than anti-war, on video, and CNN live-streamed the action to viewers back home. The result was the first "video game" war, in which soldiers experienced themselves as both the subject and object of the aggressive, penetrating gaze.
By the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the internet and the mobile phone had taken off as technology, and soldiers could now not just watch movies, but make them and stream them live to a worldwide audience, something that brought the war home--except that it didn't. In the accounts Peebles examines, the soldiers seemed to feel just as isolated from civilian life back home as they ever had. Furthermore, they were acutely aware that they were "performing" soldiering and particularly masculinity, even the female soldiers, but that, as Peebles recounts, their performance could never become reality: caught up in the concept of performance, they were never able to achieve a true sense of self that would enable them to merge with the ideal masculine collective. Modern technology and concepts of identity as a performance were unable to overcome the fundamental reality and separateness of individual bodies and individual experiences.
In the conclusion Peebles states that the central theme emerging from the stories about the war(s) in Iraq is "the accidental killing of a child. In each instance, the bodies of these children call out as totems of the guilt, helplessness, and frustration felt by soldiers fighting a war in which choices are impossible--not because they are morally ambiguous, but because often there is very little time or leeway to make a choice in the first place. These soldiers have even less agency than their Vietnam counterparts" (164).
Indeed, one of the central tensions that Peebles uncovers is that these recent wars really are in many ways "video game wars," in which soldiers believe they have agency, only to have that falsehood cruelly exposed. They often never see their targets at all, and are encouraged to think of what they are doing as in some ways being not real--but ultimately, it is. Ultimately everyone is still grounded by their own bodies and what has happened to them, and they can't think their way out of their situation. The people they kill are still dead, and the same thing could happen to them.
"Welcome to the Suck" is a scholarly work, and should be understood as such. While it is quite readable for its genre, the point is not to produce an exciting or easy-to-read narrative, but an in-depth study of other narratives. Although not as jargon-heavy as some academic works, it does rely heavily on the concepts of scholars such as Judith Butler, with the attendant lingo. Interestingly, it flirts with challenging the currently fashionable theories of identity that it uses, but stops short of doing so outright. Those who experience it say that war strips you bare and reveals who you really are: that seems to be part of its attraction--and for many it IS attractive--as it will force its participants to stop performing and start actually living what so many thinkers desire: an authentic life. But for many, their true selves were unable to stand up to the revelation that war provided them.
These most recent wars, Peebles claims, and with justification, were experienced differently from previous wars by those who fought them and those who witnessed them, due to the rise of communication and information technology in the past three decades. Soldiers going into the Persian Gulf war were able to work themselves into a battle frenzy watching classic Vietnam movies, which they perceived as pro- rather than anti-war, on video, and CNN live-streamed the action to viewers back home. The result was the first "video game" war, in which soldiers experienced themselves as both the subject and object of the aggressive, penetrating gaze.
By the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the internet and the mobile phone had taken off as technology, and soldiers could now not just watch movies, but make them and stream them live to a worldwide audience, something that brought the war home--except that it didn't. In the accounts Peebles examines, the soldiers seemed to feel just as isolated from civilian life back home as they ever had. Furthermore, they were acutely aware that they were "performing" soldiering and particularly masculinity, even the female soldiers, but that, as Peebles recounts, their performance could never become reality: caught up in the concept of performance, they were never able to achieve a true sense of self that would enable them to merge with the ideal masculine collective. Modern technology and concepts of identity as a performance were unable to overcome the fundamental reality and separateness of individual bodies and individual experiences.
In the conclusion Peebles states that the central theme emerging from the stories about the war(s) in Iraq is "the accidental killing of a child. In each instance, the bodies of these children call out as totems of the guilt, helplessness, and frustration felt by soldiers fighting a war in which choices are impossible--not because they are morally ambiguous, but because often there is very little time or leeway to make a choice in the first place. These soldiers have even less agency than their Vietnam counterparts" (164).
Indeed, one of the central tensions that Peebles uncovers is that these recent wars really are in many ways "video game wars," in which soldiers believe they have agency, only to have that falsehood cruelly exposed. They often never see their targets at all, and are encouraged to think of what they are doing as in some ways being not real--but ultimately, it is. Ultimately everyone is still grounded by their own bodies and what has happened to them, and they can't think their way out of their situation. The people they kill are still dead, and the same thing could happen to them.
"Welcome to the Suck" is a scholarly work, and should be understood as such. While it is quite readable for its genre, the point is not to produce an exciting or easy-to-read narrative, but an in-depth study of other narratives. Although not as jargon-heavy as some academic works, it does rely heavily on the concepts of scholars such as Judith Butler, with the attendant lingo. Interestingly, it flirts with challenging the currently fashionable theories of identity that it uses, but stops short of doing so outright. Those who experience it say that war strips you bare and reveals who you really are: that seems to be part of its attraction--and for many it IS attractive--as it will force its participants to stop performing and start actually living what so many thinkers desire: an authentic life. But for many, their true selves were unable to stand up to the revelation that war provided them.
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