It is admittedly crude to call a country stupid. It may not even be valid, but so long as we accept that polls venture into the vicinity of some collective truth in virtually every other area of life, then recent surveys reporting that Americans favour sending troops back into Iraq by 57 (cbs) or 60 (Fox) or 62 per cent (Quinnipiac University) indicate that a great slab of the United States is indeed stupid, and getting more so by the minute. In the Quinnipiac poll, the latest of the three, 69 per cent of voters also said they were confident that the us and whatever alliance it might cobble together would be victorious in Iraq and Syria. Washington may not be so confident, but Republican presidential hopefuls are with increased thunder reviving the old mantra of ‘taking the fight to the terrorists’. And the corporate media, which in 2013 spoke solemnly of ‘a war-weary nation’ and last year lured customers with desert beheadings, are advancing a predictable path to mindless amnesia. ‘Americans aren’t very war-weary anymore’, The Washington Post announced online in February. A month later the liberal television network msnbc used almost identical language: ‘War-weariness fades; most Americans support isis ground war.’
Meanwhile, the tiniest minority of the population—about 0.16 per cent by standard measures—is so weary, so lacerated, so hyper-acute to the realities of war that its members cannot sleep, function, or, often, bear to go on living. These are the soldiers who have fought the long wars and been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Their relatively small number, generally placed at 500,000, bulks larger when seen as a percentage of all troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan—they are an estimated 20 to 30 per cent of the total—and when the multiplier effect of parents, spouses, lovers, children and others implicated in their lives is taken into consideration. It is also an undercount. It does not reflect the nature of ptsd, whose fullest impact can be delayed. It does not include those wracked by memories of prior wars, or those suffering secretly. At least half the 2.7 million soldiers who have been in Iraq and Afghanistan have never sought evaluation or treatment. The mental wounds of war are a stigma. They also present an excruciating paradox: the soldiers are in real pain, sick with guilt and rage and, for the sake of themselves and others, in urgent need of relief; yet the society that defines normalcy in the popular, if not therapeutic, imagination is vapid, remote, unserious, irresponsible. ‘Normal’ isn’t very war-weary anymore. What rational person, what moral soul, would wish to be normal then?
Traumatic weariness is not, in any conventional sense, heroic. It is not particularly attractive. It does not satisfy the appetite for dramatic story-telling. We remember Achilles’s savagery more than his torpor, Odysseus’s cleverness and adventure more than his tears, us Navy seal Chris Kyle’s unmatched kill record and racism—especially evident in American Sniper, his autobiography—more than his unravelling. David Finkel won acclaim and a MacArthur genius grant following his 2009 book The Good Soldiers, about the experience of an infantry battalion out of Fort Riley, Kansas, sent to Iraq in 2007 as part of the surge. Steven Spielberg bought the rights to the 2014 sequel, Thank You for Your Service, which tracks some of the same soldiers and their families trying to survive the ‘after-war’, but the movie project has been held up: not enough action, it’s been rumoured. It is a better book than its predecessor, a harder book. Reading it is an act of endurance. Its violence does not have the frisson of embedded war reporting, whose events have a beginning and an end, and which tends to redeem the terrible acts of the band of brothers while placing the terrible acts of their enemy beyond explanation. Violence here, and in Laurent Bécue-Renard’s recent documentary Of Men and War, is embedded in the soldier’s being, an emotional efp, waiting, exploding anywhere and in every direction, again and again and again.
The term ‘Thank You for Your Service’ developed early on in the long wars. Like ‘Support the Troops’, it was a way for a sheltered people to perform unity. In towns across America yellow ribbons, yellow lawn signs, balloons and car decals sprouted like team colours on game day. War would be a sport, the people spectators, and ‘Thank you for your service’ the high-five to combatants after quick and decisive victory. When that proved a vain hope, team spirit settled into the rhythms of commerce. ‘Support the Troops’ appeared the way ‘Buy American’ once had—a slogan on shop windows, billboards, bumper stickers. War was an enterprise, security its product, the people consumers, the soldiers trained workers and ‘Thank you for your service’ a kind of tip. As the enterprise (though hardly the business) failed, the signs faded, sometimes replaced by an image of folded hands, ‘Pray for Our Troops’. War had become a problem, the soldiers exhausted, the people clueless and ‘Thank you for your service’ a bit of empty etiquette, or a penance. By the time Finkel was writing, what remained among civilians was a desire to move on, and among soldiers, bitterness. ‘They wouldn’t be fucking thanking me if they knew what I did’, many would say, in almost exactly the same words.
Finkel, a Washington Post reporter, is masterful at conveying the absurdity and pathos of the moment. His Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the efforts of one foreign service agent to realize George W. Bush’s policy of ‘exporting democracy’ to Yemen in 2005 was a tale of good intentions (the agent’s) and false fronts (both governments’), of money, danger and overlapping crises. The Good Soldiers was a tale of a lost war. Both may be read as episodes in the history of an empire on the rocks, but what their author believes about those imperial projects beyond the absurdity that he shows—whether he thinks American adventures in the Middle East are simply misguided, or thwarted by unworthy foreign partners, or executed by inept civilian leadership, or rooted in a larger, longer strategy of domination and exploitation—he doesn’t let on.
In interviews since the publication of Thank You for Your Service, Finkel has been at pains to say that not all soldiers are broken by war; most readjust and do fine. He wants to acknowledge Americans’ collective responsibility for those who are not fine, but otherwise, he has said, the book is ‘agenda-free’. That is not exactly true, since there is a default politics in accepting war as an eternal fact and militarism as an essential feature of us policy and culture, as he does. The book and everyone in it are silent on the politics of the war, and how it inflects the after-war. That, too, is a political decision. But then, as lived by Finkel and the soldiers to whom he entrusted himself for eight months, the war was felt to be outside politics, with no logic or argument, only fear and heartbreak and the effort to survive: or as he writes, ‘over time the war came to mean less and less until it meant nothing at all, and meanwhile the other soldiers meant more and more until they came to mean everything.’ And so Thank You for Your Service is a book about what happens when meaning vanishes; when the soldiers disperse and their experience of extremity collides with the intimate and social politics of home.
Danny Holmes returned from the surge with a set of photographs that were supposed to be classified but which he had anyway, in a computer file named Iraq/Graphic. They documented a day in the war that has become notorious because of a grainy video posted on Wikileaks: the day a Reuters photographer, his assistant and seven other people were blown apart by Apache helicopter fire. Danny was among the troops on the ground that day, and his pictures, Finkel writes, were taken for after-action reports: