Discourse of Killing and Counternarratives in “After Action Report”

In this section I first discuss the ways in which “After Action Report” challenges and fragments the reified military unconscious by challenging its discourse on killing. In doing so, the text generates a counternarrative that ruptures both the reified discourse of the military institution and the hegemonic soldier and uncovers the text’s previously hidden military unconscious.

As has become evident throughout this thesis, stories carry with them an immense power to shape their surroundings. In Jamesonian terms, not only do we tell stories to understand the world, but the world itself “comes to us in the shape of stories” (Dowling 95). These stories allow the uncovering of a hidden unconscious governing a given text, the interpretation of which allows “access to the collective, political unconscious of the societies in which these literary works have been produced” (Kilpeläinen 31). Furthermore, it is through the telling and re-telling of narratives with which identities are constructed and experiences integrated into a coherent whole through an ideological lens. As such, a short story situated in a war zone forms a useful starting point into the exploration of the ways in which Klay’s texts seek to challenge and fragment the hegemonic soldier through the use of in-text narratives. The stories in Redeployment situated in a war zone (“Frago,” “After Action Report,” “OIF,” “Money as a Weapons System,” “Prayer in the Furnace,” “Ten Kliks South”) all deal with war in a rather unique fashion, owing to Klay’s background as a non-combat veteran author.

Klay’s approach to narrating war is marked by the foregrounding of previously marginalized voices in war literature, such as the Foreign Service Officer (FSO) narrator of

“Money as a Weapons System,” or the artillery crew in “Ten Kliks South.” While some of the stories do include the “traditional” viewpoint of the infantry, as in “Frago,” most narrators in the stories are removed from combat in some manner. Portrayals of combat are

often marked by a high level of abstraction, such as in “OIF,” which presents an IED ambush and the death of a team member in the reified language of military jargon as seen in the text’s emphatic use of abbreviations:

PV2 swerved and the HMMWV rolled. It wasn’t like the HEAT trainer at Lejeune. JP-8 leaked and caught fire, burning through my MARPATs. Me and SGT Green got out, and then we pulled PV2 out by the straps of his PPE.

But PV2 was unconscious, and I ran back for PFC, but he was on the side where the IED hit, and it was too late. (74)

These scenes are also often depersonalized through distance or technological mediation, such as in “Ten Kliks South” or “Psychological Operations,” or through the disorientation found in “After Action Report”. This approach to narrating war, and especially scenes of combat, also provide a metafictional quality to the stories, once again highlighting the way in which Klay’s own background as a combat veteran reflects the combat versus non-combat divide discussed in section 2.2.2. These metafictional qualities will be discussed in more detail later in this section.

The counternarrative created through questioning the hegemonic soldier’s discourse on killing, and the metafictional layers generated by it, are at the heart of “After Action Report” (“AAR”). Through the examination of these themes, the text challenges and fragments not only the hegemonic soldier, but also questions the veteran author’s authority as a conduit for the military unconscious. In other words, the text generates a multilayered counternarrative that ruptures the hegemonic soldier through the examination of narrative’s role in the construction of identity, and the questions arising out of its ownership.

The ambush which provides the narrative’s impetus is where the central antinomy of the text is first located: the clash between the hegemonic soldier’s discourse and the soldier subject’s personal experience. From the beginning, the enemy is not visible, but

rather the soldiers find themselves surrounded by civilians: “Somewhere beyond, Iraqi civilians startling awake. The triggerman, if there even was one, slipping away” (“AAR”

29). The narrator’s sense of disorientation is heightened by a sudden burst of incoming fire, a “crack of rounds, like someone repeatedly snapping a bullwhip through the air” (“AAR”

31), which he is unable to properly respond to despite his best efforts. It is only after seeing the direction of Timhead’s fire that Suba is able to respond: “Timhead fired from the front of the MRAP. I fired where he was firing, at the side of the building with the flickering light, and I saw my rounds impact in the wall” (“AAR” 31). Afterwards, when Suba approaches Timhead he realizes that their target was a fourteen year old boy, who now was “lying on the ground and bleeding out” (“AAR” 31) with his mother beside him:

“Holy shit,” I said. I saw an AK lying in the dust.

Timhead didn’t say anything.

“You got him,” I said.

Timhead said, “No. No, man, no.”

But he did. (“AAR” 31-2)

Rather than killing on purpose, the role of the killer is thrust upon Timhead through a reflexive action of returning fire without conscious thought: “Here’s what I see. Everything dust. And the flashes from the AK, going wild in circles” (“AAR” 41). By doing so, text strips the act of killing an enemy of any traditional sense of ‘heroism’ or ‘honor’ found in hegemonic portrayals of war. The desire for heroic action in the American context is rooted in the mythologized Frontier of the Western, where the “moral and emotional resolution” is to be found “in a singular act of violence” (Slotkin 352). By removing agency from Timhead’s singular act of violence, the possibility of performing heroic action through a clear moral resolution provided by the killing of an enemy is destroyed, and thus made impossible. Furthermore, Timhead’s act reflects a central trope of the Iraq War literature, in

which the lack of agency felt by soldiers becomes symbolized in the “accidental killing of a child” (Peebles 174). The text further challenges the hegemonic soldier’s discourse on war and killing the enemy in its portrayal of Suba, a gunner who fires his .50 caliber machine gun several times towards targets throughout the text but, ironically, never kills anyone as far as he or the reader knows. Sometimes the enemy is hidden in houses (“AAR” 41), or disappears into the distance in the night:

I fired. They were on the edge of the field by then, and it was dark. The flash of the .50 going off killed my night vision. I couldn’t see anything, and we kept driving. Maybe they were dead. Maybe they were body parts at the edge of the field. The .50 punches holes in humans you could put your fist through.

Maybe they got away. (“AAR” 47)

Similarly, the invisible IED triggerman, and the unseen sniper who later in the text kills a fellow platoon member, function as narrative devices that emphasize the lack of agency 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” (Peebles 164). Rather than arriving at a definitive resolution to a conflict, such as the disarming of a bomb in Hurt Locker or outwitting the enemy sniper in American Sniper, the soldiers of “After Action Report” are stuck in a repeating cycle where the enemy remains invisible, only making themselves known through regular patrol ambushes. This approach presents a clear point of rupture against hegemonic cultural representations of war termed by Rowe as “compensatory narratives”; narratives that are “imaginatively fighting the war again and winning” (45).

In other words, violence does not lead to a cathartic moment of victory. In doing so,

“AAR” ruptures a fundamental tenet of hegemonic Americanness: there is no “spiritually regenerative” (Slotkin 486) aspect to violence. The enemy appears in the form of a shot from

an unseen sniper rifle or an IED by the side of the road. Killing and the possibility being killed are both marked by a definite sense of impersonality and a degree of removal, as seen in the way Suba describes firing his weapon at enemies:

That’s not quite what I felt, shooting. I felt a kind of wild thrill. Do I shoot?

They’re getting away. The trigger was there, aching to be pushed. There aren’t a lot of times in your life that come down to, Do I press this button?

[...] So that happened. It wasn’t bad, though. Not like the kid. Maybe because it was so dark, and so far, away, and because they were only shadows.

(“AAR” 47-8)

This impersonality is contrasted against the only person in addition to Timhead who has faced and killed an enemy up close, Staff Sergeant (SSgt) Black. However, in SSgt Black’s case his encounter only exists in the form of another war story. The war story takes the form of a rumor Suba had heard during boot camp that SSgt Black had “beat an Iraqi soldier to death with a radio” (“AAR” 33). The circumstances of SSgt Black’s rumored kill provide an ironic twist to the numbing effect of technology, which allows the modern combatant to

“maintain an emotional distance from their victims” (Bourke 5). Rather than allowing for the request for a distanced technological killing of an artillery or air strike, the technological apparatus of the radio is transformed into a primal instrument of intimate face-to-face killing that removes any possibility of mediated killing. When compared to the conscious act of killing as seen, for example, through the sniper scope in the American Sniper, the discourse of killing provides the first layer of the text’s counternarrative that challenges the hegemonic soldier.

While Timhead does grapple with what being a killer means to him, the text also refuses to position him as a victim, echoing Burke’s thesis that modern Western soldiers see themselves more as killers rather than victims (Harari 41). This view is contested by

researchers such a Kalí Tal who posit that there exists a “tendency to collapse the distinction between victims and perpetrators among American Vietnam veterans” (Baines 268).

However, in the case of “AAR,” Burke’s thesis is closer to it than the comparison with Vietnam veterans, mainly owing to the absence of a draft. “AAR” and Redeployment do not shy away from the portrayal of people shattered by war, but the tendency of victimization has been replaced by a sense of personal responsibility for their own situation, something which can also be seen in Yellow Birds: “but then you signed up to go so it’s your fault, really, because you went on purpose, so you are in the end doubly fucked” (145). The sentiment is echoed in “AAR”, where characters refer to the enlistment papers as a deal with the devil: “Harvey asked how he knew what Satan’s asshole tasted like and Mac said, ‘Yo, son. You signed your enlistment papers. Don’t act like you ain’t have a taste’“ (36). The emphasis on willingly joining the military is also a common trope in the Iraq War literature (Ryan 17-21) and stands out as one its defining characteristics especially in contrast to the draftee characters of American Vietnam War literature.

In “AAR”, the line between a soldier who has killed and those that have not forms a clear delineation in the social structure of their unit. This becomes apparent in the way Suba ponders upon the almost voyeuristic desire to know what it felt like it:

“You’re the first guy in MP platoon to…” I stumbled. I was gonna say “kill somebody,” but the way Timhead was talking let me know that was wrong.

So I said, “To do that. They’ll want to know what it’s like.”

He nodded. I wanted to know what it was like, too. (“AAR” 33)

As Joanna Bourke notes, talk of the seductive aspect of killing is a taboo and often suppressed even in a military context: “to describe combat as enjoyable was like admitting to being a blood-thirsty brute” (14). Furthermore, as Bourke notes in her analysis of the writings of a former Marine William Broyles, combat possesses an infatuating quality due

to the “awesome power conferred upon individuals by war (14; emphasis original), going on to note that this power over life and death is the “male equivalent of childbirth” (14). In this context, Timhead’s act of killing the child and his mother witnessing it comes to represent an inverse childbirth, in which the male figures of the Timhead and the boy are inextricably drawn towards battle and shattered by death while the female giver of life is powerless to act.

The text also points towards a rupture between the subjective experience of the soldier subject and the hegemonic military discourse that emphasizes the dehumanization of the enemy:

Harvey said, “It’s okay, Timhead. You just ain’t quick enough on the draw.

Ka-pow.” He made a pistol with his thumb and finger and mimed shooting us. “Man, I’d have been up there so fast, bam bam, shot his fuckin’ hajji mom, too.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah, son. Ain’t no more terrorist babies be poppin’ out of that cunt.”

Timhead was gripping the table. “Fuck you, Harvey.” (“AAR” 38)

The abject dehumanization of the enemy is not particular to the modern American experience in Iraq. Rather, as Fussell notes, the dehumanization of the enemy is a “persisting imaginative habit of modern times, traceable, [...] to the actualities of the Great War” (75).

Furthermore, as pointed out by Slotkin, stereotypes themselves are not simply signifiers of

“casual bigotry”, but rather “symbols in which important ideological dilemmas about social, racial, and political relations are condensed” (486). By using the military slang term ‘hajji’

to refer to Iraqis, the killed child and his mother are reduced to the reified and racialized Other of the hegemonic military discourse, transforming them from individuals into a generalized and singular entity that exists simply as the reified enemy.

A closer examination of this racialized discourse reveals its connection to history as a totality in the Jamesonian sense, thus unearthing the “uninterrupted narrative” of “the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history” (PU 20). First, it is connected to the wider Orientalist discourse in the West as defined by Edward Said in Orientalism, who posits that the West defines itself in opposition to the Middle and Far East (Steuter & Wills 24). The enemy ‘hajji’ of the hegemonic military discourse is characterized by the Orientalist stereotype of the “Eastern man as a violent primitive” (Steuter & Wills 24). Second, in the American context, the discourse of dehumanization is also inextricably linked to the mythologized Frontier as seen through the “ideologically loaded images of heroism and savagery” (Slotkin 485), placing the ‘civilized’ whiteness against the ‘savage’ non-white cultures. Furthermore, as Salaita notes, the Othered Arab or the ‘hajji’ functions as the icon against which modern American patriotic self-identification constructed (110). A similar oppositional pairing also applies to the construction of the contemporary American hegemonic soldier. Like the earlier American regimental hero that was often defined against the Native American ‘threat’ (Slotkin 359), the contemporary American soldier is defined against an Arab ‘enemy’.

As such, Timhead’s defiance and refusal to reduce the child into a racialized Other of the ‘hajji’ generates another counternarrative thread which ruptures the process of reification by providing an alternative to hegemonic representations, while also fragmenting hegemonic American national ideology in the process. Therefore, Timhead’s actions are an active act of rebellion against the hegemonic soldier and, in a wider sense, demonstrative of the transgressive nature of contemporary American veteran literature as documented by scholars such as Maureen Ryan and Paul Petrovic. In Jamesonian terms, Timhead’s transgressive actions represent a symbolic act that attempts to present an “imaginary solution of a real contradiction” (Dowling 125), which lies in the disconnect between the soldier subject and

the reified discourses of the military institution, and thus unearthing the military unconscious present in the text.

For Timhead, the dehumanization process is also interrupted by his own past. He comments that it is not the fact that he killed someone that truly bothers him, but rather that the boy’s “family was there. Right there. [...] “Brothers and sisters in the window. [...] There was a little girl, like nine years old. I got a kid sister” (“AAR” 48). Earlier, he relates the dead child to his sixteen year old brother who is in “juvie” for setting off “a couple of fires”

(“AAR” 40). His older brother served in Iraq as well, and was badly burned in an IED attack, prompting Timhead to join the military to “take his place” (40). For Timhead, the site of what initially seemed to be a site of traumatic violence is transformed into a site of familial trauma that interlinks with his own personal history. Juliet Mitchell writes of traumatic breaching events in which “the catalytic event in the present triggers an earlier occurrence which becomes traumatic only by virtue of its retrospectively endowed meaning” (121). In Timhead’s case, the reflexive killing of a child serves as a catalytic event that breaches the present and connects it with his own past, making the repetition and reinforcement of hegemonic enemy representations impossible.

Furthermore, having not gone through the experience of killing, Harvey and the other members of the platoon seemingly repeat the reified military discourses in an uncritical fashion. The divide between Timhead and his platoon is reflective of studies showing “men without combat experience hated the enemy more than actual fighters did” (Bourke 147-8).

For Timhead’s platoon members, the enemy remains a distant and impersonal force devoid of individuality that acts from a distance, allowing the reified enemy representations remain believable. Harvey’s case demonstrates the way in which re-enacting the internalized hegemonic discourses can also serve as a coping mechanism in the face of a terrifying reality

where death is a daily possibility. After Harvey almost gets killed by sniper fire grazing his neck (“AAR” 51), he proceeds to show off his new wound in the mess hall proclaiming

“Purple fucking Heart, bitches! You know how much pussy I’m gonna get back home? [...]

“This is gonna be a badass scar,” he said. “Girls’ll ask and I’ll be like,

‘Whatever, I just got shot one time in Iraq, it’s cool’” (“AAR” 51).

The posturing and male bravado implicit in the Harvey’s adherence to the reified representation of the American soldier functions as a protective shell for himself, allowing for him to continue functioning. This is not lost on Suba, who tells Timhead that it does not really matter what Harvey says, so long as the story he tells allows him to keep on going:

“What do you want him to say?” I said. “He got shot in the neck and he’s going out tomorrow, same as us. Let him say what he wants.”

I could hear Timhead breathing in the dark. “Yeah,” he said. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.” (52)

Suba’s central role in the text is reminiscent of a witness, and in particular, that of Margalit’s moral witness, someone who “who has been through a violent life-threatening experience and who lives to tell the tale” (Winter 42). As such, he is also fundamentally a

Suba’s central role in the text is reminiscent of a witness, and in particular, that of Margalit’s moral witness, someone who “who has been through a violent life-threatening experience and who lives to tell the tale” (Winter 42). As such, he is also fundamentally a