{"id":98846,"date":"2016-06-02T16:45:44","date_gmt":"2016-06-02T20:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=98846"},"modified":"2016-06-02T17:17:20","modified_gmt":"2016-06-02T21:17:20","slug":"dearer-to-the-vultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/02\/dearer-to-the-vultures\/","title":{"rendered":"Dearer to the Vultures"},"content":{"rendered":"

How the perspective of\u00a0war stories has shifted\u2014from gods to guns.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of the American edition of Anatomy of a Soldier<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

My memories of war are fractured: faces disappear like smoke while literal plumes of smoke, their specific shapes and forms, linger on vividly for years. I remember the mesh netting, concrete, and dust smell of tower guard, but the events of entire months are completely gone. I remember the sound of a kid\u2019s voice, but not anything he actually said. I guess that\u2019s what Tim O\u2019Brien meant when he wrote about Vietnam, \u201cWhat sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning or end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Memories of people, too complex to carry through the years, fall apart. It\u2019s easier to find purchase on memories of objects. The weapon I was assigned on my first deployment to Iraq was an M249 SAW, or what we would colloquially and inaccurately refer to as the \u201cSquad Assault Weapon.\u201d I remember the way it felt to disassemble\u2014the slight give of the heat-shield assembly, its tiny metal pincers clinging to the barrel. I remember the sound of the feed tray snapping shut on a belt of ammunition. And I remember the tiny rust deposits on the legs of my weapon\u2019s bipod, which would never go away, no matter how hard I scrubbed with CLP (Cleaner, Lubricant, and Protectant oil). I remember my SAW\u2019s voice and the things it said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During my second deployment, I served as the gunner in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. We ran over two Soviet-era landmines that had been stacked on top of each other. Besides a few bruises and perforated eardrums, everyone in the crew was fine. When I would try to tell people the story back home, civilians would get caught up on the descriptions of objects they had never heard of, objects that were integral to understanding my experience of the event. \u201cWere you hurt?\u201d Not really, I\u2019d say, but my head slammed against the ISU, and since we had the BFT mounted in a weird place, that sort of got in the way. \u201cWhat\u2019s an ISU and a BFT?\u201d<\/p>\n

I came to realize that the barrier in explaining my injuries to civilians wasn\u2019t quite phenomenological so much as it was ontological. Everyone has experienced pain, fear, and frustration, but not everyone knows what an Integrated Sight Unit is or has had their face slammed into one. Even in just trying to narrate the events to family members, it seemed like any understanding of my trauma would have to come through a knowledge of the materials around me that made the trauma possible: the ISU, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the way the tracks moved, the type of soil underneath the tracks, how the mine mechanism worked, the radios we used to call in the explosion to base.<\/p>\n

Harry Parker, a former British Army Captain, recently published Anatomy of a Soldier<\/a><\/em>, a novel that puts forward an object-oriented ontology of war: an assertion that the material objects sharing the battleground with humans play an equal role in the composition of reality itself. In the book, Tom Barnes, like Parker himself in real life, loses both of his legs to an IED blast\u2014one to the blast itself and one to infection while recovering. Although the setting is ambiguous (we assume the blast happens in Afghanistan and the recovery in the UK) and the novel hops around chronologically, the story is moored to the voices of the objects around Barnes and Afghani nationals: a boot, fertilizer, a prosthetic limb, a rifle. They narrate objectively, even if sometimes whimsically. As a broken broom handle says during a premission brief,<\/p>\n

\n

He started describing the plan and used me to direct their attention to different parts of the square. He said their mission was to secure the road and then provide rear protection. He told them how they would move out before first light and push along the orange ribbon, past the blocks with\u00a0L33<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0L34<\/em>\u00a0written on them.\u00a0I paused as he explained how vulnerable this point was, and that one team would provide overwatch at the block marked\u00a0M13<\/em>\u00a0while others cleared the road.<\/p>\n

I was pointed at one of the men, who nodded that he understood.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When we tell ourselves war stories, we\u2019re forced to reconcile with our wounds. Whatever form that reconciliation takes says\u00a0something about our understanding of war itself. Letting objects tell that story is a relatively recent development\u2014which might be because the reduction of the battle space to a field of objects is itself a recent development. In his paper \u201cCounterinsurgency and the cultural turn in late modern war<\/a>,\u201d the geographer Derek Gregory calls the movement toward an object-based description of war the \u201crush from the intimate to the inanimate.\u201d To illustrate that \u201crush,\u201d imagine it\u2019s five thousand years ago and two people are rolling in the dirt, stabbing each other over contradictory messages from their local gods. Now jump cut to today, when a remote-controlled drone is making wide, buzzard-like circles over western Pakistan, looking for someone an algorithm told it to kill. That transformation was profound and disorienting.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The oldest war stories are epics\u2014primordial, gargantuan, and episodic all at once. The narratives are powered by a m\u00e9lange of psychological energies so remote and powerful that they\u2019re given the gloss of semidivinity when not personified as gods outright. The reasons for war are heavy with metaphysical force: fate, thumos<\/em>, the interdiction of a god. It\u2019s almost impossible to experience the true weight of these things as existential facts instead of concepts to intellectually dissect. The forces at play are literally Delphic. And in trying to understand how war was experienced (or at least how it was sung, chanted, or dramatized), we get a keyhole peek into the larger civilization. War stories are artifacts; their form and mode are dictated by the wider culture, which also determines how the wars themselves are conducted. The variety of war stories through time echo the variety of cultures from which they came.<\/p>\n

Narratives have cultural force. But war narratives of course describe the use of actual force. This is the single omega point to the varied chorus of war stories, their bone-brittle common denominator. As Simone Weil wrote of the Iliad<\/em>, \u201cTo define force\u2014it is that x<\/em> that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing<\/em>. Exercised to its limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense; it makes a corpse out of him.\u201d To illustrate how a person becomes a thing, Weil turns to the part of the Iliad <\/em>that has empty chariots rattling across the battlefield, their once proud drivers ground into the gore, \u201cdearer to the vultures than to their wives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Somewhere between the ancient voice of Zeus and Harry Parker\u2019s talking broomsticks are the battle narratives of the nineteenth century, resonating with the voices of people. There\u2019s Fabrizio del Dongo in The Charterhouse of Parma<\/em>, Byron\u2019s Don Juan at the Battle of Ismail, or Pierre at the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace<\/em>. The reality is psychological and the perspective rooted in personality. These stories cultivate an intimacy that is as profound as it is limiting. They don\u2019t have the transcendent notions of the ancient descriptions of warfare. The individual personalities might be sophisticated, but the world itself struggles for meaning. The cultural historian Leo Braudy writes, \u201cFrom the perspective of the common soldier or lowly officer participant, war was not the road to glory or the game of kings, but a deadly testing ground for the uncertain willingness to sacrifice personal nature to national goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

But psychological explanations of combat aren\u2019t enough. The alien brutality of war demands more. Laurence Sterne, the sardonic prophet of the contemporary, sensed the limits of psychology and anticipating objected-oriented ontology when he has Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy <\/em>re-create the Battle of Namur using toy soldiers and household objects in order to tell the story of how he was wounded. Braudy again: \u201cOnce every detail of the fortifications and weaponry is mapped, and the place where he was wounded precisely determined, then and then only will Toby be able to explain his wound to himself. In the absence of rituals that justify the wound, to specify it by time and place and detail is to regain power over the wounding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sterne\u2019s literal objectification of war is an antecedent of Anatomy of a Soldier<\/em>, and it\u2019s in the same family tree as Tim O\u2019Brien\u2019s Vietnam classic, The Things They Carried<\/em>. O\u2019Brien explicitly uses the objects that soldiers carry with them into battle to tell the story of the war. His descriptions blur the relationship between the landscape, the human, and the objects of war in a way that anticipates Anatomy<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

We walked along. Forward with the left leg, plant the foot, lock the knee, arch the ankle. Push the leg into the paddy, stiffen the spine. Let the war rest there atop the left leg; the rucksack, the radio, the hand grenades, the magazines of golden ammo, the rifle, the steel helmet, the jingling dog-tags, the body\u2019s own fat and water and meat, the whole contingent of warring artifacts and flesh. Let it all perch there, rocking on top of the left leg, fastened and tied and anchored by latches and zippers and snaps and nylon cord. Packhorse for the soul.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Harry Parker goes further than O\u2019Brien in giving equal narrative play to nonhuman things. Not only do they make the plot of Parker\u2019s novel\u00a0possible, they also bear semiconscious witness to our shared reality, corroborating it. Their inability to pass moral judgment comes off as a silent accusation. If this ontological shift toward objects\u00a0is the most honest way we have of talking about war, it\u2019s still limiting: it turned its weakness\u2014its inability to fully articulate the moral significance of war\u2014into a defining characteristic. In doing that, it\u2019s as much a product of our postmodern Weltanschauung as it is a parody of it.<\/p>\n

The fact that Anatomy of a Soldier <\/em>is cutting-edge suggests something will eventually replace it. There\u2019s an almost dialectical tension between our technical descriptions of things like drone warfare and climate devastation and our inability to articulate their significance. Our moral vocabulary can\u2019t\u00a0convey the absurdity of violence or its scope. From\u00a0this inadequacy sprang Oppenheimer\u2019s apocryphal words after the first successful detonation of an atom bomb: \u201cNow I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.\u201d He was, of course, quoting a god. Nothing else would do.<\/p>\n

Scott Beauchamp is a writer who lives in Portland, Maine. His writing has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The Atlantic,\u00a0<\/em>Bookforum,\u00a0<\/em>Al Jazeera, and\u00a0<\/em>The Baffler, among other places.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How the perspective of\u00a0war stories has shifted\u2014from gods to guns. My memories of war are fractured: faces disappear like smoke while literal plumes of smoke, their specific shapes and forms, linger on vividly for years. I remember the mesh netting, concrete, and dust smell of tower guard, but the events of entire months are completely 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