Politics by Other Means

Politics is not simply about elections, campaigns, or organized movements. Writing itself can be a political act. In “Why I Write,” George Orwell identifies what he sees as the four primary motives for writing. Along with egotism, and aesthetic and historical aims, he proposes that in varying degrees, all writers are motivated by a political purpose: “Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” In his view, “no book is genuinely free from political bias” and, in fact, “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude” (5). I agree, and hope to show that as writers, veterans and soldiers convey attitudes that reflect political subjectivities—for instance, attitudes toward authority or the obligations and limits of patriotism. They also implicitly contribute to something beyond their own egos or personal gain. The act of writing sparks connections between the personal experience of war and broader questions about America’s exercise of military force. Veterans’ stated motives for sharing their stories vary, that is, to advocate change, help others, or help themselves. Some seek cathartic relief, others see writing as a way to memorialize, inform, or warn. But in choosing memoir rather than fiction as the vehicle for their stories, they expose themselves to public scrutiny and judgment, unable to hide behind imaginary events and characters to disavow their own opinions or actions. As “unsurrogated narrator,” to use Vivian Gornick’s apt term, memoirists pick through scraps left behind by personal experience—sorting, discarding, revising, judging, and assembling to create a story (7). They engage in a personal process of self-creation as writing gives shape to otherwise inchoate or unintelligible dispositions. Writing can spark the emergence of an individual’s political consciousness, forging connections between the articulation of memories and their implications for questions of power, authority, and the legitimacy of the state. At the same time, authors must navigate competing interests—between what their editor wants, the public expects, the uniform dictates, and their conscience demands. As a result, soldier-memoirists step onto another battlefield, now wielding the proverbial pen in a symbolic, but no less consequential, battle for hearts and minds. The act of “representing” is, after all, an exercise of power, a way of “standing in” and “speaking for” (presenting another’s point of view, telling their story) or influencing how an event is remembered, understood, articulated, or contested. Representations of reality help produce political culture and, more importantly, “can also transform it” (Krebs 170). The reflective and transformative potential inherent in the memoir as a literary form suggests that what begins as a personal journey can ultimately breach gaps between the personal and the political in ways that writers may not have intended or anticipated.

Implicit in the choice to share one’s personal story with the outside world is a desire for recognition—not in terms of status or achievement but as acknowledgment that one’s experiences have value, that they are part of a group’s or nation’s larger story. By contributing to a story of war that is personal but ultimately public—veterans’ memoirs entail a social gesture, a way of straddling the “I” that recalls and the “we” that commemorates. As Nancy Miller argues, memoirs use personal experience not as an end but as a means to connect with a broader community. Similarly, Julie Rak suggests that memoirs “explore—and upset—the balance between public and private, personal and political” and help articulate an individual’s “imagined relationship with others in a public sphere” (211–12). This movement from private to public is why memoir has the potential to shape social action. Soldier-writers acknowledge that they are always walking a fine line “between romance and vision, between reality and imagination, between propaganda and what you lean on to survive” (Scranton and Gallagher xiii). They must traverse the distance that differentiates witnessing from testifying, the event and its representation; this is the realm of politics, where compromises and choices are made, where the critical differences between remembering and memorializing are negotiated, and where certain points of view are privileged. Their published memoirs reflect not only the outcome of this personal journey but also a kind of negotiated settlement, a truce that aligns economic forces (“selling” the manuscript to potential presses, “branding” themselves for readers, navigating the marketing and publicity circuit); aesthetic demands (forging a compelling “literary” work while remaining true to the “real” story); and political currents (the public’s prevailing attitudes toward a particular war, the level of vitriol or patriotic rhetoric feeding those attitudes). Veterans “are key protagonists in the negotiation of relations between geopolitics, the state, the military, and society” (Bulmer and Eichler 162). Their memoirs offer readers a look behind the wall that separates civilian from military life, and while this glance is partial and short-lived, it can deepen Americans’ relationship with the service members they claim to support. Veterans’ accounts also express broader cultural vicissitudes and power struggles over who is authorized to speak, whose “truths” we trust, and what stories shape public memory.

Reading countless military memoirs in preparation for this book, I encountered views and perspectives across a wide ideological spectrum. Most are not reducible to a party line or a sound bite, despite the stereotype, often exploited by the Right in American politics, of service members as gung-ho patriots. But how these authors interpret their actions, the tone and attitudes they convey, and the narrative choices they make are inherently political, as these express judgments about the ways that America wages its wars, for better or worse. Some may rail against incompetent leaders or question America’s benevolent motives for war, while others draw on a wellspring of patriotic themes to shape their experiences into redemptive stories; in most cases, however, critiques and affirmations of America’s strategies or policies are implicit—to be inferred by readers in their encounter with the story and its characters. While most veterans claim unit cohesion and camaraderie as primary factors in combat motivation (as opposed to patriotism or fighting for a cause), soldiers also cite ideological reasons as important incentives (liberation, freedom, democracy). Many are neither indifferent nor uninformed politically. In fact, studies suggest that today’s professional American soldier is often “politically savvy,” “amazingly in touch with the pressing issues of the day,” and aware of key “policy debates” (Wong et al. 19–21). Veteran memoirists can expose the negative outcomes of leadership decisions or the discrepancies between what the public is told and what they witnessed (“we are winning the war” or “we will be greeted as liberators”). Their stories map the intriguing intersection where national politics, personal memory, and collective history interact and often collide.

Yet in the course of my research, I was surprised to discover a dearth of academic books focused on contemporary American military memoirs, and fewer still concerned with their politics.7 Most monographs that are available blend war films, blogs, poetry, and fiction into their analyses. Others tend to read soldiers’ memoirs as trauma narratives rather than as literary works that reflect the writer’s aesthetic choices and political agency. As Iraq War veteran-author Benjamin Schrader acknowledges, “Many examinations of veterans fail to fully recognize the ways in which veterans are subjects (political agents fighting to reshape the lives of themselves and others) rather than objects (waiting for medical/administrative attention)” (65). I made the decision early on to focus exclusively on war memoirs, excluding “milblogs” (military blogs). While these give soldiers ready access to an online readership and expand their reach, the aims, form, and effects of blogging differ significantly from published memoirs and merit discrete analyses. Blogs offer soldiers a less filtered and more spontaneous platform to air their views, an almost “real time” broadcast of events perceived through the fog of war rather than the haze of memory. Although there are certainly important political repercussions related to milblogs, my interest is in the ways that memoirs negotiate the ever-shifting lines between fiction and nonfiction, history and memory. Memoir is the most intimate form of storytelling, one born out of a dramatic event and its aftermath; this is a tricky terrain for storytelling, one with wide latitude for veering off the factual or descriptive and into the interpretive. Unlike milblogs, the published memoir is the culmination, at its best, of months or years of self-reflection and self-evaluation, an intensely personal search for understanding and meaning. Soldier-authors are also something of a breed apart: they are far more likely to write about their experiences if they are deployed individually rather than with their own unit (Kleinreesink). Their “outsider” position can foster a certain critical distance and a motivation to share their perspective.8

Whose Memories Are These, Anyway?

The Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars have done what wars have always done—generate great poetry and fiction.9 For those who have never stepped foot on a battlefield, war stories are not simply popular entertainment but ways of knowing; they provide a basis for forming judgments about the nation’s leadership, the consequences of certain choices and actions, and the effects of war on its participants. They transport viewers and readers into the subjective experience of war, and while contingent on the whims of selectivity and perspective, contribute to public memory. This slide from individual subjectivity to collective memory is more likely when individual experiences resonate with historically significant national events. Since this book focuses on what is arguably a most historically significant kind of national event, the experience of war, it is less concerned with soldiers’ memoirs as chronicles of personal experience than as distillations of cultural history—stories produced, circulated, and sometimes incorporated into a citizenry’s repertoire of collective myths and ideological struggles. When a war is turned into a site of memory—whether through historical texts, fictions, movies, or memoirs—what is known about it refers not so much to the “actual event” but to “a canon of existent medial constructions, to the narratives and images circulating in a media culture” (Erll and Nünning 392). This suggests that the line dividing history and fiction becomes, in public memory, mutable and even irrelevant in shaping how wars are remembered. Similarly, critics increasingly question the boundaries between memory, fiction, and history, for as historian Yuval Harari posits, soldiers’ memoirs are among the “most influential historical texts ever to be written” and probably shape the public’s image of war more than any other source (19). Memoir’s basis in “reality” aligns it with history, while its emotional pull borrows fiction’s persuasive power. Images and stories about war are always poised at this intersection between self and nation, a point of encounter that shapes how we imagine our history and cultural identity.

This is, of course, a dialogical and coproductive process. While I suggest that veterans’ stories feed into the discourses of nation, they also draw from them. The stories that individuals and cultures tell about their past are always aligned with “culture-specific configurations” (Neumann). Preexisting cultural narratives frame how wars are interpreted and remembered, as well as what meanings we may ascribe to our experiences of war. The most pervasive and persuasive representations of war in both political discourses and literary texts are those that activate these schemas of war remembrance, drawing from the images, myths, and tropes that a culture uses to apprehend past wars. These act as templates through which later wars are understood and function at the political level to intensify responses and mobilize citizens during present conflicts (Ashplant et al. 34). For example, veteran and author David Buchanan argues that critics should “examine war literature according to the symbolic scapegoats it creates” (7). He identifies the “savage Indian” stereotype as one template that informs Americans’ perceptions of war to this day (8). Drawing from cultural images and tropes related to the frontier wars, both civilians and service members superimpose these on current conflicts, framing how they respond to events in the present. Soldiers overlay this template on “their own war experiences because they have become a subconscious part of their national identity” (7). Buchanan points to Vietnam soldiers’ use of the term “Indian Country” when referring to Viet Cong–controlled areas, to the military’s use of Native nomenclature for the machinery and weaponry of war (i.e., Tomahawk missiles, Apache and Black Hawk helicopters), and to the name given the mission to kill Osama bin Laden: Geronimo. But this template also frames political rhetoric when leaders want to “circle the wagons” or “rouse the cavalry”—as when Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech at an army base in 2003 equating US soldiers with nineteenth-century Indian fighters.10 The politics of such a vernacular is obscured by its familiarity; such tropes are so ubiquitous that few Americans take notice of them, despite their evocative power.

These cultural tropes and images rile us to sympathize with a hero or to despise an enemy; they enact metaphysical conflicts of good versus evil and evoke a range of moral and ethical judgments. Mediated tales of Arab men as uncivilized, irrational, and sexist, for example, have long fed our cultural imaginary and fueled the politics of war.11 John Esposito argues that media-driven phobia of the “Green Menace” (the color of Islam) “has profoundly affected American perceptions of Islam and the Middle East” (203). As Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner testified during the 2008 “Winter Soldier” hearings, racism is “a more important weapon than a rifle, a tank, a bomber, or a battleship. . . . More destructive than an artillery shell or a bunker buster, or a tomahawk missile” (IVAW). Stripped of causality or context, racist “templates” function at both the political and personal levels; in the former, leaders can activate the psychic charge embedded in these meanings to gain support for anti-Muslim policies or Middle East invasions—while in the latter they inform how the individual soldier-author interprets and recounts their war experiences. These cultural assignations do not reproduce a preexisting “reality.” Rather, they help define and constitute it. As some of the memoirs examined in this book suggest, they form the basis of predispositions toward the enemy, frame readers’ expectations about what is “true” or “realistic,” and affect soldiers’ behavior in the field.

Granted access to the warrior’s unique perspective, readers may also be initiated into a way of seeing and interpreting the world. But this is never an “innocent” or simple exchange. As Stanley Fish argues, “It is interpretive communities, rather than either the text or reader, that produce meanings” (465). That is, readers are situated in time and space; we bring to our reading of war stories certain interpretive strategies and expectations. Truth in this sense is a matter of convention—a way of telling that conforms to civilians’ sensibilities and mythic conceptions of war. How readers identify and situate themselves within a political and social genealogy plays a pivotal role in their narrative expectations and, more importantly, their foreign policy opinions. In particular, gender and political affiliation are significant predictors of attitudes toward the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. A study of male and female West Point cadets, for example, found that male conservatives expressed the most favorable attitudes toward sending troops to both Afghanistan and Iraq; including gender and political party into advanced statistical models explained most or all the effects of military affiliation on support for both wars (Rohall et al. 74). As I argue in chapter 3, veteran-writers navigate the benefits and perils of credibility in diverse ways, but gender further complicates how authority is granted and evaluated.

When soldiers’ stories do not conform to prescribed generic conventions or are not easily refracted through our mythic lens, their legitimacy is called into question. Female soldiers face a double bind in this regard: their narrative authority is subject to gendered assumptions and cultural predispositions. The “Green Menace” is not just a set of negative stereotypes about our Others; it is also a lens through which we see ourselves. Through this cultural lens, “our” women enjoy equality and freedom; “theirs” are subjugated, veiled, or victimized. Female veterans’ memoirs can paint a more complex picture, for while male soldiers have limited access to Afghan and Iraqi women, female service members may often interact with them on a personal level. Sarah M. Jackson, who served as army operations officer in charge of a seven-hundred-person-unit Afghan military base, recounts the warm friendships she developed with some Afghan women who, despite extreme poverty and hardship, showed immense courage and resilience. Jackson’s memoir The Devil Dealt the Cards: One Female Soldier’s Account of Combined Action in Afghanistan also provides a more nuanced view of the Afghan soldiers she oversaw, noting that while some treated her with resentment or hostility, others “were extremely respectful and went to great lengths not to offend me.” (79). Some kindly welcomed her and shared meals and stories about their families. Jackson explains that the “degree of restrictions placed on Afghan women depended on how strictly or loosely [the local mullahs] interpreted the Koran” (77). “Overall,” Jackson writes, “most of the Afghans worked well with our females, some begrudgingly at first but eventually warming to the idea” (80). Her descriptions of Sahil, for example, a young male interpreter with whom she “developed a respectful but affectionate friendship,” counters stereotypes; Sahil “was thoughtful, smart, kind, and devoted” (80). Upon her departure, Colonel Durrani, a battle-seasoned Afghan warrior with whom she worked at the base, presents Jackson with “a beautiful set of light blue prayer beads,” assuring her that “instead of reciting prayers to Allah with each bead” she could repeat, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” (172). Like many other veteran-writers, Jackson insists that she does “not promote any political angle” (10). But her complex rendering of Afghans defies cultural expectations, fostering the kind of receptivity and mutual acceptance that can influence foreign policy views.

Clearly, factors unrelated to content coproduce a text’s meanings and help warrant its claims. In America, the war stories we expect to read—and the ones likely to be published and turned into Hollywood movies—tend to be redemptive and rehabilitative. This frame imposes a burden on soldier-writers, a duty to enlighten readers with their “truths” and moral lessons, to bestow a knowledge that they alone possess. But that “knowledge” is validated only when it conforms to the reader’s preconceptions and generic conventions. Veteran-author Roy Scranton, for example, challenges what he calls the popular “trauma hero myth” that “informs our politics, shapes our news reports, and underwrites our history.” This myth dominates academic interpretations of war literature and “affects whom we vote for” (“Trauma Hero”). Most important here is Scranton’s insistence that “understanding the problem of American political violence demands recognizing soldiers as agents of national power and understanding what kind of work the trauma hero is doing when he comes bearing witness in his bloody fatigues.” While these “trauma heroes” are certainly inspirational models of personal strength and resilience, the political work they perform is significant. In Words of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma, Kali Tal shows how memories of individual psychic traumas, through their telling and retelling, “enter the vocabulary of the larger culture where they become tools for the construction of national myths” (6). Tal argues that the cultural representation of traumatic experience is always political. In my view, the trauma hero’s struggles and ultimate recovery are readily exploited as models of national triumph over adversity: war as the staging ground for representing American mettle. An adherence to generic expectations, what William Dean Howells described as the American taste for “a tragedy with a happy ending,” fosters expectations beyond the story: predisposed to want uplifting tales of survival and recovery, civilians sanctify their soldiers or pathologize them as traumatized victims in need of “support.” Such expectations fuel marketing campaigns: “self-help” and “survivor” memoirs flood America’s literary marketplace with stories of recovery that follow tidy conventions—protagonists who take us on predictable journeys from psychic or physical wounding through struggle to ultimate triumph. These tropes and stereotypes are not merely “fictions” circulating through media and entertainment forms. They are discursive forms of power that fortify certain truth claims and invalidate others. Since controlling the meanings of the past involves ideological policing, soldiers’ personal experiences can be recruited into broader efforts to control or interpret collective memory. This implicates soldier-memoirists, despite their intentions, in competing efforts to control, manage, and instrumentalize memory, as their narratives can be appropriated and exploited by “memory entrepreneurs” seeking legitimacy for a particular political agenda or rendering of the past (Jelin). The “I” that overcomes the horrors of war deflects attention away from a war’s negative outcomes toward its heroic survivors. Veterans’ shared memories, imperfect as memories are with gaps, inconsistencies, and embellishments, become part of a culture’s discursive toolkit, the “scripts” that situate events within the national story and help positions for or against war “make sense.”

The Personal Is Political

I do not mean to suggest that the memoirs discussed in this book all extoll overt political messages or act as forms of propaganda. My understanding of politics erodes crude distinctions between “public” and “private”—between affairs related to the state and those involving personal choices and experiences. As I noted earlier, politics is not just what happens in campaigns and elections, in government buildings or backroom dealmaking among elites. It mediates our daily encounters, making its presence felt in boardrooms and bedrooms, in schoolyard and prison yard. Feminists have long asserted the inextricable links between these domains, pointing to the many ways that politics is at work in routine social activities, interactions, and relationships. Some critics argue that the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is itself a fiction that supports an oppressive status quo. Here again veterans’ memoirs offer important insights. Soldiers’ memoirs suggest diverse ways that politics is performed, experienced, and transacted through the bodies of soldiers. In this sense, the conception and reception of the soldier’s embodied experiences are one source of national identity formation, one means of giving emotional weight to notions about the American body politic.12 Government policies help construct and police racialized and gendered bodies, which in turn frame public perceptions of bodies: whose bodies pose a threat, whose are unruly and in need of restriction and control, and whose can be admitted into the fold. This dynamic is reflected in veterans’ memoirs, as policies come to be inscribed and enacted on the bodies of soldiers.

The body is a politically charged template for imparting meanings and ascribing cultural values. US military culture draws from certain preexisting assumptions about gendered bodies, informing institutional policies and practices with patriarchal norms that can be toxic to female service members.13 As more female combat vets tell their own stories, these gender norms assume new meanings. The title of Mary Jennings Hegar’s memoir Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman’s Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Homefront intentionally disrupts gendered associations, while her story also exposes their enduring influence. Hegar, a decorated Air National Guard pilot who served three tours in Afghanistan, recounts the sexual assault she endured under the guise of an annual flight physical. The general doctor refuses to accept her ob-gyn’s exam results from the previous week and threatens to fail her for “psychological reasons” (75). Terrified of losing her pilot’s certification, Hegar is subjected to an aggressive, painful, humiliating gynecological “exam.” He “had complete control over my future,” she writes, and she felt powerless to stop him (76). Even after the doctor admits what he did, his chain of command protects him; a few months later he is even selected as the medical group’s “Company Grade Officer of the Year” (80). The doctor was able to use a common weapon in the patriarchal arsenal: the pathologizing of female resistance or physical complaint as “hysteria.”14

Such gendered articulations of weakness and pathology help sustain a military culture that impedes female service members’ rise in the ranks. They articulate the gendered nature of militarized power and of the nation-state itself, “Reinforcing the imagery of masculinity—power, strength, blood, death and war embedded in the heroic soldier and breeding masculine cultural themes like honor, adventure, patriotism, cowardice and bravery” (Toktas 30). These attributions rely on gendered understandings of strength or ability that delimit female service members’ contributions. Hegar counters that if the military is going to make decisions about who can do a job based on biology, then research suggests they should “make all their snipers and fighter pilots women” (54). While acknowledging the absurdity of such blanket ascriptions, she highlights how “equally absurd it is to bar women from certain jobs without even assessing them individually” (54). Hegar’s experience with the doctor teaches her that “mental constraints can be as tight as physical ones” (76). She refuses to ever again conform to paradigms that constrain and devalue women: “I was proud of myself for shooting like a girl, damnit, and I planned to fly like a girl one day soon” (54).15 Hegar would go on to earn a Distinguished Flying Cross with valor and a Purple Heart, but as her experiences suggest, gendered conceptual and discursive frameworks have coercive effects in both personal and professional contexts. Like many other veterans, Hegar continued her service through political activism. In 2017 she ran as the Democratic nominee against Republican John Carter for the US House of Representatives in the Thirty-First Congressional District in Texas and then again against Republican John Cornyn in 2020 for the US Senate. Although she did not win, she gave both men a run for their money, garnering more votes than any other Democrat ever had in Texas (Gilman). Hegar would also challenge the constitutionality of the Combat Exclusion Policy, which prevented her from ground combat training despite her combat experience and expertise as a pilot. The policy was finally repealed in 2013.

In addition to facile distinctions between the personal and the political, my approach in this book rejects a top-down understanding of political power. Such an approach creates a false binary privileging the state, its agents, and military brass; it ignores how power circulates through social relationships and how it is used, displayed, and exerted by individual actors at all levels of society rather than “contained” in any one social class or group. James Gibson recognizes that the knowledge produced by combat soldiers from lower ranks is multifaceted; their memoirs produce a form of knowledge often subjugated or displaced by official accounts (466). While readers may be skeptical of the personal interests, career incentives, and political agendas motivating leaders’ accounts of war, they expect foot soldiers to “tell it like it is.” We may admire the medals or the status of the top brass, but we do not see ourselves mirrored in their ranks; generals’ accounts of war are studied by officers in war colleges and cited by military historians, but the infantryman’s “worm’s-eye view” appeals to a wide readership and makes an individual perspective plausible and compelling. Alex Vernon posits that we prefer to valorize common soldiers because they have “borne the lion’s share of war’s tragedies” at a time when so few Americans carry the burdens of war; sympathizing with their suffering can be “politically safer, analogous to ‘supporting the troops’ without supporting or even having a solid opinion (or understanding) of the operation” (Arms, 14). They also offer “reflections on the legitimation of and acquiescence (or otherwise) to the politics of militarism and the wider geopolitical ambitions of the state, from a position of relative subordination” (Woodward and Jenkins 495). War may be the “continuation of politics by other means” in Carl von Clausewitz’s famous aphorism, but as Kevin McSorely reminds us, the reality of war is “politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women” (War and the Body, 3). Even when not overtly political, military memoirs invite political critique and analysis, as their claims to truth implicitly assert the authority of the speaker, situate the speaker in relation to others, and discursively mediate an event of national significance.

Memoir and the Politics of Emotion

Memoir has a rocky history, as critics have alternately hailed or lamented its popularity. The genre is celebrated for its “wisdom and self-knowledge” (Couser), debunked as a fleeting “literary craze” or denigrated as self-indulgent, whiney, or narcissistic. Scholars long ignored it as a form not worthy of serious attention, treating it as a minor form of autobiography, much like diaries, letters, or journals. Autobiography presumably belonged to the public sphere—memoir to the domestic, private sphere, with all that implies. Lee Quinby, for example, identifies autobiography as “a privileged aesthetic and ethical discourse of the modern era,” while memoir is “a kind of poor relative” (299). In his study of memoir writing, Thomas Larson also characterizes the relationship between autobiography and memoir in familial terms: autobiography is the “patriarch, steadfast in its tenets and traditions,” who does not want anything to do with its fledgling wild child, memoir (12). My favorite of these kinship metaphors is Daniel Mendelsohn’s colorful description of the memoir’s tawdry reputation: “Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends—motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention.” Presumably worldly-wise, dispassionate men wrote autobiographies, while self-indulgent, sentimental women wrote memoirs.16

This notion that the memoir is implicitly a “feminine” (i.e., “sentimental”) form is of course difficult to defend today—particularly in the context of military memoirs, a traditionally male-centered genre that relies on the exploits of battle-hardened no-nonsense warriors for its appeal. But it does help to explain why the war memoir experienced a sharp rise in popularity during the romantic period, suited as it was to an ethos that valued subjectivity and emotional expression. Neil Ramsey’s seminal work on the rise of the military memoir during this period in England is particularly instructive. Ramsey sees the broader sentimental culture of the late eighteenth century as the “origin of a recognizable war literature that continues to shape our response to war today” (200). This affective sensibility informed Britain’s cultural response to war—arousing sympathy for soldiers and fueling concern over the moral legitimacy of their suffering. It also accounted for the “emergence of the military memoir as a distinct and prominent literary genre,” shifting its status as a marginal form to “a surprisingly dominant position in British literary culture” (193). While antiwar liberal opinion existed loosely before the military memoir’s rise, the first peace movement emerged in the early 1800s, pressuring the government through tracts, articles, meetings, and petitions (5). Accounts of soldiers’ suffering represented war’s miseries and exposed its realities, giving rise to the popularity of antiwar memoirs. This commercially successful genre, with its soldier-narrator as “naïve witness,” would profoundly shape nineteenth-century British culture’s understanding of war. Ramsey argues that in these memoirs the soldier is constructed as “a man of feeling who represents war principally as an affective experience and who recoils in horror from its suffering” (25). These representations could be “politically problematic,” Ramsey notes, “operating as a disturbing counter-narrative to a hegemonic national history” (26). As a result, the British state did not use or endorse these memoirs in its national narratives, instead relying on pageantry and military spectacle in their self-representations.

The tendency to relegate memoir to the “domestic” or “private” domain endures, however, its confessional tone underwriting its lesser status among many critics.17 Memoir’s emotional investments continue to cast doubt on the genre’s critical validity, its reliance on memory and subjectivity the mark of its unreliability and irrationality. Laura Marcus contends that the dismissal of the memoir “is bound up with a typological distinction between those human beings who are capable of self-reflection and those who are not” (21). It is also bound up with power and powerlessness, which, as Vernon asserts, implicates not only women but also soldiers, who “have always found themselves subordinated, acted upon, subjected to the results of others’ imposed wills—dependent, passive, even domesticated” (Arms, 20). Such gender-informed preconceptions ignore the political power memoirs can wield precisely because of their emotional pull—their ability to enthrall, motivate, and forge personal connections. Emotions always involve a kind of judgment, a personal evaluation of the significance of an incident or event (Solomon, Passions, xvii). This is particularly relevant in war memoirs, where responses such as empathy or outrage render a kind of judgment that has political resonance. Emotions fuel beliefs and can “stimulate people to action or allow them to approve of the actions of others in political contexts” (Frijda et al. 1). The persuasive power of veterans’ memoirs resides not in their factual accuracy, as we tend to ignore empirical evidence that challenges what feels true.18 As veteran-author Tim O’Brien puts it, reading the war story is a visceral experience.19 The ability to elicit identificatory bonds through storytelling is the root of political power.20 A war story’s “emotional capital” can pay political dividends: reading one soldier’s sensory account of a friend’s death in battle can do more to influence our response to warmongers than any policy document on the pros and cons of nation-building.21 This was driven home for me when I read Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor: while I was put off by Luttrell’s rants against “liberals,” I could not shed the emotional weight I carried for days after finishing his memoir. Luttrell’s intrusive politics annoyed and alienated me, but the empathy stirred by his grief at the loss of close friends connected me to his humanity. This empathetic bond affected how I came to judge the man and far outweighed the off-putting effects of his politics.22

Research shows not only that emotion affects a variety of political behaviors but also that it can be a desirable force for civic competence. George Marcus’s The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics rightly challenges the assumption that emotion is detrimental to good citizenship and deliberative democracy—merely a “trouble-maker intruding where it does not belong” (37). He rejects a binary that situates emotion as reason’s antagonist, emphasizing instead the explicit and vital role it plays “in bonding citizen, party, party platform, and elected officials” (37). The claim that individuals adopt their political views through reasoned analysis ignores a wealth of research in the neurosciences that demonstrates the role of emotions in decision making and judgment. What sometimes passes as reasoning is more often rationalization, an attempt to reconcile preconceived notions with newly introduced evidence. As Drew Westen puts it, “The political brain is an emotional brain” (xv). While the “marketplace of ideas” may be a great place to shop for policies, Weston quips, it is the “marketplace of emotions” that matters most in American politics (36). For example, philosopher Richard Rorty posits empathy as the root of human rights politics, suggesting that the “emergence of human rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories” (118). Corey Robin explores fear as “a political idea” that serves as a “source of political vitality” and a “meeting ground of the intellect and the passions, of our morals and our politics” (24). Robert F. Brissenden goes so far as to trace the roots of modern secular humanism and liberal democracy to eighteenth-century sentimentalism, which produced emotionally riveting and inspiring essays, novels, and speeches that instigated political change. Emotions are the engine that fuels our concerns and launches social movements, the basis of the connections we forge as social and political subjects.

Since our emotional engagement is intensified when stories are based on “real life” people and events, the memoir is an ideal form for “converting” readers or promoting a cause.23 Recounting their personal experiences of war in sensory, evocative prose, soldiers’ memoirs wield persuasive power, their rhetorical force intensified by what David Shields calls “the lure and blur of the real” (4). Studies indicate that the perceived “reality” of media content, for example (i.e., documentaries, news programs, “reality” crime shows) has a stronger impact on viewers’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors than fictional content (Potter 24). This effect occurs even when content is not factually accurate or is clearly fictionalized: creative writers understand that using first-person narrative, with events recounted through the main character’s point of view, invites the closest relationship between reader and narrative voice. Their choice of first-person narrative voice seeks to elicit the reader’s identification with the story’s protagonist. Literary theorist and novelist David Lodge argues that readers’ preference for the first-person narrative voice responds to contemporary philosophical and historical conditions: “In a world where nothing is certain, in which transcendental belief has been undermined by scientific materialism, and even the objectivity of science is qualified by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice, telling its own story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness” (87). Of course, all prose narratives court their readers’ sympathies and identifications, and as Lodge himself concedes, the first-person voice can be “just as artful, or artificial” as fiction’s third-person point of view. But Lodge defends first-person narrative as the most effective literary technique for evoking empathy, and he does so by noting its affinity with memoir and testimonial. In his view, first-person narration “creates an illusion of reality, it commands the willing suspension of the reader’s disbelief, by modeling itself on the discourses of personal witness: the confession, the diary, autobiography, the memoir, the deposition” (87–88). This literary technique, inherent in the memoir as a genre, promises readers privileged access to the inner life of the protagonists. The interiority and intimacy of the genre enhances its rhetorical force, inviting us to see and judge experiences through the witness’s eyes, to align ourselves with his or her worldview.

I have argued that soldiers’ memoirs contribute to public memory and public discourses—to a realm that is always already implicated in politics broadly defined. While looking to the past, memoir is in this sense always forward-looking, as implicit in the desire to bear witness is the conviction that we can make a difference, that our shared memories can offer something of use to those who follow in our wake. In her book Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier’s Experience in Iraq, Stacey Peebles contends that soldier-memoirists express a political disillusionment sparked by the Vietnam War but not exclusive to its veterans. In her view, Iraq War memoirs suggest that today’s soldiers are “politically cynical, but personally idealistic,” a claim that presumably does not refute her conviction that their “stories have the power to change our national narrative” (4). I would counter that given the miscalculations, fabrications, and failures that characterize much of America’s postmodern war making, political cynicism could well be a national malady. But I would also challenge Peebles’s interpretation of soldiers’ memoirs as “politically cynical” and “personally idealistic,” a view rooted in that diehard dichotomy between the personal and political, as if a soldier’s actions on the battlefield or in domestic life were fully autonomous from the contingencies of place, culture, and power relations that structure our values, motivations, and behaviors. Even if the dividing line between the political and the personal were so clearly demarcated or stable—can political cynicism coexist with personal idealism? Can I distrust the motives and efficacy of all political actions or actors yet still aspire toward some transcendent set of values?

Perhaps, but this position demands a more complex understanding of cynicism. Reexamining its political valence in a postmodern world, Sharon Stanley reminds us not to skirt “over certain instabilities and tensions built into the very structure of cynical consciousness,” tensions that suggest the possibility of “a more productive and dialogical cynicism, one that need not stand in absolute antithesis to any and all political action” (384). In their memoirs, veterans will often call out incompetence, hypocrisy, or failures of leadership, qualities that in a war zone can cost lives. The experience of war may strip away myths of glory and invulnerability, but the soldier’s cynicism can nevertheless “retain a paradoxical investment in the very values he dismisses as naïve pieties.” After all, Stanley argues, “corruption only gains substance if it can be read against some realizable standard of purity or integrity” (391). As a response to loss (of illusion, of trust in others’ motives, of the potential for a just world), cynicism can mask a nostalgia for what was lost. The foundation of our political identity lies in the belief that individual choices and actions matter, that a better world is possible—regardless of how corrupt the present state of our politics or the failures of our leaders. Instead of a retreat from politics, cynicism might entail a certain kind of orientation toward political action, or as Stanley puts it, “a realistic capitulation to the corruption of the world.” Veterans’ cynicism is often strategic: mocking or discrediting their government’s “noble goals,” they do not necessarily relinquish the political space for mobilizing these values. Soldiers who have fought in war, Paul Fussell reminds us, possess “a mysterious shared ironic awareness manifesting itself in an instinctive skepticism about pretension, publicly enunciated truths, the vanities of learning, and the pomp of authority” (48). It is important, Stanley argues, to “distinguish between cynicism as a rhetorical performance and cynicism as a deeply rooted aspect of an individual’s subjectivity. The individual who has perfected the jeering, mocking one-liner has not necessarily given up on politics—and the jeering, mocking one-liner might even be put to solid rabble-rousing use” (406). The gallows humor deployed by soldiers both in the barracks and in their writings is often a shield against vulnerability—a defense mechanism for coping with disillusionment, fear, or grief. But the villains and follies they expose, mock, and decry provide a clear-eyed picture of what needs fixing and may provoke a response from an otherwise apathetic or politically complacent American public. Army major Richard A. Lacquement Jr. suggests that American soldiers’ cynicism and skepticism “might even be considered character strengths as they mark the independent spirit that makes U.S. troops flexible and innovative in battle” (7). In this sense, cynicism is a needed counterbalance to the dangers posed by Hollywood-style heroics, delusions of glory, or a blind faith in the nobility or competence of leaders. But most importantly, cynicism as an end (rather than a means) would spell the death of storytelling, for why bother sowing seeds in the desert? Why exercise a power that Peebles acknowledges can “change our national narrative”? In a world deemed irredeemably corrupt and hopeless, wherefore storytellers?

Mapping the Terrain: Chapter Breakdown

The book’s organizational framework arises from its thematic concerns, all centering on politics, broadly conceived. I begin by setting a historical context for my interest in veterans’ diverse political subjectivities. In chapter 1, “Protestors, Patriots, and Culture Warriors: American Politics and the Citizen-Soldier,” I show that American soldiers and veterans have consistently organized and participated in political activism. In a brief overview of this history, I trace some of the economic and social conditions that shaped veterans’ civic identities and fueled their collective responses as citizens, focusing attention on the intersections of race, military service, and national politics. I include discussion of African American and Latino veteran activism, for despite a long history of military service, war commemorations and histories rarely include their perspectives. Yet their political activism reveals a more complex version of the American war story, with its democratizing themes and cast of steely-eyed White heroes. As I argue, this more complex history of political mobilizations and strategic alliances challenges the image of American service members as detached, apolitical subjects uncompromised by or disconnected from their civic or racialized identities. It is further complicated by current events, as American soldiers are increasingly making their voices heard in a variety of settings: as proxies for political candidates or parties, organizers of grassroots movements, bloggers, and as candidates in both local and national campaigns.

I then turn to the politics of emotion, particularly shame and humiliation. In chapter 2, “The Fate Worse Than Death: Saving Face and the Affective Economy of War,” I call attention to the dominant structure of feeling in post–World War II America that served as a backdrop to the Vietnam War: what I call its “pride economy.” Evoked through political discourses commemorating the American warrior as savior and protector of the “free world,” the pride economy engendered a reciprocal—even reactionary—anxiety of influence: the fear of not living up to this masculine ideal. As a result, face-saving maneuvers served as the thread binding a series of responses before, during, and after the Vietnam War, from securing popular support to foreign-policy decision making to the recruitment, training, and behavior of soldiers in the field. Reading three critically acclaimed war memoirs as case studies, Philip Caputo’s Rumor of War, Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone, and Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army, I show how face-saving motivated personal choices and behaviors. Using declassified documents and historical accounts, I situate these literary works in conversation with political speeches, interviews, and memos showing how face-maintenance shaped leadership decisions, prioritized the preservation of national pride, and cost American soldiers’ lives. Ironically, after the war, it was shame, not pride, that would dominate collective and personal memories of Vietnam.

Americans trust their military more than their government, news organizations, or even religious institutions, endowing it with a kind of soft power generally unacknowledged by political scientists, foreign policy experts, and military historians. Concurrently, a “support the troops” mantra makes criticism of the military or our nation’s wars difficult, even unpatriotic, a predicament that political leaders are quick to exploit. These factors are further complicated by our current, “post-truth” political culture, where, as Lee McIntyre argues, “largely left-wing relativist and postmodernist attacks on the idea of truth . . . have now been co-opted by right-wing political operatives” (McIntyre 6).24 In chapter 3, “Trusting the Messenger: Veterans’ Memoirs and the Politics of Credibility,” I call attention to these intersecting concerns. My reading of Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor, John Crawford’s The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, and Michael Anthony’s Mass Casualties: Death, Deception, and Dishonor in Iraq contrasts the extent to which these writers assert, exploit, or subvert their own veracity. I first situate these works against the “credibility gap” initiated by the Vietnam War, arguing for Tim O’Brien’s memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone as a critique against political certainty and absolutism. I then show how assumptions about truth as relativistic, contingent, or immutable—that is, skepticism or faith in context-transcendent notions of truth—frame post-9/11 military memoirs and model competing ways of responding to the state’s authority.

Immigrants have served in the US military in every major conflict since the Revolutionary War, their service often seen as a test of loyalty to the nation and the very crucible of citizenship. Yet their stories are mostly absent from our national narratives. In chapter 4, “‘Soldiers of Conviction’: Duty, Dissent, and the Immigrant Soldier,” I take up one of the most controversial issues affecting military personnel and polarizing Americans today, immigration, to explore questions about citizenship, cultural belonging, and duty through the rare perspective offered by foreign-born American soldiers’ memoirs: Camilo Mejía’s Road from ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejía: An Iraq War Memoir and Robert Mencia’s From Here to Insanity: An Immigrant Boy Becomes a Citizen by Way of the Vietnam Draft. I situate their stories in a broader political and social history, tracing some of the incentives that have driven noncitizens to enlist in the military, showing how political attitudes toward immigrants affect policymaking, and raising questions about the role of national and ethnic affinities in shaping concepts such as honor, heroism, and patriotism.

Chapter 5, “Silence amid the Din of War,” focuses on Brian Turner’s memoir My Life as a Foreign Country to explore the politics informing his poetics. Rather than theorizing the political and the aesthetic as separate realms (functioning in opposition, as if art’s aesthetic aims necessarily conflict with or deny its politics or as if one must invariably subordinate the other), Turner places these two modes in dialogical relation, recognizing that politics has an inherently aesthetic dimension and aesthetics an inherently political one, and that both modes reflect “ways of doing things with words.” Adopting literary devices (irony, symbolism, foreshadowing, flashback, etc.) as vehicles for oblique political commentary, I argue, Turner contributes to the diverse forms through which wars are represented and imagined. I conclude in chapter 6, “Beginnings: Stories That Need Telling,” by pointing to recent changes in the military that promise new stories by female and LGBTQ combat veterans.

In the low-intensity conflicts that have become America’s new normal, boundaries between combatants and noncombatants are blurred or shattered, alliances shift or dissolve within twenty-four-hour news cycles, and information is deployed as a weapon, a myth, an edge, a trope, and an asset (Gray 22). Treading this minefield of competing discourses, voices, and interests is complicated enough, but today’s professional American soldier is also asked to play contradictory roles: to serve as nation builder and destroyer, savior and killer, sacrificial lamb and lion of war—to fit the image of the benevolent GI who hands out candy to kids in Baghdad, and of the stoic warrior of Generation Kill.25 Civilians thank them, call them heroes, offer them free coffee, discounts, handshakes. Of course, Americans also tend to be fickle in our loyalties—ready to turn on our soldiers when they fail to live up to our myths or when wars turn too ugly or our side loses. But long after the small-town parades, the homecomings, the yellow ribbon campaigns, and regardless of what new burdens the vicissitudes of public opinion and political spin will place on them, soldiers will be telling war stories. Their voices will often be difficult to hear above the rousing calls to arms, the shock and awe of talking heads, and the shrill and bluster of warmongers. But if we listen, we will hear them.