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DOI: 10.1177/147041290600500111

2006 5: 99Journal of Visual CultureChris Kraus

Deployment of Narrative

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Deployment of NarrativeChris Kraus

Based on his award-winning dispatches from the Iraq invasion written forRolling Stone magazine, Evan Wrights Generation Kill(2005) sets itself upas the definitive document of the Iraq War, by asking an inherently fraudulentquestion: How does the post-Rolling Stone generation a generation toodisaffected and hip to read that magazine behave when thrown intocombat? Wrights subjects are no Lynndie Englanders. Theyre not the kids ofdepressed rural American towns who joined the National Guard to help payfor college and unwittingly ended up in Iraq. They are an elite, highly self-selected group of young warriors who competed for months to join an elitebranch of Marines engaged in guerilla-style style combat.

Within the rubric of the New Journalism thatRolling Stone pioneered in itsheyday, Wright amps his account of these individuals up onto a much granderlevel of metaphor. Its a quest for the zeitgeist! Generation Killis like HunterS. Thompsons delirious coke-fests internalized at a more corporate,authoritative level. How, Wright reflects, does the Shit Happens generationconceive of a war? With a strange degree of self-consciousness, Wrights bookbecomes its own paradigm for the results of journalistic embeddedness theconditions through which this book was written, and a practice Wright neverquestions and its ability to perpetuate ignorance.

Embedded with the Second Bravo Platoon of the Marine Corps elite FirstReconnaissance Batallion, Wright claims its members represent what is more

or less Americas first generation of disposable children. More than half of theguys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee,single, working parents. Wright leaves his home in LA at the dawn of the Iraqinvasion in March 2004. He is the only reporter to embed with First Recon.One other journalist, clearly a pussy, was slated to come but dropped outafter going through mandatory chemical warfare training provided by theMarine Corps in Kuwait City.

It is a given that this generation will be completely divorced from affect,because, after all, as Wright says,

many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows andInternet porn than they are with their own parents. Before the War on

Terrorism began, not a whole lot was expected of this generation otherthan the hope that those in it would squeak through high school with-out pulling too many more mass shootings in the manner of Columbine.

This glib proclamation makes me think of the most disturbing synapse inLauren Lazins magnificent documentary about Tupac Shakur, Tupac

Resurrection (2003). In Part 1, Tupacs mother, Afeni Shakur, is portrayed asa leading intellectual within the Black Panther Party in Harlem. By Part 2,

with no explanation, she has become a crack addict in a Baltimore housingproject. Shit happens indeed, and Tupac spent most of his short lifeexpounding on these very synapses.

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After briefly introducing the highly selective, competitive nature of theMarines First Reconnaissance Battalion (an organization which undergoesthe same high level of training as Navy SEALs) the reader is asked to believethat its members are, somehow, typical. Equally drawn from streetbackgrounds and Ivy League schools, Second Bravo platoon members arebonded by their reckless asceticism and desire to Get Some.

The story of the Iraq War, according to Wright, is the story of enduring fetidconditions in 130 degree heat; of driving a Humvee past snipers and landmines while wearing vision-impeding night goggles. But on its highest andmost profound level, it is the story of a mismatched band of slackers rebornas existentialists. Wrights cast of characters includes the charismatic LtNathaniel Fick, a 25-year-old Dartmouth graduate and former altar-boy who

has gone on to write his own gripping memoir, One Bullet Away: The Makingof a Marine Officer(2005). In it, Fick writes: When youre holding the gun,the responsibility is imminent. Its right there all that power is in yourhands. Decisions have immediate, irreversible consequences.

Marjorie Braman, vice president and executive editor of HarperCollins,believes that the immediacy of such memoirs and embedded reporting willresonate deeply with readers. I think what people are tired of certainly

what I grew tired of were in-depth, long pieces about politics and policies,she told theLos Angeles Times (Klein, 2005). These books are bringing thefocus to an intimately personal level, and I think this is where peoplesconcerns are now. The media falls over itself to collude with the Bushregimes mandate for ignorance. So long as all war reportage is embedded,

there will only be personal stories about individuals.

Senator Susan Clark (Republican, Maine) immediately voiced concern aboutsystemic torture/abuse in her capacity as a member of the Senate ArmedServices Committee after Abu Ghraib became public. She was the onlyRepublican (and one of very few representatives of either party) to do so. Sheremains the lone voice in her party, insisting that the torture of prisoners at

Abu Ghraib was too culturally specific to have been devised by a few boredredneck youths from West Virginia; that it must be systemic. As yet, the storyof Captain Ian Fishbecks 18-month struggle to report just how systemic thistorture is ignored, then investigated, by his Army superiors, Fishbeck finallyreported his own experience to the Senate Armed Services Committee andHuman Rights Watch is not as much of a story as the transformationalstory of combat. No one wants to hear much about just how this shithappens. I joined the Marines for idealism and romance, says WrightsSergeant Rudy Reyes. Idealism because its so hard. The Marine Corps is a

wonderful tool of self-enlightenment. Acting on orders at Camp Mercuryoutside Fallujah, Ian Fishbeck recalls: We would give [the prisoners] blowsto the head, chest, legs and stomach and pull them down, kick dirt on them.This happened every day, he told Human Rights Watch.

The voice of the government, the voice of the media: indistinguishable.Embeddedness becomes a new form of celebrity journalism, in which no-one is in charge and anyone can say anything. Noxious individuals can mouth

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their opinions while remaining immune from revealing any particularsource, and the President of the United States criticizes the government asif it had nothing to do with him.

Reference

Fick, Nathaniel (2005) One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. Boston, MA:

Houghton Mifflin.

Klein, Julia M. (2005) One Bullet Away,Los Angeles Times, 6 September.

Wright, Evan (2005) Generation Kill. London: Corgi.

Chris Kraus is the author of the novels I Love Dick (Semiotext(e)/MIT

Press, 1998), Aliens & Anorexia (Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2000) and theforthcoming Torpor. A book of her art essays, Video Green, was published bySemiotexte/MIT Press in 2004.

Imperial Vagueness and the Image in the Iraqi War

Gerry Beegan

SMOKIN Marlboro men kick butt in Fallujah

Bloodied but unbowed, a leatherneck from Charlie Company of theU.S. Marines First Division, takes a drag of a well-deserved smoke

yesterday after he and his comrades stormed the terrorist stronghold ofFallujah, wiping out bands of bloodthirsty guerrillas. (The New York

Post, 10 November 2004)

This is a warrior with his eyes on the far horizon, scanning for danger.See it. Study it. Absorb it. Think about it. Then take a deep breath ofpride. And if your eyes dont dampen, youre a better man or womanthan I. (Dan Rather, CBS News, 10 November 2004)

These are two readings of a photograph of an American soldier whichappeared on all of the major television networks and in over 100 USnewspapers in November 2004, an image which has become one of the warsicons in the US. The photograph shows a blank-faced young soldier with ascrape on his nose and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. The New York

Posts use of the image on its front cover was the most provocative of theseresponses; as a Murdoch tabloid, its belligerent triumphalism echoed The

Suns infamous Gotcha headline celebrating the sinking of an Argentinianwarship in the Falklands War of 1982. The Posts one-word headlineostensibly refers to the act of smoking a cigarette, but it is at the same time aslang word for killing someone with a gun. The subheading, which is also in

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