Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq by Peebles Stacey

Author:Peebles, Stacey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8014-6142-2
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Fighting for a New Community

In the years since Vietnam and its cultural aftermath, the masculine collective seems to have taken a hit, at least as seen and understood in these contemporary American memoirs of war. That collective no longer functions effectively as the frame for a master narrative about war and the self. According to Turnipseed, Fick, and Williams, the master narrative has become a blur—unknown figures advancing on a convoy, a child holding what might or might not be a rifle, a fierce storm that cloaks everything in uniformly colored sand. The circle of one’s fellow soldiers is not immune, as it turns out, to the doubts and second-guessing that all of these situations engender.

Joel Turnipseed struggles with the proper performance of masculinity, not because it’s “too hard,” but because he sees it as just that—a show. It’s a show for which he has not a small amount of talent, but which role is the right one? Is it the drama of the struggling intellectual, searching for truth, or the comedy of the Marine Corps smart-ass, cynical asides at the ready? The pipe-smoking, port-drinking white man with precise elocution, or the chain-smoking, rapping, honorary black man? Turnipseed’s awareness that his identity is really just a performance creates a fragility in the connections he has with other people. If it’s all just a show, then what’s a friendship made of? The Dog Pound may be a delightful distraction from the labor of war, but when the opportunity comes to leave, Turnipseed jumps at the chance.

For Nathaniel Fick, the logic of military masculinity is a reductio ad absurdum. Hardness is key to being a real man, he learns, and he gets harder and harder until he realizes that the leadership role he has undertaken requires him not just to protect and guide his fellow soldiers, but also to sacrifice them if necessary. The hardness that brings the group together—the tests they all pass, the impossible tasks they all complete, the stoicism they all inculcate within themselves—is the same hardness that can potentially lead to the group’s annihilation. That, as he concludes, is too hard.

Finally, Williams, who struggles so mightily to be accepted only to fail in the end. She can hardly be called a pioneer—there have been too many women serving in too many capacities for that—but her story does mark what is perhaps a crucial point in the history of gender and the American military. She sees and acts on the potential for crossing boundaries—as a female soldier and as a scholar of Arabic. But Williams is denied true acceptance into the tight circle of military comradeship, and that sense of personal betrayal leads to a recognition of larger, political betrayals as well, like Shane’s inability to secure proper medical care.

Though Williams does include this description of her disillusion with the military near the end of her book, neither she, nor Turnipseed, nor Fick include an extended consideration of the political motivations and justifications for war in their narratives, and the absence is telling.

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