Operation Homecoming is a compilation of stories written by U.S. soldiers of their experiences in Iraq as well as stories written by parents, lovers, spouses and friends (Carroll, 2006). The stories are touching, profound, challenging, complex and painful to read. However, by omitting mention of Iraqi experiences, and focusing the reader's attention only on the heart-wrenching, emotion-inducing experiences of U.S. soldiers without providing the larger context and negative impact of their presence in Iraq on Iraqi people, the book heroizes these individuals and absolves them of any personal responsibility for being part of the U.S. military engagement in Iraq and the devastating consequences of that presence.
Although as a collective whole the stories seem to question the legitimacy of the war itself, and expose the complexity and messiness of the war revealing a lot of mixed feelings about the U.S. presence in Iraq, for the most part, the individuals in the stories are represented and also represent themselves as pawns or victims of a larger game; the U.S. presence in Iraq is represented as though it is up to a decision made in Washington, rather than being a consequence of the choices made by a collective mass of individuals including the ones whose stories are included in the book who are active agents in the process. As a result of perpetrating this way of thinking, readers also are encouraged to believe that as individuals, the most they can do is to "support the troops" rather than believing that through an act of collective effort, they too can stop the war. Whether this omission of important content is conscious or not, the fact that the book can be funded and endorsed by the National Endowment of the Arts, and acclaimed by a large audience of readers, suggests there has come to be a culturally accepted form of forgetting here in the United States with respect to the war in Iraq and in generally about the wars the U.S. is involved in. I am thinking mainly of the Vietnam War and what it took to end it, and the ways in which both the Iraq and Vietnam Wars have similar characteristics that are worth examining so we can explore how to end the current war in Iraq.
I remember going to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. many years ago. It was a war my mother lived through, a war my uncles suffered through, my aunt died and my grandfather died in. However, I only saw American names on that Wall, and still to this day wonder whether Americans really are aware that over five million Vietnamese died? Perhaps even more tragic is the lack of awareness that Lao and Cambodian people also died and yet are omitted from American memory because they are not often included in representations of the Vietnam War. Last October I attended an exhibit and theatrical performance entitled Legacies of War at the Cambridge Center for Multicultural Arts. The exhibit and performance were aimed to raise awareness about the genocide that took place in Laos: apparently the United States Air Force dropped the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years on the people of Laos – approximately 2,000,000 tons (Public Interest Projects, October 2007). This was some of the heaviest aerial bombing in world history. An estimated 500,000 people died from 1965 to 1973 and yet, I wonder whether the general U.S. population is aware of this at all (Public Interest Projects, October 2007). Its eerie to think that there might be some correlation between the widespread representation of the deaths of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust in a war that the U.S. won and was proud of winning, and the omittance of much representation of the 5 million Vietnamese, 500,000 Lao and 200,000 Cambodians from a war the U.S. lost (Wikipedia, February 2008). Even looking online for an "official" website for the number of Lao civilian casualties was disturbing: the CIA website does not even document it. I am starting to see similar process of forgetting happening with regards to the U.S. war in Iraq and it is appalling. In both these cases –Operation Homecoming and Vietnam War memorial, the amnesia has come to be normalized, the heroicizing of certain people and complete forgetting of others who were similarly killed and wounded is haunting, tragic and in my opinion is perhaps the worst consequence of war.
After the Vietnam War ended, many Hollywood films were created such as Apocolypse Now, Deer Hunter and Platoon. I remember when my mother was in A Bright Shining Lie she took three weeks off work and got very excited and took loads of photos of the cast. But basically, her role in the story was to get shot and die, while Bill Paxton, a White American male, played the star. It disturbs me that many Vietnam War films glamorize war, portray the Americans as heroes while the Vietnamese are dehumanized, victimized or exoticized. The impact of these representations is evident today in Hanoi where, for example, you can go for a drink at a bar called Apocolypse Now, listen to music from the 60's and 70's, sit at a table made of bomb shells, and get served by Vietnamese women who are wearing as little as they do in the Hollywood films (but not like they would anywhere else in other aspects of their everyday lives), and admire the part of a small U.S. army plane that adds to the whole re-enacted Vietnam War era atmosphere. This disturbing phenomena of touristic nostalgizing and glamorizing of war is summed up quite well in Lucy Lippard's article "Tragic Tourism" (1999). Lippard's main point is that we cannot trust representations of tragic events in history – whether they be film, books, artwork, or news media – to do our remembering for us; we have to use more critical thinking, read between the lines, be conscious of what we are not being told, how we are being told and who is doing the telling and what their agenda might be. It worries me when films like Black Hawk Down are being created about the war in Iraq which, similarly to many Vietnam War films, feed more American patriotism, absolving the armed forces of any responsibility for the descruction of a country, cultures and peoples, and heroicizing Americans as protectors of the innocent.
Besides war films, news media representations of the war in Iraq are similarly disturbing. Particularly noteworthy is the CNN news story about Youssif that was turned into a televised documentary (CNN, December 2007). Youssif was a young Iraqi boy who was badly burned by US troops – so badly that his face was permanently scarred. His story was broadcasted on CNN and became quite a sensation because 12,000 viewers contributed donations and one American plastic surgeon offered to try to repair the damages to his face for free. With the donations from CNN viewers, Youssif and his family were offered a free trip to the United States, free accommodation, free stipend and hospital services until his face healed. Although the over all on-going documentary up until now highlights the act of generosity on the part of everyday Americans, the whole story leaves out the larger context and reality: that it is because of the American occupation of Iraq that Youssif's face was badly burned in the first place. Americans should not be heroized like this, rather, it is a gesture that obviously needs to be offered to every Iraqi child injured in that war and not just one.
Jehane Noujaim, in her documentary film entitled Control Room (2004), provides a more multi-layered, complex representation of the war in Iraq which exposes how the act of representing is political and motivated by the agenda of the one doing the representing. By including the conflicting opinions of Al Jazeera (a global news media service) reporters, the U.S. military, U.S. journalists, and international journalists, as well as the Iraqi victims of the war she shows different points of view about the same event and the variety of processes taking place behind-the-scenes that determine which voice gets heard and which one is silenced. Particularly noteworthy was her coverage of the staging of the U.S. occupation of Baghdad. The film showed how the characters, props, and activities that took place that day were all not naturally there at the time, but were purposely brought there by the U.S. military for the media in an effort to convince the public that the American overthrow of the capital was welcomed by locals when, in fact, the reporters at Al Jazeera claimed the opposite was the case. The film's inclusion of multiple perspectives was invaluable for the viewer to be exposed to multiple truths and provided insight into the processes involved in constructing each sides' representation of the same events.
The editors of Rethinking Schools capture the point I am trying to make quite well in their article "Sept. 11 and Our Classrooms" when they encourage teachers to instill "globalizing empathy" by getting away from using terms like "'us', 'we' and 'our' to promote a narrow nationalism" (Winter 2001: 3). They continue to urge teachers to "enlist students in questioning the language and symbols that help frame how we understand global events" and to encourage students to be conscious of how "language is marshalled for political ends" and to give students the opportunity and permission to "think differently from the Official Story", and recognize different stars . . .a point of view I hoped to capture in this piece of writing as a student, educator, activist and artist. . .
Excerpt from Good Morning Starshine Travelogue by Diem Dangers
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