Book Reviews

Parameters Editors
2009 Parameters  
Parameters ers give more details, or describe the gore. Daniel Cotnoir, a Marine identified as being in "Mortuary Affairs," says: "It is gruesome to just beyond the realm of a horror film." The great majority are shocked by the blood, the heat, the killing, the chaos. Almost all are decorated soldiers; Wood lists their ribbons. If the overall impression left by these voices is that war is individual worlds of chaos, most of these individuals persist in trying to understand the big-picture sense
more » ... of what they are involved in. Alan King, an Army officer, notes that he had always been told there was a plan for reconstruction; "I would get [it] when I needed it." But when the moment comes, the commanding officer levels with him: "You know, there's no plan; you have got to come up with something in 24 hours." A military policeman stationed at Abu Ghraib, Ken Davis, comments on what happened there. "I don't believe it was just a few bad apples. I'm not that gullible. I am not going to be lied to by a government that I would have given my life for in Iraq." Few of them see a point in the war. The overall sense the book leaves is that of people with ants'-eye views of things describing what they saw and trying desperately to understand. Thus, What Was Asked of Us makes clear the fundamental paradox of war: It is an exercise that uses individuals in a way that transcends the individual. It seems that those involved in war can never understand it as a whole because their individual experiences are so vivid, as well as being so individual. Understanding, if it is ever achieved, is left to the people who start it, to those who order it from afar, or to the historians who explain it decades later from the silence of the university. And they did not fight it. Certainly a video-game view of war is discredited here, that it is motivational, adrenaline-pumping, rock 'em, sock 'em good guys vs. bad guys. But the kind of people who read books such as this do not need to have this view discredited; they do not believe it to begin with. The view that it is only unpatriotic liberals who would question the war bites the dust too; one soldier, Garret Reppenhaben, mocks the "Support the Troops" magnetic ribbons by saying they "begin to look like swastikas." This much of a polemical point is, at least, clear: Through its meticulous recreation of these voices, What Was Asked of Us opposes a view of war as something we should engage in because it will feel good for a moment to have the sense we are "doing something." We should, it is clear, resist saying, "They did X to us, so let's 'take the war to them.'" This book reminds us vividly that it is always people who take war anywhere, and people to whom it is taken. It is a point that we who theorize about war forget only at our peril.
doi:10.55540/0031-1723.2469 fatcat:lzj5z5fmsvagxda23gptanaoby