Seeing Darkly: The Case of Armored Vehicles

While as Evan Wright has learned, the seeing of targets in Humvees and LAVs during the U.S. invasion of Iraq was adversely affected by the vehicle’s limited maneuverability, there is also a matter of perspective that results from the isolation that a vehicular enclosure entails. The Lebanese novelist, Hanan al-Shaykh captures its implications through her protagonist Asmahan’s epiphany when she enters a tank:

Now I understand why when they’re in a tank, soldiers feel they can crush cars and trees in their paths like brambles, because they are disconnected from everything, their own souls and bodies included and what’s left is this instrument of steel rolling majestically forward. I feel as if I’ve entered another world...There is no window where we are, and the feeble light comes from a bulb, or filters through from the small windows in the driver’s area.¹³

The experience of the Marines traveling in Humvees, reported in Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, resonates well with al-Shaykh’s representation of the perspective they had in their vehicle. What Wright adds are details about the enmities and erotics fueling their gaze.

In both the book and HBO versions of Generation Kill, Sergeant Brad Colbert (played by Alexander Skarsgard in the HBO drama series version), the main protagonist, is involved in an ethical becoming. Although Colbert is a cool, seasoned veteran, eager for combat (“For him, it’s a grand personal challenge…Scary isn’t it?…I can’t wait”¹⁴ ), and although the advanced technology in his Humvee often creates mediated view of his potential targets, he is nevertheless affected by what he sees and ultimately becomes more observant of the rules of engagement than the mission instructions of superiors have encouraged him to be (their primary code is killing to protect fellow troops whenever there is any ambiguity with respect to whom they are seeing). As both the ethnography and HBO drama series indicate the “seeing” of targets is screened not only through weapons but also through a highly sexualized prolexis; an eroticized male gaze is deployed on both their targets (as the mantra “get some,” equating targets with sexual conquests suggests) and on their weapons, as one Marine referring to machine gun in Wright’s ethnography puts it, “I hope I get to use her tonight” (Wright adds, “I can picture him caressing the top of his SAW as he sometimes does during tender moment before a firefight.”¹⁵ The HBO version enacts that erotic person-gun relationship with an image of a marine sleeping cuddled up with his rifle (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Marine and rifle

In the ethnographic version of the war, Wright effectively constructs the “invasion force” as a “machinic assemblage” in a way that recalls Hannah al Shaykh’s remarks about the obtuseness of men in tanks to their environment:

It all has the feel of a monumental industrial enterprise. Somehow all these pieces are being put together – the people and the equipment – to function as one large machine…the machine works. It will role across 580 kilometers to Baghdad. It will knock down buildings, smash cars and tanks, put holes in people, shred limbs, cut children apart.¹⁶

And he observes the mediated seeing involved in using the armored vehicles killing power. For example, describing the LAV’s (Light Armored Vehicles), he writes:

Each has a Bushmaster 25mm rapid-fire canon mounted in a top turret. Unlike the open turret in a Humvee, which requires a man standing in it to fire a weapon, the Bushmasters are fully enclosed. Thy resemble mall tank guns and are operated by a crewman sitting below inside the vehicle, controlling the weapon with a sort of joystick…the guns are also linked to Forward—looking infrared scopes, which combine both thermal imaging and light amplification to easily pick out targets 100 meters distant in the darkness…¹⁷

Nevertheless, for all the mediated seeing by the Iraq War’s machinic assemblages, the “man” portions of the “industrial enterprise,” which Wright describes, bring their own mediated gazes to the war. One aspect of their gaze could be best described (borrowing from Herman Melville) is “the metaphysics of Iraqi hating.”¹⁸ The Melvillean analogy fits especially well, if one recall’s Richard Drinon’s evocation of it in his history of the violence on the Western frontier in which he chronicles the Euro-American rationalizations for the massacres of Native Americans as they moved westward.¹⁹ The expression of Iraqi-hating were abundant among the Marines that Wright accompanied in their assault during the Iraq War – for example the frequent use of a a racist epithet used against African Americans but adapted to Arabs: “dune coons,” Antonio Espera’s remark, “Before we crossed into Iraq, I fucking hated Arabs,”²⁰ the remark by one of Colbert’s buddies after a “fat man” with a cell phone stepped out of a doorway and was shot by many of the Marines, “We shredded him…we fucking redecorated downtown Nasiriyah,²¹ and perhaps the most callous verbalized image of all, “Tomato man,” applied to an Iraqi corpse in the road who had been run over so many times that he looked “like a crate of tomatoes in the road.”²²

The HBO version provides a compelling visual frame for comparing the conquest of Iraq with Drinnon’s version of the Euro-American conquest in his Facing West because the continuing shots of the desert landscape help to construct the plot as a reprise of the conquest of America’s western frontier. In this case, the topological orientation is one of “facing north,” and this early scene of the armored vehicles in a long line heading across the desert (Figure 5) evokes the lines of the covered wagons, headed across the American prairie during the process of the Euro-American settlement.

Figure 5: Heading North

That Wright's Generation Kill "takes up the project of discovering who American ...Marines are by locating them in the landscapes in which their combat experiences coalesce" is effectively enacted in the HBO version with point of view shots that sweep desertscapes and cities that are...experienced as disorienting and inherently threatening"²³ The camera work in the HBO version of Generation Kill effects a “dual attunement.” With close-ups of Marine (and the Evan Wright character’s) faces, it provides accounts of the “subjective states of characters,” while with its sweeps of the Iraqi deserts and towns, it is showing the way the Marines are situated in the warscape.²⁴ And crucially, the camera movement effects an ethical response to the Marine’s Iraq mission, articulated through close-ups and tracking shots as the Marines head North: As Daniel Morgan points out, “Camera movements are in some way deeply, perhaps inextricably, interwoven with concerns of ethics – that, as Jean-Luc Godard once put it, tracking shots are matters of morality.”²⁵

Thus the ethical perspective (or at least problematic) that emerges in HBO’s Generation Kill is delivered with images. Throughout the episodes, the camera work is involved in raising issues about the contrast between human perception – a weapons- meditated, technologically aided perception – and cinematic vision. In the filming in HBO’s Generation Kill, like that in much of contemporary cinema, the camera often restores what perception tends to evacuate. Nevertheless, the dialogue among the Marines is also telling, for it is in their conversations that they are making a world that is alien and enigmatic familiar by filtering it through the cultural genres with which they have already been accustomed to interpreting the world they (think they) know. In the war that Generation Kill is exploring, the filtering genre had changed from those opetating in earlier wars. For example, whereas the Marines engaging the jungles during the Vietnam war frequently imagined themselves in a Hollywood film (Michael Herr reports one of them saying something to the effect, "I don't like this movie")²⁶, the Marines in the assault on Iraq's cities saw themselves participating in the virtual reality of video games. (For example, one Marine evoked the violent urban crime video game, Grand Theft Auto).²⁷ And, ironically, many of those games have a “military technoscientific legacy”²⁸

As a result, while the official military gaze is articulated not only through the optics of weapons but also in through maps (The HBO version of Generation Kill "emplaces Wright's narrative" with two maps, one “large-scale," placing Iraq in the geopolitical region of middle eastern states and the other plotting the invasion route within Iraq),²⁹ the individual gazes of the Marines are structured culturally rather than geopolitically or strategically. As they screened their experience of the Iraq War through their consumption of culture genres (popular and otherwise), the Marines effectively displayed the diversity of mediated ways of seeing that abound in America's socio-cultural life-world. In addition to the virtual, video game worlds they brought to their perceptions of the Iraqi land- and ethnoscape, were a variety of musical genres (e.g., country and western and hip hop), super heroes (one of the more hyper violent Marines was called Captain America), religious codes (from versions of Christianity), and Hollywood films, (e.g., Blackhawk Down and The Matrix). Moreover, although many of the cultural genres were evoked as positive sanction for their battle engagements, some were evoked for purposes of critique. For example the Latino, part "Indian," Sergeant Antonio Espera, equated the war with the Euro-American conquest, referring to the "manifest destiny" ideological legitimation,³⁰ which he reframed with the remark, "America's 'white masters' (engaged in) the genocide of his Indian ancestors."³¹ And he derided the Disney film version of the Pocahontas myth's benign version of Anglo-Indian encounter: "What's the story of Pocahontas? White boys come to the new land, deceive a corrupt Indian chief, kill 90 percent of the men and rape all the women. What does Disney do? They make this story, the genocide of my people, into a love story with a singing raccoon.”³²

Accompanying the cultural genre-driven ways of seeing with which the Marines perceived the war was an affective mood, a jouissance derived first from their anticipation of continuing the macho acting out of manhood that they brought to their training (and was exercised with each other in their encampment, shown vividly in early scenes in the HBO version in which the assemblage in the tent looked like a chaotic martial arts tournament (figure 6)), and second from the already-noted eroticization of the engagement in which killing the "enemy" is equated with sexual conquest. However,

Figure 6: A Macho Contest in the tent

despite the cultural depth of the gaze which was the condition of possibility for much of what the Marines saw, some displayed a degree of plasticity, a susceptibility to being affected and changed by what they encountered. In particular, Sergeant Brad Colbert, who like the rest of his company began by anticipating the enjoyment of deadly encounter, ultimately evinced a degree of empathic vision as Iraqis returned the Marine weapons’ mediated looks as well as their more direct looks.