Soldierporn! Or: Celebrating destruction of the ultimate enemy.

At the end of last year, I contributed to a roundtable at Stone Telling, in which I said the following while talking about my space opera setting:

As I’ve studied war (literally: I have a BA in War Studies) and seen it play out on the news, I’ve got a lot less interested in the narratives that make war sound really exciting. Space opera and military SF continue to be guilty of this; only this month I saw a call for reprint submissions that talked about “the ultimate enemy” and the future lying in “the hands of the warriors who use the weapons”. Fairly recently I actively decided that I want my stories and novels in my SF setting to focus much more on the regular people, the ones who actually have to deal with the consequences of the war; and when I made this decision, something clicked in a way it never had before.

To state the obvious: War is many things. It is terrible, always complicated, sometimes the only recourse left to a people, sometimes an act of imperialism (whether in the 19th Century sense or the modern sense), and so much more. One only has to follow the news to understand this. I have never been involved in a war situation, either as an active combatant or a civilian or anywhere along the frazzled, bitter line between the two; I am an observer from very afar. I feel very passionately that the glorification of war is a very risky thing, certain to damage at least some people, if not all. I have specific feelings about the modern wars being conducted by the US and UK, mostly to do with how amusing it is that in a so-called democracy a government can go to war without consulting its people, how disgusting it is that people talk about the defense of our countries (defense of “our” oil, sure, but let’s at least be fucking honest; and it’s not ours, anyway) against some poorly defined threat, and other thoughts.

Anyway, this is preamble, telling you where I stand.

A person I used to be friends with runs a tumblr called soldierporn – which is a title that has bothered me since I first saw it. The header says that this is “Not a glorification of war”, but “rather a recognition of the soldier”. I’m leaving aside the complicated issue of disentangling the soldier from the war because I can: it turns out that other words speak louder than those initial words.

I’m going to slap a big ol’ warning on this now: Potentially very upsetting attitudes ahead.

It kind of veers all over the place really. The post that made me write this post, after gritting my teeth at a few other examples shared between a few of us who all used to be this person’s friend, before things got faily, is a reblog of a post about a soldier with 255 confirmed kills. Its subject: “255 Confirmed Kills: Meet Navy Seal Chris Kyle… The Deadliest Sniper In US History”

Sounds kinda like a movie tagline, huh.

No, those aren’t R’s words, but R has chosen to reblog them and not comment upon them; to me, that is a sure sign of support. Apparently killing 255 people is awesome.

There is then a discussion of the sniper’s favourite weapon. Not, oh, a consideration of the fact that 255 people (at least) have died at this person’s hands, in a war with no clean line at all between ‘bad person’ and ‘good person’.

Not long ago, the US pulled out of Iraq. Shortly afterwards, bombings killed a number of people in the capital – the post mentions 69, but I don’t know if that was the final count. This time we have R’s very own words on the matter: “We’re gone less than a week, and this is how they celebrate. Why am I not surprised?”

There are no words, really there aren’t, for how disgusted this still makes me.

In another post, an image of soldiers in an isolated village in the Nowzad District is given the title “Where the streets have no name”.

I am pretty fucking sure the streets have names, you fucking tool; you just don’t know them, the soldiers don’t know them, perhaps even the people of this village have lost them or cannot identify old streets among the rubble; there is nothing fucking poetic about saying the streets of Iraq have no name.

I read a novel with a similar title, written by a Palestinian woman, Randa Abdel-Fattah, about the occupation of Palestine. It’s called: Where The Streets Had A Name.

SEE THE DIFFERENCE.

It’s also a fantastic novel.

To return to the topic of R reposting other people’s hideous words, here’s another two.

“A display of jubilance from the gunner. Just seconds later in response to the query “How does it feel to be in Kuwait?” issued by a reporter standing on the ground, the soldier definitively replied, “AWESOME!”” [Post.]

“I am going to be brutally honest here folks and realize that this statement applies to me and me alone, others have their own opinions. Ladies and Gentleman COMBAT IS FUN!!! Yes there are many moments where bad things happen and you wish you were far far away, but when you are in the heat of the moment and you are closing with and destroying the enemy as you have been trained to do all your adult life that is fun.” [Post.]

Spoilers: The second person does not then go on to discuss the immense psychological difficulties of adrenalin-fuelled highs in a situation they do not want to feel high about, which is something that I can imagine being hellishly complicated to cope with. No, this guy apparently just likes “destroying the enemy”. If his views are indeed more complicated off the page, then I respect that; but R is showcasing excitement at “destroying the enemy” without any commentary and EUGH GET IT OFF.

In case all this exciting terminology is confusing anyone, “destroying the enemy” is another way of saying killing people. Which is exciting. Or interesting. It’s certainly something.

I don’t know about you, but I find images like this a little bit terrifying. But it’s a highlight of December on this tumblr!

Many posts on this tumblr are not as terrible as the ones quoted above, thankfully. But these views, scattered throughout the other posts, shine out the strongest – they are un-ignorable, un-forgiveable.

And these are exactly the views that I still see in both society at large and genre writing. War is exciting! Killing “the ultimate enemy” is exciting! (Or should I say “destroying”?) It’s also totally okay because aliens aren’t people and and – What is wrong with this picture? What is wrong with our society that we wage a war like the one in the Middle East, a war of 21st Century imperialism, and some of us continue to valorise its combatants? They are not engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Hitler, nor are they fighting a faceless alien force. Sometimes they are in the military because it beats unemployment, because it gives them skills they couldn’t otherwise attain in order to gain employment outside of the forces – there are many reasons people join the military and I will not assume that every single US and UK combatant has the same motives and feelings about this war and about war in general. Nor will I say that our soldiers cannot do heroic deeds – a person who risks their life to save another person is pretty awesome, in my view, and there are some incredibly good acts being committed in that region alongside the heinous ones.

But that some of us, the observers, are promoting an attitude in which the reality of this war is hidden behind applause for mass-killers and narrow-mindedness – I cannot abide this.  I cannot stand it.  In life, in fiction, anywhere.  I would like there to be a genre anthology about the reality of war instead of dstroying “the ultimate enemy” – and perhaps it would be a symptom of progress.  Perhaps.