{"id":1042,"date":"2017-11-28T21:24:09","date_gmt":"2017-11-28T21:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/?page_id=1042"},"modified":"2018-06-27T17:12:09","modified_gmt":"2018-06-27T16:12:09","slug":"7-he-didnt-blow-us-up-routine-violence-and-non-event-as-case","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/7-he-didnt-blow-us-up-routine-violence-and-non-event-as-case\/","title":{"rendered":"7. \u201cHe Didn\u2019t Blow Us Up\u201d: Routine Violence and Non-event as Case"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome. Plea<\/i>se read the\u00a0instructions<\/a>\u00a0for reviewing before commenting.\u00a0We ask contributors to be generous when thinking along with our pieces and to keep in mind that the final chapters are intended to be short essays.\u00a0Visit matteringpress.org<\/a> for more information on its other books. Readers might\u00a0also want to have a look at this resource<\/a> created by one of the book’s editors, Emily Yates-Doerr, which catalogues key Open Access anthropology publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

By\u00a0Ken MacLeish<\/em><\/p>\n

This case is a story that a soldier told me. I call her Kelly, and she said it was \u201cthe craziest story I was gonna get\u201d from her. So for her it was an extreme, a worst case, but also a kind of telos of conditions she lived with and feelings she felt every day in occupied Iraq. It was a case of something not happening. As is fitting for those tensions of normalcy and emergency and rule and suspension that characterize state violence, it was both exceptional and part of a pattern: the pattern of soldiers\u2019 embodied terror and vulnerability (even as they surely inspired terror in vulnerable others) and the pattern of the mechanisms that shaped their thought and action. It was a case of something that might have happened to Kelly but didn\u2019t, that she might have done but didn\u2019t do, and of things that were treated as if they were real even when they turned out not to be. It was a case of a potentiality or hypothetical attaining a curious afterlife of actuality.<\/p>\n

Kelly was a junior enlisted engineer in her early twenties who spent a tour in far western Iraq building bridges to replace ones that had been destroyed by the US counterinsurgency campaign. Kelly was in her unit\u2019s headquarters section and so spent a lot of time convoying around with the company commander, making thrice-weekly visits to the bridge construction site. She was the driver for their high-riding utility truck, called an LMTV, in the middle of a small convoy of similar vehicles and Humvees. Her NCO sat beside her in the passenger seat and a gunner stood behind them manning a mounted .50 caliber machine gun. The .50 cal (or M2 Heavy Machine Gun), along with its smaller cousin the M249 Light Machine Gun, is a ubiquitous tool in contemporary US wars. Large and heavy enough that it must be mounted on a vehicle or tripod, it can nevertheless be operated by a single individual, firing rounds the approximate size of an adult\u2019s thumb either singly or in a continuous stream, and quite efficiently tearing apart metal, wood, concrete, and flesh.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

The main threats confronting Kelly and her unit were roadside bombs and what in Army argot are called VBIEDs, for \u201cvehicle-borne IED,\u201d pronounced \u201cvee-bed\u201d\u2014car bombs delivered into the middle of convoys or checkpoints. Everyone was afraid of these bombs. People Kelly knew in other units had been hurt and killed by them. Once a Humvee right in front of her in a convoy was hit, another time a trailing vehicle. A Marine tank that left the FOB (forward operating base) right before her convoy got blown in half. \u201cIn my eyes, in everybody\u2019s eyes, we got lucky a lot\u201d when it came to bombs, she said. \u201cSomebody was totally looking out for us.\u201d These cases didn\u2019t belong to Kelly, but she was still being shaped by them. Indeed, they brought into existence her own parallel set of cases: \u201cgetting lucky a lot\u201d in the face of the risk and vulnerability that were affirmed by these other incidents.<\/p>\n

One day, on a run to inspect the bridge, their convoy of trucks and Humvees rolled past a long line of oncoming civilian vehicles that pulled over and stopped at their approach. Except one car continued right on toward the lead Humvee in the convoy; from her elevated vantage, Kelly watched anxiously as it came on and listened over the radio as the soldiers in the lead Humvee found their .50 cal jammed as they prepared to fire on the car. The car pulled over at the last instant and let the Humvee pass. But then it continued to advance directly toward Kelly\u2019s oncoming truck. She was terrified; one of the Marines stationed with her unit had been killed in a VBIED attack that occurred in exactly this way. The middle of the convoy, where she was, is a better target, and also a more probable location for a command vehicle. \u201cI about shit myself,\u201d she said. \u201cI was praying, \u2018Dear Lord, forgive me for my sins!\u2019\u201d Suddenly the death that had been stalking friends and fellow troops seemed to be staring her right in the face. \u201cIt was the perfect scenario of everything that was going wrong with the other convoys, and it was scary as shit.\u201d Kelly yelled to her gunner to shoot, but for reasons she didn\u2019t know or explain to me, he didn\u2019t shoot. The car came closer, and kept coming, and then drove on past without incident. The command group completed their inspection and their trip back to the FOB. But when she got there, Kelly said, she and a friend who had been riding in another vehicle went to her room and prayed together, \u201ccause it was that traumatic.\u201d They felt like they had narrowly escaped dying. The violence that they had seen claim other soldiers\u2014people who they resembled in all the ways that mattered in this scene\u2014was all of a sudden that much nearer, even though it remained unrealized. \u201cIt\u2019s not your friends anymore, it\u2019s starting to hit you.\u201d Virtual or not, false alarm or not, she felt touched by the threat.<\/p>\n

So she now had her own case,\u00a0scary as shit<\/em>, but I wondered what it meant. I asked Kelly how she felt about the fact that the driver had not actually been a bomber. She explained that the escalation of force protocols she had been trained in defined the driver\u2019s behavior as threatening. \u201cIf somebody came at you, if they even get in the vicinity of your convoy, you blow them up. Cause it\u2019s considered a threat. Cause they know the rules, they know they\u2019re supposed to pull over. And that was scary because there was clearly people pulled over\u201d\u2014other civilians\u2014\u201cknowing that that was what they were supposed to do.\u201d The driver \u201cknew what he was doing was wrong.\u201d And Kelly, it seemed, knew that she had to fear him as a result.<\/p>\n

She allowed that the driver may just have been impatient, as she said she probably would be herself if convoys of armed foreigners were constantly jamming up traffic as they pushed their way through her hometown, or that he may have been in the grips of some emergency, as she had seen earlier in her deployment when a family with a sick child were shot by soldiers as they rushed through a checkpoint on their way to a hospital. The specifics of the driver\u2019s case were unknown to her but they were not impossible to imagine. If her gunner had listened to her, \u201cthis dude would\u2019ve been dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story tacked between two poles: the intensity of this \u201ctraumatic\u201d brush with death and a vague sense of reflection and relief that the gunner hadn\u2019t fired. \u201cThe fact that he didn\u2019t blow us up was just astonishing to me, because in our minds, it was like, that was what was gonna happen.\u201d The \u201cwe\u201d of this shared mind remains unclear in her telling, since her NCO and gunner didn\u2019t appear to share her assessment of the situation, even if some of the soldiers in the lead vehicle, the one with the jammed .50 cal, did share it. But the fact remained that for Kelly, the threat was not just potential, but actual, an ontological reality that extended to her fellow soldiers, endangered along with her even if, in her telling, many of them did not share her perception of the situation. \u201cHis actions\u00a0were<\/em>\u00a0threatening,\u201d she asserted of the driver, and she wondered, despite her knowledge to the contrary, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t he blow?\u201d \u201cI would\u2019ve felt terrible,\u201d she said at one point right before the subject changed and our conversation moved on, and at another, \u201cI almost feel bad,\u201d her language curiously contingent. \u201cI had the intention of killing him and it wasn\u2019t a threat. It\u2019s weird. I\u2019m sure it happens a lot\u201d\u2014this disastrous bad luck paralleling, but somehow not equal to, how she and her soldiers \u201cgot lucky a lot.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s probably the best story you\u2019re gonna get out of me!\u201d she said. And then she laughed.<\/p>\n

The thing that made this story eventful for Kelly was not the narrowly averted killing of an innocent civilian, described in vague and contingent\u00a0almosts<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0would have<\/em>s, but the sense, articulated far more concretely, of narrowly avoided death: his actions\u00a0were<\/em>\u00a0threatening, she said, she\u00a0did\u00a0<\/em>pray in the terror of the moment and afterward, and she believed she was almost killed. Despite the sympathy with which she was able to regard the driver\u2019s perspective\u2014in his situation, she said, \u201cI\u2019d be like \u2018fuck that!\u2019\u201d\u2014and the divergent perceptions of her fellow soldiers\u2014some contravening her call to shoot and others sharing her sense of narrowly-avoided death\u2014her telling of the story remains framed by the fact that she was following the well-established escalation-of-force rules while the driver \u201cknew what he was doing was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this story, as in many others I heard from soldiers, the proverbial \u201cfog of war\u201d is something both less and more than the morass of potential moral and existential hazards depicted in popular representations. The battlefield is frequently a chaotic and ambiguous environment, but one in which discipline, training, mission objectives, and rules of engagement provide both a technical, procedural rubric, and a sort of embodied, affective pedagogy that makes otherwise benign behavior and objects into deeply felt mortal threats.[ii]<\/a> Such knowledge and action are technical, automatic, systematized, and distributed\u2014an effect of the way that, as Michel Callon and John Law put it, \u201cthe knowing individual\u201d disappears into the capacities and obligations of the network.[iii]<\/a>\u00a0This particular network happens to have the necropolitical mission of identifying killable, \u201crule-breaking\u201d bodies and deputizing killer actors. At the same time, individual knowledge and capacity to act do not emerge seamlessly and uniformly from that network; they are irregular, perspectival and vexingly partial ways of knowing and doing. Kelly\u2019s training told her that the driver was a threat, just as it told the crew and gunner in the Humvee in front of her, who tried and failed to fire on the car before she even started yelling to her gunner. The decision whether to fire wasn\u2019t hers alone. It only arose because of the accident of the jammed weapon in the lead vehicle, without which the Iraqi driver would likely have been killed before he got anywhere near Kelly\u2019s truck, and then it fizzled with the intercession and inaction of Kelly\u2019s gunner and NCO. Such circumstances demand careful consideration of what it means to make a decision in the first place: who the deciding agent is, how an action takes shape, and how an aftermath is sorted out. What Kelly describes is less an instance of morally anguished trade-off or a brush with transgression than it is a moment of powerful but strangely non-eventful certainty in the face of seemingly glaring contradiction.<\/p>\n

I want to conclude by suggesting a couple of ways to think this case anthropologically. The first is via its exemplarity, not just as a piece of data but as part of a project of understanding human experiences of routinized violence. Do we imagine Kelly\u2019s case to be a distortion, attenuation or exception to this human experience? Or can we take it as an expression of that humanity, however discomfiting that might be? What does it mean to take Kelly\u2019s terror seriously while taking equally seriously the Iraqi driver\u2019s terror as he made his way through overlapping fields of high-caliber fire? And might a careful understanding of the former help trouble the notion that the latter is simply an inevitable side effect of well-intentioned liberal war-making? This seriousness of consideration does not have to be a matter of somehow letting Kelly off the hook\u2014as if most of us are not in one way or another hung on that same hook\u2014or of confining our analysis to the narrow moral economy of this particular scene of sovereign violence. It can instead be cause for interrogation of a far more unquestioned mode of liberal subjectivity that is both given responsibility for acts of violence and cast as the thing being defended by such acts. In the name of defending a highly unimaginative vision of freedom, this subjectivity stubbornly and violently privileges autonomous action and individual responsibility. So another way that this is a case: it is a case of precluded possibilities for sensing and responding to the agency of others, for recognizing that doing and knowing are always ours and not-ours, and for unsettling just what defines the \u201cus\u201d to which these things belong.<\/p>\n

\n

Ken MacLeish is Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society and Anthropology at Vanderbilt. He studies\u00a0how war, broadly considered, takes shape in the everyday lives of people whose job it is to produce it\u2014U.S. military servicemembers and their families and communities. His book,\u00a0<\/em>Making War: Everyday Life at Ft. Hood<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0examines the everyday lives of the soldiers, families, and communities who personally bear the burden of America\u2019s most recent wars.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> There is a widespread but apocryphal claim that it is illegal under the Geneva Conventions to use .50 caliber rounds against human targets, but no such prohibition exists. It is common, however, for unit-level rules of engagement to limit the use of the M2 and other large-caliber weapons to non-human targets, though in urban combat that involves shooting at buildings or vehicles, such distinctions may in practice be meaningless.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> cf. Kenneth MacLeish, \u201cArmor and Anesthesia: Exposure, Feeling, and the Soldier\u2019s Body,\u201d\u00a0Medical Anthropology Quarterly<\/em>\u00a026, no. 1 (2012): 49\u201368.<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a>\u00a0Michel Callon and John Law, \u201cAfter the Individual in Society: Lessons on Collectivity from Science, Technology and Society,\u201d\u00a0The Canadian Journal of Sociology \/ Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie<\/em>\u00a022, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 165\u201382.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome. Please read the\u00a0instructions\u00a0for reviewing before commenting.\u00a0We ask contributors to be generous when thinking along with our pieces and to keep in mind that the final chapters are intended to be short essays.\u00a0Visit matteringpress.org for more information on its other books. Readers might\u00a0also want to have a look at this resource created by one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4571,"parent":0,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1042"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8617,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1042\/revisions\/8617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/processing.matteringpress.org\/ethnographiccase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}