Author Archives: Adrian Bonenberger

We Like Liars That Seem Likable

Posted on by

A great deal has been said and written about the lying our public figures do, recently. After the “misremembering war events” scandal that brought Brian Williams down, Bill O’Reilly has been subjected to scrutiny over his claims of witnessing combat during the Falklands War. This past week, Secretary of the VA Bob McDonald has been criticized for claiming to a homeless man to have been in Special Forces – he was not. Chris Kyle, of course, is remembered as a hero by many, despite having a demonstrable record of lying about events (much of this occurred post-moral injury, when Kyle was suffering from PTSD). Hillary Clinton lied about being shot at by snipers and is polling stronger than any other potential Democratic candidate for President in 2016. Army veteran (who should goddamn know better) and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal lied about serving in Vietnam. Republican Congresswoman and military veteran (who should also know better) Joni Ernst has received criticism over calling herself a “combat veteran” using a very broad definition of “combat.”

People lie. There seems to be a fairly broad consensus along the political spectrum that politicians lie a great deal – whether you believe that “your” people lie less or less harmfully probably goes a ways toward establishing how one votes in an election (having become fairly disillusioned, I recently registered Independent, abandoning the Democratic Party). This explains why a state populated primarily by Democrats would elect Richard Blumenthal over his Republican rival, despite his – well – lying about combat. This explains why Democrats are happy to forgive Hillary for lying about being in combat (misremembering is not something that happens when you’ve been under sniper fire once), and why Republicans think that Joni Ernst should be given the benefit of the doubt for her admittedly less egregious (but still fairly stupid) description of having been in combat, when she was posted to Kuwait, quite far from combat. In this case, her description of herself as a combat veteran is less annoying than her repeated and ongoing defense of that untruth.

I should also point out that most combat veterans, myself included, don’t feel that combat experience gives one special insight about life that one would covet, save that combat is a situation to be avoided at all costs. When one considers that politicians who experienced combat throughout history continued to encourage or abet warfare, it’s impossible to conclude that there’s any real utility to combat as a morally didactic lesson, save potentially on an individual level.

It’s slightly different with journalism, in that, technically, in order to call oneself a journalist it’s important that one adhere to certain unwritten but widely-obeyed rules: don’t get involved in a story, don’t plagiarize, don’t lie. O’Reilly has already said he’s not a journalist, and has no credibility with people who aren’t a certain type of conservative – this seems to have insulated him from the brunt of the fury that resulted in Brian Williams’ demise.

And that’s fascinating! Williams, by defining himself as a journalist, made himself more vulnerable to truth-criticisms from people that watch his program than O’Reilly. (For the record, I was fine with him continuing as an anchor – anyone who thinks journalists, who are human, don’t directly or indirectly lie [routinely] should be banned from ever voting)

I wanted to compare how various public figures seem to be judged on their military lies, so I threw together a basic chart and mapped public perceptions of journalists and other truth-tellers onto it.

What I found was… well, not shocking at all, really. O’Reilly’s posse sticks up for him and he won’t be fired despite having lied I’ve put myself on the spectrum (right in the middle there) because if one is going to make a claim about a thing, well, have the sack to tell others where you fall.)
 

o'reilly

 
And Williams, who has a more discerning audience that is willing to entertain shades of gray, suffers by comparison:
 

william

 
And just to see how that works out with politicians – there’s the Republican case of Joni Ernst, who has claimed (playing off a credulous public’s unfamiliarity with battle and sympathetic media) that she was in combat because she was in a combat zone. Which is exactly like me saying I got the shit kicked out of me once at a bar because there were a group of guys at the end of bar muttering and looking over at me and I was really worried about getting the shit kicked out of me. Someone who had once gotten a severe ass-whipping would probably take issue with my claim, as I do hers. Let’s see if she’s going to be fired or held to account or not (remembering that this is a question of whether or not someone’s worthy of the trust, confidence, and respect of the public):
 

ernst

 
Looks like Ernst is gonna be okay – the Republicans have her back (not surprisingly), and the Democrats / media don’t feel like evaluating her claims on their merits, and calling a liar a liar. Of course, if they did that with Ernst, they’d have to do that with Hillary Clinton, the putative fundraising frontrunner for 2016, and – don’t forget – maybe our first female president. What does it matter if she happened to lie about – well, anything?
 

clinton

 
I’m also down on Clinton because of that “we need to go into Iraq” thing she did, which if anyone remembers, was basically responsible for all the horrors we see in the Middle East today – a place that used to be filled with sensible dictators who were amenable to bribes and arms deals and could be relied on to limit their war crimes to 25,000 or 30,000 dead every decade – a tiny fraction of the dead since we became involved over there. But it looks like she’s going to walk, too.

In conclusion, the lies that get told to us by our political leadership don’t seem to matter as much as the lies that are told by people who call themselves “journalists,” which may or may not involve abiding by a set of agreed-upon rules to tell stories in a certain way. And while “liberals” or “progressives” tend to evaluate journalists and people outside their group more generously than “conservatives,” both groups are equally bad at applying rigorous scrutiny to their politicians.

So it goes.

Lovecraft’s War Memoirs

Posted on by

afghanpostcoverI made a strange discovery recently. Reading the Delta Green Call of Cthulhu RPG sourcebooks for a different perspective on the H.P. Lovecraft narrative (as well as to interact with and enjoy one of my favorite literary worlds), it occurred to me that a great deal of the current literature coming out of the forever war in Afghanistan and the Middle East are basically horror stories.

Much of the current literature on war comes to us in the form of memoir. Many of these accounts focus on special operations soldiers such as SEALs, Rangers, Delta, CIA, or mercenaries formerly employed by one of these groups. The bulk of the remainder of the memoirs are firsthand accounts produced by combat veterans from regular units. My own memoir, Afghan Post, is an epistolary account drawn from journal entries and letters to others during my time deployed. LTC Peter Molin, who reviewed Afghan Post for his blog Time Now (detailing war-themed literature) said that it reads like bildungsroman – a coming of age story.

Meditating on Lovecraft, though, I realized that my memoir makes a lot more sense as horror, and I suspect that this holds true for a great many of the war memoirs we’re used to encountering as non-fiction essay.

For those unfamiliar with H.P. Lovecraft it’s probably worth making a wild overgeneralization and claiming, briefly, that he was responsible for establishing the genre of modern horror as we know it. In Lovecraft’s stories, a protagonist who operates on the fringes of society (private detective, university researcher, scientist, a relative to some obscure and eccentric person) is presented with a mystery about the nature of the universe. The solution to the mystery is either some horrifying revelation about the nature of the universe that drives the protagonist mad, or a monster that kills the protagonist.

Given the frame of a universe wherein people are killed or driven mad by what they see and do, it’s not difficult to see how war memoirs or any trauma story could lend themselves to comparison and analysis. Most contemporary participants in war (who are, in America at least, all volunteers), elect to take part in state sanctioned violence. Whether they are shooting at enemies or being shot at, the emotional progressions moves in most cases quite naturally and predictably from some form of idealism to realism and, ultimately, to pessimism (and, frequently, to suicide as well).

I first encountered H.P. Lovecraft in a Borders in Evanston, in winter of 1996. A classmate of mine, Scott Richardson, introduced me to the author when I expressed an interest in reading short horror fiction, and fatigue with Stephen King (who has also produced an incredible body of short horror fiction, for which he should be always and best remembered). Lovecraft made effective use of the epistolary device in his horror stories –At the Mountains of Madness, for example, is a novella told through the journal of an explorer and scientist in Antarctica who makes a horrible discovery. Used appropriately, the frame allows readers to experience, firsthand, the dissolution of a mind, and undergo in hours what would otherwise transpire over a course of days, weeks, or more.

When people have asked me what my inspiration was for framing Afghan Post as an epistolary memoir, I’ve told them the truth: I’ve always enjoyed writing letters and journal entries, and I found the writing of difficult personal material to be easier if it were addressed to the friends and family with whom I’d actually corresponded during my deployments to Afghanistan. A friend had sent me a copy of Les Liasions Dangereuses shortly before I began writing my memoir, so that book – told through a series of letters between two French aristocrats – was also very prominent in my mind. It did not occur to me that, in telling the story of my psychological fracturing, and splitting, I was evoking Lovecraft.

That connection works both ways, broadly speaking – Lovecraft’s stories are filled with references to war, and especially World War I. Oftentimes a character will be revealed to have been a veteran of that conflict –not surprisingly, given the time during which Lovecraft was writing, but not often remarked upon in literary studies. And nowhere moreso than in his short story The Rats in the Walls, where the narrator’s son dies from a wound inflicted in World War I, and another World War I veteran is murdered under suitably terrible circumstances – in the earth, among the scurrying of rats, which were a powerful symbol of trench life, as well as life in the hellish, muddy wasteland between trenches.

The book I wrote is the story of an intellectual and artistically inclined young man, who encounters the terrifying reality of life outside the safe confines of the developed world, and endures the emotional consequences. Reading Afghan Post now, ten months after its release and nearly a year and a half since I last edited the text, I must admit that my journey concluded with a descent into madness, from which I have only partially recovered.

While it’s irresponsible to make generalizations about something as wide and all-encompassing as war literature, which runs the gamut from fiction masterpieces like Slaughterhouse Five to first-person memoirs like the controversial American Sniper, my own sense of the war narrative is this: there’s something to the process of going to war that undermines the confidence we veterans have in a naturally or passively just world. I’m surprised it took me this long to realize that I wrote a story that could honestly be described as “Memoir – Epistolary – Horror.”

Movie Review: Clanking of Swords IV

Posted on by

Much media attention has focused on the capabilities of ISIS’s propaganda wing, a smart and decentralized group of well-funded jihadis who have produced one of the most vibrant – and, many say, most effective – bodies of artistic work to emerge from the region in recent memory. Their latest offering, fourth in the “Clanking” franchise, is light years ahead of its predecessors, which, it must be admitted, were little more than videos of ISIS fighting against Assad’s fighters and Al Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate (Al Qaeda has disavowed ISIS).

“Clanking of Swords IV” (caution – viewer discretion HEAVILY recommended, it is an exceptionally vicious film – and some versions offer “Clanging” instead of “Clanking”) is dedicated to the proposition that only violence can cleanse the Middle East. With the redemptive power of violence as its philosophical center, the film aims to unify those competing narratives of violence we know from YouTube and LiveLeak, the badly-recorded battles wherein people die or are hurt in all the surprising ways one encounters in war.

“Clanking” begins with a geopolitical statement: a zoom-out shot of the Mesopotamian region that ISIS intends to rule. The perspective descends to a quad-copter drone hovering over the city of Falluja. The drone flies over formations of fighters, and lines of pickups and old military 2 ½ ton trucks filled with fighters and heavy-caliber machineguns and staged for attack, then heads back into the sky, at the midway point between four roads, spinning around faster and faster, creating a whirlwind-like effect, which resolves into a battle where ISIS is attacking the Iraqi military. The battle doesn’t last long, and includes the now-obligatory picture of American-style military vehicles under heavy fire, with repeated invocations to Allah. “Clanking’s” introduction then spends time recording some of its fighters delivering speeches, and dedicating themselves to the cause of establishing a super-national caliphate in the region.

From there, the film moves between scenes wherein people renounce their citizenship in various Middle Eastern countries, pledging homage to a new Caliphate by tearing their passports, and various iterations on the theme of battle. ISIS hunts down rival Sunni gangs by conducting drive-by shootings. ISIS hunts down Shia military and intelligence apparatus officers with a special squad dressed like Iraqi Army commanders. Fighters deliver victorious speeches, or inveigle against western influence. ISIS offers clemency to those who convert to the Sunni faith, or turn in their arms. Fighters snipe unsuspecting Iraqi soldiers, detonate IEDs, force prisoners to dig their own graves, tear up more passports. Fighters execute more captured members of the Iraqi military apparatus.

The cinematography is effective, accompanied, unaccountably, by the sound of a sword being sharpened, or possibly unsheathed – and certainly not “clanging” or “clanking.” More on the name of the film later. The cuts between scenes are professional and effective, and particularly devastating IED strikes and checkpoint attacks are rewound and played back in slow motion, creating a response in the viewer that can only be described as enthusiastic expectation. At least, in viewers like myself who are accustomed to scenes of violence, having been to war. Well adjusted viewers should find such scenes horrible, sick, and almost unwatchable.

The point of the film – although historians will likely debate this in years to come, depending on how effective the ISIS brand is in Iraq and Syria – is twofold. First, to create fear in viewers loyal to Iraq and citizens who (according to the point of view of ISIS) collaborated with the regime. Second, to attract new members by demonstrating ISIS fighters’ prowess in battle. The film does both of these things successfully – and it would be successful, I think, whether or not ISIS were especially active on the battlefield, as it is now. The violence is graphic, and real. The killings and attacks are chosen with an eye toward casting their enemies in the most pathetic light possible – in no frame does the Iraqi Army fight back with tenacity, save by implication. Each finishing shot of a battle is triumphal, featuring dead Shia Iraqi soldiers and police, as well as weapons seized. The sniper victims are killed in ways that render them laughable, and there are usually subtitles that ensure viewers interpret the action in a way that is as generous as possible to ISIS.

The subtitles, as well as cut-away scenes narrated by one of the filmmakers, condemn each of the victims, and the government in general. At one point near the end of the film, the group of ISIS soldiers who are hunting down regime “collaborators” enters the home of a “tyrannical” member of the Iraqi counter-terror effort – a colonel. They show pictures of him working with the Americans, and smiling. They then execute him by cutting his head off, and placing it between his legs. He struggles. The film states that “the mujahedeen will not sleep in the face of injustice.”

Overall, the film views like the most extraordinarily violent action movie you’ve ever seen. The filmmakers do an excellent job of capturing scenes using high-quality cameras, and the bloodiest parts are celebrated and revisited throughout the film. It is a meditation on violence and revenge, and it’s impossible to watch the movie without concluding that the events that are happening in the Middle East will not be resolved easily, and are bound to get worse – which boggles the mind – before they get better.

The only weak point in the movie is that whomever translated the movie chose a terrible title. “Clanking of the swords” is ridiculous to western ears, and regardless of the intention – to echo a popular song, or some relevant event from whatever past ISIS seeks to reference – it fails to inspire the same level of dread as the film itself. This wouldn’t merit discussion if the title weren’t stereotypically laughable – the signifier by which people are first introduced to the movie / documentary is absurd, and will only elicit contempt among English-speaking viewers. ISIS would likely claim that Americans and Europeans are not part of their target audience – their audience is people who sympathize with their cause, but haven’t yet picked up a weapon to fight. Calling it the “fourth” installment, and encouraging interested individuals to dig into the recent past of ISIS, before it was a nation-beater, is a further mistake. But perhaps the people who chose the name can be forgiven for catering to jihadis who had already watched the first three “Clanking” videos, and had developed emotional attachments – they probably didn’t expect to go so far, so fast. They couldn’t have expected that America would return to Iraq, giving U.S. soldiers and Air Force pilots an opportunity to make a sequel of their own: “Exploding of the Smart Bombs III.” Coming this July.
_____
Adrian Bonenberger is a freelance journalist, author of the epistolary war memoir “Afghan Post,” and helps run veteran intellectual blog “The Wrath Bearing Tree.” His twitter handle is @AHBonenberger.