A news-item appeared on my screen today. It said that the U.S. Army has charged 7 soldiers from the 82nd airborne for their participation in a video shown on gay porn web-site.

What can we learn about the war and its violence by looking at pornography? Is this even the right question to ask, especially in the context of this site?

I’m interested in the experiences of soldiers in Iraq, and in trying to tell the story of this war from their viewpoint. Not to stage a defense of war or for that matter simply to decry it, but to understand its brutality from a different, more complicated angle. In a brief piece published in the Feb 25 issue of Tehelka, I have argued that I’d rather teach in my class a book like Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, a US sniper’s account of the first Gulf War, than anything written by the likes of Noam Chomsky and the anti-war brigade. This is partly because Chomsky and his admirable cohort tell my students little that is new about how they could understand war. More than that, given the education and upbringing of my fairly liberal, fairly privileged students at Vassar, I’d rather they read the story of a Marine’s “pride, bravery, stupidity, fear” than another well-reasoned tract by an erudite professor at MIT. The latter will no doubt better explain to my students what were the processes through which contemporary American realities were shaped, but it is the former that will bring them closer to how this reality is experienced by a large portion of the population.

In the closing pages of Jarhead, Swofford writes that “the war has been mine to fight but not mine to win or lose, and I know that none of the rewards of victory will come my way, because there are no rewards, not on the field of battle, not for the man who fights the battle—the rewards accrue in places like Washington, D.C., and Riyadh and Houston and Manhattan, south of 125th Street, and Kuwait City. The fighting man receives tokens—medals, ribbons, badges, promotions, combat pay, abrogation of taxes, a billet to Airborne School—worthless bits of nothing, as valuable as smoke.” This expression of bitterness and, perhaps more surprising, the later despair about the violence and Swofford’s empathy for the Iraqi dead, is more convincing precisely because it follows the gung-ho saber-rattling of the earlier pages. An academic or political tract that already knows beforehand the position it is going to argue is in comparison far less persuasive.

I recently came across a website nowthatsfuckedup.com maintained by soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is an amateur porn site that claims to be a political resource site. Perhaps it is. It is going to be shut down in April because of a legal wrangle. One of the visitors to the site writes: “Come on, it’s obvious why they are going to single this guy out. The war photos are a public relations nightmare for the US military. The gory pictures make Abu Ghraib photos look like Disneyland. Rumsfeld wants to portray current Iraq like it’s pie-in-the-sky and the photos show what’s really going on out there. It’s a hell hole.” The photos that are being referred to here could be considered pornographic in their own right. They are also ghastly. They are filed under names like “Fried Insurgent” or “What Happens to Iraqis Who Mess with the US,” and even one called “Saddam Chillin ” Equally disturbing is that fact that these photos co-exist on the site with what the site administrator calls “wife and girlfriend pictures.” We’re back in that country which is neither Iraq nor America but maleness beseiged and insecure. Here is Swofford in Jarhead: “Near the regimental mess there is a Wall of Shame, where jarheads post photos of unfaithful women, women who’ve gone bad on debts or stolen some poor jarhead’s car and all of his clothes or simple informed him that the ride has ended.”

No Wall of Shame likely with pictures of twelve year-old Ali Ismail Abbas, though. Remember him? Here’s Jon Lee Anderson describing Ali in The Fall of Baghdad: “The child’s legs were untouched, but there was a catheter and tube attached to his penis. His torso was entirely blackened, and both of his arms had been burned off. At about the biceps, the flesh of both extensions became charred, black grostesqueries, one of the hands twisted and burned into a hideous melted claw, the other much shorter and apparently burned off below the elbow, with two long bones sticking out of it. It looked like something that might be found in a barbecue pit.”