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Our collective memories of World War II and Vietnam have been shaped as much by memoirs, novels, and films as they have been by history books. In Welcome to the Suck, Stacey Peebles examines the growing body of contemporary war stories in prose, poetry, and film that speak to the American soldier's experience in the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War.
Stories about war always encompass ideas about initiation, masculinity, cross-cultural encounters, and trauma. Peebles shows us how these timeless themes find new expression among a generation of soldiers who have grown up in a time when it has been more acceptable than ever before to challenge cultural and societal norms, and who now have unprecedented and immediate access to the world away from the battlefield through new media and technology.
Two Gulf War memoirs by Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) and Joel Turnipseed (Baghdad Express) provide a portrait of soldiers living and fighting on the cusp of the major political and technological changes that would begin in earnest just a few years later. The Iraq War, a much longer conflict, has given rise to more and various representations. Peebles covers a blog by Colby Buzzell ("My War"), memoirs by Nathaniel Fick (One Bullet Away) and Kayla Williams (Love My Rifle More Than You); a collection of stories by John Crawford (The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell); poetry by Brian Turner (Here, Bullet); the documentary Alive Day Memories; and the feature films In the Valley of Elah and the winner of the 2010 Oscar for Best Picture, The Hurt Locker, both written by the war correspondent Mark Boal.
Books and other media emerging from the conflicts in the Gulf have yet to receive the kind of serious attention that Vietnam War texts received during the 1980s and 1990s. With its thoughtful and timely analysis, Welcome to the Suck will provoke much discussion among those who wish to understand today's war literature and films and their place in the tradition of war representation more generally.
Stacey Peebles is Assistant Director of the Lloyd International Honors College, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
"Welcome to the Suck provides a timely and essential revision of our understanding of contemporary war writing, surveying the ways in which recent books and films represent war and how this marks a change in our understanding of the subject. I am terrifically impressed with Peebles's notion that the media is a central concern of Gulf War and Iraq War narratives, which not only show their soldier characters modeling their own experiences on earlier war narratives but also incorporate/address new forms of media, such as blogs."
Susan Jeffords, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of Washington Bothell:
"Stacey Peebles's thoughtful book gives us a chance to see how the depictions of the war in Iraq are differentiated from those of the Vietnam War and how those differences are shaped by changes in media, understandings of trauma, constructions of gender, and how the war is perceived at home. If you're interested in how representations of war have changed in recent decades, this book should be on your shelf."
"Remarkable literature and film are beginning to emerge from both the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War. Peebles explores the new landscape of such works.... Along the way, the author demarcates the new digital battlefield—blogs and Skype—that should reduce alienation but paradoxically call it into heightened relief. Part of the context of these works is the cynicism of the soldiers whose first political memory is, as Peebles puts it, an image of Monica Lewinsky, but who are still idealistic as they enter the war. This classic disjuncture empowers these works and transforms the destruction, waste, stupidity, and disillusionment that are part of all wars into powerful, moving art. Summing Up: Highly recommended for all readers."
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