Mediations

This subsection explores how different media forms move across time and space, and how they potentially prefigure contemporary war experiences. It engages with broader questions about how human stories depicted in and by a variety of media help to make complex wars emotionally intelligible to audiences, for good and for ill. The examples also offer evidence of how nontraditional narrative forms and audio visual languages operate online – a core question for Ego Media.

Mediation – as a concept and a practice – bridges offline and online war writing. It is one of the strongest continuities between the various forms through which people narrate their experiences of state-sanctioned violence. This is in part because memory of traumatic events is tenuous, even if the impression that they leave is strong and deep. War is inherently disorientating: life writing about war requires a sifting and an ordering of extreme and quotidian events, meaning that “the pasts we remember are representations, already ‘composed,’ mediated, for us. Mediation, that is, has already occurred in the act of auto/biographical remembering that precedes any auto/biographical writing.”¹

Mediations produce distortions that are interesting in themselves, both for how they inflect the practice of storytelling and for what they reveal about war cultures. In his extended study of British First World War culture the historian Dan Todman has shown how myth, memory, and acts of intergenerational storytelling intertwine. He also describes what happened when First World War narratives move beyond families, friends, and veterans’ groups and into the public domain, offering the example of the influential BBC documentary series The Great War (1964).

The style of the series was structured around veterans’ interviews intercut with archival photographs and footage: integrating life story and news documentary approaches to convey the sense that what they were offering was a definitive record of a national trauma. Yet Todman carefully and concretely illustrates how the expectations and assumptions of the interviewers shaped the veterans’ oral testimonies, sometimes contradicting documented experience and past writings.² Veterans described “witnessing” actions they could not have and singing songs that were not written or published at the time but subsequently became tied to events. In other documentaries established aesthetic and historical vernaculars are repurposed in order to construct narratives that have been omitted from the public record. This is the case with Stuart Marshall’s film Comrades in Arms (1990), which redeploys historical material to recreate scenes of queer intimacy among service personnel.³ The result is something that is simultaneously true and a fabrication.

Nothing overtly deceptive or nefarious is at work in these examples. In The Great War example the interviews exist as complex, collaborative expressions of war experience; Comrades in Arms carefully and humorously introduces contemporary audiences to ignored war and love stories using a style and filmic language that is deeply conventional and familiar. Both are creative examples of war writing in the genre of film. Editorial decisions, perspectives, complex and fading memories, the accumulative pressure of public narratives, and cultural mythologies combine to produce something that is resonant if not necessarily accurate. Furthermore, the variety of media now available to embed, (increasingly) manipulate, and share across online platforms expands the potential for nonnarrative expressions of the self and particular visual languages to expand and proliferate.

This leads us to another issue for war writers, whatever medium they choose to work in. The material generated – and increasingly available online – is enormous. For example, in early 1942 in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack when full mobilization commenced, the US government’s informational, promotional, and publicity activities engaged 8,433 full-time workers, coordinating activities in the private sector with news and media organizations, filmmakers, and advertisers; the numbers would continue to swell throughout the war.⁴ They generated vast amounts of potentially impressionistic and reusable analog material, which in turn made its way into other media as this global conflict interfered with and reshaped life stories. These acts of loosely coordinated creation in a time when resources were carefully monitored and regulated resulted in vast amounts of ephemera, some of which has found its way onto digital and social media platforms. This is one national example from one war: there is a lot there to try to make sense of, but also to potentially reexperience, and to fit in somewhere, somehow, to individual and collective narratives.

A discussion of the relationship between history and mediation in war writing off- and online requires not only the identification of influence in individual examples, but an understanding of figures who play a formative role in orientating writers, both at the generation or recording point of particular experiences and in their wake. Such figures may emerge from a variety of social estates: journalistic, literary, film, advertising, all interacting with one another and increasingly operating in off- and online worlds. In 1943 Ernie Pyle, a journalist embedded with United States troops was at the height of his fame. In historian James Tobin’s words, he was a “public possession,” considered by many readers to be almost extrahuman, no longer a mere chronicler but “Ernie Pyle,” a kind of avatar: “the emotional current running between the public and the war.” He was “the interpreter, the medium, the teacher who taught Americans what to think and how to feel about their boys overseas.” His work was also translatable across a variety of media, attracting significant attention from those who controlled the means of distribution. In the US during the Second World War, these included newspapers and critics, but also institutions like the Book of the Month Club and the Council on Books in Wartime, which sent books to soldiers serving overseas.

As a result Pyle’s book Here Is Your War (1943), based on his diary-style reporting on the North African campaign, was set to top the bestsellers lists. His stories, expressed and reproduced across various media, and promoted by gatekeeper institutions and organizations, reinforced Pyle’s status with readers and assured his lasting influence.⁵ One can even detect echoes of Pyle’s influence in contemporary war blogs, particularly those compiled by journalists embedded with US-led forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. The volume remains in print: the University of Nebraska’s 2004 paperback edition’s jacket blurb is reproduced in the Amazon descriptor (see https://www.amazon.com/Here-Your-War-Story-G-I/dp/0803287771). It reiterates the ideals that Pyle’s dispatches and their subsequent reinterpretations and incarnations came to represent in American wartime culture. Pyle’s collected writing, on a near-daily basis, immortalized the citizen soldier, articulating the values of a mobilized democracy. His book details how “people from a cross-section of America – ranches, inner cities, small mountain farms, and college towns – learned to fight a war”; it speaks to a mid-twentieth century sentimental view of US democracy at war: note the emphasis on spaces to convey the diverse conglomerate of the nation, with its multiplicity of identities working to secure victory. The descriptor also dramatizes the war through a series of vignettes: “It’s all here—the suspenseful landing at Oran; the risks taken daily by fighter and bomber pilots; grim, unrelenting combat in the desert and mountains of Tunisia; a ferocious tank battle that ended in defeat for the inexperienced Americans; and the final victory at Tunis. Pyle’s keen observations relate the full story of ordinary G.I.s caught up in extraordinary times.” Pyle’s recounting of individual life stories becomes a form of representative collective experience. Potential readers and buyers are afforded unique access to the war: “It’s all here.”

Comments from readers in the Amazon page pay tribute to the breadth of Pyle’s reporting and his earned reputation as a great chronicler of war, even as they filter elements of their responses through contemporary anti-institutional and establishment lenses. They express frustration with anything that is deemed an official narrative. As one reviewer, “Phred” from “Manga, Texas” – who has at the time of drafting of this chapter provided 950 Amazon reviews and is rated by the platform as a Top Contributor – writes in July 2016: “What keep me from rating this Pulitzer Prize winning collection with all five stars is a feeling that he tends to hew a little too closely to the official line. American troops are all a little too clean. American purposes and intentions are a little too much as the official Army position would have you believe.” Phred concedes that Pyle’s written experience of the war follows the line of the traditional Bildungsroman and that his “style of reporting is masterful for its direct honestly. He achieves with reality much of what [Ernest] Hemingway hoped to achieve in his sparsely designed fiction. One suspects that both worked very hard to produce what reads as simple truth.”

Here Pyle’s approach to war writing is conveyed through the invoking of another famous chronicler of twentieth-century conflict – or in other words, mediated by – Hemingway, even as Phred’s inherent distrust of the institutional line speaks to a particularly American, post-Vietnam, post-Iraq view of military and press transparency.

The core ideals of united effort and adventure expounded in the Amazon descriptor – itself a digital artifact mediating war culture in the twenty-first century, even as it addresses a source detailing a historical conflict – linger, coloring perceptions of the Second World War for would-be readers in the US (and beyond). Phred’s open-source, recommending review of the book not only provides examples of mediation, it also alludes to modern critical discourses about modern war writing in the digital age, when, as I have recently argued in a related article, war bloggers are finding ways to circumvent institutions to communicate with their readers more immediately than in the past.⁶ The British war writer Patrick Cockburn has been particularly critical of the practice of embedding “war reporters” because it skews perspectives and limits analysis: “the very term ‘war reporter,’ though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho overtones, it gives the misleading impression that war can be adequately described by focusing on military combat." Furthermore, the Pyle example, and this is one of many that could be drawn upon, speaks to the totemic status occupied by the Second World War in a number of societies. The conflict continues, to some extent to frame conceptions of victory and defeat; hierarchies of sacrifice and ultimately remembrance with respect to different military and civilian contributions; the morality of how and when to apply lethal force; and the role of technology.

And yet more recent conflicts posit alternatives that may be complicating perceptions of war, off- and online, as further material migrates between these interwoven spheres and younger generations wade through and make use of the mass of digital material from past and present wars and cultures – national and beyond – to tell their stories. Irregular or guerrilla wars are always intensely political, and none more so than the strange “stop-go conflicts that followed from 9/11.”⁷ Embedding distorts, shifting writers’ priorities and readers’ expectations to a single story wherein the lens of the reporter becomes too closely associated with that of his or her host. This in turn skews what is seen, heard, and felt, what a particular set of known, named, and hence elevated characters do, and what happens to them in a given, bounded set of framed interactions and a rationalized narrative. In other words, as Cockburn argued in an article for the Independent in 2010, “what makes a good story might not be the right story.”⁸ War writing of this sort, and in particular the blog-style reporting built on the tradition of embedded dispatches – be they institutionally commissioned and disseminated or self-published, disseminated via social media platforms – hyperpersonalize stories about war, violence, and trauma.

However prominent or influential, particularly for American and (potentially) British journalists thinking about how to write about combat, Pyle’s is, like any war writer’s, only one voice, one specific example of a form of war writing that remains prevalent, if not unchallenged, in the offline and online alike. His work and the questions and debates it engendered show how particular narrative and memorial cultures spread through transferable mediated content. In 1943 Pyle was also in discussion with Hollywood, which was set to make The Story of G. I. Joe, a film directed by William Wellman that is now largely forgotten but which, upon release in 1945, was received as a triumph of the social-realist war film genre.⁹ It was produced by Lester Cowan and written by the young playwright Arthur Miller. Miller and Pyle argued not only over how to translate a series of dislocated dispatches – again, similar in form to later war blogs – into a coherent film but also about the very nature of what that film should convey.

In preparation for the work of drafting a coherent screenplay, the producer had sent Miller on a tour of domestic Army bases, which resulted in an 85,000-page war diary that helped Miller to refine his opinions about the war’s broader meaning. Miller felt that the “fragmentary” nature of Pyle’s dispatches required an overarching, politically progressive frame that could help to orientate audiences. Pyle was opposed to this, acting as an “uncomfortable oracle” when he argued that the original dispatches were authentic representations of the quotidian reality of war that should stand on their own, whether as pieces of writing or recast on film.¹⁰ Fragmentation devoid of an organizing structure was appropriate because it reinforced the story he wanted to tell, for himself and on behalf of the soldiers whose experiences he attempted to record and relate. This discussion was prescient in that it anticipates arguments about mediated and repurposed online content. Ultimately, following a series of editorial collaborations, Pyle’s writing was transferred to the film medium. Its new visual and auditory incarnation allowed it to move across and embed itself in the culture, reaching new audiences and would-be future readers and re-mediators.

Such repurposing of material with an aim to explain and contextualize contemporary experience, moving across and between forms, takes place in all available mediums. Recognizable cultural expressions of war – stories, images, songs, etc. – already in wide circulation, help to fix and to historicize future narratives. Communicative technologies aid dissemination and access, but in the past it was the human mind that retained and then reintroduced material to prefigure and contextualize contemporary personal experience. The Marine and war reporter Philip Caputo, writing about his experience of war in the jungles of Vietnam, describes the sound of the jungle at night: the brief silences interspersed with the crackling small arms fire, the thumping of grenades and mortars, and the distant booming of artillery. He breaks up the tense descriptive narrative as B Company waits for an attack by the Viet Cong with a quote from an Irish ballad: “I’d read of our heroes, and wanted the same, / To play my own part in the patriot game.” The tone shifts, briefly framed by a song seemingly discordant with the boredom of attritional warfare: “we fought the climate, the snipers, the monotony, of which the climate was the worst. The days were all alike.”¹¹ And yet the old ballad speaks to the broader ideologies underpinning the war, feeding the grim, sometimes inexplicable resilience of the suffering soldiers, whatever their nationality.

Auditory mediations sometimes receive less direct acknowledgement than their text and image-based counterparts. Sounds permeate warscapes in unsettling ways. In the notorious Guantanamo prison and in other black sites, prisoners have written of being blasted, unrelentingly, by heavy metal tracks: a kind of sonic torture.¹² Online, platforms like Spotify offer curated playlists like Military Metal that invoke superhuman emotions and distorted, assaulting soundscapes. The subtitle of one such list reads: “Badass Heavy Metal Songs That Will Awaken a Soldier’s Inner Warrior and Make Them Feel Invincible.”¹³

The cover art includes an image of a soldier, not in any official military gear but dressed instead as a kind of international mercenary, firing off a large weapon against a backdrop of smoke, broken only by a kind of tracer line or electronic pulse, perhaps meant to invoke bullets’ paths moving to the sonic pulse of the music.

As Helle Malmvig has written such media – for instance, the Azerbaijani border forces produced the Atəş (or Fire) music video that came out to accompany the outbreak of hostilities in Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2020 just as this publication was in final preparation – was popularized by US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s and became a global phenomenon: they have become “technologies of war.”¹⁴

In Roy Scranton’s War Porn (2016) radios crackle; as he awaits his deployment in training camp, “Prerecorded bugles pierced the dark. ‘Crusader Rock!’” Soldiers wishing to remain true to wives and girlfriends back home kill time not with prostitutes, but playing Grand Theft Auto.¹⁵ Deployed but resting on base, officers watch Braveheart (1995) and listen to mix CDs prepared by friends at home; the narrator reads a letter from a girl back home, “amazed at how far away it came from, how ignorant she was of my world.” Attempting to respond, he describes himself as “struck dumb, washed in a frustration humming like great engines.”¹⁶ It may seem a great distance to travel – historically, geographically, and with respect to medium – but Scranton's description of the inherent strangeness of modern combat calls to mind Elem Klimov's presentation of a young Soviet partisan Flyora’s first experience of German artillery bombardment in what is now Belarus during the Second World War in his film Come and See (1985).

Throughout the film Klimov and his sound designer Viktor More increase – and, dramatically, in the aforementioned sequences decrease – the volume. This creates a sense of sensory dislocation for Flyora and the audience; the silence that proceeds from the bombardment is as disorientating as the rising, infernal scream that accompanies the film’s later depictions of genocide.¹⁷ In both Scranton’s and Klimov’s/Mors’s creations, war experience appears as forced through a technologically mediated sonic filter.

In addition to helping to articulate profound dislocations resulting from the sensical assault that is modern warfare, mediations also helped to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps. In his memoir Kaboom (2011) the online and offline war writer Matt Gallagher describes how the Iraqi interpreters or “terps...gave us the occasional reminder of home, due to the pop-culture-related origin of their nicknames.” These included “Suge (pronounced ‘Shoog’, like the hip-hop entertainer) Knight, Super Mario, Phoenix, and Snoop Dog,” all of whom “served as a vital asset for communicating with the local populace and served as instant comedy.”¹⁸ The names speak to the complex yet common international trade in real and imagined pop-culture celebrity characters, here deployed to translate experiences that are difficult for any of the participants to explain. This was also the case for readers: Gallagher has spoken of his memories of reading other soldier blogs and of the technologies that enabled the creation of impromptu soundtracks or mixes that interacted with bloggers’ words: of ways of “putting two mediums together.” Particular sonic landscapes linked to narratives have left an impression: “my mother-in-law still says that she can’t listen to the Killers because that was the song I put on mine.”¹⁹

The war writer and veteran Luke Ryan writes of the strange juxtaposition of objects, symbols, bodies, and sounds that framed his experience of bringing home the bodies of fellow soldiers and friends. He begins his story for the New York Times “At War’” forum with the invocation of a series of sounds: “As explosions echoed through the Afghan mountains, I knew that each blast that tore through the night was also tearing through the flesh of my friends.” Later in the narrative he recalls his strange and terrible return:

I boarded the C-17 transport aircraft with three other escorts, one for each soldier who had been killed. This was our new mission: to bring them home. Since the first explosion had been triggered that night, I had been using momentum as a crutch. Adrenaline had kept me moving. On that cargo plane, soaring over the Atlantic Ocean, I had no choice but to sit amid the hum and whine of the aircraft and confront my own thoughts. I remember that moment clearly — I was sitting with my head resting against the cold metal behind it. Before me lay the four boxes, each wrapped tightly in an American flag, in stark contrast to the olive drab and black military equipment around us.²⁰

Life writing merges with testimonials in the war memory space in complex examples of mediated content. Writing about the recordings of Indian prisoners of war compiled at Wunsdorf outside Berlin in 1916, Santanu Das identifies the sensory power of the disembodied voice: “we are in the presence of the ‘real,’ in whatever way we may define that term.”²¹ Perhaps this explains the power of something like Holding It Down (2013) an album that combines jazz and hip hop, articulating in music and spoken word lyrics a series of war veterans’ dreams. Created by jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and poet and MC Mike Ladd, the album contains first person narratives from Lynn Hill, who flew drone missions in Afghanistan from a Las Vegas air base, and Iraq veteran Maurice Decaul. In “Shush,” the latter tells of frayed nerves and “sandbag eyes, large like dish plates, scared,” rising to the statement “I prayed to die in Iraq.”²² Chris Barton summarized the power of the collaborative effort that highlights its humanist intent and artistic achievement in a review for the LA Times:

If this sounds like a difficult listen, it absolutely is. But it’s also an essential one, particularly from the perspective of listeners who, like most of America, have been permitted to keep modern war — and its horrific human cost — at a safe distance. It doesn’t sound like jazz, hip-hop or even anyone’s summer jam. But like the best of all art, Iyer and Ladd have captured an experience too harrowing for words and given it life, and an unforgettably human one at that.²³

Drawing on historic and emergent forms, Holding It Down weaves together multiple voices and storytelling forms and media to create a unique example of life and war writing. It also reminds us of the difference between passive and resistant, or active, responses to mediation as reflected in war writing. In its active form, consciousness of the overlaying dialogues running through existing off- and online material, of cultural inheritance and influence that accrues nationally but is – potentially – being complicated by the relatively fluid borders across which new written, sonic and visual material crosses, and of how these may frame individual war experiences, inform and enable new creative expressions.

Carry on to Violence, the next subsection of Life and War Writing, Off- and Online.