War, Virtual War and Human Security - 2007 Programme Session 5

Session Five: That’s Entertainment: War in Pictures
Chair: Helen Fox

The Immediacy of Narrated Combat: Operation Iraqi Freedom as Public Spectacle
Jason McEntee
Department of English, South Dakota State University, SD, USA

From the Vietnam War (VW) to Operation Desert Storm (ODS) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), we have seen a dramatic shift in the ways we see combat. We see OIF through countless, and often dubious, journalistic images (Abu Ghraib; the felling of Saddam’s statue; Bush’s infamous aircraft carrier landing) that have impacted how we interpret our warriors’s actions. Similarly, the journalistic images of ODS warfare unfolded on the television. But OIF presents an interesting shift in the immediate availability, for mass consumption, of numerous fiction and non-fiction narratives often stemming from the accounts of the soldiers themselves. I refer to this shift as the immediacy of narrated combat: Whereas we saw riveting VW and ODS footage broadcast into living rooms, we will note that several years passed before serious-minded literary texts, such as Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), and movies such as Hearts and Minds (1974), would address the wars (excluding The Green Berets [1968]).
However, OIF has seen an almost immediate response in terms of the narratives we can see and read: the Canadian-made American Soldiers (2005), the documentary Gunner Palace (2005), the FX Network’s drama series Over There (2005), the DOD’s CD-ROM compilation the 21st Century Guide to Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003), video games such as Kuma|War, the presence of numerous videos brought back with, and blogs posted by, our men and women serving in, and subsequently returning from, Iraq, and literary non-fiction accounts of combat such as Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (2004), Colby Buzzell’s My War (2005), and Kayla Williams’ Love My Rifle More than You (2005).
OIF allow us to trace how the immediacy of narrated combat suggests that we have become a nation of voyeurs privy to a representations of combat that, in a historical sense, were known only to the warrior and then revealed to the population at large after elongated periods of time. Is the ability to see OIF problematic in that we have little time to reflect on events before new events replace them, or have we finally plunged into what Orwell prophesied so long ago–war without end, broadcast for public consumption, and prompting both exhilaration and fear from viewers who absorb the spectacle of combat?

Experiencing War the Video Game Way: Call of Duty 2
Susan Scheibler
School of Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles

That intensity of war. The feeling of ‘Oh my god, this
is real. People actually went through this.’ The emotion,
the intensity—that’s what we’re capturing.

Vince Zampella, speaking of the game Call of Duty 2

World War II themed video games are an ever-growing and ever-expanding part of the multi-billion dollar video game industry. Found on every platform (console, computer, arcade), first-person shooter games are celebrated for their realism and authenticity, that is, their ability to create what is generally referred to in the press as an “authentic, slice-you-in-the-gut depiction of war with raw power and convincing detail,” or similar terms. The best of these games marshal sound and image in a way that plunges the player into a variety of combat missions, all linked to historical battles, in worlds and with weapons that celebrate historical authenticity.
While much has been made of the military’s involvement in and utilization of video games for recruitment and training, this paper will focus on the games themselves as ways in which players “experience” war through sound, image, story, and game play. Of primary interest is the way that many of these games use documentary footage in order not only to authenticate the experience of the game but also to contextualize the events and the violence that fuel the player’s gaming experience.

The Representation of British Soldierly Identity in Print Media and Soldier’s own Photographic Accounts
K Neil Jenkings
Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom.

War and military activities are multi-layered social phenomena mediated for public understanding and consumption by the press and other forms of mass media. The medium of text is important, but it is the photographic image that can define in the public’s consciousness their understanding of the armed forces and the personnel who staff them. These photographic representations are the subject of this paper that reports a UK Economic and Social Research Council funded study into representations of military identity in: a) British newspapers, and b) the personal photograph collections of service and ex-service personnel.
Over six hundred images from newspaper stories about the British military were collected and coded to themes of representation. Following this, sixteen serving and ex-service personnel were asked to choose and discuss ten photographs from their own photographic collections, that they believed represented their experiences in the armed forces. Approximately 160 individual personal photographs were discussed.
This paper examines print media photographic images and their use in and alongside newspaper texts. It also reports on the photographs from individuals’ own collections and how these representations of military life and accounts of military identity reveal a much more diverse set of images and experiences of military life and identity than the more abstract and iconic representations found in newspapers. It is suggested that the abstract, iconic, heroic and demonic stereotypes of military identity, and personnel they are attached to, mask the rich and diverse identities that soldiers have of themselves and their colleagues. We suggest that a consequence of these media representations is that it becomes easier, politically, to deploy and consequently ‘sacrifice’ military personnel in the name of state military objectives.

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