Body horror on the internet: US soldiers recording the war in Iraq and Afghanistan Kari Andén-Papadopoulos UNIVERSITY OF STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

Since the Kosovo conflict in 1999, attempts to manage the reporting of wars and conflicts, and specifically their visual representation, have accelerated. The global ‘information space’ is a key battlefront in the ongoing war against international terrorism, with all parties increasingly engaged in the production, distribution and mobilization of images to support their cause (Campbell, 2003; Keeble, 2004; Robinson, 2004; Webster, 2003; Taylor, 2003). The blurring of boundaries between those who are fighting and those who are documenting the war is critically manifested in the recent phenomenon of coalition soldiers logging on to the web from Iraq and Afghanistan, publicizing personal, at times shockingly brutal, photographs and video clips from the frontlines (Kennedy, 2008; Mortensen, 2007). The ability of global audiences to access the soldiers’ own images and stories directly through war blogs, mass emails and popular video-sharing sites such as YouTube and MySpace is opening up a new window on modern warfare that throws into sharp relief the ways in which mainstream media and governments cover the reality of war. The firsthand testimonials by soldiers actually living the war offer the public uncensored insights into the dark, violent and even depraved faces of warfare, thereby providing the basis for the kind of critical perspectives needed for a more open democratic debate. However, the soldiers’ visual recordings are at times so violent that they run the risk of severing the viewer’s emotional connection to what is represented. These hideous sights bring to a head the ongoing debates on the forms of witnessing called forth by the representations of distant suffering in the media (e.g. Boltanski, 1999; Chouliaraki, 2006; Hesford, 2004; Tait, 2008). If the moral justification for publicizing the death and agony of others lies in its potential for fostering an active public response,

Media, Culture & Society © 2009 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore), Vol. 31(6): 921–938 [ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443709344040]

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then the soldiers’ explicit exposures challenge such assumptions about an educational link between representations of violence and the production of public forms of engagement and action. Drawing on a case study of the extremely violent photographs and commentary posted by coalition soldiers on the online bulletin board NowThat’s FuckedUp.com (NTFU), this article interrogates the meanings and communicative functions of the images posted online by combat soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the discussion of images of graphic violence has focused mainly on their reception, this article centers on questions about their production and circulation. Media critics were quick to dismiss the images of dead and often badly mutilated Iraqis on the website NTFU as ‘war pornography’ (e.g. Zornick, 2005). In their view, it is a sick exploitation of dead bodies, motivated by sadism and morbid voyeurism. Such a reading is of course legitimate, but I argue that there are other, less simplistic ways to make sense of the soldiers’ motivations for creating and circulating atrocity images on the internet. The occurrence of soldiers taking photographs of the destruction of the enemy other is not new, nor does it depend on modern digital technology. Photographing acts of torture and murder – that is, actual war crimes – was, for example, widespread among Nazis and ordinary German soldiers during the Second World War. Scholars remain divided on the driving forces behind the creation of these photographs, the main problem being the lack of historical documentation of where and when they were taken, by whom and, crucially, why, for what purposes (i.e. Hüppauf, 1997; Rossino, 1999; Struk, 2004). For the first time, however, with the rise of the internet, we now have access to online communities of soldiers sharing their thoughts and feelings about such photographic recordings. By analyzing not only the images but also the running textual commentary posted on NTFU, the aim of this article is to advance both the theoretical debate and our critical understanding of the role of the camera in acts of brutalizing and killing. I make the case that the front soldiers’ repetitive creation and use of violent images should be understood primarily as symptoms of an affective reliving of traumatic war experiences, serving at once to authenticate and cancel out a hurtful reality. Moreover, the soldiers use the images in ritualistic ways that serve to recreate a sense of group identity, and to establish the borders and core values of the military community against the outside world. Ultimately, the publication of these violent artifacts and this behavior on the internet can be read as an attempt to allow the outside world to bear witness with the soldiers, who are experiencing realities whose documentation and recognition are denied a place in traditional Western media and culture. Information warfare During almost all major wars in modern times, governments have made systematic and far-reaching efforts to shape the visual experience of the citizenry

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(i.e. Brothers, 1997; Campbell, 2003; Griffin, 1999, 2004; Moeller, 1989; Roeder, 1993; Taylor, 1991, 1998; Zelizer, 1998, 2004). What is most striking about traditional war coverage in the Anglo-American news media is that the images are so relatively bloodless, and seldom hint at the capacity of modern warfare machinery to injure the human body. In recent years, increasingly professional government media management strategies seem to have strengthened the wartime dominance of official perspectives in the US and UK mainstream news media (Robinson, 2004). Now, as in previous wars, the media tend to support the government course of action during military operations, and privilege the official version of events (i.e. Allan and Zelizer, 2004; Thussu and Freedman, 2003; Tumber and Palmer, 2004). However, cable and satellite television, as well as new media technology have made it more difficult for nation states to control the information crossing their borders (Webster, 2003). The information front is no longer confined to traditional mass media, but extended to an increasingly porous and fast global communication space (Taylor, 2003). The internet is a key battleground of information and image warfare, a territory long dominated by Islamist extremist groups that have used the web to post footage of hostages or attacks on US forces (Weimann, 2006). The online response from official US military sources has been fairly subdued, characterized by an unwillingness to exploit new media to get their message out. However, in March 2007, the US Defense Department made a significant move into the cyberspace battleground with the launch of its own channel on YouTube, called MNFIRAQ (Multi-National Force – Iraq).1 The videos uploaded to the site adhere to traditional norms of propaganda, showing American soldiers succeeding in ‘clinical’ combat and aiding local Iraqi citizens (Christensen, 2008). Notwithstanding the growing and increasingly sophisticated terrorist presence on the net, the channel is primarily a direct attempt by the US Defense Department to counteract the prolific posting of damaging images by its own troops. It is presumably not a coincidence that this attempt at online visual management by the Pentagon was accompanied by what appears to be a concerted effort to suppress online publications by troops in the field. In May 2007, the US military announced that it had blocked troops from accessing popular video-sharing sites, including YouTube and MySpace, on military computers. This action was taken only one month after the Army had issued a regulation enforcing new, stricter rules on soldier bloggers. There is no specific policy that bans troops from posting graphic material, but the US Army repeatedly warns soldiers that uploading images on the web may inadvertently reveal ‘vulnerabilities and tactics’ and ‘needlessly place lives at risk’ (UPI, 2005). However, it does not take a great deal of effort to locate disturbing and occasionally horrific images posted by coalition soldiers on the web. In contrast to the carefully cultivated image on the MNFIRAQ channel of bloodless combat conducted by cool and rational US military, these images show aggressive fighting by troops who take what appears to be a near-sexual pleasure in violently destroying the enemy. The US army is facing a dilemma

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over how to manage internet access by its troops. On the one hand, online communication serves to boost battlefield performance and morale. It is primarily used for social networking, providing a crucial link between soldiers serving overseas and their family and friends. Moreover, a large majority of military bloggers in the war zone express unabashed support for the Bush administration and its war on terror, which provides invaluable PR for the military. On the other hand, the occasional posting of gruesome battle photographs and videos may not only threaten operational security, but also contradict the carefully cultivated myth of modern warfare as clinical and even compassionate. The previously banned sight of American troops carrying out inhumane, even sadistic, actions raises disturbing questions about the nature of the war effort, and about the soldiers’ motivation for documenting almost everything they see and experience, no matter how objectionable it may be to the outside world. War photography and trauma An indispensable point of reference for any attempt to understand the phenomenon of soldiers creating and circulating images of atrocious war events is the photographs that German soldiers and SS men took of their comrades torturing and murdering the victims of Hitler’s extermination policy during the Second World War. Documents and thousands of harrowing photographs that have been found in archives all over Europe reveal that many of the nearly 18 million soldiers who made up the Wehrmacht committed crimes against civilians and prisoners of war, acting not only on their superiors’ orders but in many instances on their own (The German Army and Genocide, 1999). The photographs raise inflammatory questions about the social and psychological processes that turned ordinary men into murderers and witnesses to murder, and, even more disturbingly, into ‘snap-shooters’ who took the time and risk to photograph themselves in the act of destroying their victims. Scholars remain divided on the driving forces behind the taking of these photographs of repugnant acts of brutality. Rossino (1999) foregrounds Nazi ideology, and in particular anti-Semitism, as a motivating factor. He makes the case that the troops were subjected to a drive of a concerted Nazi indoctrination, which clearly fostered a belief in the Herrenrasse (master race) ideology among them. In Rossino’s view, the perpetrator photographs can only be properly understood as the expressions of men who had incorporated into their worldview the National-Socialist propaganda about German superiority and the inhumane character of the enemy. He also stresses the fact that many of the German soldiers’ photos express pride in brutalizing the victims, and argues that the act of photographing must be understood as direct and willing participation in the crimes perpetrated (see also Levin and Uziel, 1998).

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Hüppauf (1997), on the other hand, sees the act of photographing as a defense mechanism that helped distance the soldier-photographer from the atrocity being committed (see also Reifarth and Schmidt-Linsenhoff, 1995). The horror of murder and torture became objectified through the camera lens, thereby diminishing its harmful psychological impact. In his view, the totalizing notion of ideology is blinkering rather than revealing, since it precludes us from asking concrete questions about the social and psychological constitutions of the subjects behind the viewfinder/gunsight. Hüppauf dismisses the interpretation of the perpetrator photographs as a ‘mirror image of Nazi ideology and practices’ (1997: 28) as reductionist. He is also suspicious of the Freudian reading of them as expressions of sadism and voyeurism, since it reduces the images to ‘documents of individual pathologies’ (1997: 28). Instead, Hüppauf makes the case that it was ‘the wish to document’ that motivated soldiers to lift the camera and capture scenes of violence and death. According to him, the most prominent feature of these images is neither racism nor a pathological desire to participate in atrocities with the aid of the camera, but an ‘unusual degree of documentary neutrality’ (1997: 36). These photographers used their cameras to create conspicuously crude recordings that, in Hüppauf’s view, are symptomatic of an ‘emptied gaze’, morally indifferent to what is represented. The photographs are taken from a perspective of de-subjectivization, indicating that the eye is to some degree disconnected from the ‘I’ of the photographer. The war of extermination required an act of emptying the gaze in order to protect the self, and the soldiers directed their view through the camera lens in order to subject the horrors of death to a gaze of abstraction. Hüppauf’s observation of a split between the eye and the ‘I’ of the soldierphotographer is key, but may point less to a blank subject than to a shocked one, a consideration that finds further support in the theory of trauma. The latter describes a splitting of the personality as the essential feature of ‘shell shock’, or ‘combat neurosis’ (Caruth, 1996; Leys, 2000). Trauma is the response to sudden, painful events that destroy the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition, and cause the mind to break or split. It is unable fully to assimilate the shocking experiences as they occur; instead, the traumatic memories return later to haunt the psyche in nightmares, flashbacks, hallucinations and other repetitive symptoms. In 1980, as a result of the political struggle to acknowledge the post-war sufferings of Vietnam war veterans, the American Psychiatric Association accorded the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) official recognition for the first time (Leys, 2000: 5). Psychological trauma was thereby formally acknowledged as an inescapable and lasting effect of war.2 NowThat’sFuckedUp.com The online bulletin board NowThat’sFuckedUp.com was created in the spring of 2004 as a website for amateur pornography, where male users shared

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sexually explicit images of their wives and girlfriends. It became popular among US military personnel stationed overseas, but they had trouble paying for membership since credit card companies blocked charges from ‘high-risk’ countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. The website’s administrator, Chris Wilson, decided to grant US troops free access to the site’s pornography if they posted an authentic picture proving they were stationed overseas. A majority of the photographs that American soldiers began posting were benign images of landscapes, sandstorms and troops posing in front of their tanks, but graphic battlefield pictures also started to appear – close-up shots of dead Iraqi insurgents and civilians, many of them horribly mutilated or blown into pieces. Accompanying the photographs was a running commentary celebrating the killings, cracking jokes and arguing over what kind of weaponry was used. In September 2005, the ‘trading gore for porn’ site made international news and launched a Pentagon investigation into whether the images constituted a felony (Chonin, 2005; Glaser, 2005a, 2005b; Thompson, 2005; Zornick, 2005). On 28 September, the Army investigators suspended their inquiry, since they failed to determine who took the photos, or whether any felonies were committed. A few days later, Chris Wilson – of Lakeland, Florida – was raided by the Polk County Sheriff’s office, and charged with 301 counts of obscenity. Critics raised the question whether the arrest in reality was engineered by Pentagon officials misusing obscenity laws to censor the graphic records of the US troops’ activities in Afghanistan and Iraq (e.g. Kushner, 2005). In the spring of 2006, Wilson pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of possession of obscene materials in Polk County circuit court. In exchange, the state dropped the sole felony charge against him and the remaining obscenity counts. Wilson agreed to shut down the website, and to allow the Polk County Sheriff’s Office to take control of its address. The visual content Early on, the webmaster of the NTFU site sorted the soldiers’ photographs into two main categories: ‘Pictures from Afghanistan and Iraq – General’, and ‘Pictures from Afghanistan and Iraq – Gory’.3 The ‘general’ images present the kind of stock visual scenarios found in many photoblogs posted by serving coalition soldiers: troops taking part in mundane, day-to-day activities such as relaxing in barracks or patrolling the overseas landscapes and townscapes. These general images tend to portray the war experience as a laid-back adventure, featuring the US soldiers (and their allies) as benevolent tourists and peacekeepers in Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the photographs placed in the ‘Gory’ category give a far more disturbing account of what the encounter in the contact zone seems to really be about. Typically, they are raw, artless snapshots of dismembered corpses, almost exclusively Iraqi men destroyed by the US troops or in suicide attacks. Some photographs show dead bodies

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in full figure, often bloody, distorted and mutilated. Others zoom in on severed arms, legs, fingers, poured out intestines or remains so shredded that it is hard to identify them (as indicated by the cynical post ‘Name this body part’). However, a significant majority of these ‘after-incident’ records are close-ups of the head (and shoulders) of the deceased. In many cases, though, the head is blown off, and the display details the lesion with blood and splattered brain substance. One recurring motif is the parading of decapitated ‘insurgent’ heads, demonstratively held up in front of the camera by anonymous, and sometimes gloved hands. This continuous posting of visuals with repetitive variations on a motif that the soldiers themselves callously call the ‘headshot’, indicates a mode of pathological fixation in which the acts of taking and circulating these atrocious photographs function to reproduce traumatic war experiences in the form of a compulsive acting out. Chris Wilson, the web master of NTFU, has claimed the forum to be a ‘community’ site used by 30,000 US soldiers (Glaser, 2005a), and this circumstance is certainly reflected in the visual postings. The US troops are rarely visible in these photographs: they are positioned behind rather than in front of the camera. The obsessive focus is on the dead enemy ‘other’, often dehumanized beyond recognition. His shattered remains are showcased with a conspicuous lack of emotion. The crude snapshot character indicates that the pictures are mainly meant to serve as clear-cut proof of the successful hunting down and killing of the opponent. Chris Wilson has marketed the site as ‘an unedited look at the war’. While the news media always have ‘a slant’, Wilson argues, the posting soldiers offer ‘a real look at what’s going on’ with photographs ‘that come straight from their camera to the site’ (Thompson, 2005). Nevertheless, there is clearly an element of selection at work here. We do not see any seriously wounded or dead coalition soldiers, no deceased Iraqi women and children, and no American soldiers committing potentially incriminating acts of violence on camera. The soldiers have apparently taken precautions not to publicize visuals that may violate the interests of the military community – that is, images that risk undermining troop morale or disrupting the collective self-image of just warriors fighting a sinister enemy. The verbal commentary On the surface, the NTFU forum has the crass function of a market place where active duty soldiers can trade grisly war pictures for free access to porn. More importantly, however, it also serves as an internal venue for sharing personal views and experiences from the war among soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is clearly a locus for social bonding, used by the military community to discursively re-imagine itself and firm up its borders against outsiders.4 The comment threads express a strong sense of ‘us’ (the military world) versus ‘them’ (the civilian world) who are ignorant about what war is

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really like. A central unifying bond between the users is the notion that only those who have seen and experienced war first-hand are in truth qualified to comment on it. In a typical statement, a poster dismisses critics of the forum as: … crybaby mother fuckers who in all likelihood have never even been in uniform, never been in any kind of situation where they had to give aid and comfort to a friend who just had both legs blown off in an IED attack. (diescreaming)

According to this empiricist logic, you cannot debate with a soldier until you have been ‘where he has been … until you have been covered in blood not your own’. The insider nature of the forum is further evidenced by the recurrent technical commentary in response to the gory photographs, that is, deadpan exchanges about what type of weapon might have caused the injury on show. One contributor even states that the posting of gruesome photographs is mainly: ‘a way to share information on ballistic performance and wound characteristics’ (eatmebubba). Such detached conversations in the face of the torment and death of others are of course deeply disturbing, at least to an outside civilian audience. This is even more true of the cynical jokes that follow almost every post. ‘What every Iraqi should look like’, says one contributor about a photograph of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains. Also, occasionally celebratory remarks and racist slurs occur, such as ‘Sweet! Good shot’ (hardcorepha), ‘These fuckers get what they deserved’ (slayerhippy678), ‘Suck shit Abdullah’ (chopper81), ‘Thanks so much for posting a FRESH KILL’ (FootSoldier). A continuous type of clever remark is to ironically downplay the fatal condition of the disfigured corpses on display: ‘A doc would say – “Put some ice on that”’ (OleJoe), ‘Someone give that man an extra strength Tylenol’ (sinister_t), or ‘That’ll ruin his whole weekend’ (nitro1364). The most common understatement, one that follows almost every posting, is the phrasing ‘That’s gotta hurt’. In these sarcastic remarks, the soldiers seem at once to address and deny the traumatic reality of war through belittling the agony of dying. In fact, the greater part the verbal exchanges consist of serious political discussions about the Iraq War and US foreign policy. The idea of having advanced conversations about the ethics of war on a pornographic website, accompanied by graphic photographs of death, might of course seem absurd. Still, the discussions testify that the posting soldiers have a distinct political consciousness, even conscience, and that they wrestle with the vexed issue of whether the American military invasion of Iraq was justified or not. This question polarizes the community, with users articulating either blatant critique or unconditional support for the Bush administration and its foreign policy. While the soldiers clearly bond around the ‘blood ’n’ guts’ experience of deadly combat, the political arguing is a segmenting force that threatens to disrupt the community.

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The most significant token of the site’s internal character is the fact that so many threads contain meta-discussions about the forum itself, with members of the military reflecting on the meaning and function of the site to their own community. The participants repeatedly debate the pros and cons of publicizing the atrocious images and, in particular, ponder the soldiers’ motivations for taking and posting them. A majority of the posters support the forum, and foreground its positive role. By far the most frequent argument is that NTFU shows the realities of war, in contrast to the sanitary image presented by traditional news media. One poster says: For me, to be able to come to a site where the story isn’t white washed and the pictures are as real and gory as it gets, gave me some weird sense of hope that those who are now armless, legless, sightless, and outright dead, are given a place here to be known and respected. (The Trip)

Many posters also express their belief in the didactic virtues of publicizing graphic war images – if confronted with the true costs of war: ‘maybe then the public will not be so rah-rah about killing people’ (some more gore from the Q). In addition to such claims about the public enlightenment function of NTFU, the users repeatedly point to its specific role as a therapeutic outlet for active duty soldiers. One poster says: We NEED an outlet for the soldier to be able to show what he is doing, where he has been and where he is at now, both physically and mentally.[…] You do not know what these guys are going through and you don’t understand them having to open that door that vents all of this out into the open for them.[…] These guys are going to be sleeping with ghosts and faces that will HAUNT THEM ALL THEIR LIVES DAMN IT HELL!!!!! (The Trip)

Some users further maintain that the soldiers not only post their pictures for therapeutic reasons, in order to possibly distance themselves from the violence and killing, but also for celebratory reasons: How do we expect these soldiers to cope with reality? Their commanders instruct them to go protect our freedom, and kill as many brown people as possible, and that we love you for it. BUT DON’T TALK about the brutality, don’t talk about the REALITY of it. Just shut it down and forget it ever happened. That’s all they want to do, is share what they are doing there, share what they consider to be an accomplishment, killing an insurgent. Nothing more than a guy hanging his deer or moose he shot on the wall in his cabin for all to see.… I mean Bush wants these guys’ heads on a platter right? But insurgents’ heads can’t be taken home and hung on a wall. So a picture is the closest thing to it. After all, is that not what our president said? HUNT down these insurgents, kill them, smoke them out of their foxholes like the animals they are? […] You guys are doing what we need you to do and posting here to share your reality there. To get some support, from us, and hear us say GOOD JOB! (kaizersoze)

A war veteran shares his thoughts on the subject:

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Being older, I still think in my mind that some of these pics being posted are nothing more than looking for acceptance in what they are doing.[…] If your job is to kill insurgents, then do it well, and be proud of your kills.[…] In Panama I took a lot of pictures like the ones I see here. They were pictures everyone wants to see, but few understood. Those pics to me were more of a documentation of what I saw and felt. And they were somewhat a trophy as well … (garylem)

Yet another poster makes a similar claim: People can hide their head in the sand and pretend that combat operations don’t get nasty but they do. This site shows some of that, presented as the troops see it. Call them job pics. Is it wrong to have the self-pride to do your job well? (onewraith)

Furthermore, it is repeatedly asserted that the callous attitude towards the enemy evidenced in the gory photographs is nothing to lament, but, on the contrary, a token of professionalism. Many posters point to the kill-or-getkilled logic of armed conflict, which demands of the soldier to see the adversary as nothing but a deadly threat. In the words of one poster: ‘you can’t take your morals into war or you will end up dead.[…] War is win or lose, die or survive’ (markmarkmark). Another poster expands on the subject: The soldier on the frontlines has too much to think and worry about in doing their job and staying alive. They shouldn’t be contemplating whether or not the enemy in their sights might really be a nice guy and if this weren’t they could be sitting in a bar tipping beers back together.[…] Like it or not, dehumanizing the enemy and viewing it as a dangerous animal or prey makes the job easier for many, that’s just the way it is. (fuck_u_liberal_dogs)

The warrior ethic is reflected on also in the following post: War is an ugly thing. I want soldiers who are aggressive and like killing the enemy. We cannot have those without the stomach to kill fighting for us. The pictures are their way of celebrating being alive and doing their job well. I like seeing them because it’s one less asshole who can hurt or kill my people. (BuickGuy)

Occasionally, the NTFU users also point to the possible intimidating effects of the gory images on the opponent. In the phrasing of one poster: ’[M]aybe these pictures would make som potential suicide bomber think twice after seeing what happens AFTER you pull the trigger’. Implications: the meaning and function of the soldiers’ postings In principle, the gory forum appears to have at least three different communicative functions:

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the US troops speaking to the US troops (and their allies) the US troops speaking to the general public (at home and abroad) the US troops speaking to the ‘enemy’. The military community The forum predominantly comes across as a community site, allowing members of the military to engage in relatively ‘insular conversations’ (Williams, 2003: 183) within the safety of a group of like-minded people. It is a type of intimate space that is private, and also potentially extremely public. While the posting soldiers, of course, are aware of the presence of an outside audience, the apparent intimacy of the forum – in contrast to the broadcast media – appears to create a false sense of security and protection. Here, the soldiers evidently find it apt to exorcise the demons of war in ways that would be unthinkable within the framework of traditional mass media. The troops posting on NTFU explicitly define and expose themselves as aggressors. In sharp contrast to the official propaganda, projecting an image of ‘our’ troops as peaceful, empathetic and with high moral standards, the soldiers themselves repeatedly stress that warfare per definition excludes morals, or you will end up dead. From the frontline soldiers’ point of view, war is defined by a plain principle: kill or be killed. In reality, dehumanizing the enemy is a prerequisite of war, equipping the frontline soldier with the coldness necessary to function successfully in combat operations. The act of photographing violence and death can be understood as a ritualized practice (Becker, 1995; Coman and Rothenbuhler, 2005; Zelizer, 2005) among active duty soldiers, as both an individual and collective way of dealing with the act of killing – and the fear of being killed. It functions simultaneously to authenticate and filter a hurtful reality where death or serious injury is an all too real possibility. At the same time, the soldiers share, trade, and talk about pictures in ritualistic ways that serve to recreate a sense of group identity. These practices function to affirm the foundational values of the military community, and to stress and strengthen the bonds within the group, against the outside world. The soldiers have used the camera to create conspicuously crude snapshots of the dead enemy, the other. Apparently, these dispassionate recordings are void of any moral or affective investment in what is represented, indicating, however, not so much a vacant subject (Hüppauf, 1997) as a traumatized one. In many cases, the soldiers posting on NTFU seem to have been immersed so profoundly in the traumatic experiences of death and violence that they are unable to attain the kind of ‘specular distance’ (Leys, 2000: 9) necessary for integrating the events in normal consciousness. Rather, they seem to have become possessed by the violence, the blood, the killing, and photographically repeat their traumatic experiences in a mode of compulsive and repetitive acting out.

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Trauma is not simply an effect of having faced death, but of having survived, precisely, without fully grasping this fact. What one returns to in the repetitive seeing of the destructive event is the ‘very incomprehensibility of one’s own survival’ (Caruth, 1996: 64). Repetition is the continual reenactment of an encounter with death that resists simple comprehension, and, simultaneously, an attempt to assert the fact of one’s own survival. The postings on NTFU show that the photographic repetition of murderous war events by combat soldiers can be understood precisely as a response to the traumatic experience of survival in the midst of massive death. The images can be read as projections of the soldier’s worst nightmare, what he or she fears the most to become – lifeless shreds of bodily matter. Yet, the photographs confirm that they are, in fact, still alive. The nightmare has, so far, not become reality. The images verify: ‘The enemy was killed’. And: ‘I was not’. Still, the unbearable: ‘It could have been me.’ At the heart of these acts of photographing war atrocities lies the documentary impulse: you take a picture in order to authenticate what you are experiencing. To photograph is a way of externalizing experience, to fix the present into an object that you can refer back to. The camera inevitably involves the notion of ‘mastery’, an argument originally presented by Sontag (1978) and later qualified by a number of scholars (e.g. Osborne, 2000; Pratt, 1992; Urry, 2002). Photography is a way of appropriating an alien environment, turning it into ‘objects that can be symbolically possessed’ (Sontag, 1978: 15). Photographing the enemy is in a sense equivalent to taking control over, and conquering him. It is a defense against anxiety, a means to master the fear of annihilation. The soldiers’ main motivation for posting the pictures on the internet is that they want to share their reality: gruesome, first-hand experiences of war that seldom, if ever, pass through the filters put in place by the government and the mainstream media. The forum constitutes a place where they can seek acceptance for and demonstrate their proficiency at the job they have been assigned to perform, a crucial aspect of which has been officially downplayed or denied: to hunt down and kill as many enemy combatants as possible. Some of these images are trophy shots, no doubt, triumphantly documenting – and celebrating – enemy ‘kills’. They are objects, or souvenirs, made and circulated by the soldiers as proof of their power. In this regard, the pictures clearly function as positive signifiers, serving to boost troop morale. Before there were cameras, there were certainly other objects taken from the theater of war that served the same function – the scalp, or ears, or head of the enemy, physical evidence that you have ‘done the deed’. An insider–outsider interface The visual and verbal postings on the forum are hardly controversial to the informed military community that apparently constitutes the core of the

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website’s users. However, a rupture occurs when the established photographic practice is mixed with new online technology. It is precisely the paradoxical fact that an insider military forum is now accessible also to an outside public that creates the potential for controversy, and that throws the discrepancy between military and civilian perceptions of war into sharp relief. Many members of the public have neither been exposed to extremely graphic pictures of death previously, nor are they necessarily familiar with the aggressive military jargon – and practice – of hunting for enemy ‘kills’ that reduces the adversary to a dangerous animal or prey. The forum, as precisely an interface between the military inside and a more public outside, might of course serve as a confessional, and in some cases even exhibitionist, outlet for the soldiers. In this regard, they are responding to the voyeuristic turn in contemporary visual culture, with the proliferation of (until now) private discourses in public spaces. When sharing contentious information among themselves, the soldiers are no doubt aware that the space they are using is in a very real sense ‘bugged’ – that there is a listening (and at times speaking) presence of an outside audience. While it goes against the military honor code and culture, if not law, to talk publicly about traumatic war experiences, the forum allows the soldiers to vent their violent reality within the context of an informed community, while knowing that someone else is looking and listening. To some extent, the whole point of speaking about the unspeakable, of disclosing their hideous, and hidden, reality is of course for the soldiers to have an outside audience – not least for the purpose of therapeutic release.5 The enemy A third potential function of the forum is to provide an outlet for the coalition troops to send an intimidating message to the enemy. The photographic showcasing of dead and mutilated opponents could be read as a response to the ubiquitous online presence of Iraqi insurgent imagery, showing US soldiers being shot and blown up, and the bloody work of sectarian death squads (Johnson, 2007). The point of terrorist violence is not the killing of the enemy as such, but the terrorizing of the enemy with a violent spectacle. Increasingly, these spectacles of terror are staged primarily to generate footage to be circulated in the media, and thereby subject a potential mass audience to the shocking displays of destruction. To some extent, the coalition soldiers might as well have created, and even arranged, terrifying images as a theatrical performance for the web, aimed at demoralizing – or ‘out-goring’ – the enemy. Showcasing the enemy dead and defeated is of course a recognized propaganda device, intended to broadcast the clear-cut message: ‘we win, you lose’. But the convention is to employ symbolic rather than graphic images to that end. To put on view close-ups of destroyed human bodies is to disrupt the cultural fiction of war as a hygienic and honorable enterprise (and thereby antithetical to the interests of the US government propaganda machine).6

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Concluding remarks I have not made the case that the soldiers’ online communication provides us with the true or complete image of the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, these verbal and visual postings reveal aspects of the war that are fundamentally taboo in the eyes of the US military and media elites. The soldiers portray modern warfare as a venture in excessive violence and blood, showing in detail what its weaponry does to fragile human tissue. They undermine the official rhetoric of ‘accidental’ injury (Scarry, 1985) by presenting the obsessive destruction of the enemy other as the main purpose and outcome of war. Contrary to the prevalent myth of ‘our’ troops as civilized protectors of human lives and rights, the soldiers posting on NTFU appear as arrogant killers who take pride in defacing the opponent. It is not hard to see why some critics were quick to dismiss these communications as pathological, created by and for twisted minds. The fact that the forum was hosted on a porn site made it all the more pertinent to write off the soldiers’ recordings as ‘war pornography’ – as exposures of a perverse ‘tangle of lust for flesh, power, and killing’ (Brown, 2005) posted for ‘entertainment value’ (Zornick, 2005). Yet, as hopefully demonstrated by my analysis, this material allows for a more measured reading, testifying to more complex and critical meanings. The internet, with open forums like NTFU.com, can be seen as providing striking alternatives to military and mainstream media hegemonies. It is a new form of information coming at us, at times so brutal and visceral that it runs the risk of traumatizing the viewer. In this regard, the self-imposed guidelines of the Anglo-American media can be seen as serving the public interest by restricting the display of dead and badly injured bodies, and by reflecting audience research indicating that people do not want to see atrocious events in too much detail (Taylor, 1998: 75). Yet, while the media censor disturbing sights for reasons of good taste and propriety, rather than for political reasons, their policies about what is to be seen and not seen by the public certainly have critical political and historical consequences that call for further investigation. The fact that NTFU in all probability fell prey to censorship by the US military – and that the internet is now increasingly policed by the Pentagon in order to prevent similar recordings by their troops to come to public light – is in and of itself evidence that the information at stake here is important. A new digital generation of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq is turning to the internet in a strongly felt urge to communicate, and come to terms with the realities of experiencing a war up-close. In earlier wars soldiers took, shared and discussed photographs, but these practices were not displayed instantly on the web for the world to see and respond to interactively. The internet provides what appears to be an unprecedented opportunity for social bonding and community building. This new media platform allows for subcultural groups sharing common experiences or interests to rediscover their commonality and express their distinct values in opposition to hegemonic views, and to do so within the safety of a supportive and homogeneous group

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(Williams, 2003). At the same time, however, the internet opens up such formerly insular communities to outside viewers, with all the problems – and possibilities – that can entail. In the extreme case of NTFU, the soldiers’ verbal and visual records provide external audiences with disturbing insights into an otherwise closed and extremely violent subculture, which raises urgent questions about internet spectatorship on imagery of graphic violence. How is such imagery received and made sense of within these new online contexts, which dislocate images of body horror from the control and explicitly moral agenda of mainstream newsmakers? As Tait (2008) argues, the reductive ways of understanding spectatorship on imagery of body horror in scholarly literature, as either ‘pornographic’ – looking for pleasure and entertainment – or as performing the civic duty to bear witness to atrocity, do not fully account for the diversity of viewing positions taken up by internet users. The soldiers’ violent images and practices, today made available online, give those who choose to look privileged access to the more raw realities of warfare. These new opportunities for seeing have important ethical and political ramifications, which have yet to be properly mapped out and assessed. Notes 1. See: http://youtube.com/profile?user=MNFIRAQ 2. It is worth noting that five years into the Iraq conflict (i.e. by 2008), 120,000 returning US veterans have been diagnosed with mental health conditions, and 68,000 with post-traumatic stress disorder. Also, in November 2007, a CBS News investigation reported on a ‘suicide epidemic’ among veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq (Keteyian, 2007). 3. When the site was closed down in the spring of 2006, more than 8000 threads had been created within the soldier-submitted content pages, a majority of which were sorted under the ‘General’ picture category. In turn, a single thread could contain many pictures and inspire hundreds of posts by users of the website. A random set of threads in the ‘Gory’ picture category on the NTFU website were chosen for analysis. When I accessed the site in November–December 2005, I downloaded all the threads that were available online at that time, in sum 135. Each thread was examined in its entirety, which means that the material chosen for analysis contains several hundreds of images and commentaries. 4. The internet was early on theorized as a forum for group bonding and community building (e.g. Jones, 1995; Rheingold, 1993). 5. The psychoanalyst sitting ’just behind and out of view’. 6. However, destroyed bodies may be shown as evidence of the opponent’s cruelty, in order to construct an ‘evil’ or enemy other (as in showing the destroyed bodies of Nazi crimes etc.).

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Kari Andén-Papadopoulos is associate professor at the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, Stockholm university. Her main research interest concerns the intersections of geopolitics and visual media culture. She is currently finnishing a book titled Global Image Wars. Geopolitics and post-9/11 Visual Culture (forthcoming Routledge) Address: University of Stockholm, JMK, PO Box 27 861, 115 93 Stockholm, Sweden. [email: [email protected]]