Hanna Shell in camo.

Why do so many American soldiers look, as one Brooklynite at the office of Cabinet magazine put it on a recent Friday, like they are trying to blend in to computer screens? The question was directed at Hanna Rose Shell, a historian, filmmaker, and professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, who had come to New York to talk about Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance. Cabinet had arranged to host a reading and sound performance, which promised “camouflage paraphernalia galore.”

We soon found out the answer. It seems the pixelated, “digitized” designs have been standard issue across the branches for a decade, while the iconic, splotchy pattern of green, brown, olive, and black seen in episodes of G.I. Joe and the military-themed action movies of the 1980s is no longer predominant. Officially known as the Woodland pattern of the Army’s M81 battle dress uniform, the older, iconic camo was initially designed, Shell found, to mimic the environment of a region in the Soviet Union where military researchers thought the Cold War would turn hot. Though no longer used to hide soldiers, close approximations of this earlier version can be found today on cargo shorts and Louis Vuitton luggage. It’s been replaced with a series of tiny squares and “micropatterns” that mimic a digital photograph with poor resolution, with the idea that the new uniforms would be more difficult to detect in images produced by contemporary digital surveillance. Also, as a military camouflage expert admitted, “the boys think it looks cool.” While each generation of camouflage has been developed for a specific physical environment, part of what Shell demonstrates in Hide and Seek is that, in a more general way, camouflage has adapted in reaction to changes in photography and film technologies. The word itself first appeared in 1914, a derivation of camoufler (“to diguise”), coined by French artist Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, a society portrait painter who led workers and civilian artists in France’s military section de camouflage. It entered English the following year. Since then, as both photography and surveillance have grown into regular parts of civilian life, innovations in camouflage have marked efforts to become invisible in an increasingly visual age.

Event goers arriving at Cabinet’s offices early had trouble finding Shell, who was especially well hidden in a clump of late rush-hour traffic on the BQE. After about twenty minutes, Sina Najafi, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, came outside with an announcement–“She’s now in Brooklyn!”–and offered beer.

Shell arrived, marched to a small stage area at the front of the room and, after some quick preparations, tossed what looked like a plastic bag full of folded burlap to a friend in the front row. “Can you put this on?” she asked. (His response: “Only if it’s absolutely necessary.”) The bag contained a ghillie suit, a head-to-toe outfit sometimes covered in twigs and underbrush, designed for hunters, birders, and snipers hoping to blend into their surroundings. By the midpoint of her reading, Shell had been coaxed into putting it on behind the podium, though she hadn’t needed much prodding. Pointing to a projection of an instructional photograph that had been distributed by the British War Office in 1916, showing–or, more accurately, not showing–a sniper hiding in a grassy field, she asked, “How do you teach somebody, using photographs, using film, in fact at all, how do you teach somebody how not to be seen? The implication would seem to be that you’re supposed to understand that if you needed to get lost in a similarly gravelly, grassy habitat, you would garnish yourself with local foliage, add face paint, and burrow behind grass under the rock.”

Ghillie suit.

Her friend stood and opened the bag, pulling out one large piece of material designed for the sniper’s body, and a smaller one made to cover her head. “This is a ghillie suit, which is a sniper suit,” Shell continued. “And, basically, if you were a sniper, or even if you were an amateur sniper, or if you just wanted to hide–what I would suggest, if you wanted to hide in that photograph, honestly, is you would make yourself a suit like this, and there's instructions right there.” Cutting and stitching instructions, which Shell uncovered during archival research at England’s Imperial War Museum, had been distributed to the audience. “Okay, I’ll wear it,” she said. “If somebody else wears the hat. I don’t think I can wear the hat. Does somebody else want to wear the hat? Well, all right, I’ll try to wear the hat.”

She stepped into the suit, which she pulled over her jeans, and reached for a pile of leaves and branches near her laptop to demonstrate how a hunter could attach brush for hiding in a woodsy area. The suit seemed to be an odd fit. “I don’t know, I haven’t worn–I used to wear this all the time. But I haven’t worn it in a while,” she said. A few hands went up, and she answered questions while fumbling with the burlap. “Um, okay, well, more questions, then, while this is—I think somebody else wore this! Now, I don’t know if I'll be able to do this for, for too long, cause it’s a little stuffy in here. Making ghillie suits is really fun. If we had more time I’d walk you through it. But, we don’t. If anyone wants to put this one on, though, you’re welcome to try it,” she said. She let out a high, squeaky laugh. “Especially, like, in a few minutes.” Dressed for the woods, Shell continued more or less where she had left off, talking into a microphone clipped under the headpiece and looking at the audience through a narrow slit at eye level.

After aerial photography and reconnaissance became a part of the first World War, Shell explained, “the issue of how to hide from these cameras really takes over. What I found is that, in terms of some kind of systematic set of practices that are learned and studied, camouflage wasn’t taught until this sort of photographic surveillance was all-encompassing. While you do see lots of people hiding and lots of deception in war throughout the nineteenth century, you don’t see this kind of systematization of those practices. And similarly, in the case of camouflage in nature, people have noted for a really long time that animals blend into their backgrounds, right? But until the mid-nineteenth century, these were considered to be examples of God’s disguises, like God was planting these little tricks in the world. It was only once we started having, on the one hand, an evolutionary understanding of how protective coloration could be understood as a kind of productive technology, along with humans wanting to document and incorporate that, to model for their own practice, that it becomes camouflage. And it’s kind of fascinating. There was no camouflage until 1914, and then all of a sudden there are camouflage schools, and camouflage stores, and instruction manuals. Suddenly there are natural historians going out, taking pictures of animals that are hidden, and saying, this is what we’re trying to do. This is camouflage.”

Alex Carp is an editor of the McSweeney’s Voice of Witness book series.

Marine Lance Corporal Nicole Camala Veen Playing the Role of an Iraqi Nurse, Wadi Al-Sahara, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, CA, 2008

In Hartford overnight for reasons that would take too long to explain, my wife and I visited the Wadsworth Atheneum, the city’s art museum, where she had interned a number of years before. Hartford is one of those midsize American cities, like Cincinnati or Worcester, dominated by Chris Ware cityscapes.

The Atheneum is a small, good museum and interesting in that way that Hartford is interesting: on a comparatively small stage the choices are more evident, the collections more particular. Things that would be pushed into the storeroom at another museum are given fascinating pride of place. What is less well known is not so consistently edged out by what is too well known.

We walked past the museum’s two Balthuses into a room full of photos of men in headdresses, dusty streets, namelessly Middle Eastern scenes. A man fiddling with a bomb. Something was off, however: there was too much unfinished plywood and the people staring into the camera were clearly … what?

We slowed down, read wall text. This woman is a Marine lance corporal.

Claire Beckett works out of Boston, and her interests have always been international. This show is actually a departure, then, for the Arab streets and desert and unexpectedly American-looking villagers are all from a training camp in California where soldiers come to prepare for their moon landing, among a set with military and civilian role-players meant to approximate and explore the real thing.

They’re large archival ink-jet prints, perhaps twenty-five in all, in one room. They are beautiful and as surreal as they are perhaps meant to be. More surreal in their proximity than in all the thousands of pictures we have seen of Baghdad, Mosul, and Fallujah at their remove. So this is the rarer look, the stranger country, farther from us.

Marine Lance Corporal Joshua Stevens Playing the Role of a Taliban Fighter, Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, CA, 2009

All the “opponents” in these photos are played by our soldiers.

A curious theatrical culture has always existed alongside the military along with equally strange sports and games. The overlap is growing in all sorts of high-tech ways: the now-famous redesign of weapons-system controls to resemble the video-game controllers that all our recruits have known from birth. But these photos are from a labor-intensive low-tech exercise (fitting that the base is 150 miles from Los Angeles and movie-industry types were there to work up some of the sets).

My father, briefly in the Vietnam-era army, had a strictly NATO primary military specialty: atomic demoliton. In Missouri, when they weren’t filling the time with spelunking, they practiced assembling dummy tactical nukes the size of garbage cans, arming them, and then driving away. Years later, my father learned that the point of these tiny bombs was to collapse the historically navigable mountain passes of Europe in the event that Soviets heading West in their tanks might want to use them.

He never so much as saw the bomb he had learned to detonate or a mountain pass he was meant to destroy. The tanks never came that far West.

Above Medina Jabal Town, National Training Center, Fort Irwin, CA, 2009

These photos of Medina Jabal Town are from a stage set meant for soldiers who would depart for a not at all hypothetical war. And these portraits, like cast photos from opening night, play portraiture against itself. They’re in costume, but are they in character? (Beckett says she asks them questions about their role as she takes portraits.) This color-blind casting? Does it train or untrain the eye and the mind? Will it go on or will it be a curiosity of this particular war?

Or they could be from a photo shoot in National Geographic, even the famous June 1985 issue from the anti-Soviet Afghan war. The issue whose cover was graced with the image of the then unknown green-eyed girl, a Pashtun refugee. So this could be a photo essay about a little village in a California desert, a village that never was. Insurgents who go home at the end of the night and hang up their headdresses and simply cease to be.

Shia Mosque Interior, Medina Wasl Village, 2008

While my wife and I were in Hartford, looking at Claire Beckett’s photographs, a father and son came in together. They struck me as a family separated by a divorce, on a weekend visitation outing to the museum. Or perhaps I was wrong.

The flyer for the show says that we immediately notice that something looks surprising, whether we want to admit it or not, as we examine these blond, blue-eyed insurgents, these under-detailed Arabic cityscape-sets. On some level, we all have our conditioned expectations. This man didn’t notice.

From the boy’s murmured questions and the father’s answers, it became apparent that, not reading the labels, the father hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t looking at Iraq and that these very Anglo “terrorists” weren’t actual enemies. They were walking slowly from photo to photo and it was easy to keep fairly close. What seemed odd at first glance, disorienting to me, he assimilated without a bump. This was reality.

Civilian Krista Galyean Playing the Role of An American Marine Injured in a IED Blast, Wadi Al-Sahara, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, CA, 2008

Seeing the fake blood but not seeing that it was fake, he shielded and steered his son past Civilian Krista Galyean Playing the Role of an American Marine Injured in a IED Blast, Wadi Al-Sahara, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, CA, 2008.

With her stage-makeup IED amputation and streaks of stage grime on an otherwise clean face and wearing neatly pressed fatigues, she seemed clearly recognizable as something other than what she was pretending to be. But no, he didn’t want his son to see this violence. I listened long enough to be sure that I wasn’t misunderstanding. They left the gallery without the switchover ever happening.

If there is a point to this last anecdote, it’s certainly not anything about the intelligence of these two museum visitors, but instead just our unquestioning relationship to what we’re shown, that the eye is not so sharp as essays about art and looking and cognition would sometimes have it. The photos weren’t even CGI. Was that why the man took it for granted they were real?

I thought then of the safety of the uncanny valley, in which we still cannot be fooled. We’ll leave that behind soon enough. We do not see so well as we could hope.

Images courtesy of the artist and Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston.

Drew Johnson is a writer living in Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper's, Five Chapters, The Cupboard, VQR, and elsewhere.

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They commute with guns. A lot of Israeli soldiers live at home while they do their mandatory service, and, like me, they take the bus to work every day. I’m a student so for me that means carrying four different translations of the Qumran wisdom texts to the university campus. They carry what I think are semi-automatics. We all take the bus together. There is a language to the army uniform that I cannot read. If you know these things, you can tell what part of the armed forces someone is in by the color of his or her beret. The red ones seem tough, I know that. The uniforms themselves are different colors too: a standard green, a nappy white, a khaki. The grey-blue ones tend to have broad shoulders and handguns tucked into their pants. It took me a long time to realize they had holsters under their trousers: I thought the guns were being held in by their underwear elastics, and could fall any moment. From this information, a literate person lays the bones of their expectations for the soldier they see, if she sees them at all. I think most people don’t even notice them. One thing I cannot get used to in Israel is a kind of suspension of horror: that the mechanisms of danger and violence are laid bare and become mundane. Through what I'll call a willful innocence, this is something I resist fully. I notice every soldier, every gun. Guns they tote indifferently on the bus, in the mall, getting ice cream, at the beach. Obviously they can't spend several consecutive years (required service is two for young women, three for men) having anxiety attacks about whether or not it’s emotionally damaging to develop a familiar relationship with weapons. Luckily for them, they have me to do that.

The exception to the soldiers’ invisibility is during a series of memorials, which occur in Israel over a period of two weeks. First is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is a day of ceremonies: candles are lit, and you will hear testimony from the dwindling population of survivors. This year it was on April 7 (holidays here are kept by the lunar Jewish calendar). It is marked by a one-minute siren at ten A.M. For a memorial siren, everyone stands. No matter where you are, you stop and stand. The entire country has this really effective PA system. It reminds me of that scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before Earth is bulldozed, when every physical object becomes a transmitter. The memorial siren is similar to the siren that sounds when there are rockets falling but it is one single tone instead of a falling and rising pitch. This is so that if rockets fall during the siren, you know to seek cover.

A week later is Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day; this year on April 15. It is in remembrance of Israelis who have died in war and terror attacks. The year’s dead are added to a list. The day starts the evening prior (in accordance with the Jewish calendar), marked with a two-minute siren. At this point, the entire nation gives itself forty-eight hours to focus on the soldiers. The TV stations play a continuous loop of short documentaries on the lives of the dead—heartwrenching tributes with interviews and blurry home-videos. The radio stations play only sad, traditional music. At 11 A.M. on the day-of, there is a second two-minute siren. There are ceremonies that evening and, at the end of the memorials, Yom HaAtzmaut (Israel Independence Day) begins immediately: whiplashing the nation into July Fourth mode. Opinions on this model, and the sudden change in attitude (grievance to celebration) are mixed in Israel.

My friend just left the army, after six years of service. He asked that I call him Ido instead of using his real name, and who am I to argue. So: Ido. This was Ido’s first post-army Yom HaZikaron. He said this year he was in his car, driving, when he realized the siren would go momentarily. Perhaps they said something on the radio. He pulled over, with every other car on the road, got out, and stood by his car, with the door open. He probably ended up in a Reuters photograph. He said it was strange to be in civilian clothes, to be a civilian, on that day. When you are a soldier, everyone looks at you on Yom HaZikaron: you are at the center of something that now he felt slightly peripheral to. In the past, during the siren, he has raised his hand in salute (a gesture exclusive to officers during the siren); this year he has stood with his hands folded by his car. I asked where he would look (I was never sure where to look during the sirens) in those days. “At the flag,” he said.

I was waiting for my friend Max at a Yom HaZikaron ceremony for fallen soldiers. I had taken a bus to his hometown. On the bus ride over, the first of the two sirens sounded. While Ido was standing by the side of the road, I was standing in a bus. I wasn’t sure if we should get off the bus after it pulled over, which I then realized was silly: you can stand in the bus. Once I got to the ceremony—a cordoned off street block alongside a large green in front of an angular white building—I waited for Max. The crowd was about half soldiers: anyone actively in the service is in uniform (of course, almost the entire country is in reserves). I’ve written about Max before: he is an intelligence officer who does some kind of fieldwork which I have tended to imagine as a jaunty espionage novel of turning sources over endless cups of strong coffee. His job means that Max doesn’t often wear a uniform (which I suppose means, in a way, that he’s always in uniform). Looking around at everyone in green and white and khaki and grey-blue, I wondered if I would even recognize him in the crowd. Fortunately, when your friend is in intelligence, he finds you, and Max tapped me on the shoulder. He seemed a lot taller than I remembered. And he had a gun. Why didn’t I even consider that he would have a gun? I said “HI!” very, very loudly. Then said “SORRY!” even louder. In my memory, the gun is as big as I am. Most of the junior soldiers here carry these kind of beat-up semi-automatics that look like they fell off a Soviet truck. His was more an army-reserves-at-the-Port-Authority affair. There may have been another gun somewhere—one of the underwear elastic handguns—but I could only look at him from the corner of my eye. I couldn’t look straight at him. I think he had one of the red berets, but I can't say for sure. I could ask him right now, but I won’t. He was like some sacred object, some distant planet swimming out of my keen (sorry, Keats).

The ceremony was huge, thousands of people facing a stage, the proceedings of which were projected onto the smooth white stones of the building behind it. The laying of wreaths was punctuated by the names and photographs of the dead: the number I found online said 22,684 since the 1860. The pictures flash on screen in chronological order starting with date of death—first blurry black and white shots of teenagers, thin smiling kibbutz types, then as the photographs become more recent, men and women in uniform, smiling middle aged women who died in bus explosions, generals holding their children. The picture is on screen for only an instant, each name is said aloud; it is a recording. On the screen next to the picture is information in Hebrew I cannot read, but one number I can: it is their age when they died. 26, 22, 37, 19, 55, 19, 19. You look at the photographs, and repeat the names, trying to imprint them. What were they thinking when the photographs were taken? Did they imagine they would be flashing across a screen every year, year after year? Is this what soldiers think now, when they pose for photographs with their mothers after being sworn into the service? I am aware of theories that consider each photograph the site of our own death: a historical moment that becomes, in effect, a memento mori. Tonight, these theories fall short. The ceremony also screened short documentaries of the lives of the dead—home videos of bar and bat mitzvas, boys lip synching to music we cannot hear with mops on their heads. News footage of tanks from the wars they died in, all flashing on the building in front of us. Then a family would be escorted by soldiers to the stage, and a lay wreath. This building, I suddenly know, was designed for this: to be the surface on which the faces of the dead are projected, year after year; the names read aloud are recorded, each year new ones added to the tape. All so that I could stand here on this night, next to a young man I cannot face, and stare at my hands. On the way to Max’s ceremony my bus had passed a military cemetery. “We are here because they are there,” said the woman next to me. Then she showed me pictures of her son, who is a semi-professional tennis player beginning his army service this summer. Not all people share this women’s mentality. Ido, now studying to be an architect, tells me the attitude is shifting away from thinking of war dead as a “necessary sacrifice” to an atrocious reality. Regardless of the gloss, this country has a narrative apparatus set up to contextualize really, really horrible things. And if that sounds weird to you, consider that 2,201 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan since 2001, that 4,486 died in Iraq, and that I cannot name one of them; consider that I have no idea when or how I will grieve for the four who died at Boston.

I did not do so well at my first memorial ceremony. The plan was to briefly and sincerely thank Max for his service, give him a hug, and not cry. That seemed like a pretty reasonable set of expectations: to not let my feelings make other people uncomfortable. Only, I felt nothing. Hovering somewhere around my own forehead, I watched my own hands from different angles, obsessing over what was the most respectful way to fold them. This might be called dissociating. I wonder if this is how the soldiers on the bus feel. I tried not to stare at a uniformed soldier and his girlfriend standing in front of me. She leaned up against him casually, and when she did, the end of his gun (the musket? the barrel?) pressed into the back of her knee. She didn’t seem to notice. I don’t say much of anything to Max. After the ceremony, his friends sit around a backyard table for beers, and I compulsively recount the plot of the Epic of Gilgamesh, much to my own horror.

Later, when I get home, all the hands in my head suddenly disappear and snap back in. I remember the plan: the thank you, the hug. At least I didn’t cry, and I wonder when I will. Once, Max took me biking with his younger sister in the south. She and I followed the path he cut, which I think might have actually been a burden for him—to be the object of defacto deference. But what else could we do? We were biking in an area near his grandmother’s kibbutz, a few kilometers from Gaza. He led us through a fallow field, right through it. The ground was thick, heavy, and red. In Hebrew, the words “ground,” “red,” and “Adam” (the personal name, which also can be used to mean humankind) all share the same root. So in Hebrew, what I just wrote could be said with all kinds of Biblical resonance. But in English it just means that we were all struggling to keep our bikes moving, as our tires sunk into the soft earth. Max kept moving forward and his sister and I struggled behind. Sometimes I would pause and wait for her. I would lean against my bike, watching Max bob steadily forward, his shoulder blades cutting back and forth, back and forth.

The entire country has a kind of predatory reverence toward the young male body. I run along the ocean here, and all the fit young adonim run in loincloth mini shorts. In well-lit lots they park their motorbikes and strip their shirts to practice some kind of rhythmic martial arts under a street lamp. Legs and arms swoop in a steady dance, a code I cannot crack of mutual power, agression, and respect. In a no-man’s land near the beach, an old homeless man shadowboxes with a stop sign while his dealer, a bald man in a turtleneck, looks on smoking. Bataille would say that the sacrificial victim must be set apart, must be honored. I don’t know whom I hate more: him for writing it or me for repeating it.

The day after the ceremony, I take the train to my roommate’s kibbutz. Her name is Sarai. I haven’t cried yet, which puts me on edge. The Independence Day parties begin at sundown—mourning will be over; it will be time to celebrate. I am running out of time. Sarai and I are arguing with the ticket salesman about my student card when the siren goes off, and I dropped my bags and my wallet all at once, change rolling everywhere. The siren sends a funny chill that resides only in your spine. As if the feeling were there all along, and the siren merely awoke it. Then we pick up our bags and go wait for our train. Sarai’s kibbutz is kind of north-central Israel, where the country goes wasp-waisted. I go running through the kibbutz’s avocado orchards. I run along the barbed wire fence that separates the kibbutz farmland from the next-door Arab village, which has a stunning gold-domed mosque. A butterfly flies through the barbed wire, and I actually roll my eyes because I think this day has been imbued with enough symbolism, thank you very much. I keep running, and pass an area cordoned off by electric fence, where two cow carcasses lie. I feel that I am running through the elements of my own dreamwork, but I refuse to narrate them. “I hate you,” I say to the sky. I run into the kibbutz wheatfields. I am running too fast. I have been told to stay on a path that is free of snakes. Instead I am running along the thin strip left by whatever machine cuts across the wheatfields. The short stalks are sharp, and cut at my legs. My cell phone service cuts out, and I am completely alone. If there were anyone behind me, he would see the flash of my white t-shirt cutting across the trembling gold. There is a feeling when you run too fast that your own mind is trying to lift out of your body, and keeps getting crammed back in. I run for that feeling, until each breath is a question I am answering, until I reach another electric fence and stop, drooping to pant. All around me is blue and gold, all around me is land that somebody loves. Across the barbed wire are homes of Arab families, a beautiful village of whites and oranges. Homes with dogs and toasters. More butterflies go back and forth, shamelessly, begging to be written. “Fuck you,” I say again. I have no solution. I used to think that huge human loss was the result of a bad decision. I have no idea, anymore, what the difference is between necessary and pointless sacrifice. I do not know what it took to grow this wheatfield. I am finding that I am scared to know, to see, what is required for me to walk through this wheatfield. The field in which I am now kneeling, forehead touching the earth, sobbing so hard, so ugly-sounding that it shakes my whole body. I do not know who gave me the freedom to spend my whole entire life looking for my self(ves) while some people die at war—in a world where whether we see it or not war lives alongside us, next to us, in us—before even getting the chance to start. But I know that each life, each human life, is equally sacred, which is why any of us can be sacred. That is the bargain: we all have to be worth the same. And right now my little flame is buckling under the weight of my cries which at this point come from somewhere so deep inside that I begin to heave and then to actually vomit. Convulsing on all fours, I hear in my head again and again that line of Randall Jarrell, “loosed from its dream of life.” I also hear my name. “Becca?”

No, I really do hear my name. My phone has called Max. Which means, as far as the person on the other end is concerned, I have called. He is on speakerphone, and his voice comes up from the broken wheat where my phone is lying.

I think I am dreaming. It is most likely I am dreaming. Butterflies continue to cross from one side of barbed wire to another. My legs are bleeding. Nearby the cows are rotting. I am under a blue sky in golden fields grown from red earth. I slowly hang up the phone. Then I throw up a little more. I laugh a little now, and remind the butterflies to go fuck themselves. Then I get up and run back through the fields.

Rebecca Sacks is an MA candidate in the Jewish Studies program at Tel Aviv University. She previously lived in Brooklyn, New York.

At the worst possible moment, Battlefield Hardline valorizes police violence.

An early screenshot of Battlefield Hardline.

The Battlefield series, one of the past decade’s most popular video-game franchises, has already given gamers the chance to play as soldiers in World War II, Vietnam, and the Middle East. Now Battlefield Hardline, slated for release early next year, allows players to assume the role of a new kind of soldier: the police officer. A recent preview of the game shows a cop throwing a thief to the ground and cuffing him; the player is given the option to Hold E to Interrogate. The officer yells, “Tell me what you know!” and earns fifty points: Interrogation successful.

To Visceral Games, who developed Battlefield Hardline, the roles of soldiers and cops are so interchangeable that Army camo can simply be “re-skinned” into police uniforms. In light of the killings, riots, fear, and unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, the game raises disquieting questions about the relationship between law enforcement and citizens—in short, it’s a horror to watch.

As a cop in Hardline, you’re tasked with preventing robberies and rescuing hostages, which often means shooting all the criminals until they’re dead. (The gentlest thing you can do is arrest them.) The game also enables players to take the role of the criminals, and perhaps the more troubling aspect of Hardline is that this experience is identical to playing as the police: both “the good guys” and “the bad guys” see the world through crosshairs. The best players shoot first, and shoot from behind.

“In multiplayer, the world is simple,” reads the game’s website. “You’re on one side of the law or the other.” This sort of tone-deafness permeates the game and its marketing. Given recent events, one might expect the hype around Battlefield Hardline to have gone quiet; instead, it’s becoming increasingly prevalent. On August 13, four days after police shot Michael Brown, Visceral Games released a twelve-minute trailer showing off a chunk of the game’s single-player campaign. The video opens as the main character—seemingly an undercover cop—is carted off by a guy in a bucket hat who points his pistol at your black partner and says, “Race is not a factor here. My dislike of you is strictly personal.” Even when Hardline is being self-aware, it’s tasteless.

Throughout the preview, a voice-over from the game’s creative director, Ian Milham, explains that you can complete levels one of two ways. The “stealth approach” allows you to sneak up on bad guys and arrest them. For each one you put in cuffs, you collect money—a bounty—that you can use to buy better weapons later. A less patient player can simply go in with guns blazing, shooting with impunity. Simply put: as a cop in Hardline, you have the choice of killing people or not. The decision is entirely dependent on your mood. The extent to which this varies from practice in the U.S., where police officers are ostensibly only permitted the use of deadly force as a last resort, is debatable.

I e-mailed Visceral Games to ask about the ethical predicaments that Hardline presents, but received no reply. When Hardline’s creators talk about the game, they do so with juvenile enthusiasm. Speaking to the video game site Polygon, Battlefield Hardline’s executive producer, Steve Papoutsis, explained that the inspiration for the game was all the “cool, kick-ass stuff” law enforcement has:

They’ve got cool motorcycles. And they’ve got helicopters. They even have police planes … And then like SWAT guys. Come on, who doesn’t like all the stuff SWAT guys load up in? They look pretty sweet.

Similarly, almost all of the writing about Hardline from video game outlets has shown blithe eagerness for the game’s urban setting. Polygon is perhaps the only major publication to criticize Hardline’s troubling themes, but even that comes after glowing preview articles with titles like “Is Battlefield Hardline the next eSports darling?”

If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shaken the country’s view of the military, if the rising number of school shootings has made us rethink our relationship to guns, none of these concerns have affected the robust sales of first-person shooters. In fact, as political and personal cognizance of violence has become more relevant, shooters have become more realistic, more violent, and more popular. The genre by itself has become a billion-dollar business, advancing by technological leaps and bounds each year.

Are first-person shooters popular because they’re in demand or only because they’re being developed? In an interview with NPR’s All Tech Considered about video game violence, Ken Levine, the creator of a sci-fi series called BioShock, explained that game publishers are more willing to fund shooters because they’re easy to market. “A shooter answers a lot of questions for you: the main mechanic is you have this gun, you have weapons, you have enemies, you have conflict coming at you,” he said.

The correlation between violence in entertainment and reality remains unclear at best, but it’s clear that games have an influence on American youth—it was just over a decade ago that the U.S. military developed America’s Army, a free online shooter that depicted ground warfare more accurately than comparable games. It was developed for seven and a half million dollars—just one-third of a percent of the Army’s annual marketing budget—and is considered one of the most successful recruiting efforts ever.

Last November, Maria Konnikova explored the reasons why first-person shooters are so popular in a piece for The New Yorker. “First-person shooters put our ability to control the environment, and our perception of our effectiveness, at the forefront of play,” she wrote. The irony that law enforcement appear to have neither control nor effectiveness in Ferguson appears to be lost on the 600,000 people who, as of this writing, have watched the Battlefield Hardline preview on YouTube since it was released.

Since 2002, when the Battlefield series was introduced, every major American conflict has been dramatized in an iteration of the game. Law enforcement seems like the natural next step. But it’s one thing to lionize the military; it’s another to advocate that the police is the military. The tragedies in Ferguson have renewed interest in the militarization of American law enforcement. As Jay Caspian Kang asked in The New Yorker last week, “Have we also become anesthetized to images of police in armored vehicles and full military gear?”

Battlefield Hardline implies that the answer is a resounding yes. The tagline on the game’s website reads, “Live out your fantasy of being a cop and criminal.” Note that conjunction: and, not or. In Hardline’s universe, the two aren’t mutually exclusive—perhaps the most subversive and intelligent point it’s likely to make.

Kevin Nguyen (@knguyen) is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.

Hemingway with Lanham on September 18, 1944, after the breakthrough of the Siegfried Line in Western Germany.

From Ernest Hemingway’s letter to Colonel Charles T. Lanham, April 2, 1945. Hemingway described Lanham as “the finest and bravest and most intelligent military commander I have known”; he did, in fact, go on to make general. Original spelling and punctuation retained.

Now I just feel homesick, lonely and useless. But will pull out of it. Because have to.

Also have cut out heavy drinking … and since Liquor is my best friend and severest critic I miss it. Also have explained to my old girls there is nothing doing—and this light drinking, righteous Life isn’t comparable to always haveing at least two bottles of Perrier Jouet in the ice bucket and the old Kraut Marlene [Dietrich] always ready to come in and sit with you while you shave […]

Am so glad you are happy where you are. Hope the [general’s] star comes through quickly and then that you have a Division. Am very selfish in this because figure once you have a Division there will be that liquor ration and I will come and drink it for you (thus saveing you from any possibility of rummy-hood) and I can run errands and do any odd jobs the Geneva Convention authorizes such as entertaining Gen. Rodwell when he calls (I’ll have my own trailer) and all the time will be working on my new Great Book YOU TOO CAN BE A GENERAL with all its exhaustive studies in Rummyhood and Its Effect on the General. Bourbon or Scotch—Their Effect on the General. Map Reading For Generals. Security or Sleep—A Problem In Generalship. Hormones For The General—Their Use and Abuse. All this time I will be giveing you my almost pathetic devotion with one hand and booby trapping your trailer with the other. It is the only career I really look forward to. So don’t just bog down in your military career because we ought to get started.

At the table with James Salter.

Salter in 1989. Photo: Sally Gall

“To revisit the past was like constantly crossing some Bergschrund,” James Salter writes in the introduction to his 1997 memoir, “a deep chasm between what my life had been before I changed it completely and what it was afterwards.” As it did through his life, an ineludible divide runs through Salter’s work. The same man who gave us great novels and stories of sport, of war and deprivation, produced some of the twentieth century’s most sumptuous meditations on domestic life, on the rituals at the heart of bonding. To read him in both modes is to pace the fullness of Salter’s emotional life—it is akin to entering a room full of people after completing some feat of endurance, a vow of silence or a rigorous fast, and trying to hear every word. What unites Salter’s oeuvre—more than his triumphs of style, the peculiar manipulations of perspective, and the verbless descriptive clauses—is his preoccupation with meals and all that they represent, all they can give and all they can take away.

In 1957, with his first book already published, Salter left the Air Force to become the novelist that he knew he was. As his identity was transformed—from fighter pilot to fiction writer, from that of struggle within the military complex to the isolation he encountered outside of it—so were his novels and stories. Food’s role in them increasingly became a metric for the emotional lives of his characters, who were either driven by the rejection of home or by some elaborate performance that kept the idea of home intact. The dinner table, Salter understood, was the perfect stage for the frailty of our relationships—how we present ourselves to others, how crucial to our sense of self are the recollections of the friends who saw us become the people we were. A much-cited quotation from Light Years perhaps most perfectly encapsulates his feelings about life in the air as a pilot and on the ground as a family man: “Life is weather. Life is meals.” 

In 2006, with his wife Kay, James Salter published Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days. It’s a book that defies classification, jumping from historical anecdote to cherished recipe to childhood memory without warning or apology, as the conversation at the best dinner party often does. It’s as warm as it is biting, as full of tenderness for the people who populated the couple’s parties as it is cruel toward those who detracted from otherwise perfect brunches or suppers. We watch Alice Waters, having been snubbed by a French maître d’, composing some very elegant hate mail. We hear the literary agent Irving Lazar phoning room service, requesting a very unappetizing meal (“a soft-boiled egg, not completely cooked, a little mucous-y on top … ”), and, upon hearing the hotel is “not equipped to do that,” replying, “You were yesterday.” These stories are punch lines, anecdotes to be told to company; they are meant to reinforce a bond, to reward those with taste and wit.

Salter’s appreciation of all things epicurean—as well as his Schadenfreude regarding gaffes in etiquette—came in part from his own determined efforts to reach a certain level of sophistication. In his memoir, Burning the Days, he writes: “My first duck I tasted in the dining room of a silvery apartment off Fifth Avenue. Across from me, aware of nothing remarkable, sat my friend.” For teenage Salter, that meal, prepared by a hired cook and hosted by the platinum blonde mother of his childhood companion, became a hallowed goal, a place he might reach after he’d surpassed his middle-class upbringing in a small family. He often mourned how little he knew of his ancestors. “It is the men without roots,” he writes of his heritage, paraphrasing a British aristocrat, “who are the real poor.”

As a young man, Salter grew convinced that these extravagant dinners represented the life he wanted, but he believed he needed to suffer first—“My life was too meager for me to know if I possessed it”—so, at his father’s exhortations, he tested into West Point. Meals there “were a constant terror,” an occasion during which one was expected to not only catch the glasses that upperclassmen hurled one’s way, but to treat these frangible missiles as if they’d been requested, calling out, as they flew, “Cup, please!”

Salter’s uneasiness in this masculine world did not fade. He famously composed his first novel, The Hunters (1956), while serving as a pilot in the Korean War, and though he was received by critics then as an heir to Hemingway, the book displayed a peculiar sensitivity that set it apart from the war novels of earlier decades; nowhere to be found in Salter is that inscrutable archetypical male, the one at whose feelings the reader can only guess. After a bland meal in a mess hall, the protagonist of The Hunters has “the feeling of Christmas away from home, stranded in a cheap hotel.” Other men in the book skip meals to sleep; they boast of breakfasts that are only “a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and a puke”—but behind their braggadocio is an awareness of the cost of their experience, of what’s been sacrificed to fly these planes: the world of romantic love, family, friendship unthreatened by the likelihood of sudden death, home-cooked supper. In The Arm of Flesh (1961), Salter’s second novel (revised and republished as Cassada in 2000) a weary flight captain mourns the chance for connection afforded by a long, comfortable meal:

There was suddenly a great deal Isbell wanted to say. They could have talked. They could have pushed their plates aside and leaned forward on their elbows, talking while the dust floated sideways through bolts of sunshine and the eggs turned cold, but it didn’t quite happen. The moments don’t fulfill themselves always. Somehow they started eating in silence and it was impossible to begin.

The publication of his second book seemed to give Salter the permission he needed to “possess” his life, and he left the armed forces to find a seat at another, more comfortable table.

The sixties were not the fertile decade he’d hoped for: his first two books had not brought outsize success, and his immersion in family life seemed to inspire in him a longing for anything else. When he’d chased glory, he’d craved peace—but his newfound quiet, it turned out, included few medals, and he felt largely unseen. In Korea he had flown with Ed White and Gus Grissom, whom he watched become some of our nation’s first astronauts. Salter, to support his children, tried his hand at selling pools, and he turned his gifted imagination on the prospect of suicide. A Sport and a Pastime (1967) seems a clear result of this transitory and disappointed period; the novel concerns a young man, Dean, who has abandoned his life in America, and his equally lost French lover, Anne-Marie. It unfolds almost exclusively in the hotels and restaurants of the south of France, places that require no commitments and offer comforts at a steep price.

Salter’s interest in the meal gained definition in Pastime; the outset of the liaison is marked by “a wonderful dinner. She is talkative and happy. The food seems spread around her like vegetables to a roast.” But the descriptions of “a dish piled high with ecrevisses, pale, salty,” and “a restaurant filled with the soft clatter of plates, a long dinner that seems almost a reminiscence they are so pleased” serve as proof of the relationship’s specious pantomime of connection. Anne-Marie, who was raised very poor, often doesn’t know how to eat these dishes, and Dean, whose French is limited, often cannot order them without embarrassment. His (borrowed) money runs out and they can no longer afford such luxuries; his money comes back and they spend it on an exorbitant prix-fixe affair, much too large, which Anne-Marie fails to finish despite Dean’s cold urging. In one of the book’s most telling moments, she “vomits up the whole meal at her feet, frogs’ legs and oysters splashing onto the stones. He glances around and is relieved to find no one is watching.” The meal, Salter wants us to grasp, though seductive on the surface, is an event that can summon our lesser selves, extracting the truths we’ve resisted. Rich food and ambiance may deepen an existing happiness, but they can’t inspire contentment where there was none before.

From the first-edition cover of Light Years.

The year 1975 brought Light Years, widely considered Salter’s masterpiece, a prolonged reflection on all things prandial: the preparation and presentation of a meal, the way a shift in course moves conversation, the delicate science of seating arrangements, the praise (both sincere and hollow) that home cooking inspires. One of the book’s greatest achievements is its dynamic opening, narrated in a first-person plural that focuses our attention on the protagonists, Viri and Nedra Berland, and never appears again. (“We strolled in the garden, eating the small, bitter apples. The trees were dry and gnarled. The lights in the kitchen were on.”) The book’s first fifteen pages comprise a dinner party, convincing us of the Berlands’ magnetism, connection, and generosity:

Country dinners, the table dense with glasses, flowers, all the food one could eat, dinners ending in tobacco smoke, a feeling of ease. Leisurely dinners. The conversation never lapses. Their life is special, devout …

But the moment Salter has invited us in, he carries us right out, into the departing car of the Berlands’ dinner guests. Of Nedra, a character remarks, “ ‘She’s the most selfish woman on earth.’ ”

The rest of the novel follows this pattern, shaping our understanding then reversing it, presenting a portrait of a marriage by turns intimate and duplicitous. Viri and Nedra routinely sleep with other people—usually guests at their table—which seems, for a time, to bring them closer, as though the external fulfillment of lust leaves their attachment stronger. Even as their union crumbles, their need to entertain persists; we watch them bicker about the seasonal appropriateness of gazpacho, eat “chocolate and pears,” just-picked green tomatoes, “cheese, bread, cucumbers, butter and wine.” Neither, after the divorce, successfully establishes a new life, instead pursuing trips they had never managed to take together, eating alone in European cafés. The view widens and we watch their daughters become people with careers and sex lives. Though Salter could imbue any moment with a lachrymose, sonorous quality, he knew how to wield that power; he knew when the absence of intensity gave more than the presence. The last time we see Nedra alive, ill and living in a rented farm shed, she says only, “We should really go out to dinner once or twice … There’s a Greek place run by two brothers that isn’t bad. We can have moussaka.” How peculiar, Salter seems to posit, that this type of fleeting gratification should be what we think of in our last days. Life is meals, indeed, and they vanish from our plates all too quickly.

Salter scrawled title ideas for Light Years on a napkin. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.

Though ultimately Salter furnished himself with a comfortable life, he never fully relinquished the idea that going without was what taught us most. He spent the second half of his career writing alternately about those who refuse to make a home and those consumed by it. Solo Faces (1979) chronicles the itinerant life of a renowned rock climber, Rand, whose inveterate need to abandon places and people causes others great pain, and who is said, at the close of the novel, to have, “ … somehow succeeded. He had found the great river. He was gone.” Nine of ten stories in Salter’s 2005 collection, Last Night, deal with the consequences of a meal, sometimes one finished years before. A spurned girlfriend surfaces decades later, still angry, to ask, “Whatever happened to that picture of us taken at that lunch Diana Wald gave at her mother’s house that day? … Do you still have that?”

The eighty-one-year-old James Salter who cowrote an eccentric treatise on the meal seemed, by all accounts, to have reconciled the former iterations of himself with the current, final model. He had finally become the person he wanted to be: one who he could write with authority about which cheese to pair with which fruit, and with humor about the AT-6 plane he had once flown right into a family’s kitchen in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A section on etiquette in Life Is Meals lists eight criteria, the last of which leave us a broad picture of Salter, an artist forever negotiating the distance between our interior lives and those we contrive to share:

—The ultimate courtesy is to make guests feel comfortable in whatever they are doing.
—There are occasions when etiquette is pitched overboard. Then it is every man for himself.

In the spring of 2013, James Salter published his last novel, All That Is. One evening in May, I was lucky enough to stand in a small anteroom where a group of twenty people would receive him after a much-anticipated reading and talk. A table ran the floor toward the windows, through which the offices of midtown Manhattan could be seen going dark. Almost no one touched the herbed cheeses or the wet grapes or the speared shrimp, though most held up a glass of wine, and the talk was quiet as we waited, even the introductions made in the tone of apologies. Then all the shoulders in the room began to rotate, and there he was in the doorframe, his suit cataract blue and his hair not quite tamed. He held up his hands to greet a friend in a gesture like that of someone demonstrating the size of a caught fish, and he cycled around the table like that, popping cubes of cheese into his mouth, slipping his arm around the back of one person while he spoke to another, saying “Pardon?,” gesturing with toothpicks at women across the meat platters, moving all the parts of his face as he spoke or laughed. All the white wine was gone, someone said, and the red was going fast. Then something crucial changed, but it took a while for the information to pass through the crowd, through the conversations that had gained warmth and momentum. Though his presence had been the reason for our gathering there, his exit went almost unnoticed, so completely had he changed the room.

Kathleen Alcott is the author of two novels, Infinite Home and The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets.

In 2014, I heard Solmaz Sharif read “Look,” the title poem from her debut collection. Look inserts military terminology into intimate scenes between lovers, refashioning hollow, bureaucratic language from the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms with a human touch. (Even the collection’s title has an alternate military meaning: per the Department of Defense, a look means “a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of influence.”) At a time when the U.S. automates acts of murder, Sharif insists that war is still personal—perhaps today more than ever. In one of its most quoted passages, she writes, “Daily I sit / with the language / they’ve made / of our language / to NEUTRALIZE / the CAPABILITY OF LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS / like you.” 

“By simply placing words from the Defense dictionary in small caps, and deploying them in scenes of intimacy,” John Freeman wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Sharif has begun the process of renaturing them, putting them in the readers’ hands for examination.” Look confirms what I’ve known since 2014: Sharif is poised to influence not only literature but larger conversations about America, war, and the Middle East. I spoke with her about her influences, the role of the poet in today’s world, and the stories behind Look.

INTERVIEWER

In an essay you wrote for the Kenyon Review, you said, “When I am asked to describe my poetry on airplane flights, at dinner parties, I describe it first as ‘political.’ Then, ‘documentary.’ And these two things seem to, for some, preclude aesthetic rigor.” There’s a popular conception that overtly political can’t have aesthetic value—that a political message degrades the aesthetics. Is your work a deliberate effort to rebut this notion? 

SHARIF

Clichéd, bad writing often means clichéd, bad politics, and vice versa. Aesthetics and politics have a really vital and exciting give-and-take between them. I think June Jordan is an exciting example. She was politically astute and radical, but she was also a classically trained pianist, so when you’re reading her work, it’s incredibly music driven and decided. It’s exciting for me to think of poets that are allowing their politics to also be shaped by these aesthetic considerations, and wondering when the poetic will lead you to the kind of political surprise that a dogmatic approach wouldn’t allow. These are the artists that live on the fringes of what is aesthetically and politically accepted.

When I say “living on the fringes,” I’m thinking of Edward Said’s idea of the “exilic” intellectual pursuit. It’s this artistic presence continually outside, questioning and speaking back to whatever supposed “here” or “we” or “now” we’ve created. The word fringe is belittling in a way I don’t intend—I mean a nomadic presence, or a mind that is consistently on the run, and preventing these political moments from calcifying.

INTERVIEWER

I’m interested in how your family came to the United States, and how you experienced the country as an Iranian immigrant.

SHARIF

The dominant narrative of Iranian exile or displacement in the U.S. is one that’s about people who were supporters of the Shah, who was a dictator, and were forced to leave after the Shah was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution. That’s not the only narrative, though. My parents were students in the U.S. in the late seventies, and as the revolution picked up steam, they went back home to Iran, and left again in 1983, and I was born en route out of the country. We moved to Texas so my dad could finish his studies there, and then we moved to Birmingham, Alabama, so my mom could finish her Bachelor’s there, and finally we ended up in Los Angeles when I was in sixth grade. It was the first place I lived that had a sizable Iranian population. There’s actually an Iranian population in Birmingham, but LA has the largest outside of Iran. At that time, it felt dominated by upper-class, well-to-do Iranians who were more into assimilation than my family or I was. I felt immediately ostracized by this group in middle school, when I came. I don’t mean to make it sound like everyone was rich—they weren’t. We weren’t. There are many different Iranian presences in Los Angeles, but I just didn’t have access to them.

No matter where I went, I was outside of whatever community I found myself in, so that even when I arrived in a place where there was a lot of “me,” I was totally outside again. That probably influenced my artistic impulse—to go back to the exilic intellectual—to stand outside of and look into, and constantly question and interrogate the collectives that exist. It’s easy for me because I’ve never felt a part of any of them in a real way.

It’s been important for me to write down as many narratives as I can, other narratives around the Iranian Revolution and the Iranian presence in the U.S., and also the possibility for Iranians to build coalitions with other Third World groups, as Iranians did in the seventies and eighties. That’s the community I come out of. There’s also a rift that happens between first and second generations, because the second generation has woken up to the fact that assimilation is not just a matter of your accent or class or education—there’s an “in” that you’ll never be in because of who you are.

There’s a lot of anti-Black, anti-Arab, anti-Indian, and anti-Pakistani—and on and on—racism within the Iranian community. But my experience is one of obvious allyship between these communities. I’m more interested in what brings us together and what our nearnesses are, but this can sort of dumbfound some members of the Iranian community. When I was sixteen, I went to this Iranian feminist conference, and Angela Davis was the key speaker. She referred to us all there as “women of color,” and some of the women in the older generation were squirming in their seats. It was the first time I’d heard the term, and I thought, that’s it. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to name. Whatever struggle is deemed optional or needs to be postponed, that’s my community. But that statement didn’t make too many people happy at the time.

INTERVIEWER

Look, to me, has a very female point of view. Women’s relationship to combat—though it’s changing with the evolution of war itself—is usually more oblique. We often play more supportive roles, though our experience is no less devastating. Is there significance to approaching war and surveillance as a woman?

SHARIF

Before I was even a poet, when I studied sociology, what I wanted to look at were media representations of women—Palestinian women in the New York Times, for example. How are women described by media, or by state-sponsored language, in warfare, and how is that representation used to justify state-sponsored violence? Women are often purposefully brought into descriptions of what war is—to justify the rescue of a nation, or to justify its decimation by showing its entire people as despicable or threatening, for example. By default, war seems to be just what happens to men on the front lines, during wartime. The boundaries of warfare—who it affects and who it doesn’t, and for how long—are very much divided along gendered lines, historically. I definitely wanted to challenge those lines.

INTERVIEWER

The book’s power is in its observations of the long-term effects of wars on individuals and families—some of its less-discussed casualties. I think part of the reason you’re able to take this view is because you’re a woman.

SHARIF

I think you’re right. There’s the old personal-is-political adage. But then, to be a woman is also to know that your body and your self and your mind are subject to and delimited by power at every turn, even in your own house, in your own lovemaking. There is no part of your life that has not been somehow violently decided for you by a narrative that was established before you were even born. This is not only true for women, right? It cuts across various identity strata—queerness, race, class, ability, et cetera.

But to have that sense of precarity or vulnerability questioned and challenged by misdirection—for example, when you’re told that you’re overreacting, that what you think is going on isn’t actually happening—this is how the U.S. largely deals with warfare. They say, The war is no longer happening on this block, what are you talking about? That’s something that’s natural to my experience as a woman, and something that seems necessary to expose over and over again. I want to talk about how far-reaching these effects are and how intimate these effects are and how there’s no part of our bodies or desires that are not somehow informed or violated by these atrocities. This is a conversation that began with my own gender.

Audre Lorde’s essay on erotics was a huge influence on me. When she talks about the erotic as a dark feminine power, that’s an argument that could be made here, but I’m not as comfortable making that argument myself anymore. I think all of these questions—what is femininity, what is darkness—and I’m so up in the air about them myself that I don’t really know what to say, other than that I feel, as a person and especially as a woman, that I am under constant threat and attack, and it’s not just me that’s happening to. Somehow, I want the work to show that every time you’re washing the dishes, every shower, every grocery trip—that’s all informed by this violence, whether we’re seeing it or not.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a constant awareness of surveillance in your work—in one poem, you mention that you start every phone call by saying, “Hello, NSA.”

SHARIF

The U.S.’s surveillance capabilities are not lost on me, and we’re pretty aware of this history—or maybe we’re not, actually. It’s definitely been in my awareness over the course of writing this book, and it’s something I did want to highlight. When we think of political repression, for example, or of a police state, we think of something that just happens abroad in Eastern European countries, or in Iran, whereas I understand America as the nation of COINTELPRO. How do we realize, again, that all of our lives, no matter who we are, are being surveilled, some more than others, and that we’re living in an increasingly repressive environment? How do we realize that whatever we see to be happening “there” has already happened “here”?

INTERVIEWER

The poems in Look are united thematically—the majority of these poems include rewritings of terms from the Department of Defense dictionary. I find this kind of conceptual project very interesting. Did you set out to write your first book in this way, or did it morph over the course of writing?

SHARIF

It became much larger than I anticipated, and I had to just stop it, basically, because it’s a conceptual frame that could continue ad infinitum, which is true of a lot of conceptual practices. I did not know it was going to be what it is. I discovered the dictionary in 2006, and it was another year or two until I actually started using it. I thought I was just going to write one poem that deals with the dictionary—then I realized I could write a whole book in response. As soon as I realized that, I started looking at other books that do similar work. M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! was a huge influence. That came in a later iteration of the manuscript. Later, too, I was directed to Code Poems by Hannah Weiner. Earlier on, there was Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead. Martha Collins’s Blue Front invited and encouraged a more personal narrative. With each discovery, the manuscript would shift in response—I’d think, This has already been done, or, I haven’t tried this thing yet, I didn’t realize I could do this. It started as a rewrite of the dictionary, and wanting to redefine the terms to reveal the truth beneath the terms. It then evolved into revealing those terms as a part of our lives everywhere, daily in the U.S. I think the last major piece that went into it was the long elegy, “Personal Effects,” that I wrote for my uncle, and that was probably when I thought that it was pretty much done. That was the last major piece the book needed.

INTERVIEWER

I’ve seen you mention June Jordan over and over in interviews. I know that you studied in her Poetry for the People (P4P) program at UC Berkeley and list it as a huge influence in your development as a poet. I came across this quote from her—  

The task of a poet of color, a black poet, as a people hated and despised, is to rally the spirit of your folks … I have to get myself together and figure out an angle, a perspective, that is an offering, that other folks can use to pick themselves up, to rally and to continue or, even better, to jump higher, to reach more extensively in solidarity with even more varieties of people to accomplish something.

 Can you talk a little about the program and why it was so important to you? What do you think your role is, as a poet?

SHARIF

There’s this vein of self-affirmation that runs through that generation of radical poets—this need to define and affirm a collective identity that is otherwise despised. That’s actually one place where I feel I split off. Maybe it’s a generational thing, maybe it’s just because I think of poetry, right now, at least, in the way Dunya Mikhail, the Iraqi poet, described it—as diagnostic, rather than curative. I think June was a poet of vision, and I think that I’m more reflective. I haven’t quite gotten to that moment of vision yet. I just trust and know that certain lives need to be looked at very closely, and need to be grieved, and need to be considered—and affirmed, I guess.

The P4P program was the most rigorous education I’ve ever received. It’s an amazing pedagogical model that June Jordan set up after decades of teaching. My understanding is that she was teaching an African American poetry course in the African American Studies department at Berkeley, and a women’s poetry course in what was then the Women’s Studies department, and she’d walk into these classrooms, and one class would be predominantly African American men reading African American poets, and the women’s studies classroom was predominantly white women reading women poets separately. She thought, These two classes need to be in the same room, and they need to be talking to each other. That’s how she came up with P4P, which was housed in the African American Studies department.

Each year, the program would focus on three different ethnic groups that we would have to learn to somehow define and describe a history of. When I took the class, it was one of the few—if not the only—class that was teaching Arab and Arab American poetry on campus. She started doing that right after the first Gulf War started.

As a student, you were in a class that you’re co-teaching with other undergraduate students and members of the community. You see a poetry that’s not being taught, and that you yourself know zero about, and instead of just lamenting that you’ll never have the expertise, you just figure it out. You read as much as you can, and you get up in front of the class and give a lecture. Maybe you fail publicly, but it has to be done. When you see work that’s not being done, you go and you do it. You don’t wait for someone else to.

I haven’t really seen a model that is so pedagogically complete and radical anywhere. It was her attempt at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beloved Community.” It was the closest I’ve gotten, for sure.

INTERVIEWER

Jordan was all about building multicultural alliances. I wonder how you, as an Iranian American, interact with the various racial justice movements in America that—at least at the moment—are dominated by discussions of anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism.

SHARIF

I think we need to be very, very specific in naming the racism, the multiplicity of racisms, we face. Meaning anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism, for example, must be named and highlighted. This does not preclude my own involvement or visibility as an Iranian American, and I shouldn’t be the measure by which this conversation is had, anyway. I think the more specific we are, the more inevitable it becomes to see the relationship between various powers. If we are naming the arrest of black men without charge and without trial, for example, well, I have something to add to that, something that wouldn’t be added if the conversation remained “we all face racism.” The more specific we become, the more obvious the relationship between these oppressions, the more dangerous and visionary the conversation.

You ask about movements. I do want to step back for a moment and say I believe all action is political, and poetry is an action, so I believe poetry is political, period. I have a hard time, though, saying that my poetry is activist, or that poetry in general is activist. For me there’s an important distinction to be made. I don’t want to front. As political as my work might be, and as much as I might be thinking about how these things play out globally, as much as I might think or write about anti-Black or anti-Latinx racism, I haven’t been to a meeting in a long time. That’s the most direct way I can put it.

Zinzi Clemmons’s debut novel, What We Lose, is forthcoming from Viking. She currently serves as deputy editor for Phoneme Media, and lives in Los Angeles.

The post The Role of the Poet: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif appeared first on The Paris Review.

“Temple Tomb Fortress Ruin,” an exhibition of paintings by John Wellington, is at the Lodge Gallery through March 5. Wellington embraces the formal tactics of the old masters to depict a bleak, surreal, new world order—seemingly both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western—animated above all by a kind of perverted militarism. His work fixates, as his gallery writes, on “lost worlds, passing empires, false prophets, unlikely heroes, and the allure of idolatry.”

John Wellington, You and Me, 2009, oil and copper leaf on aluminum, 68″ x 48″.

THIS IS A COMEDY, 2010, oil and aluminum leaf on aluminum, 48″ x 28.25″.

PROPHETE, 2011, oil on wood panel, 48″ diameter.

COME NEARER THE FIRE, 2008, oil and copper leaf on aluminum, 75″ x 48″.

BATHING DIANA (with guards), 2013, oil on aluminum, 30″ x 48″.

I have always loved shopping: in real life, online, even from a plane thirty-thousand feet above the earth, courtesy of SkyMall. I buy clothes, handbags, makeup, perfume, kitchen items—nothing that any other woman would find strange. But if you click the history tab on my computer, you’ll now see long lists of military tactical gear heading my way via UPS and Amazon Prime.

With the jaw-dropping exploits of the Special Operation Forces (Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, American Snipers, and Lone Survivors) brought to our attention by movies, books, and video games, a new breed of groupies has made its presence (and buying power) known. You no longer need to join the armed forces to look the part.

I have a friend named Mike Ritland who is a former Navy SEAL. Last month, during a visit to Texas, I tagged along as he made a call to ITS Tactical near Dallas. ITS stands for “Imminent Threat Solutions” and is a very successful online business. This might have been a classic “thanks, but I’ll wait in the car” moment for me. I assumed ITS was not up on designer hair-care products or sexy bras, little did I know I was walking into my newest obsession.

The ITS showroom is a Disneyland for gearheads. It is filled with a panoply of items you probably don’t think you need but will soon convince yourself you do, desperately.

I can think of no good reason why I should buy a digital desert-camo elastic MOLLE strapped combat backpack with a place to attach a Velcro patch embroidered with my blood type, but I did. Two.

Perusing the merchandise on the shelves at ITS sent red warning lights to my brain. My short visit to ITS turned out to be a gateway drug, and like the first firework snort of cocaine, I was instantly hooked on military tactical gear.

In fact, my view of the world shifted, and I no longer felt safe. I was not prepared for calamity and became dreadfully aware of how vulnerable I was. How could I have been so reckless as to not have a vacuum-sealed bag of QuikClot Combat Gauze with me at all times? If I’m gutshot in front of the Starbucks in Ridgefield, Connecticut, this stuff will stop the massive flow of blood until I reach the nearest MASH unit. I mean, local hospital.

When I returned home from Texas, I went online at two A.M. to peruse ITS’s seductive website. Soon I had filled my virtual cart with a pair of fire-resistant Escape shoelaces made of Kevlar, which, when removed from your shoes, you can use to friction saw through plastic wrist restraints. I also bought a small wallet-size lock-picking set and a jazzy Velcro-backed helmet patch that says, I RUN TOWARDS GUNFIRE. My helmet options are still undecided, but I favor the kind with netting that allows the insertion of small leafy tree branches.

After a cup of chamomile tea to settle my adrenaline-spiked shopping nerves, I retired for the evening thinking of George Orwell’s words: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Instead of sheep, I counted the hours until the next UPS delivery.

I soon learned that not every tactical-gear groupie shops for one item at a time, as I had been doing. You can sign up for a year’s worth of goodies by joining the Crate Club. Brandon Webb runs the Crate Club. Webb is a former Navy SEAL, celebrated combat sniper, and best-selling author of The Killing School and The Red Circle. Of all Webb’s prolific enterprises, I like the Crate Club best; it’s a sort of fruit-of-the-month club for badasses.

With a credit card and the push of a computer key, you can choose from various tiers of membership. The top-of-the-line crate is the Premier Crate that sells for around five hundred a year, and as with the less-deluxe Standard Crate or Pro Crate, you decide how often you would like it delivered. What you won’t know is what is in the box until you open it. That’s where the fun begins.

All the crates are filled with cool tech gear hand selected by Webb’s elite Special Forces buddies. To add gravitas to the merchandise, each warrior is pictured on the Crate Club website along with his Spec Ops credentials. So it matters little if you already own a pocketknife or a high-intensity flashlight. Now you have one with the residual glow of authenticity that comes from being curated by legendary military heroes.

Seeing a Crate Club unboxing feels like Santa Claus has morphed into Colonel Kurtz. This is the most butch shopping club in the world. If you want to see big tattooed men tremble like kids on Christmas morning, get them a subscription.

The Crate Club is not for battle-hardened guys in the military but for regular people wanting a taste of adventure that they will never see. After all, if the men who caught Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden favor this knife or that flashlight, how can you doubt that it will soon feel like a must-have as you sit in front of your TV set watching The Hurt Locker.

I’m not exactly sure what type of combat I’m preparing for. War with North Korea, the zombie apocalypse, the New World Order takeover … all are possible, but whatever happens, I now have a fully stocked medical “jump kit,” a three-day tactical backpack, and a “bug-out bag” filled with water-purification tablets, survival guides, and a collapsible camping tent to deal with it. And now for the perfect helmet.

Jane Stern is the author of more than forty books, including, most recently, Confessions of a Tarot Reader. With Michael Stern, she coauthored the popular Roadfood guidebook series. The Sterns recently donated forty years of archival materials to the Smithsonian museum, documenting the atmosphere, stories, and history of various restaurants, diners, and regional food events.

Peder Severin Krøyer, Copenhagen: Roofs under the Snow, 1870–1900, oil on canvas, 7″ x 9″.

January 1981

It’s snowing. I’m thinking back to January 1979, when I received a letter whose writer told of his sudden fear of snow; for an instant the snow floating down to earth had been a poison that smothered all life.

It’s snowing. I’m remembering the farmer on TV who told of walking out into his fields in early November, and the snow, the first very sparse and fine snow, burned like fire. But now, so much later, nobody would believe it. Even though practically every child knows that snow and fire are no longer opposites. Not in a radioactive world.

So. It’s snowing. The snow is no longer snow, but it’s still snowing.

We’re now so fearful that we’re not even fearful anymore, but the fear is spreading anyway, and the closest word for it is sorrow.

We see what’s happening, and we’re happy about what’s not happening. We compare what’s terrifying with what’s even more terrifying. We compare limited nuclear war with total nuclear war, and the comparison deprives us of the last remnant of our natural horror.

We see thousands of dead birds, thousands of dead and maimed soldiers, thousands of death wishes and their violent expressions, but as long as we see all this annihilation in all its well-known forms, at least we’re seeing something, and as long as we see something, total annihilation hasn’t happened yet. 

So fear has become a strangely useless feeling, discarded and purposeless, and over these chaotic fragments of a fear that once had a social purpose, sorrow has spread. The future is dead and buried, and the work of transforming ourselves from mourners to survivors, or at least to people capable of surviving, has barely begun.

At night we sit frozen to the TV screen, and night after night the same thing happens: first President Reagan comes on and then General Haig comes on, and night after night Reagan says we’re optimistic, and night after night Haig says that no one, and he means no one, has a monopoly on virtue.

No, we’re not really afraid anymore.

It’s true that we have a map of Denmark on which someone has shown what will happen when, in due course, an atomic bomb falls on Copenhagen. What will happen is that Copenhagen will turn completely red, and the redness won’t pale to gentle, pink radioactive fallout until way out in western Jutland.

But we don’t react anymore. We don’t pack any little brown suitcases with the things we’d need if we were trying to escape, and we don’t pile up any sandbags, either, in the bedroom or by the front door. We see what’s happening. We can’t get alerts, and we don’t want any. But occasionally, in the best Jules Verne fashion, in a dream of getting through all dangers, we set out and arrive safely at our destination, where we dig ourselves down into a mountain cave deep under the Siberian snows.

January 1982

It’s snowing. It keeps on snowing. The radio broadcasts music and weather reports, music and weather reports, and the call goes out for all civilians to refrain from driving, making unnecessary telephone calls, or contributing to the chaos with their usual defiant attitude toward the weather gods, but to get themselves home, before the roads close, before one part of the country after another shuts down and the whole country ends up paralyzed. At that point, military tractor-tread vehicles will be the only things capable of moving the immovable snow around, the only ones bringing food out to the stricken families, the only ones providing fodder for the radio’s spirited accounts of birth and death in the drifting snow.

And meanwhile Haig appears on the screen. I’ve said before, he says, and I’ll say again, he says, that no one has a monopoly on virtue. If the USSR thinks they have a monopoly on virtue, the U.S.A. knows how to break that monopoly. And that goes for every bit of virtue in the world: if it threatens our American interests’ direct and swift access to virtue, then the U.S. has the power and the ability and the will to use its power to defend that virtue. Virtue is certainly not an inalienable commodity. It must be fought for and won again and again; this means that a great country certainly can lose its virtue, but not without fighting, for a great country can never lose its greatness or allow itself to lose face.

We talk about the commission that’s been set up. It would be very good if we were less vulnerable, especially during snowstorms. It would be very good if we were less dependent on General Haig’s attempt to make a virtue of necessity or vice versa. It would be very good if we were better at survival, on the day or night when, under cover of the first, the best, round of snow, we were invaded by Russian polar commandos, while all the Danish tractor-tread vehicles were on their way out to assist all the Danish motorists. All in all, it would be very good if there were a meaning to it all.

January 1983

It’s snowing, but it doesn’t matter.

General Haig is being interviewed by Secretary of State Haig, or vice versa, but it doesn’t matter.

The neutron bomb has been put into production, but meanwhile we’re using our time as wisely as we can; we insulate our life with a vengeance, shut out everything that can possibly be shut out, and give ourselves over to living in house slippers in the living room; and when the pot of potatoes is taken out of its haybox it coincides exactly with the beginning of War Games in Denmark on TV. “When the war comes, I’m going to hide in the haybox,” says the youngest child. “It’s so nice and warm in there.”

The neutron bomb has been put into production, but there do seem to be plans to examine the civic bomb shelters. We’re not sure whether we’d need to bring water along.

I’m sitting here thinking about why it’s only greed and fear that motivate us toward these sensible pursuits that, to put it bluntly, are sensible only because everything everywhere is so senseless. Why we don’t use all our sense to establish peace, or use all our instincts to maintain life. Human beings’ peace needn’t be as different as we think it is from birds’ peace; their musical division of the country—so that each individual can take care of itself and thus help to further the entire race—is all in all a better idea than our economic division.

But that’s ludicrous; it’s a false analogy; human beings aren’t birds, and if they are, most of them are raptors.

But that’s precisely the point. All human beings are actually sparrows, songbirds, siskins, parrots, and the like. They’re prey to chance. And as prey, they aren’t guaranteed a long and fruitful life, not without implementing a comprehensive warning system, a meticulous knowledge of the area, and a network of hiding places.

January 1984

It’s snowing. Visibility is sharply reduced.

Whereas in earlier wars it was soldiers who died by the hundreds of thousands and civilians who mourned their deaths, it’s now probable that if war breaks out it will be civilians who will die by the millions, with soldiers the ones left to mourn them.

How else could it be? Considering that the home front will either quickly dissolve or be directly wiped out, so that the soldiers will have nothing left to defend, then it will be the soldiers themselves who will have to try to survive at all costs, and to dig themselves down, as many as possible, into their underground command centers.

In any case, they have gas masks and radiation detectors, and they most likely have protective suits and food as well. I’m not sure whether they thought about bringing water along. But of course they must have; maybe they even have machines that can melt the poisonous snow into something whose effect resembles that of water.

January 1985

It’s snowing, and the snow obliterates all traces.

We steal around taking classes on securing everything and everyone against everything and everyone. Classes in defense against everyone and solidarity with everyone. Classes in obstruction, sabotage, and icy courtesy. As it snows, and the snow obliterates all traces. And as the atomic procession winds through a snow-covered Europe, we sit frozen in front of our TV screens and watch the snow keep snowing, obliterating all traces.

It’s snowing; visibility is sharply reduced. We don’t dare leave the TV off. Since the atomic bomb was dropped on the mountains of Iran, and since parliament voted to dissolve Denmark’s ties to NATO (Haig in passing pushed the press aside and said it was impossible for NATO to pay attention to “a small country’s one-sided decision”), and since the Strait of Hormuz was closed, since the oil stopped coming, since we started to get cold, we’ve kept the TV on. It gives off warmth, and at least it feels like an alarm system. As long as we can see an atomic bomb exploding on screen, at least we know that we ourselves haven’t been hit. As long as we still have hope that the gas masks we’ve saved up for will be delivered. As long as we can say that where there’s life, there’s hope. Maybe we can manage to figure something out. Because no one has a monopoly on death.

—Translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied

Inger Christensen (1935–2009) was the recipient of many international awards, including the Nordic Authors’ Prize. Her other books include Alphabet, Azorno, Butterfly Valley, and It.

Susanna Nied’s work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. Her translation of It won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award in 2007.

Excerpted from The Condition of Secrecy, by Inger Christensen, translated by Susanna Nied, published by New Directions on November 27.

They commute with guns. A lot of Israeli soldiers live at home while they do their mandatory service, and, like me, they take the bus to work every day. I’m a student so for me that means carrying four different translations of the Qumran wisdom texts to the university campus. They carry what I think are semi-automatics. We all take the bus together. There is a language to the army uniform that I cannot read. If you know these things, you can tell what part of the armed forces someone is in by the color of his or her beret. The red ones seem tough, I know that. The uniforms themselves are different colors too: a standard green, a nappy white, a khaki. The grey-blue ones tend to have broad shoulders and handguns tucked into their pants. It took me a long time to realize they had holsters under their trousers: I thought the guns were being held in by their underwear elastics, and could fall any moment. From this information, a literate person lays the bones of their expectations for the soldier they see, if she sees them at all. I think most people don’t even notice them. One thing I cannot get used to in Israel is a kind of suspension of horror: that the mechanisms of danger and violence are laid bare and become mundane. Through what I’ll call a willful innocence, this is something I resist fully. I notice every soldier, every gun. Guns they tote indifferently on the bus, in the mall, getting ice cream, at the beach. Obviously they can’t spend several consecutive years (required service is two for young women, three for men) having anxiety attacks about whether or not it’s emotionally damaging to develop a familiar relationship with weapons. Luckily for them, they have me to do that.

The exception to the soldiers’ invisibility is during a series of memorials, which occur in Israel over a period of two weeks. First is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is a day of ceremonies: candles are lit, and you will hear testimony from the dwindling population of survivors. This year it was on April 7 (holidays here are kept by the lunar Jewish calendar). It is marked by a one-minute siren at ten A.M. For a memorial siren, everyone stands. No matter where you are, you stop and stand. The entire country has this really effective PA system. It reminds me of that scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before Earth is bulldozed, when every physical object becomes a transmitter. The memorial siren is similar to the siren that sounds when there are rockets falling but it is one single tone instead of a falling and rising pitch. This is so that if rockets fall during the siren, you know to seek cover.

A week later is Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day; this year on April 15. It is in remembrance of Israelis who have died in war and terror attacks. The year’s dead are added to a list. The day starts the evening prior (in accordance with the Jewish calendar), marked with a two-minute siren. At this point, the entire nation gives itself forty-eight hours to focus on the soldiers. The TV stations play a continuous loop of short documentaries on the lives of the dead—heartwrenching tributes with interviews and blurry home-videos. The radio stations play only sad, traditional music. At 11 A.M. on the day-of, there is a second two-minute siren. There are ceremonies that evening and, at the end of the memorials, Yom HaAtzmaut (Israel Independence Day) begins immediately: whiplashing the nation into July Fourth mode. Opinions on this model, and the sudden change in attitude (grievance to celebration) are mixed in Israel.

My friend just left the army, after six years of service. He asked that I call him Ido instead of using his real name, and who am I to argue. So: Ido. This was Ido’s first post-army Yom HaZikaron. He said this year he was in his car, driving, when he realized the siren would go momentarily. Perhaps they said something on the radio. He pulled over, with every other car on the road, got out, and stood by his car, with the door open. He probably ended up in a Reuters photograph. He said it was strange to be in civilian clothes, to be a civilian, on that day. When you are a soldier, everyone looks at you on Yom HaZikaron: you are at the center of something that now he felt slightly peripheral to. In the past, during the siren, he has raised his hand in salute (a gesture exclusive to officers during the siren); this year he has stood with his hands folded by his car. I asked where he would look (I was never sure where to look during the sirens) in those days. “At the flag,” he said.

I was waiting for my friend Max at a Yom HaZikaron ceremony for fallen soldiers. I had taken a bus to his hometown. On the bus ride over, the first of the two sirens sounded. While Ido was standing by the side of the road, I was standing in a bus. I wasn’t sure if we should get off the bus after it pulled over, which I then realized was silly: you can stand in the bus. Once I got to the ceremony—a cordoned off street block alongside a large green in front of an angular white building—I waited for Max. The crowd was about half soldiers: anyone actively in the service is in uniform (of course, almost the entire country is in reserves). I’ve written about Max before: he is an intelligence officer who does some kind of fieldwork which I have tended to imagine as a jaunty espionage novel of turning sources over endless cups of strong coffee. His job means that Max doesn’t often wear a uniform (which I suppose means, in a way, that he’s always in uniform). Looking around at everyone in green and white and khaki and grey-blue, I wondered if I would even recognize him in the crowd. Fortunately, when your friend is in intelligence, he finds you, and Max tapped me on the shoulder. He seemed a lot taller than I remembered. And he had a gun. Why didn’t I even consider that he would have a gun? I said “HI!” very, very loudly. Then said “SORRY!” even louder. In my memory, the gun is as big as I am. Most of the junior soldiers here carry these kind of beat-up semi-automatics that look like they fell off a Soviet truck. His was more an army-reserves-at-the-Port-Authority affair. There may have been another gun somewhere—one of the underwear elastic handguns—but I could only look at him from the corner of my eye. I couldn’t look straight at him. I think he had one of the red berets, but I can’t say for sure. I could ask him right now, but I won’t. He was like some sacred object, some distant planet swimming out of my keen (sorry, Keats).

The ceremony was huge, thousands of people facing a stage, the proceedings of which were projected onto the smooth white stones of the building behind it. The laying of wreaths was punctuated by the names and photographs of the dead: the number I found online said 22,684 since the 1860. The pictures flash on screen in chronological order starting with date of death—first blurry black and white shots of teenagers, thin smiling kibbutz types, then as the photographs become more recent, men and women in uniform, smiling middle aged women who died in bus explosions, generals holding their children. The picture is on screen for only an instant, each name is said aloud; it is a recording. On the screen next to the picture is information in Hebrew I cannot read, but one number I can: it is their age when they died. 26, 22, 37, 19, 55, 19, 19. You look at the photographs, and repeat the names, trying to imprint them. What were they thinking when the photographs were taken? Did they imagine they would be flashing across a screen every year, year after year? Is this what soldiers think now, when they pose for photographs with their mothers after being sworn into the service? I am aware of theories that consider each photograph the site of our own death: a historical moment that becomes, in effect, a memento mori. Tonight, these theories fall short. The ceremony also screened short documentaries of the lives of the dead—home videos of bar and bat mitzvas, boys lip synching to music we cannot hear with mops on their heads. News footage of tanks from the wars they died in, all flashing on the building in front of us. Then a family would be escorted by soldiers to the stage, and a lay wreath. This building, I suddenly know, was designed for this: to be the surface on which the faces of the dead are projected, year after year; the names read aloud are recorded, each year new ones added to the tape. All so that I could stand here on this night, next to a young man I cannot face, and stare at my hands. On the way to Max’s ceremony my bus had passed a military cemetery. “We are here because they are there,” said the woman next to me. Then she showed me pictures of her son, who is a semi-professional tennis player beginning his army service this summer. Not all people share this women’s mentality. Ido, now studying to be an architect, tells me the attitude is shifting away from thinking of war dead as a “necessary sacrifice” to an atrocious reality. Regardless of the gloss, this country has a narrative apparatus set up to contextualize really, really horrible things. And if that sounds weird to you, consider that 2,201 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan since 2001, that 4,486 died in Iraq, and that I cannot name one of them; consider that I have no idea when or how I will grieve for the four who died at Boston.

I did not do so well at my first memorial ceremony. The plan was to briefly and sincerely thank Max for his service, give him a hug, and not cry. That seemed like a pretty reasonable set of expectations: to not let my feelings make other people uncomfortable. Only, I felt nothing. Hovering somewhere around my own forehead, I watched my own hands from different angles, obsessing over what was the most respectful way to fold them. This might be called dissociating. I wonder if this is how the soldiers on the bus feel. I tried not to stare at a uniformed soldier and his girlfriend standing in front of me. She leaned up against him casually, and when she did, the end of his gun (the musket? the barrel?) pressed into the back of her knee. She didn’t seem to notice. I don’t say much of anything to Max. After the ceremony, his friends sit around a backyard table for beers, and I compulsively recount the plot of the Epic of Gilgamesh, much to my own horror.

Later, when I get home, all the hands in my head suddenly disappear and snap back in. I remember the plan: the thank you, the hug. At least I didn’t cry, and I wonder when I will. Once, Max took me biking with his younger sister in the south. She and I followed the path he cut, which I think might have actually been a burden for him—to be the object of defacto deference. But what else could we do? We were biking in an area near his grandmother’s kibbutz, a few kilometers from Gaza. He led us through a fallow field, right through it. The ground was thick, heavy, and red. In Hebrew, the words “ground,” “red,” and “Adam” (the personal name, which also can be used to mean humankind) all share the same root. So in Hebrew, what I just wrote could be said with all kinds of Biblical resonance. But in English it just means that we were all struggling to keep our bikes moving, as our tires sunk into the soft earth. Max kept moving forward and his sister and I struggled behind. Sometimes I would pause and wait for her. I would lean against my bike, watching Max bob steadily forward, his shoulder blades cutting back and forth, back and forth.

The entire country has a kind of predatory reverence toward the young male body. I run along the ocean here, and all the fit young adonim run in loincloth mini shorts. In well-lit lots they park their motorbikes and strip their shirts to practice some kind of rhythmic martial arts under a street lamp. Legs and arms swoop in a steady dance, a code I cannot crack of mutual power, agression, and respect. In a no-man’s land near the beach, an old homeless man shadowboxes with a stop sign while his dealer, a bald man in a turtleneck, looks on smoking. Bataille would say that the sacrificial victim must be set apart, must be honored. I don’t know whom I hate more: him for writing it or me for repeating it.

The day after the ceremony, I take the train to my roommate’s kibbutz. Her name is Sarai. I haven’t cried yet, which puts me on edge. The Independence Day parties begin at sundown—mourning will be over; it will be time to celebrate. I am running out of time. Sarai and I are arguing with the ticket salesman about my student card when the siren goes off, and I dropped my bags and my wallet all at once, change rolling everywhere. The siren sends a funny chill that resides only in your spine. As if the feeling were there all along, and the siren merely awoke it. Then we pick up our bags and go wait for our train. Sarai’s kibbutz is kind of north-central Israel, where the country goes wasp-waisted. I go running through the kibbutz’s avocado orchards. I run along the barbed wire fence that separates the kibbutz farmland from the next-door Arab village, which has a stunning gold-domed mosque. A butterfly flies through the barbed wire, and I actually roll my eyes because I think this day has been imbued with enough symbolism, thank you very much. I keep running, and pass an area cordoned off by electric fence, where two cow carcasses lie. I feel that I am running through the elements of my own dreamwork, but I refuse to narrate them. “I hate you,” I say to the sky. I run into the kibbutz wheatfields. I am running too fast. I have been told to stay on a path that is free of snakes. Instead I am running along the thin strip left by whatever machine cuts across the wheatfields. The short stalks are sharp, and cut at my legs. My cell phone service cuts out, and I am completely alone. If there were anyone behind me, he would see the flash of my white t-shirt cutting across the trembling gold. There is a feeling when you run too fast that your own mind is trying to lift out of your body, and keeps getting crammed back in. I run for that feeling, until each breath is a question I am answering, until I reach another electric fence and stop, drooping to pant. All around me is blue and gold, all around me is land that somebody loves. Across the barbed wire are homes of Arab families, a beautiful village of whites and oranges. Homes with dogs and toasters. More butterflies go back and forth, shamelessly, begging to be written. “Fuck you,” I say again. I have no solution. I used to think that huge human loss was the result of a bad decision. I have no idea, anymore, what the difference is between necessary and pointless sacrifice. I do not know what it took to grow this wheatfield. I am finding that I am scared to know, to see, what is required for me to walk through this wheatfield. The field in which I am now kneeling, forehead touching the earth, sobbing so hard, so ugly-sounding that it shakes my whole body. I do not know who gave me the freedom to spend my whole entire life looking for my self(ves) while some people die at war—in a world where whether we see it or not war lives alongside us, next to us, in us—before even getting the chance to start. But I know that each life, each human life, is equally sacred, which is why any of us can be sacred. That is the bargain: we all have to be worth the same. And right now my little flame is buckling under the weight of my cries which at this point come from somewhere so deep inside that I begin to heave and then to actually vomit. Convulsing on all fours, I hear in my head again and again that line of Randall Jarrell, “loosed from its dream of life.” I also hear my name. “Becca?”

No, I really do hear my name. My phone has called Max. Which means, as far as the person on the other end is concerned, I have called. He is on speakerphone, and his voice comes up from the broken wheat where my phone is lying.

I think I am dreaming. It is most likely I am dreaming. Butterflies continue to cross from one side of barbed wire to another. My legs are bleeding. Nearby the cows are rotting. I am under a blue sky in golden fields grown from red earth. I slowly hang up the phone. Then I throw up a little more. I laugh a little now, and remind the butterflies to go fuck themselves. Then I get up and run back through the fields.

Rebecca Sacks is an MA candidate in the Jewish Studies program at Tel Aviv University. She previously lived in Brooklyn, New York.

At the worst possible moment, Battlefield Hardline valorizes police violence.

An early screenshot of Battlefield Hardline.

The Battlefield series, one of the past decade’s most popular video-game franchises, has already given gamers the chance to play as soldiers in World War II, Vietnam, and the Middle East. Now Battlefield Hardline, slated for release early next year, allows players to assume the role of a new kind of soldier: the police officer. A recent preview of the game shows a cop throwing a thief to the ground and cuffing him; the player is given the option to Hold E to Interrogate. The officer yells, “Tell me what you know!” and earns fifty points: Interrogation successful.

To Visceral Games, who developed Battlefield Hardline, the roles of soldiers and cops are so interchangeable that Army camo can simply be “re-skinned” into police uniforms. In light of the killings, riots, fear, and unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, the game raises disquieting questions about the relationship between law enforcement and citizens—in short, it’s a horror to watch.

As a cop in Hardline, you’re tasked with preventing robberies and rescuing hostages, which often means shooting all the criminals until they’re dead. (The gentlest thing you can do is arrest them.) The game also enables players to take the role of the criminals, and perhaps the more troubling aspect of Hardline is that this experience is identical to playing as the police: both “the good guys” and “the bad guys” see the world through crosshairs. The best players shoot first, and shoot from behind.

“In multiplayer, the world is simple,” reads the game’s website. “You’re on one side of the law or the other.” This sort of tone-deafness permeates the game and its marketing. Given recent events, one might expect the hype around Battlefield Hardline to have gone quiet; instead, it’s becoming increasingly prevalent. On August 13, four days after police shot Michael Brown, Visceral Games released a twelve-minute trailer showing off a chunk of the game’s single-player campaign. The video opens as the main character—seemingly an undercover cop—is carted off by a guy in a bucket hat who points his pistol at your black partner and says, “Race is not a factor here. My dislike of you is strictly personal.” Even when Hardline is being self-aware, it’s tasteless.

Throughout the preview, a voice-over from the game’s creative director, Ian Milham, explains that you can complete levels one of two ways. The “stealth approach” allows you to sneak up on bad guys and arrest them. For each one you put in cuffs, you collect money—a bounty—that you can use to buy better weapons later. A less patient player can simply go in with guns blazing, shooting with impunity. Simply put: as a cop in Hardline, you have the choice of killing people or not. The decision is entirely dependent on your mood. The extent to which this varies from practice in the U.S., where police officers are ostensibly only permitted the use of deadly force as a last resort, is debatable.

I e-mailed Visceral Games to ask about the ethical predicaments that Hardline presents, but received no reply. When Hardline’s creators talk about the game, they do so with juvenile enthusiasm. Speaking to the video game site Polygon, Battlefield Hardline’s executive producer, Steve Papoutsis, explained that the inspiration for the game was all the “cool, kick-ass stuff” law enforcement has:

They’ve got cool motorcycles. And they’ve got helicopters. They even have police planes … And then like SWAT guys. Come on, who doesn’t like all the stuff SWAT guys load up in? They look pretty sweet.

Similarly, almost all of the writing about Hardline from video game outlets has shown blithe eagerness for the game’s urban setting. Polygon is perhaps the only major publication to criticize Hardline’s troubling themes, but even that comes after glowing preview articles with titles like “Is Battlefield Hardline the next eSports darling?”

If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shaken the country’s view of the military, if the rising number of school shootings has made us rethink our relationship to guns, none of these concerns have affected the robust sales of first-person shooters. In fact, as political and personal cognizance of violence has become more relevant, shooters have become more realistic, more violent, and more popular. The genre by itself has become a billion-dollar business, advancing by technological leaps and bounds each year.

Are first-person shooters popular because they’re in demand or only because they’re being developed? In an interview with NPR’s All Tech Considered about video game violence, Ken Levine, the creator of a sci-fi series called BioShock, explained that game publishers are more willing to fund shooters because they’re easy to market. “A shooter answers a lot of questions for you: the main mechanic is you have this gun, you have weapons, you have enemies, you have conflict coming at you,” he said.

The correlation between violence in entertainment and reality remains unclear at best, but it’s clear that games have an influence on American youth—it was just over a decade ago that the U.S. military developed America’s Army, a free online shooter that depicted ground warfare more accurately than comparable games. It was developed for seven and a half million dollars—just one-third of a percent of the Army’s annual marketing budget—and is considered one of the most successful recruiting efforts ever.

Last November, Maria Konnikova explored the reasons why first-person shooters are so popular in a piece for The New Yorker. “First-person shooters put our ability to control the environment, and our perception of our effectiveness, at the forefront of play,” she wrote. The irony that law enforcement appear to have neither control nor effectiveness in Ferguson appears to be lost on the 600,000 people who, as of this writing, have watched the Battlefield Hardline preview on YouTube since it was released.

Since 2002, when the Battlefield series was introduced, every major American conflict has been dramatized in an iteration of the game. Law enforcement seems like the natural next step. But it’s one thing to lionize the military; it’s another to advocate that the police is the military. The tragedies in Ferguson have renewed interest in the militarization of American law enforcement. As Jay Caspian Kang asked in The New Yorker last week, “Have we also become anesthetized to images of police in armored vehicles and full military gear?”

Battlefield Hardline implies that the answer is a resounding yes. The tagline on the game’s website reads, “Live out your fantasy of being a cop and criminal.” Note that conjunction: and, not or. In Hardline’s universe, the two aren’t mutually exclusive—perhaps the most subversive and intelligent point it’s likely to make.

Kevin Nguyen (@knguyen) is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.

Hemingway with Lanham on September 18, 1944, after the breakthrough of the Siegfried Line in Western Germany.

From Ernest Hemingway’s letter to Colonel Charles T. Lanham, April 2, 1945. Hemingway described Lanham as “the finest and bravest and most intelligent military commander I have known”; he did, in fact, go on to make general. Original spelling and punctuation retained.

Now I just feel homesick, lonely and useless. But will pull out of it. Because have to.

Also have cut out heavy drinking … and since Liquor is my best friend and severest critic I miss it. Also have explained to my old girls there is nothing doing—and this light drinking, righteous Life isn’t comparable to always haveing at least two bottles of Perrier Jouet in the ice bucket and the old Kraut Marlene [Dietrich] always ready to come in and sit with you while you shave […]

Am so glad you are happy where you are. Hope the [general’s] star comes through quickly and then that you have a Division. Am very selfish in this because figure once you have a Division there will be that liquor ration and I will come and drink it for you (thus saveing you from any possibility of rummy-hood) and I can run errands and do any odd jobs the Geneva Convention authorizes such as entertaining Gen. Rodwell when he calls (I’ll have my own trailer) and all the time will be working on my new Great Book YOU TOO CAN BE A GENERAL with all its exhaustive studies in Rummyhood and Its Effect on the General. Bourbon or Scotch—Their Effect on the General. Map Reading For Generals. Security or Sleep—A Problem In Generalship. Hormones For The General—Their Use and Abuse. All this time I will be giveing you my almost pathetic devotion with one hand and booby trapping your trailer with the other. It is the only career I really look forward to. So don’t just bog down in your military career because we ought to get started.

At the table with James Salter.

Salter in 1989. Photo: Sally Gall

“To revisit the past was like constantly crossing some Bergschrund,” James Salter writes in the introduction to his 1997 memoir, “a deep chasm between what my life had been before I changed it completely and what it was afterwards.” As it did through his life, an ineludible divide runs through Salter’s work. The same man who gave us great novels and stories of sport, of war and deprivation, produced some of the twentieth century’s most sumptuous meditations on domestic life, on the rituals at the heart of bonding. To read him in both modes is to pace the fullness of Salter’s emotional life—it is akin to entering a room full of people after completing some feat of endurance, a vow of silence or a rigorous fast, and trying to hear every word. What unites Salter’s oeuvre—more than his triumphs of style, the peculiar manipulations of perspective, and the verbless descriptive clauses—is his preoccupation with meals and all that they represent, all they can give and all they can take away.

In 1957, with his first book already published, Salter left the Air Force to become the novelist that he knew he was. As his identity was transformed—from fighter pilot to fiction writer, from that of struggle within the military complex to the isolation he encountered outside of it—so were his novels and stories. Food’s role in them increasingly became a metric for the emotional lives of his characters, who were either driven by the rejection of home or by some elaborate performance that kept the idea of home intact. The dinner table, Salter understood, was the perfect stage for the frailty of our relationships—how we present ourselves to others, how crucial to our sense of self are the recollections of the friends who saw us become the people we were. A much-cited quotation from Light Years perhaps most perfectly encapsulates his feelings about life in the air as a pilot and on the ground as a family man: “Life is weather. Life is meals.” 

In 2006, with his wife Kay, James Salter published Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days. It’s a book that defies classification, jumping from historical anecdote to cherished recipe to childhood memory without warning or apology, as the conversation at the best dinner party often does. It’s as warm as it is biting, as full of tenderness for the people who populated the couple’s parties as it is cruel toward those who detracted from otherwise perfect brunches or suppers. We watch Alice Waters, having been snubbed by a French maître d’, composing some very elegant hate mail. We hear the literary agent Irving Lazar phoning room service, requesting a very unappetizing meal (“a soft-boiled egg, not completely cooked, a little mucous-y on top … ”), and, upon hearing the hotel is “not equipped to do that,” replying, “You were yesterday.” These stories are punch lines, anecdotes to be told to company; they are meant to reinforce a bond, to reward those with taste and wit.

Salter’s appreciation of all things epicurean—as well as his Schadenfreude regarding gaffes in etiquette—came in part from his own determined efforts to reach a certain level of sophistication. In his memoir, Burning the Days, he writes: “My first duck I tasted in the dining room of a silvery apartment off Fifth Avenue. Across from me, aware of nothing remarkable, sat my friend.” For teenage Salter, that meal, prepared by a hired cook and hosted by the platinum blonde mother of his childhood companion, became a hallowed goal, a place he might reach after he’d surpassed his middle-class upbringing in a small family. He often mourned how little he knew of his ancestors. “It is the men without roots,” he writes of his heritage, paraphrasing a British aristocrat, “who are the real poor.”

As a young man, Salter grew convinced that these extravagant dinners represented the life he wanted, but he believed he needed to suffer first—“My life was too meager for me to know if I possessed it”—so, at his father’s exhortations, he tested into West Point. Meals there “were a constant terror,” an occasion during which one was expected to not only catch the glasses that upperclassmen hurled one’s way, but to treat these frangible missiles as if they’d been requested, calling out, as they flew, “Cup, please!”

Salter’s uneasiness in this masculine world did not fade. He famously composed his first novel, The Hunters (1956), while serving as a pilot in the Korean War, and though he was received by critics then as an heir to Hemingway, the book displayed a peculiar sensitivity that set it apart from the war novels of earlier decades; nowhere to be found in Salter is that inscrutable archetypical male, the one at whose feelings the reader can only guess. After a bland meal in a mess hall, the protagonist of The Hunters has “the feeling of Christmas away from home, stranded in a cheap hotel.” Other men in the book skip meals to sleep; they boast of breakfasts that are only “a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and a puke”—but behind their braggadocio is an awareness of the cost of their experience, of what’s been sacrificed to fly these planes: the world of romantic love, family, friendship unthreatened by the likelihood of sudden death, home-cooked supper. In The Arm of Flesh (1961), Salter’s second novel (revised and republished as Cassada in 2000) a weary flight captain mourns the chance for connection afforded by a long, comfortable meal:

There was suddenly a great deal Isbell wanted to say. They could have talked. They could have pushed their plates aside and leaned forward on their elbows, talking while the dust floated sideways through bolts of sunshine and the eggs turned cold, but it didn’t quite happen. The moments don’t fulfill themselves always. Somehow they started eating in silence and it was impossible to begin.

The publication of his second book seemed to give Salter the permission he needed to “possess” his life, and he left the armed forces to find a seat at another, more comfortable table.

The sixties were not the fertile decade he’d hoped for: his first two books had not brought outsize success, and his immersion in family life seemed to inspire in him a longing for anything else. When he’d chased glory, he’d craved peace—but his newfound quiet, it turned out, included few medals, and he felt largely unseen. In Korea he had flown with Ed White and Gus Grissom, whom he watched become some of our nation’s first astronauts. Salter, to support his children, tried his hand at selling pools, and he turned his gifted imagination on the prospect of suicide. A Sport and a Pastime (1967) seems a clear result of this transitory and disappointed period; the novel concerns a young man, Dean, who has abandoned his life in America, and his equally lost French lover, Anne-Marie. It unfolds almost exclusively in the hotels and restaurants of the south of France, places that require no commitments and offer comforts at a steep price.

Salter’s interest in the meal gained definition in Pastime; the outset of the liaison is marked by “a wonderful dinner. She is talkative and happy. The food seems spread around her like vegetables to a roast.” But the descriptions of “a dish piled high with ecrevisses, pale, salty,” and “a restaurant filled with the soft clatter of plates, a long dinner that seems almost a reminiscence they are so pleased” serve as proof of the relationship’s specious pantomime of connection. Anne-Marie, who was raised very poor, often doesn’t know how to eat these dishes, and Dean, whose French is limited, often cannot order them without embarrassment. His (borrowed) money runs out and they can no longer afford such luxuries; his money comes back and they spend it on an exorbitant prix-fixe affair, much too large, which Anne-Marie fails to finish despite Dean’s cold urging. In one of the book’s most telling moments, she “vomits up the whole meal at her feet, frogs’ legs and oysters splashing onto the stones. He glances around and is relieved to find no one is watching.” The meal, Salter wants us to grasp, though seductive on the surface, is an event that can summon our lesser selves, extracting the truths we’ve resisted. Rich food and ambiance may deepen an existing happiness, but they can’t inspire contentment where there was none before.

From the first-edition cover of Light Years.

The year 1975 brought Light Years, widely considered Salter’s masterpiece, a prolonged reflection on all things prandial: the preparation and presentation of a meal, the way a shift in course moves conversation, the delicate science of seating arrangements, the praise (both sincere and hollow) that home cooking inspires. One of the book’s greatest achievements is its dynamic opening, narrated in a first-person plural that focuses our attention on the protagonists, Viri and Nedra Berland, and never appears again. (“We strolled in the garden, eating the small, bitter apples. The trees were dry and gnarled. The lights in the kitchen were on.”) The book’s first fifteen pages comprise a dinner party, convincing us of the Berlands’ magnetism, connection, and generosity:

Country dinners, the table dense with glasses, flowers, all the food one could eat, dinners ending in tobacco smoke, a feeling of ease. Leisurely dinners. The conversation never lapses. Their life is special, devout …

But the moment Salter has invited us in, he carries us right out, into the departing car of the Berlands’ dinner guests. Of Nedra, a character remarks, “ ‘She’s the most selfish woman on earth.’ ”

The rest of the novel follows this pattern, shaping our understanding then reversing it, presenting a portrait of a marriage by turns intimate and duplicitous. Viri and Nedra routinely sleep with other people—usually guests at their table—which seems, for a time, to bring them closer, as though the external fulfillment of lust leaves their attachment stronger. Even as their union crumbles, their need to entertain persists; we watch them bicker about the seasonal appropriateness of gazpacho, eat “chocolate and pears,” just-picked green tomatoes, “cheese, bread, cucumbers, butter and wine.” Neither, after the divorce, successfully establishes a new life, instead pursuing trips they had never managed to take together, eating alone in European cafés. The view widens and we watch their daughters become people with careers and sex lives. Though Salter could imbue any moment with a lachrymose, sonorous quality, he knew how to wield that power; he knew when the absence of intensity gave more than the presence. The last time we see Nedra alive, ill and living in a rented farm shed, she says only, “We should really go out to dinner once or twice … There’s a Greek place run by two brothers that isn’t bad. We can have moussaka.” How peculiar, Salter seems to posit, that this type of fleeting gratification should be what we think of in our last days. Life is meals, indeed, and they vanish from our plates all too quickly.

Salter scrawled title ideas for Light Years on a napkin. Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.

Though ultimately Salter furnished himself with a comfortable life, he never fully relinquished the idea that going without was what taught us most. He spent the second half of his career writing alternately about those who refuse to make a home and those consumed by it. Solo Faces (1979) chronicles the itinerant life of a renowned rock climber, Rand, whose inveterate need to abandon places and people causes others great pain, and who is said, at the close of the novel, to have, “ … somehow succeeded. He had found the great river. He was gone.” Nine of ten stories in Salter’s 2005 collection, Last Night, deal with the consequences of a meal, sometimes one finished years before. A spurned girlfriend surfaces decades later, still angry, to ask, “Whatever happened to that picture of us taken at that lunch Diana Wald gave at her mother’s house that day? … Do you still have that?”

The eighty-one-year-old James Salter who cowrote an eccentric treatise on the meal seemed, by all accounts, to have reconciled the former iterations of himself with the current, final model. He had finally become the person he wanted to be: one who he could write with authority about which cheese to pair with which fruit, and with humor about the AT-6 plane he had once flown right into a family’s kitchen in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A section on etiquette in Life Is Meals lists eight criteria, the last of which leave us a broad picture of Salter, an artist forever negotiating the distance between our interior lives and those we contrive to share:

—The ultimate courtesy is to make guests feel comfortable in whatever they are doing.
—There are occasions when etiquette is pitched overboard. Then it is every man for himself.

In the spring of 2013, James Salter published his last novel, All That Is. One evening in May, I was lucky enough to stand in a small anteroom where a group of twenty people would receive him after a much-anticipated reading and talk. A table ran the floor toward the windows, through which the offices of midtown Manhattan could be seen going dark. Almost no one touched the herbed cheeses or the wet grapes or the speared shrimp, though most held up a glass of wine, and the talk was quiet as we waited, even the introductions made in the tone of apologies. Then all the shoulders in the room began to rotate, and there he was in the doorframe, his suit cataract blue and his hair not quite tamed. He held up his hands to greet a friend in a gesture like that of someone demonstrating the size of a caught fish, and he cycled around the table like that, popping cubes of cheese into his mouth, slipping his arm around the back of one person while he spoke to another, saying “Pardon?,” gesturing with toothpicks at women across the meat platters, moving all the parts of his face as he spoke or laughed. All the white wine was gone, someone said, and the red was going fast. Then something crucial changed, but it took a while for the information to pass through the crowd, through the conversations that had gained warmth and momentum. Though his presence had been the reason for our gathering there, his exit went almost unnoticed, so completely had he changed the room.

Kathleen Alcott is the author of two novels, Infinite Home and The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets.

In 2014, I heard Solmaz Sharif read “Look,” the title poem from her debut collection. Look inserts military terminology into intimate scenes between lovers, refashioning hollow, bureaucratic language from the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms with a human touch. (Even the collection’s title has an alternate military meaning: per the Department of Defense, a look means “a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of influence.”) At a time when the U.S. automates acts of murder, Sharif insists that war is still personal—perhaps today more than ever. In one of its most quoted passages, she writes, “Daily I sit / with the language / they’ve made / of our language / to NEUTRALIZE / the CAPABILITY OF LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS / like you.” 

“By simply placing words from the Defense dictionary in small caps, and deploying them in scenes of intimacy,” John Freeman wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Sharif has begun the process of renaturing them, putting them in the readers’ hands for examination.” Look confirms what I’ve known since 2014: Sharif is poised to influence not only literature but larger conversations about America, war, and the Middle East. I spoke with her about her influences, the role of the poet in today’s world, and the stories behind Look.

INTERVIEWER

In an essay you wrote for the Kenyon Review, you said, “When I am asked to describe my poetry on airplane flights, at dinner parties, I describe it first as ‘political.’ Then, ‘documentary.’ And these two things seem to, for some, preclude aesthetic rigor.” There’s a popular conception that overtly political can’t have aesthetic value—that a political message degrades the aesthetics. Is your work a deliberate effort to rebut this notion? 

SHARIF

Clichéd, bad writing often means clichéd, bad politics, and vice versa. Aesthetics and politics have a really vital and exciting give-and-take between them. I think June Jordan is an exciting example. She was politically astute and radical, but she was also a classically trained pianist, so when you’re reading her work, it’s incredibly music driven and decided. It’s exciting for me to think of poets that are allowing their politics to also be shaped by these aesthetic considerations, and wondering when the poetic will lead you to the kind of political surprise that a dogmatic approach wouldn’t allow. These are the artists that live on the fringes of what is aesthetically and politically accepted.

When I say “living on the fringes,” I’m thinking of Edward Said’s idea of the “exilic” intellectual pursuit. It’s this artistic presence continually outside, questioning and speaking back to whatever supposed “here” or “we” or “now” we’ve created. The word fringe is belittling in a way I don’t intend—I mean a nomadic presence, or a mind that is consistently on the run, and preventing these political moments from calcifying.

INTERVIEWER

I’m interested in how your family came to the United States, and how you experienced the country as an Iranian immigrant.

SHARIF

The dominant narrative of Iranian exile or displacement in the U.S. is one that’s about people who were supporters of the Shah, who was a dictator, and were forced to leave after the Shah was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution. That’s not the only narrative, though. My parents were students in the U.S. in the late seventies, and as the revolution picked up steam, they went back home to Iran, and left again in 1983, and I was born en route out of the country. We moved to Texas so my dad could finish his studies there, and then we moved to Birmingham, Alabama, so my mom could finish her Bachelor’s there, and finally we ended up in Los Angeles when I was in sixth grade. It was the first place I lived that had a sizable Iranian population. There’s actually an Iranian population in Birmingham, but LA has the largest outside of Iran. At that time, it felt dominated by upper-class, well-to-do Iranians who were more into assimilation than my family or I was. I felt immediately ostracized by this group in middle school, when I came. I don’t mean to make it sound like everyone was rich—they weren’t. We weren’t. There are many different Iranian presences in Los Angeles, but I just didn’t have access to them.

No matter where I went, I was outside of whatever community I found myself in, so that even when I arrived in a place where there was a lot of “me,” I was totally outside again. That probably influenced my artistic impulse—to go back to the exilic intellectual—to stand outside of and look into, and constantly question and interrogate the collectives that exist. It’s easy for me because I’ve never felt a part of any of them in a real way.

It’s been important for me to write down as many narratives as I can, other narratives around the Iranian Revolution and the Iranian presence in the U.S., and also the possibility for Iranians to build coalitions with other Third World groups, as Iranians did in the seventies and eighties. That’s the community I come out of. There’s also a rift that happens between first and second generations, because the second generation has woken up to the fact that assimilation is not just a matter of your accent or class or education—there’s an “in” that you’ll never be in because of who you are.

There’s a lot of anti-Black, anti-Arab, anti-Indian, and anti-Pakistani—and on and on—racism within the Iranian community. But my experience is one of obvious allyship between these communities. I’m more interested in what brings us together and what our nearnesses are, but this can sort of dumbfound some members of the Iranian community. When I was sixteen, I went to this Iranian feminist conference, and Angela Davis was the key speaker. She referred to us all there as “women of color,” and some of the women in the older generation were squirming in their seats. It was the first time I’d heard the term, and I thought, that’s it. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to name. Whatever struggle is deemed optional or needs to be postponed, that’s my community. But that statement didn’t make too many people happy at the time.

INTERVIEWER

Look, to me, has a very female point of view. Women’s relationship to combat—though it’s changing with the evolution of war itself—is usually more oblique. We often play more supportive roles, though our experience is no less devastating. Is there significance to approaching war and surveillance as a woman?

SHARIF

Before I was even a poet, when I studied sociology, what I wanted to look at were media representations of women—Palestinian women in the New York Times, for example. How are women described by media, or by state-sponsored language, in warfare, and how is that representation used to justify state-sponsored violence? Women are often purposefully brought into descriptions of what war is—to justify the rescue of a nation, or to justify its decimation by showing its entire people as despicable or threatening, for example. By default, war seems to be just what happens to men on the front lines, during wartime. The boundaries of warfare—who it affects and who it doesn’t, and for how long—are very much divided along gendered lines, historically. I definitely wanted to challenge those lines.

INTERVIEWER

The book’s power is in its observations of the long-term effects of wars on individuals and families—some of its less-discussed casualties. I think part of the reason you’re able to take this view is because you’re a woman.

SHARIF

I think you’re right. There’s the old personal-is-political adage. But then, to be a woman is also to know that your body and your self and your mind are subject to and delimited by power at every turn, even in your own house, in your own lovemaking. There is no part of your life that has not been somehow violently decided for you by a narrative that was established before you were even born. This is not only true for women, right? It cuts across various identity strata—queerness, race, class, ability, et cetera.

But to have that sense of precarity or vulnerability questioned and challenged by misdirection—for example, when you’re told that you’re overreacting, that what you think is going on isn’t actually happening—this is how the U.S. largely deals with warfare. They say, The war is no longer happening on this block, what are you talking about? That’s something that’s natural to my experience as a woman, and something that seems necessary to expose over and over again. I want to talk about how far-reaching these effects are and how intimate these effects are and how there’s no part of our bodies or desires that are not somehow informed or violated by these atrocities. This is a conversation that began with my own gender.

Audre Lorde’s essay on erotics was a huge influence on me. When she talks about the erotic as a dark feminine power, that’s an argument that could be made here, but I’m not as comfortable making that argument myself anymore. I think all of these questions—what is femininity, what is darkness—and I’m so up in the air about them myself that I don’t really know what to say, other than that I feel, as a person and especially as a woman, that I am under constant threat and attack, and it’s not just me that’s happening to. Somehow, I want the work to show that every time you’re washing the dishes, every shower, every grocery trip—that’s all informed by this violence, whether we’re seeing it or not.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a constant awareness of surveillance in your work—in one poem, you mention that you start every phone call by saying, “Hello, NSA.”

SHARIF

The U.S.’s surveillance capabilities are not lost on me, and we’re pretty aware of this history—or maybe we’re not, actually. It’s definitely been in my awareness over the course of writing this book, and it’s something I did want to highlight. When we think of political repression, for example, or of a police state, we think of something that just happens abroad in Eastern European countries, or in Iran, whereas I understand America as the nation of COINTELPRO. How do we realize, again, that all of our lives, no matter who we are, are being surveilled, some more than others, and that we’re living in an increasingly repressive environment? How do we realize that whatever we see to be happening “there” has already happened “here”?

INTERVIEWER

The poems in Look are united thematically—the majority of these poems include rewritings of terms from the Department of Defense dictionary. I find this kind of conceptual project very interesting. Did you set out to write your first book in this way, or did it morph over the course of writing?

SHARIF

It became much larger than I anticipated, and I had to just stop it, basically, because it’s a conceptual frame that could continue ad infinitum, which is true of a lot of conceptual practices. I did not know it was going to be what it is. I discovered the dictionary in 2006, and it was another year or two until I actually started using it. I thought I was just going to write one poem that deals with the dictionary—then I realized I could write a whole book in response. As soon as I realized that, I started looking at other books that do similar work. M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! was a huge influence. That came in a later iteration of the manuscript. Later, too, I was directed to Code Poems by Hannah Weiner. Earlier on, there was Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead. Martha Collins’s Blue Front invited and encouraged a more personal narrative. With each discovery, the manuscript would shift in response—I’d think, This has already been done, or, I haven’t tried this thing yet, I didn’t realize I could do this. It started as a rewrite of the dictionary, and wanting to redefine the terms to reveal the truth beneath the terms. It then evolved into revealing those terms as a part of our lives everywhere, daily in the U.S. I think the last major piece that went into it was the long elegy, “Personal Effects,” that I wrote for my uncle, and that was probably when I thought that it was pretty much done. That was the last major piece the book needed.

INTERVIEWER

I’ve seen you mention June Jordan over and over in interviews. I know that you studied in her Poetry for the People (P4P) program at UC Berkeley and list it as a huge influence in your development as a poet. I came across this quote from her—  

The task of a poet of color, a black poet, as a people hated and despised, is to rally the spirit of your folks … I have to get myself together and figure out an angle, a perspective, that is an offering, that other folks can use to pick themselves up, to rally and to continue or, even better, to jump higher, to reach more extensively in solidarity with even more varieties of people to accomplish something.

 Can you talk a little about the program and why it was so important to you? What do you think your role is, as a poet?

SHARIF

There’s this vein of self-affirmation that runs through that generation of radical poets—this need to define and affirm a collective identity that is otherwise despised. That’s actually one place where I feel I split off. Maybe it’s a generational thing, maybe it’s just because I think of poetry, right now, at least, in the way Dunya Mikhail, the Iraqi poet, described it—as diagnostic, rather than curative. I think June was a poet of vision, and I think that I’m more reflective. I haven’t quite gotten to that moment of vision yet. I just trust and know that certain lives need to be looked at very closely, and need to be grieved, and need to be considered—and affirmed, I guess.

The P4P program was the most rigorous education I’ve ever received. It’s an amazing pedagogical model that June Jordan set up after decades of teaching. My understanding is that she was teaching an African American poetry course in the African American Studies department at Berkeley, and a women’s poetry course in what was then the Women’s Studies department, and she’d walk into these classrooms, and one class would be predominantly African American men reading African American poets, and the women’s studies classroom was predominantly white women reading women poets separately. She thought, These two classes need to be in the same room, and they need to be talking to each other. That’s how she came up with P4P, which was housed in the African American Studies department.

Each year, the program would focus on three different ethnic groups that we would have to learn to somehow define and describe a history of. When I took the class, it was one of the few—if not the only—class that was teaching Arab and Arab American poetry on campus. She started doing that right after the first Gulf War started.

As a student, you were in a class that you’re co-teaching with other undergraduate students and members of the community. You see a poetry that’s not being taught, and that you yourself know zero about, and instead of just lamenting that you’ll never have the expertise, you just figure it out. You read as much as you can, and you get up in front of the class and give a lecture. Maybe you fail publicly, but it has to be done. When you see work that’s not being done, you go and you do it. You don’t wait for someone else to.

I haven’t really seen a model that is so pedagogically complete and radical anywhere. It was her attempt at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beloved Community.” It was the closest I’ve gotten, for sure.

INTERVIEWER

Jordan was all about building multicultural alliances. I wonder how you, as an Iranian American, interact with the various racial justice movements in America that—at least at the moment—are dominated by discussions of anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism.

SHARIF

I think we need to be very, very specific in naming the racism, the multiplicity of racisms, we face. Meaning anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism, for example, must be named and highlighted. This does not preclude my own involvement or visibility as an Iranian American, and I shouldn’t be the measure by which this conversation is had, anyway. I think the more specific we are, the more inevitable it becomes to see the relationship between various powers. If we are naming the arrest of black men without charge and without trial, for example, well, I have something to add to that, something that wouldn’t be added if the conversation remained “we all face racism.” The more specific we become, the more obvious the relationship between these oppressions, the more dangerous and visionary the conversation.

You ask about movements. I do want to step back for a moment and say I believe all action is political, and poetry is an action, so I believe poetry is political, period. I have a hard time, though, saying that my poetry is activist, or that poetry in general is activist. For me there’s an important distinction to be made. I don’t want to front. As political as my work might be, and as much as I might be thinking about how these things play out globally, as much as I might think or write about anti-Black or anti-Latinx racism, I haven’t been to a meeting in a long time. That’s the most direct way I can put it.

Zinzi Clemmons’s debut novel, What We Lose, is forthcoming from Viking. She currently serves as deputy editor for Phoneme Media, and lives in Los Angeles.

“Temple Tomb Fortress Ruin,” an exhibition of paintings by John Wellington, is at the Lodge Gallery through March 5. Wellington embraces the formal tactics of the old masters to depict a bleak, surreal, new world order—seemingly both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western—animated above all by a kind of perverted militarism. His work fixates, as his gallery writes, on “lost worlds, passing empires, false prophets, unlikely heroes, and the allure of idolatry.”

John Wellington, You and Me, 2009, oil and copper leaf on aluminum, 68″ x 48″.

THIS IS A COMEDY, 2010, oil and aluminum leaf on aluminum, 48″ x 28.25″.

PROPHETE, 2011, oil on wood panel, 48″ diameter.

COME NEARER THE FIRE, 2008, oil and copper leaf on aluminum, 75″ x 48″.

BATHING DIANA (with guards), 2013, oil on aluminum, 30″ x 48″.

I have always loved shopping: in real life, online, even from a plane thirty-thousand feet above the earth, courtesy of SkyMall. I buy clothes, handbags, makeup, perfume, kitchen items—nothing that any other woman would find strange. But if you click the history tab on my computer, you’ll now see long lists of military tactical gear heading my way via UPS and Amazon Prime.

With the jaw-dropping exploits of the Special Operation Forces (Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, American Snipers, and Lone Survivors) brought to our attention by movies, books, and video games, a new breed of groupies has made its presence (and buying power) known. You no longer need to join the armed forces to look the part.

I have a friend named Mike Ritland who is a former Navy SEAL. Last month, during a visit to Texas, I tagged along as he made a call to ITS Tactical near Dallas. ITS stands for “Imminent Threat Solutions” and is a very successful online business. This might have been a classic “thanks, but I’ll wait in the car” moment for me. I assumed ITS was not up on designer hair-care products or sexy bras, little did I know I was walking into my newest obsession.

The ITS showroom is a Disneyland for gearheads. It is filled with a panoply of items you probably don’t think you need but will soon convince yourself you do, desperately.

I can think of no good reason why I should buy a digital desert-camo elastic MOLLE strapped combat backpack with a place to attach a Velcro patch embroidered with my blood type, but I did. Two.

Perusing the merchandise on the shelves at ITS sent red warning lights to my brain. My short visit to ITS turned out to be a gateway drug, and like the first firework snort of cocaine, I was instantly hooked on military tactical gear.

In fact, my view of the world shifted, and I no longer felt safe. I was not prepared for calamity and became dreadfully aware of how vulnerable I was. How could I have been so reckless as to not have a vacuum-sealed bag of QuikClot Combat Gauze with me at all times? If I’m gutshot in front of the Starbucks in Ridgefield, Connecticut, this stuff will stop the massive flow of blood until I reach the nearest MASH unit. I mean, local hospital.

When I returned home from Texas, I went online at two A.M. to peruse ITS’s seductive website. Soon I had filled my virtual cart with a pair of fire-resistant Escape shoelaces made of Kevlar, which, when removed from your shoes, you can use to friction saw through plastic wrist restraints. I also bought a small wallet-size lock-picking set and a jazzy Velcro-backed helmet patch that says, I RUN TOWARDS GUNFIRE. My helmet options are still undecided, but I favor the kind with netting that allows the insertion of small leafy tree branches.

After a cup of chamomile tea to settle my adrenaline-spiked shopping nerves, I retired for the evening thinking of George Orwell’s words: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Instead of sheep, I counted the hours until the next UPS delivery.

I soon learned that not every tactical-gear groupie shops for one item at a time, as I had been doing. You can sign up for a year’s worth of goodies by joining the Crate Club. Brandon Webb runs the Crate Club. Webb is a former Navy SEAL, celebrated combat sniper, and best-selling author of The Killing School and The Red Circle. Of all Webb’s prolific enterprises, I like the Crate Club best; it’s a sort of fruit-of-the-month club for badasses.

With a credit card and the push of a computer key, you can choose from various tiers of membership. The top-of-the-line crate is the Premier Crate that sells for around five hundred a year, and as with the less-deluxe Standard Crate or Pro Crate, you decide how often you would like it delivered. What you won’t know is what is in the box until you open it. That’s where the fun begins.

All the crates are filled with cool tech gear hand selected by Webb’s elite Special Forces buddies. To add gravitas to the merchandise, each warrior is pictured on the Crate Club website along with his Spec Ops credentials. So it matters little if you already own a pocketknife or a high-intensity flashlight. Now you have one with the residual glow of authenticity that comes from being curated by legendary military heroes.

Seeing a Crate Club unboxing feels like Santa Claus has morphed into Colonel Kurtz. This is the most butch shopping club in the world. If you want to see big tattooed men tremble like kids on Christmas morning, get them a subscription.

The Crate Club is not for battle-hardened guys in the military but for regular people wanting a taste of adventure that they will never see. After all, if the men who caught Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden favor this knife or that flashlight, how can you doubt that it will soon feel like a must-have as you sit in front of your TV set watching The Hurt Locker.

I’m not exactly sure what type of combat I’m preparing for. War with North Korea, the zombie apocalypse, the New World Order takeover … all are possible, but whatever happens, I now have a fully stocked medical “jump kit,” a three-day tactical backpack, and a “bug-out bag” filled with water-purification tablets, survival guides, and a collapsible camping tent to deal with it. And now for the perfect helmet.

Jane Stern is the author of more than forty books, including, most recently, Confessions of a Tarot Reader. With Michael Stern, she coauthored the popular Roadfood guidebook series. The Sterns recently donated forty years of archival materials to the Smithsonian museum, documenting the atmosphere, stories, and history of various restaurants, diners, and regional food events.

Peder Severin Krøyer, Copenhagen: Roofs under the Snow, 1870–1900, oil on canvas, 7″ x 9″.

January 1981

It’s snowing. I’m thinking back to January 1979, when I received a letter whose writer told of his sudden fear of snow; for an instant the snow floating down to earth had been a poison that smothered all life.

It’s snowing. I’m remembering the farmer on TV who told of walking out into his fields in early November, and the snow, the first very sparse and fine snow, burned like fire. But now, so much later, nobody would believe it. Even though practically every child knows that snow and fire are no longer opposites. Not in a radioactive world.

So. It’s snowing. The snow is no longer snow, but it’s still snowing.

We’re now so fearful that we’re not even fearful anymore, but the fear is spreading anyway, and the closest word for it is sorrow.

We see what’s happening, and we’re happy about what’s not happening. We compare what’s terrifying with what’s even more terrifying. We compare limited nuclear war with total nuclear war, and the comparison deprives us of the last remnant of our natural horror.

We see thousands of dead birds, thousands of dead and maimed soldiers, thousands of death wishes and their violent expressions, but as long as we see all this annihilation in all its well-known forms, at least we’re seeing something, and as long as we see something, total annihilation hasn’t happened yet. 

So fear has become a strangely useless feeling, discarded and purposeless, and over these chaotic fragments of a fear that once had a social purpose, sorrow has spread. The future is dead and buried, and the work of transforming ourselves from mourners to survivors, or at least to people capable of surviving, has barely begun.

At night we sit frozen to the TV screen, and night after night the same thing happens: first President Reagan comes on and then General Haig comes on, and night after night Reagan says we’re optimistic, and night after night Haig says that no one, and he means no one, has a monopoly on virtue.

No, we’re not really afraid anymore.

It’s true that we have a map of Denmark on which someone has shown what will happen when, in due course, an atomic bomb falls on Copenhagen. What will happen is that Copenhagen will turn completely red, and the redness won’t pale to gentle, pink radioactive fallout until way out in western Jutland.

But we don’t react anymore. We don’t pack any little brown suitcases with the things we’d need if we were trying to escape, and we don’t pile up any sandbags, either, in the bedroom or by the front door. We see what’s happening. We can’t get alerts, and we don’t want any. But occasionally, in the best Jules Verne fashion, in a dream of getting through all dangers, we set out and arrive safely at our destination, where we dig ourselves down into a mountain cave deep under the Siberian snows.

January 1982

It’s snowing. It keeps on snowing. The radio broadcasts music and weather reports, music and weather reports, and the call goes out for all civilians to refrain from driving, making unnecessary telephone calls, or contributing to the chaos with their usual defiant attitude toward the weather gods, but to get themselves home, before the roads close, before one part of the country after another shuts down and the whole country ends up paralyzed. At that point, military tractor-tread vehicles will be the only things capable of moving the immovable snow around, the only ones bringing food out to the stricken families, the only ones providing fodder for the radio’s spirited accounts of birth and death in the drifting snow.

And meanwhile Haig appears on the screen. I’ve said before, he says, and I’ll say again, he says, that no one has a monopoly on virtue. If the USSR thinks they have a monopoly on virtue, the U.S.A. knows how to break that monopoly. And that goes for every bit of virtue in the world: if it threatens our American interests’ direct and swift access to virtue, then the U.S. has the power and the ability and the will to use its power to defend that virtue. Virtue is certainly not an inalienable commodity. It must be fought for and won again and again; this means that a great country certainly can lose its virtue, but not without fighting, for a great country can never lose its greatness or allow itself to lose face.

We talk about the commission that’s been set up. It would be very good if we were less vulnerable, especially during snowstorms. It would be very good if we were less dependent on General Haig’s attempt to make a virtue of necessity or vice versa. It would be very good if we were better at survival, on the day or night when, under cover of the first, the best, round of snow, we were invaded by Russian polar commandos, while all the Danish tractor-tread vehicles were on their way out to assist all the Danish motorists. All in all, it would be very good if there were a meaning to it all.

January 1983

It’s snowing, but it doesn’t matter.

General Haig is being interviewed by Secretary of State Haig, or vice versa, but it doesn’t matter.

The neutron bomb has been put into production, but meanwhile we’re using our time as wisely as we can; we insulate our life with a vengeance, shut out everything that can possibly be shut out, and give ourselves over to living in house slippers in the living room; and when the pot of potatoes is taken out of its haybox it coincides exactly with the beginning of War Games in Denmark on TV. “When the war comes, I’m going to hide in the haybox,” says the youngest child. “It’s so nice and warm in there.”

The neutron bomb has been put into production, but there do seem to be plans to examine the civic bomb shelters. We’re not sure whether we’d need to bring water along.

I’m sitting here thinking about why it’s only greed and fear that motivate us toward these sensible pursuits that, to put it bluntly, are sensible only because everything everywhere is so senseless. Why we don’t use all our sense to establish peace, or use all our instincts to maintain life. Human beings’ peace needn’t be as different as we think it is from birds’ peace; their musical division of the country—so that each individual can take care of itself and thus help to further the entire race—is all in all a better idea than our economic division.

But that’s ludicrous; it’s a false analogy; human beings aren’t birds, and if they are, most of them are raptors.

But that’s precisely the point. All human beings are actually sparrows, songbirds, siskins, parrots, and the like. They’re prey to chance. And as prey, they aren’t guaranteed a long and fruitful life, not without implementing a comprehensive warning system, a meticulous knowledge of the area, and a network of hiding places.

January 1984

It’s snowing. Visibility is sharply reduced.

Whereas in earlier wars it was soldiers who died by the hundreds of thousands and civilians who mourned their deaths, it’s now probable that if war breaks out it will be civilians who will die by the millions, with soldiers the ones left to mourn them.

How else could it be? Considering that the home front will either quickly dissolve or be directly wiped out, so that the soldiers will have nothing left to defend, then it will be the soldiers themselves who will have to try to survive at all costs, and to dig themselves down, as many as possible, into their underground command centers.

In any case, they have gas masks and radiation detectors, and they most likely have protective suits and food as well. I’m not sure whether they thought about bringing water along. But of course they must have; maybe they even have machines that can melt the poisonous snow into something whose effect resembles that of water.

January 1985

It’s snowing, and the snow obliterates all traces.

We steal around taking classes on securing everything and everyone against everything and everyone. Classes in defense against everyone and solidarity with everyone. Classes in obstruction, sabotage, and icy courtesy. As it snows, and the snow obliterates all traces. And as the atomic procession winds through a snow-covered Europe, we sit frozen in front of our TV screens and watch the snow keep snowing, obliterating all traces.

It’s snowing; visibility is sharply reduced. We don’t dare leave the TV off. Since the atomic bomb was dropped on the mountains of Iran, and since parliament voted to dissolve Denmark’s ties to NATO (Haig in passing pushed the press aside and said it was impossible for NATO to pay attention to “a small country’s one-sided decision”), and since the Strait of Hormuz was closed, since the oil stopped coming, since we started to get cold, we’ve kept the TV on. It gives off warmth, and at least it feels like an alarm system. As long as we can see an atomic bomb exploding on screen, at least we know that we ourselves haven’t been hit. As long as we still have hope that the gas masks we’ve saved up for will be delivered. As long as we can say that where there’s life, there’s hope. Maybe we can manage to figure something out. Because no one has a monopoly on death.

—Translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied

Inger Christensen (1935–2009) was the recipient of many international awards, including the Nordic Authors’ Prize. Her other books include Alphabet, Azorno, Butterfly Valley, and It.

Susanna Nied’s work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. Her translation of It won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award in 2007.

Excerpted from The Condition of Secrecy, by Inger Christensen, translated by Susanna Nied, published by New Directions on November 27.

Still from accompanying video (below), edited by Miles Lagoze and Eric Schuman.

A few weeks before our unit’s operation started, Lance Corporal Loya and I stood over a wadi, waiting for each other to throw our cameras down into its dusty, hollow trench. Wadis—the streams or natural ravines that farmers in the region often used as irrigation canals—were our generation’s rice paddies; they were everywhere in Helmand Province. When they weren’t wet, it was comforting to climb inside them—womblike slits in the ground to curl up in and shoot out of. They were the last thing some of us would see before dying. Like feudal tendrils etched across the fields, the wadis in the Sangin Valley were fed by the Kajaki Dam, which provided the area with a (very) limited source of electricity. It was also the main source of water for all the nearby poppy fields. This was September 2011, and guys were already talking conspiracy theories about how the pharmaceutical industry was behind the war, how they were funding the whole thing with the aim of getting us hooked on opioids once we got back to the States all fucked up and traumatized.

I looked down into the wadi where, amazingly, there crawled a tiny desert crab—“shit crabs,” we called them, because everything was shit—and, as a matter of compulsion, I crouched down to get a shot of the little guy before we disposed of our cameras.

“We’ll say we dropped them while we were getting shot at,” I said, standing back up.

“I dunno,” Loya said. “Both of us? That seems fishy.” Loya was the other combat photographer for the First Battalion, Sixth Marines. He was a very spiritual guy, in the sense that in high school he would drop acid and take ecstasy in the deserts of El Paso, and he felt the presence of God with such assuredness that he could convince you, too.

“Maybe one of us should drop ours, and the other should get theirs crushed by an MRAP or something.”

We wanted to break our clunky DV tape recorder cameras so we could get issued the new digital ones that the Marine Corps had just transitioned to. That was how the military worked: you couldn’t get new shit unless the old shit was broke. Ours took forever to export and the footage looked all grey and washed out. We wanted the new digital cameras that made the war pop, to bridge our cinematic dreams of combat with the real thing, and render flat the things that were trying to kill us. They came with night vision infrared; with the click of a button we could turn the world inside out, and make evidence-based war porn the way it was supposed to be seen. To enhance the footage, we even toyed with adding fake muzzle-flash F/X, even though, 95 percent of the time, we didn’t have a clue where we were getting shot from. We didn’t want it to look like we were just shooting into an empty cliff wall, or a mound of dirt, or a house (which, most of the time, we were).

It’s not like we were real journalists anyway; we were propaganda stooges. Loya and I had both enlisted in 2008 as Combat Camera, a small division of the Marine Corps that consisted mostly of guys who’d seen Full Metal Jacket a couple too many times, and didn’t want to have to actually kill anyone. There were usually one or two combat photographers with each infantry unit, so probably ten or fifteen of us total in Helmand Province when we were there. Our main job was to show the benevolence of our troops abroad: building schools and wells, et cetera. Sometimes we’d shoot stuff for Civil Affairs or Psychological Operations as propaganda for the Afghans to come to our side—photos of us playing soccer with some kids that they’d drop from the sky onto a village we were about to invade.

Usually, the purpose of Combat Camera, once you were on the ground and actually filming stuff, was not entirely clear. If you needed to get an interview with someone, their first question would usually be, “Where’s this video gonna go?” I often wouldn’t have the answer. If you were lucky, your video would get broadcast on AFN, the American Forces Network, a news station created by and for the military. AFN was mostly seen as a joke or just ignored as it played in the background at mess halls on air bases in Bagram, or Italy, or Kurdistan. “Today, airmen with the Eighteenth Wing stationed on Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, got a special treat,” I once had to narrate. “A volleyball match between Japanese police officers and air force MPs. What started out as a serious competition soon turned to laughs, as Okinawan locals joined in on the fun …” You wouldn’t know America was at war if you were tuned in to AFN.

Most of the footage just got shuffled into a database so that some colonel working at a desk in Quantico could get a glimpse of what the war was looking like on the ground. If it was deemed suitable for public release, it would get uploaded onto the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service at DVIDShub.net, where you can find an endless stream of Christmas and Thanksgiving shout-outs from soldiers and sailors wishing their families back home a merry Christmas and happy holidays from Afghanistan.

If our footage ever did make it to the civilian news it was usually when there was a firefight, but everything had to be super whitewashed—no images of casualties, no marines cursing, no smoking, et cetera. We had to look professional.

But Loya and I had a side hustle going on. We were filming something besides the fake war we were supposed to be recording and the real war that no one cared about: our own, alternate movie war. And with the switch to digital, anything seemed possible. What we wanted most of all, what we thought would elevate our secret war movie, was to capture, just once, the enemy getting gunned down in crystal clear, 4K high resolution—a real Bigfoot, UFO type of moment. Most of the war footage we had seen was too localized, not expansive enough. You could never see the bad guys until it was too late, after they’d been killed and left as carnage in the gray and dusty archives of Google Street View: War.

We’d sit around stoned, imagining the heaps of awards we’d receive, the praise from both the military and civilian world, for capturing the “brutality of war” in such an “unvarnished” and “candid” way. “Visceral,” it would be called, “psychedelic.” And our bravery would be lauded as well, for never putting down the camera, for running ceaselessly into the fire. “The brave ones shot bullets, the crazy ones shot film”: we loved that corny slogan from Vietnam, from the glory days of journalism, back when you could actually make a difference just by photographing a napalmed girl or an executed VC. Now there was no difference to make. Pro-war, anti-war—it didn’t really mean anything anymore.

And yet: if our eyes were beginning to become one with our technologies of 24-7 documentation—we had drones and surveillance blimps hovering in the sky that could see through walls, and biometric-analysis tracking systems that catalogued people via retinal scan—and if we were Marines with the gall to film through the scopes of our rifles, then surely something real, something incredible and also educational about war and dying that we hadn’t already seen in the beheading videos they showed us in boot camp, would get captured through the steely lens of our holy death cams. For ComCam kids, the camera was an extension of our rifle, a kill-shot camcorder that doubled as both weapon and cataloger. We dreamed in first-person shooter.

We were eighteen when we enlisted, horny yet abstinent, vile yet pure, impressionable and impenetrable at the same time. You can’t tell an eighteen-year-old nothing, unless it’s something like “Getting shot at is better than sex.” The videos we watched growing up opened a door to the hidden parts of reality, but also distorted it. Internet porn taught us how to fuck while heightening the act to the point of pastiche, so that when we started doing it for real, mimicking the words and sounds and movements, it felt less intimate, less authentic than when we were alone in our rooms. We weren’t just desensitized, we were transubstantiated into a new design, a new frame of looking, feeling, believing. Things happened in videos of real life that could not be explained—a weird blip in the night sky might be a UFO, or it might be an effect of autoexposure. It was hard to process, and left you feeling sort of removed from it all the more inundated you got. The more the world was documented, the less sense it started to make.

***

Stills from accompanying video (below), edited by Miles Lagoze and Eric Schuman.

***

In the end, the only deaths we’d capture were of our own guys, which we never wanted to happen but also secretly needed to happen. To show the cost of war there had to be an actual cost. The stakes of war were such that people you knew would have to die—this came with the cinematic baggage we each brought with us.

One of our first KIAs was not a KIA at all, but a suicide. It happened a couple of months into the deployment, not long after Loya and I were issued the new digital cameras we’d been pining for—we ended up not having to break the old ones; our commanding officer heard that other ComCam guys were breaking theirs, and intervened by switching everyone out. Lance Corporal Laight had a speech impediment, and he kept falling asleep on post. He’d been in Afghanistan before, so he shouldn’t have been fucking up the way he was. After getting hazed by Marines who were technically his juniors, he left a note on his iPhone and shot himself with his M4. His squad leader had chewed him out the night prior to his death.

I remember they didn’t give Laight a memorial while we were in country. One of our duties as Combat Camera was to film memorial ceremonies, where the chaplain would stand up and read off a few Bible verses—they lumped everyone into Christian services—and someone would play “Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band. After we put the packages together, we’d send the videos home to the families.

I was pissed that Laight didn’t get a memorial, because I liked him—he was a goofball and had the face of a little kid, and his presence had a weird, comforting effect; you thought that if he could make it through the deployment, anyone could—and it seemed like they were trying to sweep his death under the rug, or like he didn’t rate a memorial because he hadn’t died the right way. Suicide was so common in the Marines that it became a chore; anytime someone did it, we’d have to sit through a PowerPoint presentation about not killing ourselves, how to spot the signs, ask for help, etc.

After filming a memorial for another guy, who’d died from a sucking chest wound around the same time as Laight, I got called into the office of the Company “Top,” First Sergeant Argon. He had a lazy eye and thought my job as Combat Camera was totally useless: “I could teach a monkey to do your job,” he told me once. He was very intimidating, especially because his lazy eye made it nearly impossible to tell if he was looking at you or not.

“You’re going to the dam,” Argon said.

We’d be on the next convoy through the Sangin Valley, up the rocky slopes riddled with IEDs to the crown jewel on the hill that was, although we didn’t know it at the time, the sole reason our unit was in Afghanistan.

“Why, First Sergeant?” I asked.

“Why do you think? To film something.”

They never told us anything. Secrecy was a currency in the Marine Corps: the higher up you were, the more you knew, and in order to maintain the hierarchy you had to keep the lower-enlisted in the dark.

“Hey, you lazy-eyed fucker,” I wanted to shout. “Why didn’t you give Laight a memorial?”

It wasn’t till we got back to the States that I realized why that would have been a bad idea. If he had killed himself because of how his squad was treating him, would his family really want to see a video of the same guys commemorating him? When we had the final memorial ceremony, back in North Carolina, for all the guys that had died during our deployment, Laight’s photo was up on the stage with the others, and I imagined the pain and confusion his parents must have felt sitting there packed into the assembly hall, enveloped by a sea of his camouflaged killers.

***

***

Loya and I had heard rumors about the dam, and when we got there, after an hour-long ride through abandoned villages and bazaars, we saw that they were all true. The dam was a theme park, a cathedral, a cinema. The views were from another world: you could see the whole war from its rocky slopes—all the mud huts and hamlets our unit was occupying. It was like a Universal Studios ride through a different time, back when Kabul was called the Paris of Central Asia, and Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, used the dam as a resort. He’d bring women to go swimming in its many pools, and get them drunk on wine. It was the only place in our area of operations that had actual buildings as opposed to mud huts, and the chow hall was fully staffed with Marine cooks who had steaks and other goodies flown in to the base. There was supposedly a haunted hotel somewhere around there, where an entire company of Soviet Spetsnaz had been overrun and flayed alive by the mujahideen. Marines would get high on hash and go swimming in the dam’s turquoise waters when the place wasn’t under mortar attack, then explore the hotel.

But the dam was impossible to film. It didn’t look right on camera. You couldn’t capture the weight of it, nor the faint, always present sound of rushing water that crushed everything and expanded it at the same time. Filming at the dam was like holding a camera up to a movie screen.

The first thing Loya and I did, after getting some shitty panorama shots of the place for the intel folks, was seek out our friend Wahid. Wahid was the personal Afghan translator of a colonel who worked at the dam. Like all the interpreters (terps for short), he was working for a visa to the U.S.—an interminable process that you might not outlive, unless someone higher up intervened on your behalf. Wahid’s hope was that the colonel would show his thanks by pushing his paperwork to the front of the pile. And, unlike the other terps, Wahid had already been completely Americanized by U.S. forces. He’d been on nine consecutive deployments with a host of different units ranging from Blackwater to Special Ops. He was also an asshole, and the most anti-Muslim Muslim I’d ever met. He ate pork in front of the other terps, much to their chagrin, and derided the prophet Muhammad. Some months later, after I’d gotten hit with shrapnel from a grenade, he wouldn’t stop flicking me in the head where my bandage was, talking about how many times he’d been shot.

“Americans are fucking pussies, man,” he said. “I’ve been shot twice on two different deployments. Where is my Purple Heart? Where is my PTSD?” We would come back to the States mythologized as traumatized heroes, overmedicalized and treated with kid gloves, free college, and pancakes at IHOP on Veterans’ Day, while Wahid would remain merely a collateral fixture of the place he came from.

We found him serene, almost glowing, in what looked to be an old bomb shelter. He had his own room with a TV, a beautiful rug, and a giant hookah in the corner. The three of us got high and watched live performances of Alizée, the French Britney Spears, who he was obsessed with, off his hard drive. The other terps came and watched us, and Loya started dancing.

“My mom always knew I was going to be a dancer,” he said. “When I was in the womb, I’d always start kicking anytime she played music.”

Then we did the thing we always did for Wahid: romanticize America, building it up to the sublime. The women, we’d tell him. “They’ll sleep with you the first time you meet them?” he asked. “Oh, yes,” we said. The food, the drugs. You wouldn’t believe it. You’re gonna love it. We’d all get so drunk when we got back, we’d die. This was the happiest moment of our deployment.

The next day, they had us film the Afghan engineer who ran the dam, a short man in typical Afghan garb, except for the fancy Warby Parker–esque glasses he wore, which made him stand out. Rumor was that the poor guy kept getting kidnapped by the Taliban and other militias on his way home from work. They would snatch him up and use him as leverage in their attempt to hold sway over the region. Most of the time they’d let him go after a couple days, and he was probably getting a few kickbacks from the various groups as they tried to get him on their side.

There were a bunch of Army engineers putting around, shaking hands with him before the tour started. Then we walked through the innards of the hydroelectric dam, which was like a dementia-ridden brain where antiquated pieces mixed with new ones. The Army guys would stop every now and then and tell me to get a shot of them talking with the guy. It didn’t matter what was being said, just so long as I had B-roll of them gesturing and pointing at stuff. After ten years of trying to fix it, the dam was still broken. It was missing seven hundred tons of cement that U.S. and British forces had been trying to transport there, but we’d kept getting ambushed and blown up by IEDs along the way.

The dam was meant to be our supreme “Sorry for invading you, look, we’re here to help” act of benevolence. It had been built by the U.S. during the Cold War in the fifties, bombed by the Soviets when they invaded in the eighties, left broken for years, and then bombed again by the U.S. immediately after 9/11—and now this unit was trying to fix it. The U.S. military had already thrown close to a billion dollars at the project by the time we got there, most of which had gotten funneled to the Taliban.

The Army guys did the usual song and dance with the engineer, and even drove to his house to sit down and eat some fish that he’d caught in the Helmand River (“shit fish,” someone commented). We met his family, and I filmed the whole thing, like some kind of weird sitcom. It reminded me of detainee reunions, where we’d release the people we’d wrongfully detained and I’d take photos of them being greeted by their families upon their return. I’m sure if the Taliban had Combat Camera, they’d do the same thing for the engineer when they returned him.

When I was done filming the engineer, Loya, Wahid, and I got lost in the dam some more, and sat staring at its rushing water for hours until the moonlight played holochrome with its reflections. We never wanted to leave.

When I got back to the Company, First Sergeant Argon looked at me like I was a fool. I had lost track of how long we were gone; we had been at the dam for over a week when it was only supposed to be a couple days. He told me they didn’t need my bullshit video anymore, that whoever had wanted it—probably in order to get more funding—had already left. Some State Department official. Like most of our footage, it would get archived and then eventually lost.

***

***

Twelve people from our unit were among the hundreds of coalition forces who died trying to fix the dam during the course of the war. I don’t know how many civilians we killed, but I personally saw four who were either caught in the cross fire or mistaken for Taliban. There’s no way to know the number for sure: war is one of the last untouchable spaces where data can never be trusted—especially if it’s our data.

Wahid finally made it to America about a year after Loya and I got out of the Marines in 2012. Within a couple years he hated it and wanted to go back to Afghanistan. He was bogged down by student debt, and didn’t have many friends. American Gen Z students didn’t talk the way Marine grunts did, and the rednecks he lived near thought he was either Mexican or a terrorist. Eventually he was back to praying twice a day like he did when he was a kid, before he was “corrupted by the Marines,” as he’d say.

After the Taliban took over again this past summer, his family had to go on the run. The Taliban knew about Wahid and his work with us, and were leaving death threats. His family were among the thousands trying to flee from Kabul Airport in August. They were almost killed by the suicide bomber who took out 180 people, a few of whom were Marines born after 9/11—the American news kept emphasizing that, as if the war had still been about 9/11 by the time us millennials were there.

“The U.S. abandoned my family,” Wahid texted me.

“That’s what we do,” I replied. I wasn’t trying to sound callous, but he interpreted it as such, and blocked me for a bit.

***

Now I miss the old mini-DV tape cameras. They made the real look dirty, and maybe that’s how it should look. We’ve gotten too comfortable with the real. But I suppose that documentation, like everything, goes in phases. Once you can see the phases, the world loses meaning.

In my Trazodone dreams I’m at the dam—still broken—with Wahid and Loya, and the engineer is there too, and so is crazy Laight. We’re all watching Alizée and waxing lyrical about finally coming to America.

***

Miles Lagoze’s 2019 documentary, Combat Obscura, was made from footage shot during his deployment to Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in 2011. The video below was created to accompany this essay using footage that didn’t make it into the feature-length film, as well as propaganda material produced by the Department of Defense. It was edited by Lagoze and Eric Schuman, who co-produced Combat Obscura.

Miles Lagoze is a Marine veteran, writer, and filmmaker based in New York. His memoir, about filmmaking and his time in Afghanistan, will be published by One Signal/Simon & Schuster in 2022.

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.

In March 1937, eight months into the Spanish Civil War, Virginia Cowles, a twenty-seven-year-old freelance journalist from Vermont who specialized in society gossip, put a bold proposal to her editor at Hearst newspapers: she wanted to go to Spain to report on both sides of the hostilities. Despite the fact that Cowles’s only qualification for combat reporting was her self-confessed “curiosity,” rather astonishingly, her editor agreed. “I knew no one in Spain and hadn’t the least idea how one went about such an assignment,” she explains innocently in the opening pages of Looking for Trouble, the bestselling memoir she published in 1941. She set off for Europe regardless.

In the four years between arriving in Spain and the publication of Looking for Trouble, Cowles travelled the length and breadth of Europe. She was something of an Anglophile, having been captivated as a child by the stories of King Arthur and his Knights, and thus happily relocated to London, stoically braving its inconveniences—the “lack of central heating, the fogs, the left-hand traffic”—in order to benefit from the front-row seat it offered her to the “sound and fury across the Channel.” In her words, living in the English capital in the late 1930s was “like sitting too near an orchestra and being deafened by the rising crescendo of the brass instruments.”

In 1937, Cowles arrived in Madrid, wearing high heels and a fur coat—the first of quite a few sartorial descriptions in the volume, usually given because the inexperienced Cowles finds herself inadvertently under or overdressed!—but was soon gamely venturing out to the frontlines, ducking to avoid the bullets that whined “like angry wasps” overhead. When not in the midst of the action, she was holed up in the now famous Hotel Florida, alongside Ernest Hemingway—“a massive, ruddy-cheeked man who went round Madrid in a pair of filthy brown trousers and a torn blue shirt”— and other war reporters. Among them, too, was fellow female journalist Martha Gellhorn, with whom Cowles would forge a close friendship; the two later co-wrote a play loosely based on their experiences, ‘Love Goes to Press’ (1946).

This was the beginning of Cowles’s relatively brief but impressively prolific career in war reporting. She was in Prague during the Munich crisis, and Berlin on the day Germany invaded Poland. In early 1939 she escaped “the gloom of London” by means of a six-week trip to Soviet Russia, hoping for what might be “almost a holiday.” She soon stood corrected, determining Moscow to be “the dreariest city on earth,” the depression of which “penetrated [her] bones like a damp fog.” She’d probably have felt less grim if she wasn’t so cold, but yet again, she’d arrived inadequately attired: this time without any woollen stockings, naively assuming she’d be able to buy what she needed when she got there. “Good heavens! Do you really think you can buy woollen stockings here?” a shocked French journalist asked when she tried to enlist his help in tracking some down. A year later, she was in Finland—this time clad in a thick suit, fur-lined boots and a sheepskin coat—travelling north towards the Arctic Circle to report on the Winter War, the bloody battle being waged by the Finns against the invading Russians. In June 1940, as everyone else fled the city, she flew into Paris to cover its fall to the Germans. Three months later, she was in London on the first day of the Blitz.

Cowles is one of six women—along with Gellhorn, Clare Hollingworth, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Sigrid Schultz—whose stories Judith Mackrell tells in her excellent new group biography, The Correspondents. When war broke out in 1939, Cowles and her sisters-in-arms were still enough of a “novelty” to invite special attention, Mackrell determines , but, “[a]s the battle lines spread and the story grew to encompass both civilians and soldiers, editors had to increase their global coverage, and, by the end of the war, around 250 of the reporters and photographers accredited to the Allied armies were women.”

Not only did Cowles distinguish herself in terms of the breadth and scope of her reporting, she was also one of the very first woman combat journalists to document the reporting experience itself. “As the compact yet comprehensive record of a woman correspondent’s unique experience,” wrote the New York Times in their glowing review of Looking for Trouble in August 1941, “her story makes one of the most engrossing and most illuminatingly effective books that the war has produced.”

***

Before she left for Spain, Cowles was a flapper columnist. The byline of her second report from the frontlines was “NY Society Girl Sees Americans Fighting in Trenches.” Her only apprenticeship as a freelance foreign correspondent was makeshift: in 1933, she and her sister Mary used the small inheritance they’d been left by their recently deceased mother to finance an ambitious overseas trip. The siblings spent eleven months travelling through Japan, the Far East and northern India, during the course of which Cowles cabled a series of columns back to Hearst newspapers in the U.S. These covered all manner of topics, from the feminist movement in Burma, through Tokyo’s commercial marriage bureaus, to reports of pirates on the China seas. “Although she was writing as a tourist—her research skimpy, her analysis superficial—she had an eye for the surprising incident, the piquant human detail, and she was very good at getting strangers to confide in her,” Mackrell assesses.

These skills are also much in evidence in Looking for Trouble. Cowles’s observation of the platinum blond Spanish woman “whose hair was growing out very black due to the fact that all the peroxide had been confiscated by the hospitals,” is tangible; so is her description of her first experience of being under fire: “a noise like the sound of cloth ripping. It was gentle at first, then it grew into a hiss; there was a split second of silence, followed by a bang as a shell hurtled into the white stone telephone building at the end of the street.” In a later chapter, she recounts travelling through Paris on her way back from Romania, where she’d watched Polish refugees “streaming across the frontier before the massacre of the German tanks and planes.” Amongst the hustle and bustle of the overcrowded Romanian hotel where Cowles, the other correspondents, diplomats and military attachés have gathered, the fleeing Poles are immediately identifiable:

You could tell them by their mud-stained clothes and the dazed looks in their faces. In one corner of the lobby a Polish woman, with a fine head and long slender hands, sat alone, crying. She didn’t make any sound but sat quite motionless, hour after hour, the tears streaming down her face.

Cowles concludes the chapter with a sharp juxtaposition to this “tragedy of smashed lives,” describing a woman who wants to get into the French capital in order to buy a Schiaparelli dress, incensed that she’s being denied entry just because she hasn’t got the right visa.

According to Mackrell, “the most powerful weapon in [Cowles’s] armoury was charm. Wide-eyed and slenderly built, disconcertingly glamorous in lipstick and high heels, she could walk into a military mess or a politician’s office, and coax the toughest, most recalcitrant of men to talk.” In England, between assignments, she hobnobbed with the political elite: Lloyd George, Chamberlain and Churchill. (Her friendship with the latter’s son, Randolph, opened all manner of doors.) She was granted an audience with Mussolini, and took tea with Hitler and his cronies in Nuremberg. The Führer struck Cowles as a decidedly “ordinary and rather inconspicuous little man.” In Spain, she drank champagne with a Russian Red Army General. “Here’s to the bourgeoisie! May we cut their throats and live as they do!” he shouted as they raised their glasses in a toast. On a bitterly cold January night in 1940, “in a world of white forests and glassy lakes,” she dined with the notorious General Tuompo, Commander of the North Finland Group and the man responsible for the deaths of 85,000 Russians. In Rome later that spring, Prince Philipp of Hesse invited her over for cocktails, during which he professed how sorry he was that the Germans couldn’t help the Finns—who, despite putting up an incredible fight during the winter months, were eventually forced to surrender—claiming that his country’s pact with Russia prevented them from interfering. “But darling,” his wife, Princess Mafalda, artlessly interrupted, “you told me you did interfere. You told me you persuaded the Finns to sign the peace treaty by promising to put things right for them later on.”

Cowles’s reportage from Finland, during what she rightly describes as “some of the fiercest battles of the war,” is particularly memorable. In the seven weeks prior to her arrival, over one hundred thousand Russian troops had crossed the frontier, only to be slaughtered by the Finns or pushed back over the border. “To understand how they did it,” Cowles explains, “you must picture a country of thick-snow-covered forests and ice-bound roads. You must visualise heavily armed ski patrols sliding like ghosts through the woods; creeping behind the enemy lines and cutting their communications until entire battalions were isolated, then falling on them in furious surprise attacks. In this part of Finland skis outmanoeuvred tanks, sleds competed with lorries, and knives even challenged rifles.” It’s here, in the “strange pink light” of dawn and on a stretch of road and forest that’s recently become known as ‘Dead Man’s Land’, that Cowles witnessed “the most ghastly spectacle” she’d ever seen:

For four miles the road and forests were strewn with the bodies of men and horses; with wrecked tanks, field kitchens, trucks, gun carriages, maps, books and articles of clothing. The corpses were frozen as hard as petrified wood and the colour of the skin was mahogany. Some of the bodies were piled on top of each other like a heap of rubbish, covered only by a merciful blanket of snow; others were sprawled against the trees in grotesque attitudes.

Already enough to “very nearly” make her ill, the scene only became more horrifying when she learned that she was looking at the remains of the 44th Division, the exact band of soldiers that she had encountered trooping along a country road in the Ukraine a year earlier; “husky, clean-shaven men,” whose “high boots and long, thick coats [had] offered a striking contrast to the shabby appearance of the peasants,” whom Cowles had been interviewing at the time.

***

Looking for Trouble isn’t just a memoir. It is also an impassioned cry to Cowles’s fellow Americans to do their bit and join the fray, an appeal in the tradition of Mrs Miniver, William Wyler’s 1942 film adaptation of Jan Struther’s 1940 novel about a resilient English housewife facing the hardships of the war with an impeccably vermillioned stiff upper lip, which was credited with rallying significant support in America for Britain and the Allies. Cowles draws her book to a close with a crescendo of rhetoric colored by what Mackrell calls “near-Churchillian levels of emotion”:

Let us recapture the virility of our forebears and rise up now, before it is too late, to declare war on the Nazi forces which threaten our way of life. Let us rise up now in all our splendour and fight side by side with Great Britain until we reach a victory so complete that freedom will ring through the ages to come with a strength no man dare challenge.

Following a six-month tour promoting the book across America (during which time the country officially joined forces with the Allies) Cowles was, according to Mackrell, “acclaimed for her contribution to the propaganda effort.”

After a brief stint in London, working in the office of the American ambassador to England, she returned to the action. In January 1943, during a two-month leave of absence from the embassy, she went to North Africa, where the American and British armies allowed her unprecedented access to the frontlines. Getting deeper into the desert war in Tunisia than any other correspondent, male or female, Cowles was embedded with the British 6th Armoured Division while they fought for control of the Kasserine Pass in the Atlas Mountains. Th e intelligence officer looking after her—who’d been astonished when she turned up in the first place—begged her to turn back while he and the other men fought on (all of whom, apparently, were utterly smitten with her, captivated by both her bravery and her beauty when she appeared, dream-like, in their midst). Only once she’d got the material she needed did Cowles agree to turn back .

Cowles was awarded an OBE for her services to war reporting in 1947, and promptly settled down to a new life as part of the British Establishment. Shortly after the fighting ended, she had married her beau, Aidan Crawley, a British pilot who’d been shot down over the Libyan desert in July 1941 and detained as a POW for the rest of the war. He became an MP, and the couple had three children. Cowles threw herself into her new roles of wife and mother. Mackrell reports that in the eyes of Gellhorn, her old friend became “the dullest of matriarchs, and [grew] unforgivably smug.” While Cowles did continue to write, she’d handed in her press pass. Instead, she turned her hand to historical biographies, the subjects of which included the Rothschilds, Churchill and Edward VII. Sadly, this only deepened the gulf between her and Gellhorn, who, “seeing Virginia so cosily ensconced with her biographies, her clever children and her Establishment husband, grew,” as Mackrell puts it, “touchily judgemental.”

One can’t help but wonder if the conventionality of Cowles’s second act accounts for the ease with which her ground-breaking work has been overlooked. Since the initial publication of Looking for Trouble, she has been largely overshadowed by her peers: Gellhorn, and, in more recent years, Miller, the Vogue model-turned-photographer whose work has been showcased in a series of major exhibitions across the U.K. Both of these women failed to readjust to civilian life. Gellhorn continued to work as a war correspondent well into her seventies. Miller did try to settle down, but, haunted by what she’d seen in Dachau and Buchenwald, was plagued by PTSD, depression and alcoholism. While Cowles’s later life is a tad pedestrian in comparison, it’s also an astonishing testament to the diffidence and dexterity with which she navigated identities —flapper, journalist, wife and mother —that might, even today, appear irreconcilable for a woman. She exited the world of war reporting as easily as she’d entered it: with all the grace of a well-timed change of dress.  

The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II was published by Doubleday this month; so was Looking for Trouble, by Faber.

 Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the NYR Daily, the Financial Times, The New York Times Book Review, and Literary Hub, among other publications. Read earlier installments of Re-Covered.