Prosthetics as Pro-war narrative, The aggression of War discourse.

I thought that it was interesting that in the examples we talked about last week, in the case of prosthetic limbs, that we primarily discussed WWII veterans. I was curious as to how the conversation might have been different if the examples used were cases of less popular wars. It struck me that we felt safe discussing war so long as we were talking about a "popular" war or one which we can space over half a century back.

I thought about how when it comes to injured vets, we tend to create hero structures not only as an admission of a probable horrible circumstance, but also as a way to adapt pro-war narratives without breaking them. It seems to me that equating wounded vets as "heroic" is an attempt to not only shape but to control discourse about military culture and about war. There's a sense of a large dis-service that is done when the young people of this country are sent over seas in occupational wars and in turn are violently injured as a consequence. War hungry "hawks" Imperializing the third world for the sake of U.S. posturing, and as a means to bolster U.S. dominance, find far too much comfort in "support our troops" yellow ribbon rhetoric.

The "heroicizing" of soldiers is difficult when many of our soldiers return home injured. Soldiers without limbs don't fit our conventional/traditional understandings of hero and therefore the discourse itself has to be reshaped in order to accommodate instead of ignoring injured vets, to broaden the idea of hero so that it can now sustain within it mutilated bodies. But the problem is that in creating the Heroic out of the brutally injured we attempt to alleviate or disregard any dis-service done to the young waves of people signing up for service in the U.S. military.

I'm not saying that injured vets are "un-heroic" (or insert any arbitrary binary opposition to "heroic). What I am saying is that the "Hero" narrative is a lie, and a dangerous lie at that. Instead of entitling individuals as "hero" we should consider more deeply the larger hands at work in order to be able to critically address our country's morally apprehensive Geo-political stance without feeling that such analysis is a disservice to the many U.S. military personal who have fought, served, and died in the service of their country.

It comes as no surprise the power of war rhetoric and all the ways in which war is at often times reduced to the "heroic" actions of "Soldier" (Army of One) in order to symbolize the "good" that is done by a U.S. military presence in just about every corner of the globe. With the war on terror exhibiting no signs of slowing down, I find it ironic that we are now considering wounded vets, a group of people who are arguably most affected by war (if not the neo-colonized themselves), as those who can be normalized and rightfully cared for by the employment and advancement of prosthetic limbs. And at least dully "compensated" by the corrections provided by adequate post-war medical care, and all the while being elevated to the status of "hero" in the process.



-Jayson Castillo