Toxic Soldiers, Flickering Knowledges, and Enlisted Care

Abstract

Based on many years of fieldwork with US veterans, this essay examines the production of “toxic subjects” through three types of toxic exposures in the history of US soldiering—from Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, to still unspecified exposures that produced Gulf War Syndrome in the first Gulf war, and to the burn pits used for waste disposal on bases throughout the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. While all toxic subjects are at odds with established systems of medicine and law, we argue that toxic subjects in military formations are especially challenging. Deeply entrenched ideas about soldiers’ able-bodied masculinity and readiness for sacrifice (coupled with the logics of entrenched legal and biomedical systems) make toxic soldiers particularly difficult to account and care for. We describe the experiences, structural positioning, dispossession and resistances of toxic soldiers at different historical conjunctures, pointing to cultural logics that connect them. Working with an especially literal instantiation of “the subaltern,” we hope to help toxic soldiers speak, so to speak, giving them “access to metonymization” (Spivak, 2004)—capacity to understand and experience their conditions collectively, politically and culturally. We cast toxic subjects as sentinel figures of “late industrialism,” a historical juncture characterized by pervasive contamination (of bodies, landscapes and political systems) and out-of-date infrastructure (conceptual, biomedical, legal, technological).

Canary Science in the Mineshaft of the Anthropocene

“…Another important cross-class canary study (volume and a fi lm) was Alison Johnson's (2008;Johnson et al 2006) work on "amputated lives" that compares the above EPA case to the cases of Exxon Valdez workers, Gulf Coast residents evacuated to those aforementioned FEMA trailers, and fi rst responders at the World Trade Center aft er September 11, 2001. Especially notable are the estimated third of some 200,000 veterans from the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War with idio-pathic, multisystem illnesses that are comparable to MCS (Miller and Phihoda 1999;Morgan and Fortun 2020): fatigue, depression, irritability, memory problems, muscle aches, shortness of breath, and chronic diarrhea. Perhaps explaining the "brain fog" that both Gulf War veterans and people suff ering from MCS experience, they show similar patterns of brain injury (lessened blood fl ow) on SPECT scans (Heuser 1998;Johnson et al 2006).…”

Homing Toxicity: The Domestication of Herbicidal Warfare

“…Glyphosate was originally manufactured by Monsanto in the 1970s, concurrent with its development and use of military-grade herbicides used in Operation Ranch Hand. As a result, Agent Orange has re-entered scholarly discourse as a fertile site for investigating the confluence of slow violence, intergenerational trauma, chemical kinships, and the molecularization of chemical regimes (Nixon 2011;Zierler 2011;Lee 2020;Morgan and Fortun 2020;Tu 2021). Many of these studies articulate the spatial and temporal scope of the herbicides as a limited geography bounded by rural regions of Southeast Asia and the decade-long Operation Ranch Hand.…”