under control
a strategy of weakness. By late summer pointed to the breast which had suckled him. Officials expected to start drawing down Hector, my son, but occupation forces of no more than 30,000 Americans comfort from my own bosom, 130,000 troops, loosing the initiative to protect us from this man; stand not nowhere and after carrying out its increasingly managed disappearance, intelligence officers kill me as easily as though there is no parleying with him for some rock TV
incidence of penetrating wounds. Better fight at once, gunshot wounds, shrapnel injuries or blast thus did he stand and ponder the heart, but Achilles required far more frequently than in civilian
taking
up, I begin to
feel
of holes
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time coming. I began writing it in 2005, while still in the Army, and finished the first draft in 2007, after having moved to New York City. Its journey to publication—and into its present form—has been circuitous and difficult, with many obstacles and hazards along the way, but also with many friends and allies who by their close reading helped make the work better, and who by their support helped keep it alive.
My greatest thanks go to my editor at Soho Press, Mark Doten. His ambitious vision for War Porn was a refining volcano, and his insight, care, and boldness have been been fresh air and cool water to a parched and weary traveler. I can’t thank him enough. I’m also immensely grateful to Bronwen Hruska, Amara Hoshijo, Abby Koski, Rachel Kowal, Gary Stimeling, and everybody at Soho: a truly exemplary publishing team. I feel very lucky to have wound up working with people who care so deeply about books—as provocations, as contributions to a conversation, and as works of art. Thank you.
Many thanks to early readers Helen Benedict, Peter Blackstock, E. L. Doctorow, Jim Fitzgerald, Matt Gallagher, Travis Just, Phil Klay, Kseniya Melnik, Shakir Mustafa, Nawal Nasrallah, Hilary Plum, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, Jacob Siegel, J.W., and Martin Woessner. Further, I am awed and amazed by the consistently superhuman levels of patience, acumen, and brilliance my partner, Sara Marcus, has been able to access reading and rereading this book. I owe whatever is beautiful or humane in it—or in myself—to her wisdom, perspicacity, and love.
In 2014, I had the chance to go back to Baghdad for Rolling Stone. This visit was an important experience in its own right, but it also helped me rework the middle chapters of this book with a more informed eye. Thanks to Will Dana for making the trip happen, to Alison Weinflash for arranging the logistics, and to Phoebe St. John for her painstaking fact checking. Special thanks go to everyone who helped me connect with people in Iraq and to the Iraqis and journalists there who took the time to talk with me: Isra Abdulhadi, Samr Abdul-Satar, Ghadah Abdul-Sattar, Ali Adhab, Sarem Dakhel Ahmed, Jane Arraf, Raad al-Azzur, Hassan Blasim, Matt Bradley, Hanaah Edwar, Borzou Daragahi, Haider Falih, Dexter Filkins, Alice Fordham, Haider Hashim, Naseer Hassan, Ahmed Farouk Lafta, Quil Lawrence, Christopher Merrill, Nadia Fayidh Mohammed, Soheil Najam, Ayman Oghanna, Ned Parker, Methaq Waleed, Kael Weston, the English students at Mustansiriyah University, and all the others on Mutannabi Street, in the Shorja Market, and at the polls in al-Saydiya. I am especially grateful to my interpreter on that trip, Aziz Alwan, may he rest in peace, and to my driver, Ahmed Qusay: brave, courteous, patient, and streetwise, they guided me through the labyrinth. I would have been lost without them.
My first visit to Baghdad, from 2003 to 2004, was a very different kind of labyrinth, and relied on a different network of support. Thanks to Lieutenant Chiarrez, Staff Sergeant Hayes, Homan, Lieutenant Juarez, Sergeant First Class Mitchell, Nick Lehman (RIP), “Smokey” Robinson, Timmy Shore, and Javier Velasco for helping me stay alive and sane out there. FTA 4evah.
Bits of this book were published in different form in canon, CITY, Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo 2013), the New York Times, Prairie Schooner, Theory and Event, and Warrior Writers. These parts are reprinted here with grateful acknowledgment.
Praise for War Porn
“Forceful and unsettling.”
“One of the best and most disturbing war novels in years.”
“Scranton, a US veteran with an unusually poetic ear, captures the Beckettian banter—as well as trauma—of modern soldiering. War Porn rewards repeated reading.”
“In writing War Porn, Scranton has produced a literary work that doesn’t just describe the outrages of the war, but punches them into the American gut. War Porn contains some of the most significant and original writing on deployment to be found in contemporary American literature about the Iraq War.”
“War Porn offers a view of the American military unlike anything else written about Iraq or Afghanistan. The book offers a guided meditation on Iraq certain to force long overdue introspection on how we think about the war, those who fought it and the Americans and Iraqis it affected. Though War Porn doesn’t set out to change anyone’s mind, it’s impossible to read it without reconsidering how you think about Iraq and our treatment of those who served.”
“To read Scranton is to engage with a powerful intellect.”
“[Scranton] has a real aesthetic skill and is moved by a genuine sympathy for humanity. Roy Scranton’s War Porn expresses and helps advance the profound social anger that is emerging amidst the rumble of a society devastated by imperialist war.”
“What impresses is the brutal immediacy of the writing, its authority. Roy Scranton is a truth telling war writer.”
“Roy Scranton’s searingly honest first novel is surreal, ultra-real, and like everything he writes from the heart. This examination of the tragedy of what happened in Iraq reaches out to touch of all us. A brilliant literary achievement.”
“I have never read a book like War Porn. Roy Scranton writes with unnerving power. There is much to admire here—the meticulous craftsmanship, the hysterical comic passages, the way the sheer audacity of vision is matched at every turn by the innovative skill to carry it out—but what I’m left with at the end is difficult to put into words. It’s intense and troubling. It’s what all truly excellent literature leaves you with. A sense of something shattering.”