NOTES on simulation and
brut
ality
Nineteenth Issue 13.10.14 1
Contents This issue of Notes is loosely themed around simulation and brutality. Grace Carroll’s essay and the first part of Sarah Caulfield’s longer, serialised work, refer to a more military violence whilst the short prose of Arthur Thompson and Oscar Farley demonstrate the way brutal events occur in everyday life. The latter two present a more playful approach, however, and along with ‘Fag’ by Adam Napier, tie in with the simulation component of the theme. We hope this issue provides inspiration for future works and further discussion.
Dalian, Liaoning Province Illustration Not a Victory March It Was Merry for Elza Sleepsong in Five Parts Fag Motorway Becoming Glenbervie’s Shipwreck In The Office Towards a contemporary war doctrine Genius Loci
cover, centerfold 3 4 11 12 14 18 21 22 23 25 30
Arthur Thompson Katie Fox Sarah Caulfield Arthur Thompson Oliver Mayeux Adam Napier Oscar Farley Saki Shinoda Megan Dalton Anna Rowan Grace Carroll Seonaid Francis
to submit or to subscribe: http://notespublication.com http://www.facebook.com/notespublication © Notes (Cambridge). All works are © the individual author. ISSN 2051 - 4204
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“And on the way I dropped it, A little boy, he picked it up and put it in his pocket.” A- Tisket A- Tasket, American Nursery Rhyme, Late 19th Century
Katie Fox 3
N
ot a Victory March
“It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth.” - Paul Nash Oscar; sixteen; 1914 onwards Oscar McQuillen wasn’t going to be an artist. He came from Vauxhall, for Christ’s sake. He was going to be a paper boy with ink rubbing off onto his knuckles, running through dripping rain; flushed in and churned out of a cracker factory, red-eyed after his shift; maybe land a plush job in a newsagent’s, where he could sit and breathe in sweets and carbolic. He was going to marry young, the girl-next-door he’d loved for longer than he knew to count, grow into fatherhood too early and work down to the bone to provide for Alice and the children, whilst she cleaned hotel rooms two days a week and kept house the rest. Oscar McQuillen wasn’t going to be an artist. He didn’t stand a bloody chance. * He signs up for war at the working men’s club where he boxes for money, amongst a hubbub of people he knows and people he doesn’t quite. They are flashes of eyes and sweat and breath crammed in the dank and smoke. “I’m nineteen last Sunday,” he lies. He doesn’t really look older, but he’s no baby-face. The barman raises an articulate eyebrow at him from over the counter, but says nothing as the recruiting officer passes the requisite forms over with a sense of deep, aching boredom, enthusiasm worn down by the sheer loudness of men fighting to get fighting. Oscar doesn’t want to live and die here, never more than ten minutes from the Thames, with the water laughing away to worlds he’s not ever seen, not even in photographs. Oscar signs his life on the dotted line, passes it back to
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the officer, and smiles. Jonathan and Andrion; twenty-one and twenty-one; 1945 onwards Jonathan and Andrion are sent to Nuremberg to search for something worth saving. It was a Sabbath, but Jonathan did not go to synagogue. He went to roll call instead. When informed of his mission, Jonathan Abram, of Fifth Battalion, laughed shortly and muttered something low, then asked sharply by his commanding officer to speak up, he did. They should be left to rot. Jonathan Abram, of Fifth Battalion, suffered an official reprimand and disciplinary for a fortnight before he was sent anyway, because the war was dragging itself on its belly to the closure and they needed every uniform they could get. He followed in the footsteps of every traveller he ever knew, stars of David etched into his shadow like scars. Andrion was innocent looking enough to be a good aide for a British liaison officer. Andrion was innocent looking because he had spent four years cultivating, like a rare leaf, the particular expression that let him blend, bland and pleasant, into the midst of Paris traffic. Also, his Resistance cell told him he had to so Andrion kept his eyes on the floor and nodded and left that midnight, dodging the patrols that had invaded the boulevards. He didn’t take orders from men who stole his country so he took orders from shadows on the wall instead. The irony was the sort of thing that left him awake, jolting over train-tracks in the early morning, sky the grey of the inner whorl of a mussel. Andrion remembers the day the National Socialists and their army marched on his city, how the streets were packed with fleeing people clutching letters to their chests, dragging suitcases, trying to rescue grand pianos from thirdstorey apartements. How all was for naught, because panic makes people selfish: united we stand, divided we fall. How he was seventeen, and stood to watch them tear down his flag and beside him, his grandfather had cried through gnarled fingers. It was only the two of them of their family here now; the rest fled to lands of the free or further, his mother gone to states that never slept for work and his father dead of scarlet fever. His mother sent telegrams on a Sunday, heedless of the cost. It was a Sunday. There were no
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telegrams. The foreign officers had ordinary, mild-mannered faces. Some of them joked, swapped cigarettes, gave snivelling children lollipops. People whispered they injected them with poison, but there was nothing more dangerous than sugar trapped inside. Andrion remembers that and cannot bring himself to make sense of it. It was much easier when they were just uniforms. Rachel; twenty seven; 1970 onwards “Oh, not you again,” the Colonel sighs. His neat moustache droops at her proximity. She waves her press pass at him, smugness radiating. Around them, the encampment ebbs and shifts in weaving khaki rivers. Boys with fresh-shaved heads hunch over polishing their boots and checking ammunition supplies; boys who wolf-whistle when she passes and talk about Hollywood and don’t talk about the version beyond the newspapers. Some of them keep a photograph of a pert little housewife in one pocket and the number of their Saigon call-girl in the other. “Signed, sealed and completely official, sir.” He eyes the Kodak slung about her neck with a certain disdain. Her smile grows. They look at each other, the Kodak swinging between them like a pendulum, a sigil, its own declaration of war. America signed up for it before she did. “Don’t point that thing at me,” he snaps, and goes to rifle practice. She takes a photograph of his retreating back anyway and grins with triumph. Oscar; sixteen; 1914 onwards There’s a photograph kept of him on his Ma’s mantelpiece now; sepiatinged smile and grave eyes grey as newsprint in rain. There are scraps of hair peeking, soft as duck-fluff, from beneath the steel brim of his helmet, and when he comes back on leave he can barely stand to look at it, turns it when she’s not watching to grin at the peeling wall instead. He brought his
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brothers up for years whilst she struggled with the insidious burning sadness leaking through her blood, him scorching meals and secretly darning socks like a lass and lying his damn face off to the neighbours. He owes her no explanations and, if she notices, she asks for none. His little brothers ask to try on his coat and stuff tiny tin soldiers in the pockets, left forgotten until they break for marching a Europe away; he shoves his hand in, looking for a pencil stub or cigarette, some comforting breadcrumb, and their miniature rifles jab him sharp. They don’t draw blood. His sketchbook jangles with loose pages. Such a fanciful title for an old accounts book, with ink drawings of birds pursuing their own patch of sky. When they get to a destination with pause enough, he barters caricatures for supplies, glue and string to keep the bundle of sloughed-off sanity together. His CO asks to send one of them home to his mother. Oscar trades him for chocolate and picks out one of men laughing over a makeshift game of cards. Three of them are ghosts now. She won’t be told. He doesn’t have pastels, or watercolours, no glistening oils or gleaming mountainous canvas, tang of turpentine washed over by the stench of rot. He has a matchbox of charcoal stubs and three pencils he keeps pointed with his bayonet’s edge. He’s not an artist, after all. What he draws isn’t art to him, not like the portraits of flaring nostrils in national galleries, or dying maidens in a lake because their lover threw their devotion to the dogs. His sketches are languid, lily-pale arms that strip to bone and marrow the consistency of dessicated coconut. A dead Yorkshire boy laughing and laughing. They are a group of gleeful French village children making a playground of an aeroplane wreck, little cotton pinafores fluttering between the jagged ribs of rusting steel; a stern moustachioed officer with his tea tray amidst the trenches, book of Aeneid on his lap; doctors dressed in butcher gowns of blood and martyrs with no cause; makeshift tin signs with macabre trench names, memento mori at every corner. One time he sees one called for Trafalgar and feels it down to his homesick city soul. He’s seventeen tomorrow. Bullet-holes riddle his soul. He’s not an artist. Jonathan and Andrion; twenty-one and twenty-one; 1945 onwards Jonathan finds out where they took them, and what happened where they
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were taken. Once he’s finished throwing up he lies on his army cot and stares up at the tent’s ceiling for a long, long time, thinking of a God who rescued his people from Egypt but abandoned them when the smoke bled out of the crematoriums, turned deaf to those shoveled in ovens and closed his eyes to chained generations of prayers. Andrion, unknowing, lights a cigarette beside him the next morning and, despite himself, Jonathan flinches. They don’t know each other yet, not properly, not like they will. Jonathan is a golem with eyes the colour of clay, who sits when he’s told and stands like he’s told with all the solemnity of Andrion’s grandfather at Mass. Andrion is slight, whippet-vicious, with a snaggletooth and eyes that are always darting in his forgettable face. It’s not morning, it’s too early to be called morning and Nuremberg is deadly quiet, the drift of settling ash. It’s a contender for this generation’s Pompeii but Nagasaki will take the crown and by then Jonathan and Andrion will have been friends and by then But all this later. Right now, they’re two men who don’t know each other and can’t sleep. “Where’d they hunt you down?” Andrion asks - for the second time, Jonathan realises with a jolt. “England,” he replies shortly. Andrion takes another long, slow drag on his cigarette and Jonathan’s stomach churns. “You?” “Paris.” Jonathan glances Andrion over then, plans to just nod but before he can help it blurts out with a “you’re young for an arts expert, aren’t you?” Andrion smirks pointedly. “So are you.” “I’m qualified,” he says, thinking with a sudden pang of the university building, its bustle and hurry and its strange pouches of quiet. “My grandfather,” Andrion says, after a short pause, very guarded, “My
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grandfather, he ran an art gallery.” “Which one?” Andrion pauses again, reminds himself the Third Reich’s Europe is dying and he can become a person again, admit to an existence beyond the shadows on the wall. “Musee D’Orsay?” Jonathan merely nods. Andrion isn’t sure if he recognises it. “Why didn’t they send for him, then? There’s half of Christie’s drinking damn tea in there.” “He’s dead.” “Then what are you doing here?” Jonathan asks, genuinely confused. Andrion finally stubs out his cigarette. He’s here because the Resistance wanted one of their men inside, to make sure Paris got her treasures back. Because he grew up knowing the names of Old Masters better than the saints, more real to him than Father Christmas, waiting for his grandfather in the galleries as a schoolboy. Because the official delegates are never enough, not when they gave up their people like plague victims to an invading army. He should say that. He goes to say that. “I’m not sure I know,” he replies instead. Oscar; sixteen; 1914 onwards Oscar meets a stretcher-bearer when he’s transferred to the Front Line. His hair is bleached shell-shock white like a haloed beacon of damned youth. Oscar’s been told all stretcher-bearers are commies, conchies and cowards, for the posters in the Tube had said, but his old employers had been objectors when the battle calls came rolling in (and were probably so even yet and would probably be so ever more). The one with the white hair is called Arthur, and he’s an unlucky Fenian bastard, so for whom he’s embroiled carrying carrion in Europe over nobody’s quite sure. He has nicotinestained cuticles, hoards his cigarettes, carries a photograph of seven moonpale sisters by his heart, keeps a fistful of flimsy unionist pamphlets in his
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pockets. His eyes blare sirens. They talk sometimes, sparingly, when Arthur’s off shift and away from his Sunday confession, done by clockwork rote. Oscar’s pencil skitters across the page as a perpetual afterthought. Arthur tells him about dock-work in Liverpool, about a friend who held out against the barrage of white feathers until rumours of conscription drifted in from London town, signing up together for your mate, for your mate, until he trips onto a mine one routine nightmare and your chest caves in around a sniper bullet. For your mate, but your mate’s gone and running won’t get you far. You crawling into a crater to save your own neck, dizzy and praying for the next lads down the line to come get you. Oscar isn’t a child; he’s seen mud-holes a man can drown in and men disintegrated but for their jawbone, yet Arthur talks about the world of the army hospital; of the nurses in bloated starched gowns and begging to die from behind flimsy bloody curtains, of his chest knitted back into a shiny maroon badge of scar. He doesn’t say anything of the day he was told that he was being sent back to the Front, but the thing is with Arthur is everything rests in the gaps between his words, the cadence of pause and breath, and Oscar can imagine well enough. “Morbid thing, aren’t you?” sniffed the shiny-new officer, just transferred from the world beyond, glancing at Oscar’s nurses, their skulls monstrous gas-masks, the Red Cross of Arthur’s armband screaming a warning, come here and then no further. Oscar shrugs and tucks away the sketchbook, helmet clanking against the ladder as he prepares to go over the top again. He disappears into his head by the scraps of the last candle. Arthur asks about London, but makes no plans to visit. Oscar draws ribs, birds, bombs. He still isn’t an artist. Spoiler: he survives. to be continued in the next issue...
Sarah Caulf ield 10
I
t Was Merry for Elza
Gaggles of nannies, in bonnets and linen aprons, waved relentlessly to their charges clinging to their merry-go-round seats. All was well—sort of. Elza hovered a considerable distance from the spectacle, her arms folded. She didn’t like the boy she looked after. Forty long years of nanny-hood, and he was the nastiest. Other nannies told her to be patient. “He’s only seven,” they’d say. Such comments only made her want to go boil cabbage. But, today was a good day. It had been her idea to take the boy to ride the merrygo-round. She thought about his haemorrhoids and grinned.
Arthur Thompson
11
S
leepsong in f ive parts
for D— v
on my back in warm and weary night a softwood schooner in the sun stands sharp and sheer as vivid glassy sea laps at its body of pine my feet warm on its deck of teak there is a smell of sandalwood it lulls me until all is very gone iv i am gone and not gone here and not dear heart clear of fear these are deserts of rainwater where i come to kiss your hurt limbs like rainforest nurture there is a mild monsoon and the air is snug with the trees our rags fall on soil now in the eyes of earth we are bare i bathe your skin with milk massage your wet hair with honey and wild lemon you touch my thigh and smile a prayer there is a whisper it tells tender promises all of this soon very soon a breeze and we shake like a leaf a big brown pelt and i cover you
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there there your safe shelter in soft fur tucked in comfort and shall i leave you to sleep i say you say no stay but i was gone iii with the rising it is not ever quite the same slit of day uninvited stands proudly between my eyelids dull throb in my dry skull gull caws curt at the windowsill i try to remember the damp forest and who we were my eyes close my nose fills with soaked mahogany then ii all is i gone
Oliver Mayeux 13
F
ag
We called him Drag Queen Mab, at the club. Because, in his green gown and mauve boots, he ruled over all us fairies. Every Karaoke Thursday he’d put on the wig, the lashes, the heels and the earrings and take the train to the club. His caffeine-wide eyes would alight on one of us and that was that – we’d play the part of his plaything until closing time. ‘Felix,’ he said to me one ghost-town-dead night, ‘you’ll never guess what’s between me legs.’ Knees akimbo on the barstool, he withdrew a pen-like thing from his garter and plonked it onto my bottom lip. ‘Now suck,’ he said. Heads turned. People thought he was taking my temperature. Even the old codger crooning his way through Maybe This Time craned his neck, shut his trap and breathed through his heavily-populated nostrils. ‘Suck, darling, suck.’ And so I did. It was one of them electric cigs. Not the oddest curio Mab’s brought in, I thought. Until I took a long, hefty drag and inhaled every particle of dust the place had. The dead skin cells formed a beige fog, the fallen-out hair: floating apostrophes, the lint: a monochrome cloud that pricked on the way down. My heavy, heavy lungs were fit to burst with the stuff. So Mab walloped me off my seat; sent me to the floor on all fours like a dog. I coughed static up out of my mouth onto the Jäger-stained tiles. It was fuzzy, susurrated like a flame and was just a little less hot. The sound it made switched into a quick tattoo of rum-pum-rum-pum. Then the spat-out dust whirled and grew, reformed itself into an effigy. Brunette, short, alive. With a moustache as thin as kettle vapour. ‘D’ya mind?’ it asked me – (a communal gasp) – and I promptly swung my leg over so that I wasn’t astride him. But he whipped it right back and stole a hug from me. The hair on his skinny chest like velvet, the sticky ground cold on his stark bollock naked skin. He trembled. ‘Let’s fix that,’ Mab said, emptying the cartridge out of the e-cig and slipping it into a box marked amour. He swapped it for one from a box labelled armoire and put it to his lurid blue lipsticked lips. Our resident drag queen took a drag and – instead of dust – all my clothes converged on the tip of the cig in a nigh-on perfect silhouette of me. (It looked, now, like Mab was taking more than my temperature). He blew and my shirt, my jeans, boxers, socks wrapped around the boy I had coughed up. ‘Call me Connor,’ he said and clenched his lips like a fist and smacked me right on the cheek. We walked all the way home, joined at hand and hip and those fist-shaped lips, singing
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to the tune of rum-pum-rum-pum. Rum-pum-rum-pum. But it wasn’t his heart that swelled for me. Next day I woke up to find the bed, of course, empty. Following Thursday, Mab sold me the cig, no questions asked. I huffed – And puffed – And almost blew the place down.
Adam Napier
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16
Arthur Thompson 17
M
otorway
The TV studio floor shone like oil. “First up we have David. David you’re a lorry driver?” said the host. “Yes” said David. “For what company or ... ?” said the host. “I’m freelance.” said David. “What’s that like do you enjoy it?” said the host. “Yes it’s a good job. Lonely but travel a lot. See a lot.” said David. “Fantastic. And he will be up against Winston. Winston you work with animals?” said the host. “Not exactly. Animal care administrator.” said Winston. Winston sweated. “David: which is the only US state to begin with the letter ‘D’?” said the host. “Delaware.” said David. “Winston: in ancient Rome, what were newlyweds showered with as a symbol of fertility?” said the host. “Almonds.” said Winston. Winston spoke with the tip of his tongue and his cheeks swallowed his words. “David: Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire opened in which year?” said the host. The host held the cards to his chest.
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“1947.” said David. “Winston: Dag Hammarskjöld Medal is a posthumous award given by which organisation?” said the host. “United Nations.” said Winston. Winston had a small nose twitching as if it had sensed something in the studio air. “David: what is the stopping distance of a car in good condition travelling at sixty miles per hour?” said the host. “Two hundred and forty feet.” said David. “Winston: footballer Maicon Pereira de Oliveira was born in which country?” said the host. “Brazil.” said Winston. Winston had large gnawing incisors which poked from his lips on ‘zil’. “David: you are a killer. Have you killed before?” said the host. “I
uh.” said David.
“Winston: the name Beelzebub translates to Lord Of The what?” said the host. “Flies.” said Winston. Flies gathered around its lips. “David: Sheffield in thirty two miles.” said the host. “ .” David turned off the radio. The road was black. David sweated. “Winston: is the man who did this to you in the room? can you point him out for the benefit of the court?” said the host.
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Winston stared into the camera. It showed its tail a torn apart stump for the viewers at home. “Dav EXIT with the weight of the semi-trailer id’s eyes were weights colder “ “ picking apart the host gripped pill his podium harder grey fur the edge ” lifted its stomach and Winston’s intestines fell out as it disappeared under the wheel of David’s lorry. A mile later David turned into a service area and bought a burger and fries. He ate them in the cabin. He ate them in the light of a sodium-vapour lamp. The lamp flickered and buzzed.
Oscar Farley 20
B
ecoming
They said that the day that drowned in blood would pave my womanhood, a red carpet to my prize of docility. I’m not sure which day they meant. Neither proved memorable. More haunting, enduring, My trembling alone cracked an egg within me, That I contained, and contained me. All nape, waist, lips, breasts, brazen tongue and eye, she frightened me like a harpy with her beauty. I put her on trial. She’ll go free if she sinks, good riddance. The tarn couldn’t wash the buoyant filth from her, so, bobbing, bobbing, her pale face glistened with scum. Eyes, with hunger. An oil slick bled across the clouded mirror, and a blackened blot, like silver, from a match. Long strands of hair like wicks were the last I saw of her before I built my house on the peat bog, that smoking dawn. They say that when judgment comes, all rise, and I, dying – screaming, writhing, incessant beating – will feel her cold hands rise, engulfed in fire, spreading – every look inflaming, every breath destroying – and sweating the burning wet film of guilt through my blameless flesh.
Saki Shinoda 21
22
I
was in the off ice
I was in the office, getting nowhere with a translation. Aside from the fact that translating lift manuals is about as soul-destroying as it gets, I couldn’t even work the bloody translation software. The order of the text kept changing. The computer kept gleefully hiding phrases I’d already translated under the pretext of filing. I didn’t ask for help but I was doing a lot of sighing. Lisa smiled at me from across the desk. She hadn’t been there that much longer than I had but it was already obvious that she was the competent intern. I started typing authoritatively to show that I had everything under control. Then I realised I had deleted the document I was translating. ‘Shit’, I muttered, pressing the ‘undo’ key to no avail. The document was surely saved as back-up somewhere. I started looking through random computer files. There were press packs, medical records... but no lift manuals. Suddenly I realised Lisa was standing behind me. She was still smiling. ‘Do you... need a hand?’ ‘I think I’m fine actually.’ I said automatically. I looked at the screen and realised I had opened the death certificates folder. ‘I’m just especially interested in...’ ‘Let me help you.’ She reached over and put her hand on the mouse, closing the file and getting back to the translation programme. She saw that I had deleted the original document. To her credit, she didn’t gasp. I wanted to tell her I could handle it. I opened my mouth but she looked at me. It wasn’t the warning look I had anticipated. She didn’t seem annoyed.
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Now she was pressing different keys. I slid my seat slightly to the side to give her easier access to the keyboard. A window appeared on the screen and she pressed ‘continue’ several times. Then she typed something in. I told myself to remember what she was doing but I was too distracted. Strands of her hair were tickling my cheek. I stayed as still as possible, trying not to twitch. I realised that the artificial office lighting that usually makes everyone look a slight shade of green made her skin look luminous. Her blouse was crumpled but still looked professional. I adjusted my ironed cuffs. ‘Look’. She’d nudged me. There was the original document. I’d never been so happy to see a lift manual in my life. ‘Thanks’ I said feebly. ‘You’re welcome.’ She lingered for a few moments, and then went back to her desk.
Anna Rowan 24
T
owards a contemporary US war doctrine
The USA today is a highly militarised society, and an outside look at its contemporary attitude to warfare seems to indicate that the nation has an inherently hawkish foreign policy. Yet a study of how America’s war doctrine has developed over the country’s short history demonstrates that this is a significant departure from its historical attitudes and conduct. The main changes have been in the nation’s attitude to the creation of strong centralised forces; the constantly fluctuating nature of policy formation in regards to civil-military relations; and the constant need to adapt to new modes of warfare. One can best analyse these changes through the following five conflicts: the War of Independence, the Civil War, World Wars I and II and the Cold War. US War doctrine cannot be understood without first understanding it relationship and attitude to military forces: it is this which will determine the emphases they shall place on its size and power and influence the way in which war is carried out. Bruce Porter claims that since its early years the US has held a “deep rooted hostility to centralised power” (Porter, 1994) and to this end during the War of Independence, numerous colonial elites were highly adverse to the creation of a large, institutionalised central army to fight the British on organized battlefronts. Colonial military coordinator Charles Lee, for example, favoured the use of insurgent militias to fight the British troops through guerrilla warfare. It was only after this approach proved highly ineffective, as militias were unreliable and untrained, did revolutionaries turn to General George Washington. Political elites eventually agreed to create a professional standing army for fear of losing the war. The army created was vastly popular, with approximately one twelfth of the total population taking part in the war effort at some point (peaking at roughly 200,000 men) many of whom were incentivised by the promise of government funded lifetime pensions. Despite the success of this army in allowing the establishment of a new government and state, with the war’s conclusion the army was rapidly demobilized, dropping to two mere garrisons totalling 80 troops. This was fuelled by a public distrust of a strong military that could threaten to use its monop-
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oly over force to undermine the masses. Demobilization is demonstrative of the distrust the US has in centralized power (both military and political) and this attitude, coupled with the structural impact of a lack of central institutions through which to coordinate and organize war, flavoured the US war doctrine and the way it engaged with the rest of the world in its early years as an independent country. Rather than having a professional army that was well trained in the art of war and ready to engage if threatened, the US instead would rapidly mobilise militia forces when it went into conflict, such as in the war of 1812, and then quickly disband them again. Such a policy was made possible because the US is geographically isolated, so there was an absence of external enemies in close proximity (Porter, 1994). At the time fiscal and organizational limits were also a significant barrier towards a permanent standing army. In this way in its early years the American war doctrine was rather sporadic, with little institutionalised military response to threats or conflict being defined due to fears of oppression. Unsurprisingly, the Civil war did much to change the structural capabilities of the state and public perceptions of war. Characterised by its intensity, with over 10,000 battles fought between 1861-65 and an estimated 400,000 direct casualties (Keegan, 2010), this brutally violent period created a strong aversion to warfare but also shifted the public favour toward strong central powers (helped by the victory of the North). John Keegan claims that the horrific realities of the Civil war created an appetite for such authority to negotiate disputes for the people, rather than risk engaging in conflict again. This led to a willingness of the people to accept compromise with the central union and the authority of the federalist government. In this period the Lincoln administration greatly expanded the power and role of the state (often with questionable legality) from an army of approximately 16,000 men and a federal budget of $63 million in 1860, to a 1 million strong army and a $1.2 billion budget five years later. A large number of newly created institutions also allowed the government to mobilize the economy and population in ways that were previously unheard of. This was a turning point for the war doctrine of the US, setting the foundations of organization which would greatly facilitate the mobilization of the US in the two World wars. Wars which were defined similarly to the civil war strategy of “extended fronts, complex logistics and massive firepower� (Porter, 1994). The Civil war doctrine of the States survived through World War I and II, by which time the relevant mobilization structures were so soundly established that the pattern of immediate post-war demobilisation that previously occurred in the US was stopped; instead the military continued to grow in size and significance.
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However, this linear pattern of progression changed during the cold war, with the Vietnam War proving a pivotal moment. Whilst previous wars may have affected the extent and size of the military’s power and the government’s ability to mobilize for war, Vietnam placed a new sort of stress of civil-military relations which forced a change in military tactics. The US military was most confident in conventional warfare, placing boots on the ground and engaging with opponents on battle lines and with clear strategic goals to follow, as it had excelled at in the World Wars and in Korea. Vietnam was characterised by none of these things, fraught with corrupt officials, unclear objectives and unpredictable insurgent guerrillas that the military did not know how to properly engage. This caught the Americans by surprise (Polk, 2008) and goes some way to explaining the resounding US failure in Vietnam - despite a vast technical advantage over the Viet Kong. This proved especially problematic for an army that was beginning to pale in significance next to the Navy and Air force which had excelled in WWII. Blame for the failure was placed on the public’s lack of support and on politicians who had set unclear goals that were unachievable with the resources provided. An increasingly Moltkean relationship between civil and military affairs began to emerge from this point: Moltkean theory contrasts with Clausewitz’s civilian control model which states war is an extension of politics, instead positing that they are both totally different spheres, with war resulting from the failure of diplomacy. Once war is declared, the military as technical specialists should be left to conduct the war as they see fit without political consultation (Roxborough, 2003). The increasingly prevalent attitude that the civilian elite should be removed from the implementation of war was reflected by the introduction of the Weinberger-Powell doctrine in the 1980s, which set out a list of governing points and conditions under which the US would commit troops, such as the expression of clear objectives and public support, an exit strategy and no use of half measures. This set objective of no half measures leads into another consequence of the Vietnam War on the American War doctrine: a change in offensive tactics. After the failure of the limited, progressive policy used in Vietnam, the military began to commit itself to a doctrine of ‘overwhelming force’ in order to achieve decisive victory and leave swiftly. This new policy, which Roxborough refers to as “standoff precision strike warfare” was characterised by methods of “precision strike, dominant battle space knowledge, systems integration, force protection and expeditionary warfare” (Roxborough, 2003). The Gulf war is a good template of this method: the campaign was short and the dominance
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of US military might meant that through frequent, systematic brutal strikes, rather than a gradual increase of pressure, military goals were achieved swiftly and with no casualties. In fact, the swift success of the Gulf War brought with it the emphasis on ‘zero casualty’ warfare, where a war was seen as increasingly successful if the loss of American lives was minimized. This contrasts with previous doctrines which emphase the battle space and engagement, characterising war less as a contest between two bodies (according to Clausewitz’s definition) and more as a “form of punitive action” (Roxborough, 2003). Many of these ambitions have not been met in the last decade of US military engagement. The two major post-9/11 conflicts for the US - Afghanistan and Iraq - reflect a failure in the precision strike policy, or rather an inability to implement it. Whilst these engagements may have appeared to have clearly defined goals for the military to achieve systematically and quickly, such as removing Saddam Hussein or the Taliban government, in reality these political goals fell short of bringing the long lasting democracy and stability in these states the US hoped for. In this way, whilst the army may be successful in implementing the narrow aims it set for itself, in a grander sense the US war doctrine appeared to be failing as it did not reach the political goals of the US as a whole. In a time where the ‘new wars’ described by Mary Kaldor seem prevalent, where insurgency is rife, explicit battle lines do not exist and actors are predominantly non-state, the US war doctrine needed to be re-developed, giving the army a role in protecting the people of nations to assist in state building, rather than simply overpowering them. However the American war doctrine evidently has developed outside of the more conventional military framework in the last 10 years, in particular through covert operations. The use of Special Forces and intelligence forces had been part of the US security framework for decades, especially prevalent during the Cold War. Polk, for example, describes the targeted assassination “Phoenix” programme carried out by the CIA under the Johnson administration in 1967, which resulted in the imprisonment, torture and death of tens of thousands of Southern Vietnamese (Polk). However, this was seen as subordinate of the overall military project of stabilising the country, being more a facilitator than a main instrument of policy implementation. This subordinate role, however, seems to be changing. The prolific role of Special Forces in US foreign policy in the last decade demonstrates that increasingly covert missions and tactics are being carried out in place of conventional military interventions.
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Jeremy Scahill writes at great length on this in ‘Dirty Wars’ in describing the importance of Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC), and how the US, in its attempts to fight the ‘war on terror’, inevitably has come to see the entire world as a battlefield and thus is exercising its power across the globe without accountability. These Special Forces carry out targeted assassinations, kidnappings and torture missions that are outside of the control, and often the knowledge, of the rest of the military branch. JSOC itself is directly answerable to the president and not congress, highlighting how the US war doctrine appear to be changing to not only bypass congressional constraints but also military ones too, such as the Weinberger-Powell doctrine. This new form of warfare has sinister repercussions, as it robs US foreign policy of its accountability and undermines many recognised legalities of warfare. As well as this, it throw into some disarray civil military relations, as the conventional armed forces are increasingly side-lined in favour of this more streamlined approach and also by the increased use of drone warfare to carry out precision targeted strikes and missions, which plays back into the ‘no casualty’ mind set. Whilst these precision targeting methods are not without continuation from the “standoff precision strike warfare” doctrine of the 1990s in that the emphasis is not on contest between two warring bodies but targeted, punitive action, the integral difference is that now this method has moved into the dark and operates under a veil of secrecy, and is depersonalised and unrestricted. Characterised at first by an aversion to military strength, the US war doctrine encouraged a rather non-aggressive warfare policy. Changing ways in which the state organized itself and the fear of anarchy caused by the horrors of the civil war eventually allowed for mobilization on a grander scale as greater faith was placed in central planning. This allowed the US to become a military colossus over the 20th Century, which has been shifting in tactics for a number of years and seems to have culminated in a turn away from conventional warfare methods to aggressive, covert operations. The more hawkish nature of the US war doctrine today can be said to reflect the increased strength and size of the US army. Robert Kagan describes that when a man is in the woods with a bear armed only with a knife, the best policy to ensure ones safety is to lay low unless they are engaged. When armed with a gun, however, the logical choice to safeguard once security is to seek out the bear so as to not be taken by surprise (Kagan, 2003) - even if the legality and ethics of are questionable.
Grace Carroll
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G
enius Loci
We drove north that day, over Rannoch Moor and past the roadworks, until suddenly there they were, the mountains of Glencoe, the Buachaille Etive Mor, Bidean nam Bian, Stob Corrie nan Lochan, the mighty Aonach Eagach, baking in the blue shimmer of a hot August afternoon. The purple heather was blooming high up on craggy rock faces, and down lower, next to the road. Bog cotton bobbed whitely in the hot breeze of passing cars, caravans, giant Hymers, while shy harebells shone skyblue. It was the kind of scene you might write a poem about. The car park was heaving with tour buses, tourists standing on the wall, photographing the majesty of the mountains the glory of the waterfalls the unexpected sunshine each other, smiling and waving and, for one, the tour bus. Crowds of people stood gazing searching for any ghostly
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remnants of the massacre to come limping up the glen, bowed and bloody, feet frozen in the cruel snow, but only groups of walkers came hobbling down the well worn paths of the West Highland Way. An entrepreneurial ice cream van was doing a roaring trade in snow white Mister Whippys. The ghosts were not coming. Ice cold cream would have to do, and a crow pecking indifferently at road kill. And we went crawling past through the summer traffic one kid asleep in the front, one asleep in the back, and me with my eyes on the road and my mind on the ferry.
But one late November afternoon, we two stopped the car and stood in the cold, still darkness. Somewhere, a waterfall. Down below, a river, above, crags and us, breathing with the mountains until a car’s headlights cut the dark and the moment was lost.
Seonaid Francis 31
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