September 25, 2019
Bronwyn Leebaw (University of California – Riverside)
In 1971, a group of American veterans that had served in Vietnam gathered in Detroit to share war stories before a public audience. They referred to themselves as “winter soldiers,” invoking Thomas Paine’s contempt for the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot,” who shrinks from service in times of crisis. The 1971 Winter Soldier hearings generated significant attention and inspired a 2008 event, organized by the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War (AVAW). This paper investigates the role of anti-war veteran narratives with attention to their role as interventions in the politics of memory aimed at addressing the limitations of international criminal law and transitional justice. War crimes trials and truth commissions have been championed as a way of expelling the “ghosts of the past” by documenting victim testimonies and shaming individual war criminals. Such institutions inspire backlash from those who maintain that soldiers are obliged to follow the orders of commanders, that they should be regarded as heroes, or that wartime violence is a matter of military necessity. This paper argues that anti-war veteran narratives articulate an important challenge to the way that such debates are framed by publicizing narratives that are deliberately haunting. The experience of feeling like “living ghosts” is a familiar trope in the memoirs and testimonies of veterans. Building on this theme, the paper investigates the implications of three three haunting features of such accounts: First, they aim to publicize uniquely shameful memories that continue to haunt veterans; Second, they aim to expose ghostly silences and omissions in the official records of war crimes and systematic forms of abuse; and third, they aim to haunt and unsettle indifferent civilian audiences into sharing the burdens of shame and responsibility for war policies and their legacies.