War Porn

The term “war porn” refers to videos and images brought back from combat zones. IED explosions, air strikes, firefights, images of death and gore largely shorn of context, at times even evidence of potential war crimes (most famously, the photos of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib).

“War porn” is also, in Scranton’s searing debut, a metaphor for the fragmentation and confusion of modern combat, the broken shards of experience that form the wartime experiences of soldiers and civilians alike. The three sections ofWar Porn fit inside one another like nesting dolls: from an end of summer barbecue in the American Southwest; to the perspective of a young US soldier in the early months of the occupation of Iraq; to the story of Qasim al-Zabadi, an Iraqi math professor who faces the American invasion with a blend of fear, denial, and perseverance. Through the eyes of the occupiers, we watch Qasim become an interpreter for US forces, then prisoner and victim. As the scene switches from America to Iraq and back again, as home and hell merge, Qasim reveals the fragile humanity that connects occupier and occupied, torturer and tortured.

Roy Scranton is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, and co-editor ofFire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. He grew up in Oregon, dropped out of college, and spent several years wandering the American West. In 2002, he enlisted in the US Army. He served from 2002 to 2006, including a fourteen-month deployment to Iraq. After leaving the Army he earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree at the New School for Social Research, then completed his PhD in English at Princeton.