Geographies of Terror: Homecoming and Displacement in GWOT Literature

About ten years before the September eleventh attacks, in the opening pages of the autobiographically inspired novel An Afghanistan Picture Show, William T. Vollman noted the captivating draw that war has on the protagonist’s mind and identified it as the primary reason for his journey to a distant land: “once upon a time there was a Young Man who wanted to be more than he really was. This made him unhappy. He decided to go to Afghanistan and take pictures of the bullets whizzing past his ears.” As in this case, war has always been inextricably linked to travel, whether it be an attraction for young and hopeful reporters, desperate civilians seeking refuge, or soldiers stationed in foreign lands. The last statement is even more true for Americans soldiers, since the last war fought on American soil dates back to the nineteenth century. This paper analyzes some of the recent literature of the War on Terror—such as Elliot Ackerman’s aptly titled memoir Places and Names (2019) and Phil Klay’s ironically named novel Missionaries (2020)—and explores the spatial dynamics, cultural encounters, and dislocations caused by the series of interrelated conflicts that have characterized the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In doing so, I argue that these narratives unveil, through both formal and plot devices, like the juxtaposition of different toponyms at the beginning of an episode in Ackerman’s memoir or the use of different focalizers (and therefore diverse geographical settings) in fragmented narratives, the global network of power and violence that underlies modern warfare. The characters of these stories are then depicted as nomadic individuals doomed to perpetually look for their metaphorical home, war itself, across the globe, travelling from one warzone to the next and constituting the threads of a web of smaller conflicts that take place simultaneously, in a seemingly never-ending cycle, around the world.