Toxic Soldiers, Flickering Knowledges, and Enlisted Care

Abstract

Based on many years of fieldwork with US veterans, this essay examines the production of “toxic subjects” through three types of toxic exposures in the history of US soldiering—from Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, to still unspecified exposures that produced Gulf War Syndrome in the first Gulf war, and to the burn pits used for waste disposal on bases throughout the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.  While all toxic subjects are at odds with established systems of medicine and law, we argue that toxic subjects in military formations are especially challenging. Deeply entrenched ideas about soldiers’ able-bodied masculinity and readiness for sacrifice (coupled with the logics of entrenched legal and biomedical systems) make toxic soldiers particularly difficult to account and care for. We describe the experiences, structural positioning, dispossession and resistances of toxic soldiers at different historical conjunctures, pointing to cultural logics that connect them. Working with an especially literal instantiation of “the subaltern,” we hope to help toxic soldiers speak, so to speak, giving them “access to metonymization” (Spivak, 2004)—capacity to understand and experience their conditions collectively, politically and culturally.  We cast toxic subjects as sentinel figures of “late industrialism,” a historical juncture characterized by pervasive contamination (of bodies, landscapes and political systems) and out-of-date infrastructure (conceptual, biomedical, legal, technological).