007 - In Memory of Sgt. Joker's Peace Pin
The inspiration for Paper Clip Bullets came one dark, wintry afternoon as I was preparing some official documents. In such boring moments, I find my mind adrift, and this paragraph popped into my head:
“No, sir. We bomb these people, then we photograph them. My stories are paper bullets fired into the fat black heart of Communism. I've fought to make the world safe for hypocrisy. We have met the enemy and he is us. War is good business — invest your son, Viet Nam means never having to say you're sorry. Arbeit Macht Frei—”
“Sergeant Joker!”
“Negative, Captain. Number ten. I’m a corporal. You can send me to the brig, sir — I know that. Lock me up in Portsmouth Naval Prison until I rot, but let me rot as a corporal, sir. You know I do my job. I write that the Nam is an Asian Eldorado populated by a cute, primitive but determined people. War is a noisy breakfast food. War is fun to eat. War can give you better checkups. War cures cancer — permanently. I don't kill. I write. Grunts kill; I only watch. I'm only young Dr. Goebbels. I'm not a sergeant.” I add: “Sir.”
Paperclips are one of those innocuous objects that no one pays much attention to, especially when what they are holding together is of consequence. Bullets – especially 9 mm ones – also look harmless. It is only when coupled with ballistic force that they can be devastating.
It is not lost on me that one of the background maps we used for the photography of our Inauguration Collection shows that corner of the world where Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia intersect. Our paperclips do kind of look like stylised bombs from yesteryear.
The Iran War is the 17th conflict to have happened since my birth in the regions and countries neighbouring Turkey. (Don’t come at me with ITS TÜRKİYE; I’m writing in English, grow thicker skin and take a Xanax). It's unsurprising that war informs so much of our aesthetic here at Gündem; we don’t really have a choice: wherever we look, we see it – either being livestreamed in real time or the prospect of it forming like some hideous carrion flower about to unfurl.
Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the corpse flower is one of several types of carrion flowers, all of which smell like rotting flesh.
The Short-Timers is a terse, tense glimpse into war and lays bare its paradoxes: most of these kids understood that they were fighting an enemy that had not attacked them, under a banner of freedom that the people they were supposedly liberating did not want. Or as the M-60 machine gunner Animal Mother explained to the newest soldier of the squad: “Don't kid yourself; this is a slaughter.” The author of this slim work of fiction that often reads more as a work of truth, Gustav Hasford, really did wear a peace pin while serving in Vietnam (and did get a bollocking from higher-ups for it).
Gustav Hasford during his time in Vietnam
Hasford was a combat correspondent in the Marines. He was 19 when he signed up, and hadn’t even turned 21 years old by the time he fought in the Battle of Huế. The average age of the US soldier that died in combat during the Vietnam War was 23. Finding the average age of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers killed in the conflict is much harder but the estimates suggest they were no older than 22. Hasford was one of the thousands of corn-fed southern American boys bred to fight (and die) in Yankee Wars; he hailed from Alabama. The American South and Midwest buried a disproportionately higher number of their returned loved ones in standard-issue metal caskets draped in the Stars and Stripes [1] than the rest of the US of A.
James Donald Bowman also enlisted in the Marines at 19, deployed as a combat correspondent during the Iraq War, and achieved – much like Hasford’s Joker – the rank of Corporal. He’s now been earmarked to lead the negotiations with Iran; you probably know him by another name: JD Vance. Vance built part of his political career and appeal on not sending American troops on ill-advised foreign “adventures”. But a bigger part of his political survival – at this juncture – rests in his ability to prove his fealty.
One key difference between Hasford and Vance: it would be an understatement to say that the former “saw” combat; he engaged in the act of killing his opponent while trying not to get himself killed. Vance has admitted that he was lucky to never have experienced a firefight. I don’t give much credence to the notion that those who experienced the horrors of war are more keen to pursue peace (if that were so, the veterans of the IDF should be the most avowed peace activists alive today).
What has all this got to do with paperclips? War is, like many aspects of life, very bureaucratic. So maybe this small, absurd object could get someone to stop and think about how it is possible to indirectly participate in war without ever firing a single bullet. Or maybe not. I like to imagine that Hasford’s equally innocuous and meaningless peace pin pierced through and got some people thinking. Regardless, he probably got a kick out of confusing people; we’re guilty of that.