The Bodies in Person

July 15, 2018
A firsthand look at the terror of war as visited on noncombatants exposed to American fire.Civilians are always hurt and killed in war, collectively deemed "collateral damage" with all due regret. As McDonell (The Civilization of Perpetual Movement: Nomads in the Modern World, 2016, etc.) writes, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and other American theaters of operation, many of them have become "excess mortality," a grim and Orwellian term that would seem to mean those killed beyond the actuarial numbers that enter into the calculus of "acceptable" death: If a sniper is on a roof and 100 civilians are slated to die in the bombardment required to eliminate that threat, then the 101st gets a whole new category. By any measure, according to a well-quoted epidemiological study, "at least 650,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the first three years of the war"--a figure, notes the author, that George W. Bush dismissed, saying that it was "only" 30,000. As to numbers, McDonell--who began his career as a teenager as the author of an undercooked but popular coming-of-age novel but hardened up as a roving journalist--does the math to show "information about innocent death in foreign wars is most accessible to America's cosmopolitan wealthy, even though it's mostly the working classes, domestically and abroad, who become casualties." The statistics he turns up, working at the fringes of classified military information, are ugly, and they tell stories that speak to those working-class experiences--a pair of young Iraqis, for instance, who, braving fire to recover the body of a relative, court death by Iraqi or American fire, a choice that "is not their own, precisely." The author concludes, with righteous anger, that "killing innocent people to increase our own security is cowardly." That it also seems to be accepted military doctrine puts the lie to any notion of moral superiority that we might bring to the enterprise.Grim indeed and sometimes gruesome--and a brave work of investigation.

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August 6, 2018
Political theorist and novelist McDonell (Twelve) brings investigative research and a strong narrative voice to this harrowing search for an accurate understanding of civilian casualties in the United States’ recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Receiving limited access to U.S. personnel, McDonell seeks out firsthand accounts of military actions that resulted in noncombatant injury or death. Rather than relying on a linear narrative, he creates a collage of chaos, violence, and cold calculation: using a novelist’s eye for character and detail, he introduces readers to a wide variety of Iraqis and Afghans, from the young veterans of Iraq’s civil defense staff to emergency room doctors treating the injured and a con man whose brother was shot while working on American base. The vivid reporting of the unrecorded lives of those killed and harmed is moving, and the discussions with American officials are revealing. Given the vast cast of characters and the jumps between different war zones, the narrative can be difficult to follow, but the overall power of the work is undeniable. By introducing the human stories behind anonymous and apparently often inaccurate casualty reporting, McDonnell casts a much-needed light on
a significant and too often downplayed aspect of war.