Uniform to Pulp: Performance of Transformation, Critique, and Community-Building for Veteran Soldiers

Abstract

Veteran soldiers who choose to confront a culture of militarism occupy a challenging subject position. They cannot rely on the institutional and public respect generally reserved for veterans who do not question their military service. The Combat Paper Project, a workshop that allows veterans to create paper artwork out of their pulped combat uniforms, is a unique medium of identity renegotiation for veterans. This essay analyzes how Combat Paper, as performance rhetoric, offers veterans a multilayered and open-ended script to enact and transform their complex relationships to the military and the war experiences they embody. The essay illuminates the tactical nature of the Combat Paper performance, highlighting the performance of metaphor and metonymy as rhetorical devices. Overall, the essay identifies three rhetorical functions of the Combat Paper performance, namely its transformative, critical, and community-building functions, and demonstrates how a performance-oriented approach can animate a rhetorical text and enrich rhetorical criticism.

Keywords:

• Dissent
• Performance Rhetoric
• Tactical
• Veteran Identity

Acknowledgments

The author is especially grateful to Dr. Kathryn Olson and Dr. John Jordan for their valuable assistance with this article. She also wishes to honor the late Dr. Renee Meyers, whose initial encouragement of the essay was an important catalyst. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the National Communication Association.

Notes

For example, Reyes (2006) argues that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a conservative group of Vietnam veterans, was successful in undermining presidential candidate John Kerry's ethos, as future commander-in-chief, by using his anti-Vietnam rhetoric to discredit his military service. Although, the Vietnam War shattered the traditional American patriotic war narrative, replacing it with a counternarrative of the heroic individual soldier martyred by the failure of the administration, by the 1990s, the “good war myth” (p. 581) had resurfaced in American political discourse strengthened by the attacks of September 11. The ambiguity toward war in the Vietnam era was replaced once again by a “moral clarity” (p. 582) toward war efforts, and amidst this rhetorical landscape, John Kerry's past testimony against the Vietnam war contradicted the single-minded patriotism that was deemed appropriate for a future American president.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mridula Mascarenhas

Mridula Mascarenhas is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.