There is an unmistakable uneasiness about those videos, shot by insurgents, that show a truck, or humvee, or other military vehicle traveling along an Iraqi highway when suddenly BOOM. The roadside bomb explodes in a flash, sand, dust, flame, and hot metal covering both highway lanes and plenty else besides. There's something eerie about it, but not only for the obvious reasons. Yes, the suggestion of grievous wounds, even death. Yes, the visual force of such chaos. But something else makes me cringe too: the streetlights that line the highways. They are, too put it plainly, thoroughly familiar.

There's always been something vaguely unfamiliar about our war imagery. The photographs of the Somme or the Ypres Salient show us some alien landscape, shell-cratered, muddy, otherworldy, what Pynchon once called the "gassy, Armegeddonite filth." Even in the more familiar Norman farmhouse image of World War II, there was something strange and other about it, feudal maybe, filled with hand-hewn tables, quaint and candle-lit, and that's not talking the snowy wilderness of the Ardennes, much less the oppressive otherness of Peilelu, or Guadalcanal. For Korea we generally see a hilly no-man's-land with fire raked across it, or long lines of troops descending into wind-swept valleys with a million Chinese in hot pursuit. Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, say again: jungle, paddy, hills built to twice their height with sandbags and outposts at Con Thien, Khe Sanh, tunnels for the underground, the geometry of the view from a Huey. Even when the fighting was taken to the cities, street fights in Cholon, or - yes, ma'am - Hue City, the cityscape is distinctly foreign, no matter how many French balconies could support a sniper team. And all the little wars around the world, dirt roads through jungle space, the fluorescent green landscape framing the child soldiers, corrugated metal shanties masquerading as field hospitals, painted that wild blue, red, and orange.

But Iraq? Those highway images look anything but foreign. Modern street signs compare strangely to those weird, mythical wooden contraptions made famous in M*A*S*H: New York 5,000 miles. The highways look well-paved, well-lined. The exit ramps look functional, and well-built. And those streetlights look, well, they look like home. And you pause for a moment and wonder "Is this Baghdad, or the westbound Belt Parkway?" You pause for a moment and think "That looks like I-80 roundabout Davenport, Iowa." Yes. Not strange at all, or rather, stranger than anything. It is the very familiarity of the image that makes it so strange, makes it fit so uncomfortably within our image-scape, which formerly had a tidy box for "war images," marked EXOTIC. Not so now. globalization touched Baghdad, Ramadi, Tikrit, and its aesthetic is too close to home, too near the bone. That tidy box, like this war itself, has spilled over. So tell me, is this Baghdad, or Columbia, South Carolina. And tell me, why should it matter?




Link to "On Three Years in Iraq Part 1"