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I belong to a generation of journalists who cut their teeth reporting on the political upheavals in the Middle East during the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. It was a story of revolution that began with hope but quickly turned bleak. The horrors of authoritarianism and war were laid bare in front of us. To my mind, it all culminated in the Islamic State’s executions of journalists and aid workers in the Syrian desert and videos of those deaths posted online. The first American to be murdered, in August 2014, was a freelance journalist named James Foley.

In her most recent collection, Mothers Over Nangarhar (2019), the poet Pamela Hart looks for meaning in Foley’s murder. In “On the Orange Jumpsuit,” her narrator watches footage of Foley’s death and searches his hands for Morse code, his eyes for some signal of defiance.

It must be the sun, though it’s a myth women blink more
than men. James Foley’s mouth is a slash in the sky.
We blink 29,000 times a day. I pause the video to see if there’s a pattern.

The narrator is interested in the execution because her son, an American soldier, is also stationed in the Middle East. (Hart is the mother of an American soldier, and her poetry is deeply personal.) She becomes engrossed, in particular, with the color of Foley’s jumpsuit. Orange is the color of the second chakra, as well as of a pashmina the narrator admires on a plaza table. It’s the color of the jumpsuit worn by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, who was detained without charges for 14 years before being released in 2016. It’s a color whose varied iterations the narrator recounts, as if she’s found a coherent throughline that connects Foley to ancient history:

            The history of orange is about a word
                        that begins in Sanskrit as nãranga-s, flows to
            Persian nãrang and into Arabic as nãranj
 
            then to old French
                        where the n disappears along a riverbank
            snagged by a willow root.
 
            In England the fruit arrives before the color
                        which is called yellow-red until the 16th century.
            And there’s no true rhyme. 

Even now I can’t bring myself to write about the way Foley and the others were killed. Strings of letters put together can’t begin to carry the weight of what that word—beheaded—means to me. Hart uses the word only once, in reference to Steven Sotloff, the second American journalist executed by the Islamic State. It’s as if her narrator has already grown hardened to the executions:

            When news of Steven Sotloff’s beheading comes in the fall
                        I watch the video. He’s kneeling in a rocky
            landscape that offsets the orange.
 
            I think of Rilke’s instruction and how the color
            fights, drowning itself in its own taste.

When I was a 20-something freelance journalist living and working in a region of the world shared with Al Qaeda, it crossed my mind that I could be kidnapped and executed in such a way. This was a nebulous worry though. It felt like something I should worry about rather than an actual threat. My daily life bore little resemblance to how the region is often represented. I was on the receiving end of endless hospitality and kindness in the Arab world. Besides, violence and kidnappings were isolated in the countries I lived in and traveled around. Then it happened to one of us, and then to another, and another, and another.

I met Sotloff at a party in Yemen in 2010, when we drank smuggled whiskey on a rooftop in Sanaa’s majestic old city. Wait, was that when we first met? I can’t remember now. He often asked me for advice on reporting in Yemen, as I was the veteran correspondent, having lived there for about a year, though I wasn’t helpful. His Facebook messages, to which I never replied, still sit in my inbox. Nearly a decade later, I read about his public execution in a book of poems about which I am asked to write. Is this as difficult as walking across a room crammed with dying protesters, many of them freshly shot by snipers, my notebook in hand while I try to stay tough? No—and yes. Sotloff may have been with me that day, in that room full of dying people. I can’t remember anymore.

I haven’t watched any of the Islamic State’s videos. In fact, I click away or switch off if any reference to them comes across my screen. Similarly, I won’t read articles or watch news reports about the famine in Yemen, my old home and a place I love dearly. I’m like the benumbed mother Hart writes about in “Private Jonathan Lee Gifford’s Mother” who doesn’t think of the costs of war after her son is killed in combat: “Because there are days she sits in her kitchen / Turning the blender on and off.”

When I lived in Yemen and war nearly broke out in March 2011, I bought a plane ticket to leave the country. I threw a few belongings into a bag and headed to Sanaa International Airport. I had an idea then of what I thought war would be like. I imagined myself trapped in a building while dust and bombs fell from the sky. Eventually, I imagined, a Humvee would come rescue me. I ended up not boarding the plane because a friend convinced me that my idea of war was probably wrong.

Later, when conflict did break out in Yemen in the latter half of 2011, it didn’t look anything like what I had expected. As a result, I doubted myself, as if some strange version of imposter syndrome had seized me. Is this a war I am living through or a fake war? Does the crackle of artillery fire alone make a war? There was a frontline, but it wasn’t long, and in the middle of the afternoon, when fighters were busy chewing khat, I could walk across it with no problem. The reality is that war is many things, as Hart’s constant self-questioning throughout Mothers Over Nangarhar indicates. In “War Stories,” for example, she writes, “This isn’t a story of war. This is the mother on the idea of a son at war,” as if her experience at home was somehow less profound or meaningful.

In another recent book of war poetry, Nomi Stone’s Kill Class (2019), it’s likewise difficult to ascertain what takes place in Iraq, in the real war, and what is just a game in Pineland, the fictional training ground where US soldiers prepare to fight overseas. There’s a mock Iraqi village there, complete with Iraqi actors who play enemy combatants. The book was inspired by the time Stone spent at similar camps as an anthropologist. In “Pineland, in the Empire,” she describes the role of the facility: "Pineland has room for whatever the world does to itself. In the beginning, Pineland / was somewhat like the Soviet Union. Now, Pineland is somewhat like the Middle East."

For the Iraqi actors, Pineland is a job between their shifts at Walmart. They were forced to flee their native country because they worked as interpreters for the US Army—“a killable choice,” as Stone writes. For the American soldiers, Pineland is a game or, at best, theater. Stone suggests as much in “On the 4th of July in the Empire”:

They tell me this in a bar
right outside of these woods
where old boys act-out
a rape to teach war’s
 
do’s and don’ts, slapping
their hands together —
Are you in on this joke?

This imagined war brings nothing good. In Pineland, soldiers are taught that they can’t trust anyone in Iraq. Indeed, the dehumanization of Iraqis takes hold. I won’t say that it starts there, because the dehumanization starts in the American education system as well as in American media and movies.

The woods
 
are a class in what
they can take. The country
is fat. We eat
from its side.

In “Former Iraqi War Interpreters Role-Play Executioners,” a poem in which the Iraqi actors masquerade as terrorist executioners, readers are reminded that, really, this is all a game for the young Americans.

            Willy
           
            :::
 
                        holds out his iPhone. “Honey,
check it out     I played
 
                             killed.”

At the end of the poem, Stone somewhat distorts verse 51 from the fifth chapter of the Koran, which counsels Muslims to distrust Jews and Christians:

Take not the Jews and Christians for your friends
 
and protectors    they are not friends
and protectors to each
 
                        other  And among you
 
who turns to them is of them.

It’s as if she’s relaying something an extremist once said to an interpreter turned actor. The poem ends abruptly, with a brutal line that conjures the moment just before an execution, whether a mock execution played out at Pineland or a would-be execution the actors narrowly escaped in Iraq: “Brother, look into my eyes / until the act is done.”

I see Pineland as a kind of fantasy that connects the Iraqis to their home country, even though the training camp is obviously manufactured, and the Iraqis there play roles quite different from those in their former lives. In “Living the Role,” Stone captures the insidious durability of these fictional alter egos:

Living the role is like if you listen to a song and it was your song
with your girl—
your brain tells you to stop     you can’t stop.

For the Iraqis in Kill Class, it’s not only being a refugee that’s tragic but also knowing that their homeland has been so disfigured by conflict that it’s no longer recognizable, as Stone suggests in “The Camera Burned a Hole”:

we passed boats sluicing
over drained marshes,
orchards which re-sprout
just as they’re leveled.

Both Kill Class and Mothers Over Nangarhar carry readers through scenes in which the worst is omitted, the violence and trauma implicit and yet still undeniable, as if the poets are mimicking the coping mechanisms by which suffering is repressed. People at war often soften the violence around them by making jokes that those on the outside may consider callous or uncaring. (A real-life example: in Yemen, the brother of a man who’d just been killed in an American drone stroke quipped, “You shouldn’t sit with me. You’re liable to get struck by a drone.”)

When a person no longer lives through such violence but is still impacted by it—as with the Iraqis of Kill Class or the families of Mothers Over Nangarhar—another coping mechanism often comes into play: intentional ignorance. In this method, tragedy becomes literally unspeakable, and victims talk about anything except the source of their trauma. In “Field Notes from Home,” in Mothers Over Nangarhar, the narrator relays the stories of several women from military families. One of them, Madison, speaks of her father, a recent veteran who is now locked away from civilian life:

When we visit him in prison
we play Pictionary and Jenga.
He lets my little brother win.

The father’s incarceration is never explained. His damage—possibly from war, as readers are told he served in both Kuwait and Afghanistan—is filtered through terse, cryptic lines: “Sounds I remember. / Him singing loudly to heavy / metal music. Yelling at my mom. / Pacing around the house at night.”

A common thread between Mothers Over Nangarhar and Kill Class is that in both books, what was once only imagined is subsequently brought to devastating life. The village in Pineland comes as an easy-to-assemble kit, a modular toy that soldiers can destroy again and again without repercussions. It’s not a stretch to connect this to combat in the real Iraq, as Stone writes in “Soldiers Parachuting into the War Game”:

Iraqi role-players whispering
in collapsible houses
made for daily wreckage.

Pineland hosts a war game in which Muslims in Iraq burn down a Christian village, a neat (albeit simplistic) rendering of who is bad and who is good. In another game, all the Iraqis in a village work for a militia. The Middle East imagined at Pineland is what the Middle East is slowly becoming in reality, at least partly because of American intervention. It all begs the question: does it matter that Stone toggles between theater and reality in her poems? War can feel like a game, after all, especially for those taking part in it.

Once, over beers in New York, I heard a photojournalist mutter that “Misurata was the best time of my life,” referring to time spent reporting from the beleaguered Libyan city during the Arab Spring. More than 1,000 people died fighting in Misurata in 2011, but when journalists shadow ragtag guerilla fighters feeding off each other’s energy, it can be exhilarating. I’ve laughed while dodging sniper fire, and I’ve heard journalists brag about how close a bullet whizzed past them. Perhaps the only way conflict is bearable is if it’s cast as a game, as in Pineland, and held in that light as long as possible—until it clearly isn’t a game anymore, and death or injury comes too close. For innocent bystanders caught up in fighting, such a crude rendering can feel shameful or heartless.

In Mothers Over Nangarhar, the narrator, who has imagined her son’s war overseas, goes to war with herself. She fights the passage of time and questions her child-rearing. She wonders if she raised her son to become a warrior. The deeper she delves into war’s violence, the more violent her thoughts become. She imagines a soldier torn to shreds by an improvised explosive device yet nonetheless praises the existence of rocket launchers and bullets—paradoxically, they’re what keep her son safe. Then her son takes a class in mortars, which he deems a “good career move.” In “On the Soldier’s Birthday,” Hart writes from the mother’s perspective:

[I] try to read Clausewitz again. Who warns there’s no light of reason
on a battlefield. I google mortar explosions. Is picturing a crime of
imagination.

Throughout Mothers Over Nangarhar, the narrator tries to feel closer to her son. She studies the history of the countries in which he serves. She wants the word Jalalabad to be as familiar to her as doing the dishes: “I am late for everything because Jalalabad. I find it difficult to talk. In meetings, other words seem dissonant.” She watches videos of young Americans executed in the Middle East, though, of course, this brings no respite. Rather, the war continues to rage in her imagination because she cannot ever fully know the experience that her son is living through. She doesn’t want time to pass, because she fears the losses that time will bring. The moon’s cycle haunts her, as does the day’s news. It’s a nefarious version of living in the moment, of trying to freeze time because she’s afraid of the future. In “The Matins Project,” Hart writes, “Picasso said he painted to stop motion / Tell that to another five minutes gone.”

Mothers Over Nangarhar and Kill Class highlight the lives of people on opposite sides of US wars in the Middle East. The former is an homage to military families, for whom the Long War has ceased to end, despite being far removed from most Americans’ daily consciousness. The latter is an ode to Iraqi civilians and a hard look at the American military machine. Yet both books are testaments to the hardships those at the periphery of war face—hardships that too often become grim statistics in public dialogue.

In the end, these books offer the idea that the United States at war overseas has begot a country at war at home. One of Hart’s poems is titled “M16/M4,” which is a gun that has irrevocably transformed civilian life in the United States: at concerts, in schools, at work, in any place where people gather. American leadership wanted to make a weapon out of Iraqi and Afghani civilians; in the end, the United States has made a weapon of itself.