Soldiers – and combat veterans in particular – often chafe when civilians try to speak about war. There are dues to be paid before one can speak about the experience of combat, so the story goes, and those who haven't experienced the hardship haven't the right to describe the experience. In Welcome to the Suck, Peebles, the chair of the Film Studies Program at Centre College, steps bravely across the line dividing civilians from the military to analyze war texts from the Gulf War to the just-ended War in Iraq. Unfortunately, while the book's concept is a commendable one, the final product is ultimately unsuccessful.

Peebles's overarching thesis is that the stories from the Iraq wars show a new ambivalence: a “desire to be truly in-between – to break down and transcend the cultural and social categories that have traditionally defined identity” (2). Despite this desire for transcendence, she argues, most soldiers’ attempts at self-fashioning fail. Four chapters and a short conclusion explore objectification, gender, absence, technology, and combat trauma in film, memoirs, blogs, and poetry.

The book's great strength is the voices of the soldiers, both male and female, whom Peebles takes as her subjects. Some of the voices are already well known, such as the two memoirs written by marines: Nathanial Fick's One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer and Anthony Swofford's Gulf War memoir Jarhead. Others are not. Kayla Williams's Love My Rifle More Than You receives careful and detailed attention, as does Brian Turner's excellent collection of poems, Here, Bullet. And Peebles may be the first scholar of military culture to give serious attention to blogs as cultural artifacts, which will please media scholars and military historians alike.

The writing throughout is clear and mostly free of unnecessary jargon. Unfortunately, the work suffers from a number of conceptual and organizational problems that make it of limited value. First, and most problematically, the thesis outlined in the introduction fades shortly after the first chapter. Later chapters make occasional reference to the veterans’ “palpable desire to transcend categorization,” but this gets lost in other equally underdeveloped arguments, which do not seem to flow from or connect to the main thesis (21).

Furthermore, the thesis is a comparative one; what is new here, Peebles claims, is the authors’ desire for hybridity not seen in previous cultural productions about war. Convincing evidence for this claim never appeared. Were memoirist Joel Turnipseed's attempts to negotiate Marine culture and intellectualism so different from Tim O'Brien's experiences in Vietnam? If so, how so? If there are important differences, they were not clearly stated.

A more serious problem is the use of Iraqi texts, which are sprinkled throughout the work with only the loosest association to the arguments put forth at the start of the chapters. One wonders if the inclusion of these texts was an afterthought, or a demand from the publisher to widen the scope.

Chapter 1, “Lines of Sight,” uses Anthony Swofford's Gulf War memoir, Jarhead, and a collection of blog posts (Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq) to explore what happens when the viewers of war become doers themselves. The chapter's argument, hidden in the middle of a paragraph, is that both texts show soldiers in “a kind of identity crisis in which they recognize the vulnerability of their own position as representations themselves” (25). It does not convince. Swofford's tale does contain angst and even anger at the experience of the hundred-hour ground war, but there is little in the text itself suggesting that he is disenchanted because “the gaze” has been turned on him. If anything, Swofford's is a typical grievance for marines who fought in that truncated war: the experience wasn't long enough or violent enough to fulfill their desire for suffering and sacrifice.

Chapter 2, “Making a Military Man,” tackles a different subject: masculinity. With readings of three memoirs (Joel Turnipseed's Baghdad Express, Nate Fick's One Bullet Away, and Kayla Williams's Love My Rifle More Than You), Peebles argues a common theme: all three authors struggle to perform masculinity and all three fail. The major strength here is the discussion of the work of Kayla Williams, whom Peebles argues convincingly is an example of a woman striving to perform masculinity. The other readings are less persuasive.

Chapter 3, “Consuming the Other,” makes another strange argument: that two texts from the War in Iraq (John Crawford's The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell and Brian Turner's poetry collection Here, Bullet) “convey the act of consumption – the obliteration of a home, a nation, a life, or many lives” (102). How destruction equates to consumption is not well explained, and much of the material cited is exactly what one would expect from men engaging in violent activity in a foreign land. If there is something new and different about these war stories, Peebles does not explain it well. The final chapter also makes an obvious point: that those who return from war have difficulty healing, both mentally and physically, and that films that focus on those traumas are implicit acts of political activism. There are other themes throughout the chapter – “the gaze” returns from chapter 1, and there is an interesting discussion on technology and healing – but none of these combine to make a clear, cohesive argument.

As veterans return from a decade of wars, American studies will need more scholars who commit to hearing their voices and analyzing their writing. Peebles took a first step in this direction; unfortunately, she went to press before the argument was fully developed. In the end, Welcome to the Suck will only be useful for specialists writing on media representations in wartime, or for those looking for introductions to some of the more recent cultural productions by America's combat veterans.