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Beginning as an attempt to understand the short video of U.S. Marines in Helmond Province, Afghanistan, urinating on dead Taliban fighters in January of 2012, this essay first explores the ways urine comes to be understood in cultures as an ambiguous symbol, at times representing clean and nourishing (as in flood myths) and at other times representing dirty and polluting. With that understanding of the ambiguity of urine and urinating, the essay then considers the role of pissing (using the folk term in English) in the construction, maintenance, and repair of masculinity in American culture, with special attention to the ways American warriors use pissing as a ritual response to the traumas of combat.
Keywords: urination, ritual, military, trauma, PTSD
This inquiry begins with a 39-second video released to the press in early January of 2012, showing four United States Marines in Helmond Province, Afghanistan, urinating on the bodies of three dead Taliban fighters (Bowley & Rosenberg, 2012).' United States officials quickly condemned the act portrayed in the video while people worldwide expressed shock, disgust, and anger. The video reminded the public of the shocking photographs taken by American soldiers of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad eight years earlier (Hersh, 2004; Morris, 2011; Sontag, 2004). Both the 2004 digital photographs and the 2012 digital video demonstrate how the visual narratives of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now in the hands of the soldiers, sailors, and Marines, offering war stories from the people actually fighting the wars on the ground. The vernacular photography by combat- ants is as much warrior folklore as are their oral stories, pranks, play, and rituals (Mechling, 2012).
Both the photos and the video also raise questions about why the soldiers and Marines taking the pictures wanted to record the events, some of which are criminal. What is so important about these images that the participants, the eyewitnesses, want to preserve the moment, carry it back to safety, and get some sort of satisfaction or other meaning reliving the events by watching the images? Did they share these images with anyone who wasn't there?
Internet sites posting the video and online articles by journalists and bloggers about the video often give the viewer or reader...