Tournament: UNT | Round: 7 | Opponent: Kansas | Judge: Allsup

UNT 1AC

TW; My narrative contains triggering content for combat-related PTS.

My inability to forget what war means to me, and play it like the game of the resolution, subjectifies me as pathologized.  I am a singular member of a large community, socio-historically constructed, unable to engage "normally" in the game like everyone else.  But It’s time for debate to acknowledge that its relentless fascination with war creates a collective responsibility for the trauma of war – that veterans cannot simply be denied access to the community, abandoned as the inconvenient byproducts of last year’s escalation scenarios.

Carlton 12 ~Lisa Silvestri Carlton is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. "Together We Stand, Divided We Fall: Building Alliances with Combat Veterans." Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal,Vol. 95, No. 3~
What is striking about both of these cases—the new PTSD policy and the
AND
.7 This demands an examination of the way power is socially configured.

When our veterans return, they are not safe.  Too often some part of them is left behind, while they struggle to reclaim their identity at home.  There are material implications to the spatial exclusion of veterans that create structural impacts of depression and endemic psychoses of suicide.  Our country is losing more veterans every day to suicide than to the battlefield.

CNN 13, "Soldier’s suicide note goes viral; family demands better for veterans", By Chelsea C. Cook, CNN, Sat July 6, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/06/us/soldier-suicide-note/index.html
"Too trapped in a war to be at peace, too damaged to be
AND
there for him," he said. "He fell through the cracks."

The representations of war in debate make it a hostile space for veterans to engage in, silencing and disorienting us. To properly claim our identities, to begin the healing process, our stories must be recognized.

Demers, 2011:
(When Veterans Return: The Role of Community In Reintegration. Ann Demers, Assistant Professor of Health Science At San Jose State University. March 2011)
Although soldiers (active duty, reservists, and veterans) described feeling excited and
AND
(Collins, 1998) and creating stronger support networks for returning veterans.

Thus, our advocacy statement.

In this round, we should welcome military veterans.

Status Quo War Rhetoric Establishes An Epistemological Regime That Silences Soldiers, Always-Already Foreclosing Our Discussions Of The Topic. Only personal narratives that put a face to the pain of combat can break through this silence.

Grand, 2007:
"Maternal Surveillance: Disrupting the Rhetoric of War", Grand, Sue. Psychoanalysis, Culture 26 Society12.4 (Dec 2007): 305-322.Dr. Sue Grand is faculty and supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis.

It relies on a shuttered, and redundant field of vision. Ideologies regulate what
AND
through the war zone. It will not assent to its own obscurity.

Debate’s obsession with war is deeply problematic, especially given our concern with issues of race and exclusion. The idea of war underlines all structural oppression.  It doesn’t matter if we are talking about neoliberal wars on societal issues or colonialism. War enables endless cycles of structural violence, racial and ethnic cleansing.

Cowen, 2007:
~Deborah Cowen is a professor in Geography 26 Planning at the University of Toronto. "National Soldiers and the War on Cities." Theory 26 Event, 10(2)~
For close to two hundred years, war has been broadly understood as organized violence
AND
us to trace the struggles at home that support or subvert wars abroad. 

I am fundamentally marked by war.  War can be a site of ontological construction and ontological criticism.  We must be aware of how the historically-situated truths that pervade our debate space are created by war in order to understand political and social orders.

Barkawi and Brighton 11, "Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge, and Critique" Tarak Barkawi University of Cambridge and Shane Brighton University of Sussex, International Political Sociology (2011) 5, 126–143
Fighting presents itself as the duration of the clash of arms but is an always
AND
generative powers and their function in the production of social and political orders.

For example, The resolution reflects our desire to talk about war, but also instructs us in HOW we should talk about it.  In fact, National-level war powers debate produces dissociative rhetoric that quarantines civilian and military knowledge. In this context, military issues are always described in mass terms. Soldiers become "troops," collectivizing our experiences and erasing our individual identities, assimilating them into the singular identity of military leadership.  This denies veteran’s the ability to claim onto-cartegraphic experience to claim place in the round in favor of de-subjectification and disunion.  The affirmative reconstitutes place as a potentiality for the inclusion of narratives.

Stahl 09 ~Roger Stahl is Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. Why we support the troops. Rhetoric 26 Public Affairs Vol. 12, No. 4~
If deflection works to construct the drama of war, the function of dissociation works
AND
picturing the soldier as a real individual, such as soldier body counts.

Debate can be a mechanism to help soldiers shed their disguises of defense in the academy, to truly feel at home with their post-war identity.  But As long as the disjunctures of identity - that soldiers are either heroes or babykillers, and that war is a morally simplistic event – remain, veterans will not be able to tell their stories, reintegrate, or feel at home in our community.  Establishing trust in academic settings by creating discursive linkages through narratives is the only way to transform the debate space into welcoming place; bridging the divide that leaves so many veteran identities "over there".

Moore 12 ~Ellen Moore, PhD candidate, Graduate School of Education, U Cal Berkeley. "From Combat to College: Student Veterans in Academic ’Contact Zones’". http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/92m9r81k. September 11~
In this paper I have discussed pedagogical and cultural disjunctures felt by veterans who attend
AND
achieve the educational promise for which they have paid an extraordinarily high price.