Tournament: GSU | Round: 1 | Opponent: na | Judge: na

Soldier 1AC

Student veterans like myself are silenced about our experiences of war, especially in the higher education community. We are made to fit into neat little representations as lionized heroes or demonized babykillers. There’s no room to speak from that chasm. Debate that fails to bridge this gap corrupts our education about war, and is complicit in excluding and alienating me and my fellow veterans.

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
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achieve the educational promise for which they have paid an extraordinarily high price.

This dissociation removes the opportunity for public deliberation or interaction with the military, erasing the identity of individual soldiers like me and making it impossible for us to tell our stories. As a war veteran, unless I allow myself to be tokenized by the far right or far left, my voice is unheard. Allowing this situation to continue makes meaningful debate and dissent impossible for both veterans and civilians.

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
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picturing the soldier as a real individual, such as soldier body counts.

This year’s topic is war. But you already knew that. The topic is
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Why? Because war is still what we choose to make debate about. 

But you’ve been doing it wrong. All these years debaters have been talking about war, but they’ve been doing it without ever once hearing from the people they are talking ABOUT. Debate has been deliberately blind, willfully deaf to the soldiers who fight the wars that fascinate them. As a result, the policy education we are so eager to pat ourselves on the back for producing is a hollow and useless thing. 

In this round, we should welcome and affirm the voices of veterans. The role of the ballot is the critic should vote for the team that best welcomes and affirms the voices of veterans.

My experiences have always taken a backseat to the supposed war "experts", despite their inexperience. When I heard the topic was going to be war powers, I felt like not debating at all, assuming that arguments from Kagan or Cuomo would be privileged over my direct experience of war. But without my story, and others like it, jingoistic representations of veterans will be deployed by the executive to shut down true debate over war powers. Our advocacy is a prerequisite for any meaningful topic discussion.

Brown 06 ~Wendy Brown is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California in Berkeley, "American Nightmare," Political Theory, vol. 34(6)~
The combination of submissiveness toward a declared truth, legitimate inequality, and fealty that
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to resent and even attack the classic principles and requirements of constitutional democracy.

After my time in Iraq, I couldn’t just re-integrate into the debate community. I had to assimilate. My story doesn’t fit into accepted narratives like securitization and it isn’t part of some nuclear war escalation scenario. I tried to hide my identity, purposefully not wearing my dog tags or camo backpacks. There was no one I could identify with. 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 heard. For debaters to even begin to understand a topic about war, veterans must bridge the gap between civilian and military knowledge.

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
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(Collins, 1998) and creating stronger support networks for returning veterans.

But veterans are often purposefully excluded from civic life, denied access to opportunities to tell our stories and heal our trauma, because many of us suffer from what is called a "disorder". Trust me, there is nothing disorderly about the Post Traumatic Stress that my buddies and I endure. It’s a natural response to other humans trying to kill me for a year. Until we recognize that we are all complicit in war, regardless of our approval or disapproval, combat trauma will remain unnoticed and veterans will be pathologized. 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
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.7 This demands an examination of the way power is socially configured.

The trauma experienced as a result of war isn’t left on the battlefield. There is no reset button that gets pushed at the end of a deployment. I prepared myself, numbed and pumped up, to kill someone, because that is a fact of war. I was responsible for the lives of the men left and right of me, and my emotions were structured to resemble that. When I returned, my numbness and aggression continued. I couldn’t understand why I felt nothing towards the ones I loved. Post-traumatic stress, like war, affects every part of a veterans life. It causes family problems, violence, avoidance, substance abuse, and homelessness. These impacts are real, and affect me and my friends every day. The hypothetical specter of nuclear war pales in comparison to the actual darkness and isolation felt by many veterans, sometimes resulting in real death, not just debate impacts.

I.O.M., 2013:
(Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, March 2013 Report Brief, http://www.iom.edu/~~/media/Files/Report20Files/2013/Returning-Home-Iraq-Afghanistan/Returning-Home-Iraq-Afghanistan-RB.pdf)

Psychosocial Effects Many studies have shown an association between PTSD and a variety of psychosocial
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burden, and caregiver burden was strongly associated with the veterans’ psychologic adjustment. 

The nationalization of violence cannot be contained within war.  It creates cycles of intolerance that crush struggles for justice in race, gender, and class. The specter of war always reappears, and when it does, it demands allegiance and support, preventing social movements from making progress and reversing their gains. Studying the individual soldier, and bridging the citizen-soldier divide, is the only way to disrupt this cyclical violence at it root.

Cowen 07 ~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
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us to trace the struggles at home that support or subvert wars abroad. 

Soldier K

Our current national discourse surrounding soldiers is a result of the blindness of politics.  Individual narratives of war are swallowed up in favor of a simplified version capable of consumption during the five o clock news.  Soldiers are solicited to act on the nation’s libidinal imaginary, called forth to perform again and again until their bodies are broken.  As a result, war rhetoric creates us into a collectively acting, yet unthinking body.  The AFF’s resolve of war through fiat as the end byproduct, and not an experience, is an example of how the unseen director constructs our field of vision towards an ever-closing finalé.  The epistemological blindness created by this politics overcomes all social movements.

Grand 07, "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.
War rhetoric always conjures this blindness. It relies on a shuttered, and redundant
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through the war zone. It will not assent to its own obscurity.

The violent reality of war is never questioned by modern politics.  Support-the-troops rhetoric shuts down the discussion surrounding national war policy, locking in support for endless wars.  Acquiescence of the political to the president and policymakers simulated by the 1AC is required to be a good citizen, leaving political rhetoric a hollow shell.  Only by questioning war on the whole can we truly reclaim the discourse surrounding it.

Engels and Sass, 2013:
~Jeremy Engels is an Associate Professor, and William O. Saas is a Ph.D. Candidate, in the Department of Communication Arts 26 Sciences, Penn State University, "On Acquiescence and Ends-Less War," Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 99(2)~

A number of tropes and techniques are used today to promote acquiescence, to cultivate
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creating space for talk where we have previously been content to remain silent.

Thus, The Alternative:

In This Round, We Should Welcome And Affirm The Voices Of Veterans. The Role Of The Ballot Is The Critic Should Vote For The Team That Best Welcomes And Affirms The Voices Of Veterans.

Storytelling is the only way for returning veterans to reclaim their identities.  In fact, the status quo academe Silences The Voices And Experiences Of Veterans, Putting Them At Risk Of Terminal Education Failure. This isn’t like their nuclear war scenarios.  This is real, and the way we construct our conversations about war makes our activity complicit in it.  Veterans desperately need to reclaim their identity from liminality.  The academic setting is a unique site for the possibility of dialogue between students, both veteran and civilian.  This open discussion Is Key To Understanding Our National War Policy, making the alt a prerequisite to topical education..

Moore, 2012:
~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.