Matt Siwerski

Matt Siwerski BFA

2008

“In the Vietnam War a collective resistance in the U.S. armed forces, mutinied, sabotaged, shirked, fragged and smoked their way to a full withdrawal and an end to the conflict.”

To “frag” meant to assassinate an officer or career soldier usually with a “fragmentation device” a grenade.
In the same sense, GI antiwar poems mean to explode the official narrative of the war by refusing to mythologize the conflict. Mutilation serves as a metaphor for the project of GI Resistance poetry in this sense. It radically changed the idea of the military “corps” and its hegemony over the discourses of the war.”

Fragging the Chains of Command: GI Resistance and Mutilation by Michael Bibby in The Journal of American Culture, Volume 16, Number 3, September 1993, pp. 29-38

…not only exploding the official narrative of the war but the military’s archetype of masculinity…

Photos: Siwerski