Wounded warriors: Further explorations into a biocultural semiotics

Abstract

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Within five days, forty-one countries began deploying troops to Saudia Arabia in a buildup of mass manpower and weaponry. On the morning of January 16, 1991, Coalition troops began intensive air strikes. On February 24, 1991, the ground war began. It lasted a mere one hundred hours. There were 148 combat deaths among Coalition troops. Troops were home by June. It had been by all accounts the ‘perfect war.’ A few months later, Coalition troops began to complain of strange symptoms. Within a year of the soldiers return, the press had created a disease which as yet had no ‘biomarkers’ and an unbounded set of symptoms. They called it Gulf War Syndrome. I write here about a process whereby a new ‘disease’ was created and two competing etiologies battled for primacy for the right to explain the nature and cause of this mystery ‘illness.’ This is about differing methods of seeing inside the body and the ways in which knowledge about disorder is produced.