All that is Solid Burns into Smoke: US Military Burn Pits, Petrochemical Toxicity, and the Racial Geopolitics of Displacement

Abstract

Focusing on US military burn pits in Iraq, this paper traces entanglements between the materials of US war-making, the logistics of global capitalism, and the racialized displacement of toxicity and chemical kinship. In interviews about their experiences of burn pits at Joint Base Balad, a city-sized US military base located in Yathrib, Iraq, US veterans living along the US Gulf Coast linked their exposures to the toxicity of burn pits in Iraq with petrochemical exposures in their everyday lives at home. These links forged a chemical kinship with domestic others, while largely overlooking such kinship with Iraqis who share veterans' body burden. Yet I suggest that in these veterans' attention to logistics and infrastructure lies the possibility of a more expansive account of chemical kinship, one that cuts across the racialized distinctions of foreign and domestic, and gendered imaginaries of the domestic as a comfortable space for the reproduction of homophilic kin. I describe this dual imperative of the domestic as an ideology of domestic security. The toxicity of burn pits helps us to undermine this ideology of domestic security, opening new spaces to reckon with the relation between US and Iraqi experiences of US military toxicity.