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of the global audience, without deliberately aiming for, but certainly achieving, a twofold psychological effect: first, “authentic” violence was made available to secondary witnessing thousands of miles away from the battlefield, inducing different degrees of psychic numbing in viewers; and second, a feeling of reassurance (it is happening there and not here, to them and not to us) was conveyed by the surreal incongruity of the images, their intriguing non-conformity to “normality.” However, the images, run and rerun by the media day in and day out, shocking in the beginning and unnervingly obsessive later, gradually turned “normal”: war planes dropping their deadly load on what seemed like uninhabited jungles; burning villages; helicopters evacuating the wounded and the dead; bleeding, terrified, gaunt-looking human beings—the enemy; and then, more than two decades later, video images of buildings suddenly turning into puffs of smoke; ships launching “smart” missiles; tanks and humvees rolling across an endless desert; explosions and tracers lighting up the night sky over cities; and again gaunt-looking human beings with their hands tied behind their backs—the enemy. The normality of combat zones: not everyone was in the war, but most of us felt at war. Traumatization by witnessing does not necessarily require one’s physical presence at, or direct exposure to, an extreme event, spatially or temporally; what matters is the feeling incurred by experiencing the event in one way or another: through oral accounts, written narratives, or audiovisual media. Nevertheless, secondary or tertiary witnessing cannot and should not be treated on an equal plane with firsthand witnessing, nor can bearing witness by proxy ever be granted the same degree of authority to which survivors’ and victims’ accounts are entitled.
Most of us remember Vietnam, Desert Storm, and Iraqi Freedom from images similar to the ones described earlier; few of us have ever had the opportunity to listen to primary witnesses’ accounts, and even fewer have actually experienced the heat of jungle or desert battles. Most writers discussed in this study (with two exceptions, Günter Grass and Tim O’Brien) have not directly experienced the violent time-spaces—or shock chronotopes—that they re-created in their works. Evidently, the phrase “authentic vicarious experience” is in itself an oxymoron of