War experiences are a material of political currency, invoked, appropriated, and ‘written’ in particular configurations to sustain, complicate, and contest narratives about war. This occurs through and within the same relations of power that are intrinsic to the conduct of war as war-experiencing subjects comprise a political vocabulary of selves and others that populate and operate within war’s wider social (re)production. To track these power relations and consider implications for how dominant accounts of war can be complicated and contested, the article is grounded in an analysis of the visual regimes at work in footage, photographs, and testimony relating to the shooting of a group of people by an American Apache helicopter in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007. The event was publicised on a dedicated website and dubbed ‘Collateral Murder’ by WikiLeaks in 2010. Analysis of the website reveals how visual modes and the experiences of war subjects accompany each other, revealing war in contrasting locations of sight and violence: the ‘view from above’, the ‘view from below’, and the view of the ‘on-the-ground’ soldier eyewitness. Taken together these discursively produce ‘Collateral Murder’ and contest the dominance of war known through the experience of those who wage it ‘from above’.

A neuropsychological investigation of 21 Persian Gulf veterans and 38 demographically matched controls was conducted in order to make a preliminary determination concerning presence of neuropsychological deficits associated with the Persian Gulf War experience. The neuropsychological test battery consisted of measures of complex attention, memory, and motor skills previously shown to be sensitive to exposure to environmental toxins. It was found that the Persian Gulf veteran group did not demonstrate substantial impairment, but an impairment index derived from 14 test variables was statistically significantly different from controls in the direction of poorer performance. (JINS, 1996, 2, 368–371.)