Witness to the Thousand-Yard Stare: Civilian Imagination of Service Members’ Mental Injuries in Wartime

Abstract

The thousand-yard stare is a commonplace rhetorical convention in visual representations of US wars. This essay analyzes the stare in Tom Lea’s, David Douglas Duncan’s, and Luis Sinco’s war images, and asks: How does circulation of such images encourage civilian spectators to imagine their military representatives’ wartime experiences? Does this imagination support or constrain civic action on behalf of veterans? Unlike prior analyses, which critique the stare for constraining protest, this essay argues that the stare can encourage civilian action by productively mediating civilians’ distance from war’s violence. The stare indexes traumatic violence not presented in the image yet calls on spectators to imagine that violence in spite of its absence. Although Duncan’s framing of the stare offers a masculine, stoic, and sacrificial vision constraining its critical potential, Lea’s and Sinco’s framings offer multimodal depth, rendering originary violence, traumatic dissociation, and mental injury as public problems in need of redress.