Irony is not just a figure of speech or a way of saying things in a roundabout way, although it is those things as well. It is also an insistence on ambiguity, one entrenched in the form of belief that one cannot say certain things directly, that the game of meaning is just that, a game, and one that must be played carefully. It is that brand of irony, of that meaning of the word, that plays a central role in the form of life that is war, whether through ironic or absurd events taking place, or through the seemingly ironic use of language and slang. However, irony is not only a characteristic of these military experiences, but also what could be called its underlying philosophy. Irony, the ‘ghost’ shifting between alive and dead that travels between index and symbol, represents a new way of thinking during and after trauma and war, one tethered both to one form of life coming to an end as well as to the enacting of that life through poetry – a life lived in irony. Similarly to the man injured in the factory warehouse explosion, new information or information of a different kind is taken in; it does not provide a better grasp of one’s safety or sense of life but challenges those distinctions and, consequently, desta-bilises communication and one’s self-identity as human. In the case of veterans, this means a lesson not only in what violence can do or in the fragility of one’s own body, but also in the nature of communication, humanity and time – that one can be at a loss for words, that one can feel like an object, and that one can be at war and at home simultaneously.

It seems counterintuitive to ascribe ‘irony’ to that lesson, to a sense of dissipating borders, since what we have in mind when we think of irony, again, is aligned more with an evasive discourse, a way of saying things in a circumventory manner rather than ‘getting to the point’. I think I have made it clear thus far that ‘getting to the point’ is not something soldiers can or even wish to do, seeing that the point in question is painful, paralysing and to an extent inaccessible.