Institute of Governmental Studies

The American media devoted primetime coverage to the military offensive in Baghdad in March

of 2003 but as time passed the ‘War on Terror’ became an uneasy norm in American consciousness.

Although the Iraq war swept through the lives of millions of Iraqi civilians and hundreds of thousands of

American military families, few ethnographic studies document that aftermath. Furthermore, while

veterans and refugees are the two largest populations affected by the war, no previous studies have

analyzed both groups in concert. To that end, this paper is an ethnographic analysis of the war’s aftermath

through the lived experiences of Iraqi refugees and American veterans in California. The research on

which the study is based derives from twelve months of participant observation, group discussions, and

qualitative interviews with refugees formerly of the Iraqi professional class who relocated to northern

California after 2003 and, separately, with American veterans of the war who pursued bachelor’s degrees

in northern California after leaving Iraq. The results of the study illustrate that the postwar situations of

the two groups are surprisingly similar despite their divergent points of origin, with both experiencing a

drastic change in professional opportunity, repercussions of trauma, and isolation. I argue that a reading

of the narratives of refugees and veterans together, as mutually constitutive, is essential for a coherent

view of the Iraq war and its multivalent aftermath.

Key words: Iraq war, War on Terror, California, Iraqi refugees, American veterans, professional

development, trauma, moral injury, isolation