A quotation of dubious origin, but often attributed to George Orwell, states that ‘we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm’. This gothic vision of a shadowy threat, repressed in order for civilian life to function normally, speaks deeply to an underlying cultural anxiety around war. It is, of course, absolutely correct that members of the US armed forces put themselves in harm's way, and that the general population remains blissfully ignorant of the full reality of war. Whether or not the repeated invasions in the Middle East, carried out by the United States and its allies against a broad and shifting spectre of ‘terror’, do anything to keep American citizens safe in their beds is another question entirely. The death and destruction wrought upon countries like Iraq (the focus of this chapter) and the trauma and abandonment of American troops at home are constantly haunting reminders that war is not something that can comfortably be ignored, even if it occurs in seemingly distant and ‘exotic’ lands, easily characterised through an Orientalist lens as Other. This chapter will develop the idea of an American imperial gothic, examining three key texts that demonstrate its presence and what it has to offer to a discussion of US imperial conflict and its representation in literature and wider media.

The examples given are purposefully drawn from popular culture, and variously reflect and comment on dominant attitudes to US imperialism. The first is American Sniper, the 2012 memoir of Chris Kyle: ‘the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history’ (Kyle 2012, cover), who claims to have accumulated at least 160 confirmed kills (Kyle 2012, 6). The story was brought to the screen in Clint Eastwood's blockbuster film version in 2014, after Kyle's own shooting death at the hands of a fellow veteran. The film's handling of this aspect will be discussed alongside the book itself. The second example is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019): a video game that, as part of a long-running series, has come to represent what might be the most globally dominant conception of contemporary armed conflict, and one that deserves close scrutiny. The intertextual relationship between games, films and military memoir is one that will be shown to flow continually back and forth.