Act
I of LaFrance’s first book, Species Branding, ends with the line:
“crippled on my last leg. where are our friends?” It is a
question that led to Friendly
+ Fire
(Talonbooks 2016), where LaFrance takes aim at friendship as such.
The
Tarnak Farm Incident, where four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan
were killed by American Air Force pilot Harry Schmidt, is used as
source material to navigate and build a discourse of friendship in
the 21st century. From this case study, Friendly
+ Fire
interrogates the male subjective experience of war and the gendered
implications of camaraderie or “brotherhood” by employing a
character named H.S. (his? Harry Schmidt?) on the cheap as a filter
for engaging with and through real-life stories of friendly fire.
Friendly
+ Fire
commingles receiving a “pink slip” from an employer with forced
affect in the workplace. Work, of course, is another social site
where friends are made and ultimately collapse outside the parameters
of wage labour. Here is where friends can become comrades.
In
Friendly
+ Fire
the mental and physical conditions endured by fighter pilots
(suppressed appetite, prescribed sedatives and amphetamines to
regulate sleep and stress tolerance) parallel the semiotic and
parasitic flows of online friends. The inaccuracy of a war target, of
friendly fire, hovers and takes aim at the frivolities of gossip
quasi far away from any war zone: “MILITARY LINGO SUBLIMATES SMACK
TALK FROM HERE ON IN.”