In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have influenced Americans’ understanding of the conflict. Yet few historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has shaped the nation’s collective memory of the war and its aftermath. Instead, veterans’ accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the race, gender, or class of the narrators. Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood unearths truths embedded in the memoirists’ treatments of combat, the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans’ postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry’s influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as a whole.

The Vietnam War has had many long-reaching, traumatic effects, not just on the veterans of the war, but on their children as well. In this book, Weber examines the concept of the war as a social monad, a confusing array of personal stories and public histories that disrupt traditional ways of knowing the social world for the second generation.

Up until fairly recently, memory used to be mainly considered within the frames of the nation and related mechanisms of group identity. Building on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, this form of memory focused on the event as a central category of meaning making. Taking its cue from a number of Anglophone novels, this book examines the indeterminate traces of memories in literary texts that are not overtly concerned with memory but still latently informed by the past. More concretely, it analyzes novels that do not directly address memories and do not focus on the event as a central meaning making category. Relegating memory to the realm of the latent, that is the not-directly-graspable dimensions of a text, the novels that this book analyses withdraw from overt memory discourses and create new ways of re-membering that refigure the temporal tripartite of past, present and future and negotiate what is ‘memorable’ in the first place. Combining the analysis of the novels’ overall structure with close readings of selected passages, this book links latency as a mode of memory with the productive agency of formal literary devices that work both on the micro and macro level, activating readers to challenge their learned ways of reading for memory.

The Routledge History of Global War and Society offers a sweeping introduction to the most significant research on the causes, experiences, and impacts of war throughout history. This collection of twenty-seven essays by leading historians demonstrates how war and society studies have dramatically expanded the chronological, geographic, and thematic breadth of the field of military history. Each chapter addresses the ways in which recent scholarship has integrated cultural, ethical, environmental, medical, and ideological factors to explain both conventional conflicts and genocide, terrorism, and other forms of mass violence. The broad scope of the collection makes it the perfect primer for scholars and students seeking to understand the complex interactions of warfare and those affecting and affected by conflict.

Explores how Cold War men's magazines idealized warrior-heroes and sexual-conquerors and normalized conceptions of martial masculinity.

On American cultural memory

Who writes novels about war? For nearly a century after World War I, the answer was simple: soldiers who had been there. The assumption that a person must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction was taken for granted by writers, reviewers, critics, and even scholars. Contemporary American fiction tells a different story. Less than half of the authors of contemporary war novels are veterans. And that’s hardly the only change. Today’s war novelists focus on the psychological and moral challenges of soldiers coming home rather than the physical danger of combat overseas. They also imagine the consequences of the wars from non-American perspectives in a way that defies the genre’s conventions. To understand why these changes have occurred, David Eisler argues that we must go back nearly fifty years, to the political decision to abolish the draft. The ramifications rippled into the field of cultural production, transforming the foundational characteristics— authorship, content, and form—of the American war fiction genre.

This book fills a gap in the historiographical and theoretical fields of race, gender, and war. In brief, Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare (RGMWW) offers an introduction into how cultural constructions of identity are transformed by war and how they in turn influence the nature of military institutions and conflicts. Focusing on the modern West, this project begins by introducing the contours of race and gender theories as they have evolved and how they are employed by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars. The project then mixes chronological narrative with analysis and historiography as it takes the reader through a series of case studies, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the Global War of Terror. The purpose throughout is not merely to create a list of so-called "great moments" in race and gender, but to create a meta-landscape in which readers can learn to identify for themselves the disjunctures, flaws, and critical synergies in the traditional memory and history of a largely monochrome and male-exclusive military experience. The final chapter considers the current challenges that Western societies, particularly the United States, face in imposing social diversity and tolerance on statist military structures in a climates of sometimes vitriolic public debate. RGMWW represents our effort to blend race, gender, and military war, to problematize these intersections, and then provide some answers to those problems.

Movies have provided a record of the war veteran as he was viewed within his own culture and within the culture in which the movies were produced. Thus, movies account for a significant portion of what people "know" about the war veteran and how he fared during and after the war. In this book, the author examines 125 movies from the classical era to the 20th century that feature the war veteran. The author provides commentary on specific categories the films can be organized into and notes similarities between films produced in different periods. The categories deal with the wounded veteran returning home (e.g., The Sun Also Rises, The Best Years of Our Lives, Born on the Fourth of July, The Manchurian Candidate); the veteran struggling with guilt, revenge and post-traumatic stress disorder (Anatomy of a Murder, Lethal Weapon, Desert Bloom, In Country, Jacob's Ladder); the war veteran returning in disguise (Ulysses, Ivanhoe, The Seventh Seal, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit); the war veteran as a social symbol (Dances with Wolves, Gosford Park, The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Big Chill, Gods and Monsters, Cornered); the war veteran in action (The Born Losers, Conspiracy Theory, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Saint Jack, Looking for Mr. Goodbar); and the war veteran before, during and after the war (The Deer Hunter, Forrest Gump).