Veterans & Military Service

An original history of music in the lives of American soldiers. Since the Civil War, music has coursed through the United States military. Soldiers have sung while marching, listened to phonographs and armed forces radio, and packed the seats at large-scale USO shows. "Reveille" has roused soldiers in the morning and "Taps" has marked the end of a long day. Whether the sounds came from brass instruments, weary and homesick singers, or a pair of heavily used earbuds, where there was war, there was music, too. Instrument of War is a first-of-its-kind study of music in the lives of American soldiers. Although musical activity has been part of war since time immemorial, the significance of the US military as a musical institution has generally gone unnoticed. Historian David Suisman traces how the US military used--and continues to use--music to train soldiers and regulate military life, and how soldiers themselves have turned to music to cope with war's emotional and psychological realities. Opening our ears to these practices, Suisman reveals how music has enabled more than a century and a half of American war-making. Instrument of War unsettles assumptions about music as a force of uplift and beauty, demonstrating how it has also been entangled in large-scale state violence. Whether it involves chanting "Sound off!" in basic training, switching on a phonograph or radio, or cueing up an iPod playlist while out on patrol, the sound of music has long resonated in soldiers' wartime experiences. Now we all can finally hear it.

Part-Time Soldiers, Andrew Lewis Chadwick offers the first in-depth historical study of the development and evolution of modern army reserve forces. In doing so, he explores how a confluence of military, political, and socioeconomic developments since the First World War has forced armies preparing for major war to increase their dependence on reservists (part-time soldiers who reinforce or augment professionals or conscripts in wartime) for critical and routine military tasks. At the same time, he shows how these developments placed tremendous stress on the industrial-era reserve policies and structures that armies continue to use today. For example, reservists training for less than thirty days a year have struggled to keep up with the increasingly high-skilled character of modern warfare, as evidenced by the poor performance of reservists in the world wars and, most recently, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War. Chadwick primarily examines these developments in the cases of the US Army National Guard and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Army Reserve, given that unique geopolitical conditions have forced the United States and Israel to frequently employ reservists in combat over the past century. These cases, which Chadwick explores using archival and secondary sources, reveal how armies using two different reserve models--the former built around volunteers and the latter around discharged conscripts--have attempted to mitigate the challenge of maintaining combat-ready reservists in the era of high-tech and high-skilled warfare. By doing so, Chadwick identifies an enduring and often overlooked problem facing contemporary defense policymaking: how does one build and maintain effective army reserve forces at an affordable cost without causing undue stress on reservists' civilian lives?

As night fell on 15 August 2021, the Taliban entered Kabul, capital of Afghanistan. After a 20-year conflict with the United States, its Western allies and a proxy Afghan government, the Islamic militant group once aligned with al Qaeda was about to bury yet another foreign foe in the graveyard of empires. And for America, the superpower, this was yet another foreign disaster. As cities and towns fell to the Taliban in rapid succession, Western troops and embassy staff scrambled to flee a country of which they had lost control. To the world, Kabul in August looked like Saigon in 1975. August in Kabul is the story of how America's longest mission came to an abrupt and humiliating end, told through the eyes of Afghans whose lives have been turned upside down: a young woman who harbours dreams of a university education; a presidential staffer who works desperately to hold things together as the government collapses around him; a prisoner in the notorious Bagram Prison who suddenly finds himself free when prison guards abandon their post. Andrew Quilty was one of a handful of Western journalists who stayed in Kabul as the city fell. This is his first-hand account of those dramatic final days.

War at the Margins offers a broad comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Lin Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first-century emergence as players on the world's political stage. With a focus on Indigenous voices and agency, a global overview reveals the enormous range of wartime activities and impacts on these groups, connecting this work with comparative history, Indigenous studies, and anthropology. The distinctiveness of Indigenous peoples offers a valuable perspective on World War II, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Questions of loyalty and citizenship shaped Indigenous combat roles--from integration in national armies to service in separate ethnic units to unofficial use of their special skills, where local knowledge tilted the balance in military outcomes. Front lines crossed Indigenous territory most consequentially in northern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands, but the impacts of war go well beyond combat. Like others around the world, Indigenous civilian men and women suffered bombing and invasion, displacement, forced labor, military occupation, and economic and social disruption. Infrastructure construction and demand for key resources affected even areas far from front lines. World War II dissolved empires and laid the foundation for the postcolonial world. Indigenous people in newly independent nations struggled for autonomy, while other veterans returned to home fronts still steeped in racism. National governments saw military service as evidence that Indigenous peoples wished to assimilate, but wartime experiences confirmed many communities' commitment to their home cultures and opened new avenues for activism. By century's end, Indigenous Rights became an international political force, offering alternative visions of how the global order might make room for greater local self-determination and cultural diversity. In examining this transformative era, War at the Margins adds an important contribution to both World War II history and to the development of global Indigenous identity.

Every year thousands of foreign-born Filipino and Indian nurses immigrate to the United States. Despite being well trained and desperately needed, they enter the country at a time, not unlike the past, when the American social and political climate is once again increasingly unwelcoming to them as immigrants. Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data, collected over a four-year period, this study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses in the face of these challenges, while working at a Veterans hospital. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. In many ways, these nurses find themselves foreign in more ways than just their nativity. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients, both at the hospital and in the wider community, with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions and disconnects plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses but their place in the new American story.  

During two decades of fighting in Afghanistan, U.S. service members confronted numerous challenges in their mission to secure the country from the threat of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and assist in rebuilding efforts. Because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan occurred simultaneously, much of the American public conflated them or failed to notice the Afghanistan War; and most of the war's archival material remains classified and closed to civilian researchers. Drawing on interviews and letters home, this book relates the Afghanistan War through the experiences of American troops, with firsthand accounts of both combat and humanitarian operations, the environment, living conditions and interactions with the locals.

While Rosie the Riveter had fewer paid employment options after being told to cede her job to returning World War II veterans, her sisters and daughters found new work opportunities in national defense. The 1948 Women?s Armed Services Integration Act created permanent military positions for women with the promise of equal pay. Her Cold War follows the experiences of women in the military from the passage of the Act to the early 1980s. In the late 1940s, defense officials structured women?s military roles on the basis of perceived gender differences. Classified as noncombatants, servicewomen filled roles that they might hold in civilian life, such as secretarial or medical support positions. Defense officials also prohibited pregnant women and mothers from remaining in the military and encouraged many women to leave upon marriage. Before civilian feminists took up similar issues in the 1970s, many servicewomen called for a broader definition of equality free of gender-based service restrictions. Tanya L. Roth shows us that the battles these servicewomen fought for equality paved the way for women in combat, a prerequisite for promotion to many leadership positions, and opened opportunities for other servicepeople, including those with disabilities, LGBT and gender nonconforming people, noncitizens, and more.

The rights of pregnant workers as well as (the lack of) paid maternity leave have increasingly become topics of a major policy debate in the United States. Yet, few discussions have focused on the U.S. military, where many of the latest policy changes focus on these very issues. Despite the armed forces' increases to maternity-related benefits, servicewomen continue to be stigmatized for being pregnant and taking advantage of maternity policies. In an effort to understand this disconnect, Megan McFarlane analyzes military documents and conducts interviews with enlisted servicewomen and female officers. She finds a policy/culture disparity within the military that pregnant servicewomen themselves often co-construct, making the policy changes significantly less effective. McFarlane ends by offering suggestions for how these policy changes can have more impact and how they could potentially serve as an example for the broader societal debate.

Intervention Narratives examines the contradictory cultural representations of the US intervention in Afghanistan that help to justify an imperial foreign policy. These narratives involve projecting Afghans as brave anti-communist warriors who suffered the consequences of American disengagement with the region following the end of the Cold War, as victimized women who can be empowered through enterprise, as innocent dogs who need to be saved by US soldiers, and as terrorists who deserve punishment for 9/11. Given that much of public political life now involves affect rather than knowledge, feelings rather than facts, familiar recurring tropes of heroism, terrorism, entrepreneurship, and canine love make the war easier to comprehend and elicit sympathy for US military forces. An indictment of US policy, Bose demonstrates that contemporary imperialism operates on an ideologically diverse cultural terrain to enlist support for the war across the political spectrum.  

The country's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its interventions around the world, and its global military presence make war, the military, and militarism defining features of contemporary American life. The armed services and the wars they fight shape all aspects of life--from the formation of racial and gendered identities to debates over environmental and immigration policy. Warfare and the military are ubiquitous in popular culture.  At War offers short, accessible essays addressing the central issues in the new military history--ranging from diplomacy and the history of imperialism to the environmental issues that war raises and the ways that war shapes and is shaped by discourses of identity, to questions of who serves in the U.S. military and why and how U.S. wars have been represented in the media and in popular culture.    

Michael J. Devine provides a fresh, wide-ranging, and international perspective on the contested memory of the 1950-1953 conflict that left the Korean Peninsula divided along a heavily fortified demilitarized zone. His work examines "theaters of memory," including literature, popular culture, public education efforts, monuments, and museums in the United States, China, and the two Koreas, to explain how contested memories have evolved over decades and how they continue to shape the domestic and foreign policies of the countries still involved in this unresolved struggle for dominance and legitimacy. The Korean War Remembered also engages with the revisionist school of historians who, influenced by America's long nightmare in Vietnam, consider the Korean War an unwise U.S. interference in a civil war that should have been left to the Koreans to decide for themselves. As a former Peace Corps volunteer to Korea, a two-time senior Fulbright lecturer at Korean universities, and former director of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Devine offers the unique perspective of a scholar with half a century of close ties to Korea and the Korean American community, as well as practical experience in the management of historical institutions.

Military personnel are more likely to be exposed to significant traumatic events than the general population. Although they are trained for the rigors of battle, this cannot always prepare them for the psychological effects experienced in a combat environment. HARD STRUCK follows the story of a combat soldier as he navigates through combat operations and the effects it has on him and his team as they transition back into society. Dealing with the effects of complex PTSD, the story highlights the issues veterans face day to day and highlights the importance of mate ship when overcoming combat stress and mental health struggles.

American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines carried whiskey at Yorktown, Gettysburg, Manila, and Da Nang. It bolstered their courage, calmed their nerves, and treated their maladies. As a serious American whiskey drinker, John C. Tramazzo noticed how military service and whiskey went hand in hand during his service as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army. In Bourbon and Bullets Tramazzo reveals the rich and dramatic connection between bourbon and military service in America.                Although others have discussed whiskey's place in military history, Bourbon and Bullets explores the relationship between military service and some of the most notable whiskey distillers and executives working today. American servicemen Weller, Handy, Stagg, Van Winkle, and Bulleit all experienced combat before they became household names for American whiskey enthusiasts. In small towns and big cities across America, veterans of armed conflict in Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan cook mash, operate stills, and push the booming industry to new heights. Bourbon and Bullets delves into the lives and military careers of these whiskey distillers and tells the story of whiskey's role on the battlefield and in the American military community.  

This inspiring anthology is the first to convey the rich experiences and contributions of women in the American military in their own words--from the Revolutionary War to the present wars in the Middle East. Serving with the Union Army during the Civil War as a nurse, scout, spy, and soldier, Harriet Tubman tells what it was like to be the first American woman to lead a raid against an enemy, freeing some 750 slaves. Busting gender stereotypes, Josette Dermody Wingo enlisted as a gunner's mate in the navy in World War II to teach sailors to fire Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns. Marine Barbara Dulinsky recalls serving under fire in Saigon during the Tet Offensive of 1968, and Brooke King describes the aftermath of her experiences outside the wire with the army in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In excerpts from their diaries, letters, oral histories, and pension depositions--as well as from published and unpublished memoirs--generations of women reveal why and how they chose to serve their country, often breaking with social norms, even at great personal peril.    

This singular collection of articles, essays, poems, criticism and personal recollections by a Vietnam veteran documents the author's reflections on the war, from his combat experiences to his exploration of American veteran identity to his struggles with PTSD. His career as an advocate for the welfare of GIs and veterans exposed to dangerous radiation and herbicides is covered. Several pieces deal with how the Vietnam experience is being archived by scholars for historical interpretation. These collected works serve as a study of how wars are remembered and written about by surviving veterans.

Behind-the-scenes stories from veterans and civilians offer a more nuanced understanding of the aftereffects of war, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan.

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.

While Rosie the Riveter had fewer paid employment options after being told to cede her job to returning World War II veterans, her sisters and daughters found new work opportunities in national defense. The 1948 Women?s Armed Services Integration Act created permanent military positions for women with the promise of equal pay. Her Cold War follows the experiences of women in the military from the passage of the Act to the early 1980s. In the late 1940s, defense officials structured women?s military roles on the basis of perceived gender differences. Classified as noncombatants, servicewomen filled roles that they might hold in civilian life, such as secretarial or medical support positions. Defense officials also prohibited pregnant women and mothers from remaining in the military and encouraged many women to leave upon marriage. Before civilian feminists took up similar issues in the 1970s, many servicewomen called for a broader definition of equality free of gender-based service restrictions. Tanya L. Roth shows us that the battles these servicewomen fought for equality paved the way for women in combat, a prerequisite for promotion to many leadership positions, and opened opportunities for other servicepeople, including those with disabilities, LGBT and gender nonconforming people, noncitizens, and more.

The rights of pregnant workers as well as (the lack of) paid maternity leave have increasingly become topics of a major policy debate in the United States. Yet, few discussions have focused on the U.S. military, where many of the latest policy changes focus on these very issues. Despite the armed forces' increases to maternity-related benefits, servicewomen continue to be stigmatized for being pregnant and taking advantage of maternity policies. In an effort to understand this disconnect, Megan McFarlane analyzes military documents and conducts interviews with enlisted servicewomen and female officers. She finds a policy/culture disparity within the military that pregnant servicewomen themselves often co-construct, making the policy changes significantly less effective. McFarlane ends by offering suggestions for how these policy changes can have more impact and how they could potentially serve as an example for the broader societal debate.

Spotlights the challenges faced by our increasing cadre of military women when their service ends and they become civilians. Combining research with narrative, this book exposes common threads of lived experience and reviews the latest data on military women and their healthy reintegration into civilian society. Female veterans share their stories of seeking to be seen in a culture where they don't quite fit and their struggles to find community and friendship. Some fought during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as the first women in combat in American history. How and where, for example, does a female combat Marine find her tribe once she leaves the service? Through the stories of these courageous yet entirely human women, readers learn about the experiences of a new and often forgotten generation of veterans; about the challenges surrounding family and career choices that millions of American women face; and ultimately, about sacrifice, resiliency, loss, and love. This book will inform readers with an interest in female veterans and women's health and mental health issues, as well as researchers, students, and professionals working in fields encompassing women's psychology, health, and social work.

This inspiring anthology is the first to convey the rich experiences and contributions of women in the American military in their own words--from the Revolutionary War to the present wars in the Middle East. Serving with the Union Army during the Civil War as a nurse, scout, spy, and soldier, Harriet Tubman tells what it was like to be the first American woman to lead a raid against an enemy, freeing some 750 slaves. Busting gender stereotypes, Josette Dermody Wingo enlisted as a gunner's mate in the navy in World War II to teach sailors to fire Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns. Marine Barbara Dulinsky recalls serving under fire in Saigon during the Tet Offensive of 1968, and Brooke King describes the aftermath of her experiences outside the wire with the army in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In excerpts from their diaries, letters, oral histories, and pension depositions--as well as from published and unpublished memoirs--generations of women reveal why and how they chose to serve their country, often breaking with social norms, even at great personal peril.    

In 1918 the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France to help win World War I. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges these patriotic young women faced in a war zone where male soldiers resented, wooed, mocked, saluted, and ultimately celebrated them. Back on the home front, they fought the army for veterans' benefits and medals, and won.