Posting #20: What do I mean by “stories”? (Redux)
This is the first SoldierGirl posting I made in August 2023. I think it’s worth re-posting this essay to remind us all of the ideas that propel my research, writing, and posting. On re-reading this essay, you may recognize many of the themes that I have written whole postings about. But you might also notice that some of my postings never were mentioned in this inaugural essay. That’s the deal—I have had some points to make in mind before I started SoldierGirl, but there are many that arise from the times we are living in.
As a young person, I read a lot of fiction. Not all of it was well-written, but it occupied me and gave me alone time in a large family. One thing I refused to do, though, was re-read a novel or short story. I’m not sure why that is so, because I have since learned that re-reading is essential. I don’t need to be surprised by a plot or its ending anymore. In fact, I feel relief at knowing how things will end and can concentrate on how the story is told.
The 19 postings I have made are, in effect, a book. I hope that in re-reading this introductory essay, you understand better how this “book” is coming together.
I claim in my welcome post that “Americans are taught, via stories, to accept and even embrace the US military as the most noble and trustworthy institution in the nation.” In this post I’m going to explain what I mean by “stories.”
For the thirty or so years that I taught college courses about war stories, especially those of the American war in Viet Nam, I was mystified at the course’s outset by what my domestic students declared they knew and didn’t know. (My international students seemed to have more nuanced views.) Very few of the domestic students had read much about America’s wars, even Vietnam. At most, they had read Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War composite novel, The Things They Carried, in high school AP classes, seen a handful of iconic images of the conflict in Viet Nam, maybe watched “old movies” like Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, and had visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC. Very few of them had any affiliation with the military, and very few of them had any solid knowledge about American wars, both those fought before they were alive and those in Iraq and Afghanistan being fought as we studied. The men knew they had had to register for the Selective Service at the age of 18, but the women mostly didn’t know this of their classmates. Only one of my students in those several decades had served in the military.
Despite this ignorance, the majority of my domestic students had very decided views.
They knew they were to thank all current and past servicemembers for their service. They knew the Vietnam War was our county’s most deadly (it was not), that all servicemembers then had suffered PTSD (they did not), and that all servicemembers had been abused by the American public on their return from Viet Nam (they were not). My students were certain that all servicemembers now are heroes, if for no other reason than that they have voluntarily put on the uniform. More certainties learned by my students emerged during our classes: war is human nature and therefore inevitable; nationalism and patriotism are one and the same; a relative’s silence on being at war could only be explained by traumatizing experience, not shame or boredom or forgetfulness; and a large, well-funded military is a good thing.
Even though I had been raised in the military and my career-Army-officer father had spent two tours in Viet Nam, I can’t say I knew better than my students at the same age. In fact, I had learned many of the same lessons, but I attributed that to having grown up in military communities, where, for instance, authority was absolute, we had to stand at attention for the flag’s lowering at 5 pm every day, our father was held professionally responsible for his wife and children’s private behavior, and we Army “brats” thought we were better than “civilians.”
Still, I wondered how my students had learned these indisputable lessons when, as they told me, they weren’t military-affiliated, their high school American history classes had almost always skirted military history and ended with the Vietnam War, and only a few of my students had read war stories before joining my class. Why did they think the American war in Viet Nam was the deadliest for Americans? Why did they feel obliged to thank servicemembers for their service and that they dare not protest the wars being fought, in their names, in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why did the women not know that their male classmates’ federal financial aid was contingent on their registering for the selective service, and why did neither the men nor the women question that only one set of them could be drafted into fighting for their country?
My research suggests they learned these lessons from being marinaded in American culture, where war stories—as I define them—proliferate. Conventionally, “war stories” are written only by veterans and war correspondents who have had first-hand experience of war. I see two problems with their stories alone informing Americans about war. First, when first-hand experience of combat is regarded as the portal for authentic storytelling—even of fiction, which is ostensibly a work of imagination—readers and viewers without the experience are positioned passively: they have no way to reasonably doubt or inspect or question the stories. Consequently, those without experience only can respond emotionally to the stories and to accept them as valid. Second, authenticity of experience means that the stories are limited in scope and so can be compartmentalized as only about war and as separate from everyday life. (This compartmentalization is especially so because, barring the Revolutionary, Indian, 1812, and Civil Wars, American wars are abroad, not at home.). While readers might feel empathy for the characters, given the experience gap it is also difficult for readers to see the connection between armed conflict abroad and domestic life at home. Thus, conventional war stories can be viewed as strangely inconsequential. This inconsequentiality explains to me why my students thought they had had no exposure to American war stories.
Still, we tax-paying Americans have to be persuaded somehow to support the military, even tacitly, in all of its current manifestations: its ever-growing portion of federal discretionary spending, its expansive and expanding reliance on Private Military Contractors, its veneration as the model of all that is right and good in American culture. But in a democracy that espouses unfettered freedoms and rejection of overt propaganda, the persuasion must not seem coercive or threatening. Instead, it should be subtle, integrated into everyday domestic life, reliant on cultural tropes of gender and individualism, and so repetitive that it becomes normal, maybe even benign. This effort to convince Americans that US militarism is beneficial, necessary, and should be supported is what I mean by “war stories.” Sometimes the persuasion is blatant, sometimes implied, and sometimes hidden. Aiming as it does to influence public opinion, it is propaganda.
Consider this example. During televised National Football League games, persuasive war storytelling can occur blatantly as a recruiting ad that directly aligns the heroism of professional football players with being a servicemember. In no uncertain terms, the ads are trying to recruit NFL viewers by offering them a chance at the heroism they apparently admire by watching the game. (Why football is seen as heroism is another story.) But more implicit persuasion can also occur preceding the same games when a military color guard presents the national flag, the national anthem is sung, military guests are featured on the field at halftime, and a squadron of fighter jets flies over the field in salute. Implied by this story is that not only is there a natural relationship among professional sport, patriotism, and militarism, but also that because the athletic enterprise demonstrates its patriotism by wholly and selflessly supporting—financially—the nation’s military, viewers, too, profess their patriotism by also being wholly supportive and selfless.
The hidden persuasive war story, however, is that these activities—the color guard, the singer, the guest, the fighter jets—are in fact funded by the Department of Defense using taxpayer monies and the athletic businesses are paid to feature these visitors. In their 2017 report on this matter, Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake call this payment “paid patriotism,” finding offense not with the performances of patriotism, or “genuine patriotic partnerships” themselves but with the teams in effect requiring selfishly that they be compensated for these displays. Instead of finding fault with the conflation of professional sport, patriotism, and militarism, or with taxpayers funding the persuasive war stories being told to them, McCain and Flake object to the fact that money—lucre—is involved.
Another major concern for McCain and Flake in their study is that not only does the Department of Defense fail to account for the contracts it awards and monies it spends, DoD also does not do anything to gauge the effectiveness of these activities at recruiting. Recent failures to meet service recruiting quotas—especially by the US Army—suggest a problem with the costly stories being told. Although they appear to be effective at garnering public support for American militarism and its massive budget, the stories seem less so at persuading young people to voluntarily serve in the armed forces, as the All-Volunteer Force struggles to meet its quotas.
Here’s another example. Two recent essays appearing in the on-line newsletter, War on the Rocks: National Security, For Insiders, By Insiders respond to the Army’s missing its 2022 recruiting quota by 25%, both fearing that this failure could lead to the all-volunteer military’s demise. Professors of Strategic Studies David Barno and Nora Bensahel’s essay, “Addressing the U.S. Military Recruiting Crisis,” urges two changes to current policy: first, because so few young people are eligible to volunteer, the limits should be lessened or eased or mitigated. These easements include fitness standards, having a dependent without being married, permitting treatable mental health conditions, and eliminating as a disqualifier the past use of marijuana. Second, they urge increasing the propensity of young people to volunteer—currently at a measly 9%--by what I would call telling war stories: expose Americans to more military personnel, expand the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) and include civics classes in that training, “get serious” about recruiting women by being honest with them about sexual assault by their compatriots in the armed forces, and minimize the partisan attacks on the military by elected officials.
While Barno and Bensahel do not explicitly name as stories the changes they suggest, former Army officer and current director of a private research firm, Dan Vallone, overtly calls for the Army to tell new stories, coordinated into a “strategy.” In “Army at 250: Beyond a Slogan, the Army Needs a New Narrative Strategy,” Vallone argues that the Army’s failure to meet its recruiting quota is because, in a time of peace, the American populace inaccurately thinks the military has become politicized. Vallone concludes that to counter that misperception the Army needs to develop a network of stories “that fit together and reinforce a common meta-story about the Army,” stories that integrate militarism into domestic life. Revealingly, rather than holding responsible only the Army, veterans, and military servicemembers and their families for telling these stories, Vallone identifies other storytellers across the spectrum of American life: faith groups, businesses, state and local authorities, historians, and filmmakers. One might feasibly call this propaganda.
Having spent my life under the umbrella of the US military, I am uniquely qualified to call attention to these stories and storytellers. I was raised in the US Army during the Vietnam War era, spent a decade as an ROTC cadet and on active duty near the Cold War’s conclusion, and for the last several decades of “Forever War” have studied American war culture. Moreover, I have talked with hundreds of college-aged students about this culture, discussions that have multiplied my understanding. Thus, my unusual combination of experience as a military insider and as a scholarly outsider enriches my identification of and analyses of American war stories.
So what?
Clearly, war stories are crucial to the viability of an American military force, whether volunteer or drafted. Without these stories, American citizens are less likely to support the military, support that determines how much money the Department of Defense is apportioned in the federal budget, how well populated the armed forces become, and when the country goes to war. These war stories promote militarism broadly and deeply, from camouflage as fashion, civilian access to military-grade weapons, the prevalence of war themes in videogames, super-hero movies, Jeeps and Humvees on American roadways, the normalization of surveillance, to the militarization of local police forces. It’s crucial for informed citizens—for whom the US military ostensibly works—to be aware of the war stories pervading American culture and the stories’ persuasive endeavors to convince us that militarism is best.
Sources
McCain, Senator John and Senator Jeff Flake. Tackling Paid Patriotism: A Joint Oversight Report. CreateSpace Publishing, Scotts Valley, CA. May 13, 2015.