Posting #44: The motivating story: why I write SoldierGirl

The story: We Americans like to think that there is one answer to every question, that there is one partner for each of us called a soulmate, that Judeo-Christian religion and only it can produce morality, that patriotism and nationalism are synonymous, that the United States is exceptional, that success means having wealth, that people in a democracy are treated equitably, and that fiction conveys universal truths. We desperately want to find “these truths to be self-evident,” as our Declaration of Independence declares, as not requiring proof or rationalization or reason. Thinking through ideas is over-rated in this story; feeling them is enough. And feeling that the US military represents the peak of American patriotism is a dominant story.

My take on the story: Even as a young child I can remember being deeply skeptical about this notion of absolute truths and that feeling was more authentic than thinking. But I was an outlier in my absolute-truth Catholic, military family and can remember being told by some of my eight siblings that I was thinking too much about…fill-in-the-blank. That thinking-too-much was prized, though, when I was an active-duty military intelligence analyst. Later, as a teacher of college-aged students, I saw that they preferred to talk about their feelings—which couldn’t be disputed—in my classes when what was called for was a reasoned approach to ideas—which could. This series of experiences have confirmed for me that feeling something is an inadequate replacement for reasoned knowing and that absolute truths are always, shall we say, contingent.

And so my skepticism about feeling and the notion of absolute truths is the basis for why I write about these stories of the US military. My experiences as an Army “brat” in a big, Catholic family and as an ROTC cadet and an active duty commissioned officer gave me vague inklings that these stories existed, that they were told to persuade us to see the military as necessary, as a foregone conclusion. But at that point, I thought it was my thinking-too-much that led to my doubt about what were to everyone else, utter truths.

It was only later in my life as a scholar of military culture that I began to understand how these fiction and non-fiction stories are not fixed but instead are malleable and responsive to the politics of the era. That is, not absolute or self-evident or universal truths but stories whose meanings float, that align with current national sentiments. Once I could identify this trend, I saw it everywhere. I made it my scholarly mission to peer behind the curtain, to use my research and writing abilities to provide for Americans—and myself!—the information we all need to make smart and informed judgments. The idea that knowledge is power drives my research and writing, and for nearly thirty years I have been writing books and essays in this pursuit.

My understanding of military culture as a child at home

My experience of military culture as a “dependent” and Army “brat” was influenced by these stories, but not to my knowledge. Instead, to me being military-connected meant moving every few years, being the new kid in school, constantly having to make new friends, and my father being gone most of the time. If he wasn’t on an unaccompanied tour abroad (after the war in Korea) or twice at war in Vietnam, he was at work for very long periods of time. From my young child point of view, my mother was our primary provider and my father was, well, the disciplinarian.

The moving began, I am told, when I was five days old and the family of five relocated from Oklahoma to Alabama. By the time I was eighteen and getting ready to leave home, we were a family of eleven, we had moved twelve times, and I had gone to eleven different schools, including three high schools.

But I reveled in being the new kid because I enjoyed the performance of it. I excelled in school, especially reading and writing, and loved art and science and mathematics (until I had to take Trigonometry at my third high school). I thought of myself as athletic, as an apt performer in theater and music groups, and served in student government.

What I did know as a Catholic and a military brat was to follow rules without question (sort of). What I didn’t know how to do was sustain friendships or live in one place for more than a few years.

(Still don’t: I’ve moved twenty-one times since graduating from college.)

But even in the Vietnam War era when serving voluntarily in the US military was seen as at least dubious if not reprehensible, I can remember feeling superior to other families who were not military-connected or were not headed by a commissioned officer. I don’t know if I was encouraged to think that through a story or if it just somehow showed up in my psyche. What in hindsight I can reason is that mostly we lived among other officer families and so that is what I knew. So when we didn’t live among officer or military-connected families, the others were, to me, “others,” less-than, foreign, and inferior. That we were Catholic—the “one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church,” as I learned in catechism—only compounded my feeling of superiority.

Even though I was immersed in military culture, I had no awareness then of the stories swirling around me, the stories whose investigation compel me now.

My understanding of military culture as an ROTC cadet and active-duty officer

ROTC

When I applied to college, I knew I was expected to fund it myself, that the military academies weren’t open to females, and that my two older siblings already had acquired military taxpayer funds to pay for college. Consequently, I opted to apply for a 4-year Army ROTC scholarship, more taxpayer funds. In those pre-internet days, I applied only to two colleges, one, the expensive, small liberal arts college that hosted Army ROTC and the other, a state school that I could imagine paying for on my own.

But except for housing costs, I never had to figure out how to pay for college on my own. The generous ROTC scholarship was granted to me, and I fancied somehow I was special and so had won the scholarship on my merit alone. My accomplishments mattered, for sure. But I have since learned the story that I was a recipient of affirmative action, that my father’s military career made it more likely I—and six of my eight siblings—would be gifted taxpayer money to send us to college.

Also as an affirmative action factor (a story I only comprehended later), I was accepted at the small liberal arts college. It was transitioning from being an all-male institution to being coeducational, so the school was eager to accept qualified females, especially one with a four-year Army ROTC scholarship. (I am featured in several yearbook photos as a token.) I was in the third class that included women, and we only made up a quarter of the tiny student body.

Having grown up in the military masculinist environment, I thought I would thrive in this new one. With the emphasis on physical fitness and activities like map-reading and marksmanship, I did thrive in ROTC, familiar as I was with military culture. All of the ROTC cadre were male and had served in the Vietnam War, so, contrary to all reason, I felt we sorta’ had that in common because my father had served there.

But, silly me, in the “civilian” environment—like classes and the campus social scene—I felt like an intellectual imposter and preyed upon by the male-dominated student body.

Once I won the scholarship, the story I told myself was I would major in Political Science, go to law school at taxpayer expense, and then fulfill my obligation to the US Army as a member of the Judge Advocate General Corps. I would then move on to fame and fortune as a politician.

It took only a few weeks of being in a Constitutional Law class to convince me that I did not have the memorizing skills or interest it would take to become a lawyer. I immediately reverted to what I knew best: my “thinking-too-much” analytical reading and expository writing while majoring in English.

And, for the first time in my life, I did not experience easy success. Given that my teachers taught literature as delivering universal truths (which only they had access to) and I didn’t have the wherewithal to adequately resist those truths, I did not do well in my major. Even with a year abroad in Ireland when I earned all As in my classes, I graduated with a 2.7 GPA. But I consoled myself that although I was graduating into a recession in 1979, I had employment.

I was developing an awareness of the stories…but they hadn’t quite come into focus.

In the Army

Once I was commissioned, trained, and sent to my first duty station in what was then West Germany, that preyed-upon feeling persisted. I was one of the few women in a tactical unit of thousands of men, and while males subordinate to me were required to salute my officer front, nothing could stop their leering at my female back.

Still, my work as an intelligence analyst was satisfying, where my “thinking-too-much” ability to recognize connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information was valued. I was not involved in collecting this information but, instead, it was sent to my team from various sources. Our job was to use those many sources as evidence to create a story that would help our commander prepare for potential wars against Warsaw Pact countries, given that NATO forces did not have a handbook about the opposing forces’ strategies. Our creation of stories to explain the East German or Soviet armed forces’ war tactics gave me the first hint of how stories are crafted to explain the worlds we live in.

Simultaneously, though, at night and on the weekends, I was completing a graduate degree in International Relations (IR). My experience of studying the interactions of states and other actors in the international system made me even more aware of the fungibility of stories, of how the stories could be tailored to align with a nation’s sense of self. In particular, I researched and wrote a thesis about the UN Law of the Sea (1982), “a comprehensive legal framework for the use and protection of the sea, the seabed and subsoil, and the marine environment, including both natural and cultural resources.” Given my growing interest in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, I was particularly attentive to why President Ronald Reagan refused to sign the treaty “on the grounds that the agreement would curtail U.S. freedoms to conduct mining operations along the deep seabed.” To me, this American story heralded US commercial money-making over the notion of fair trade for lesser-developed countries. As someone raised with the felt superiority of the democratic United States, that capitalist focus came as a surprise.

So, while on active duty, my own creation of stories to explain what the “opposing forces” were doing on the other side of the East German border and the stories I learned in my study of International Relations made me much more keenly aware of the impact of the stories told in American culture.

My understanding of military culture as a scholar

Still, fifteen years passed from the time I left active duty, IR Master’s degree in hand, to when I began another Master’s degree and PhD in English. During that decade-and-a-half my partner completed a Master’s (his second) and PhD (aka DPhil) at Oxford University, we birthed three children, he looked for and found a tenure-track position at a small liberal arts college, and I taught college courses in expository writing as an adjunct professor.

Having watched my partner complete his PhD, I vowed I would never do one myself. But I know that when I make vows with such assuredness, it means I am contemplating doing it myself. Teaching college-level expository writing at four different colleges and universities as an adjunct professor persuaded me that this was a profession I could do well and wanted to continue. I knew, though, that without a PhD, my adjunct employment was precarious. More importantly, I wanted to continue doing research, a practice I’d only really begun in my IR Master’s program while I was working more than full-time on active duty. I wanted the chance to be a full-time researcher and writer. So I started taking graduate non-degree classes at the local university, Ohio State, to try it out.

In my first graduate non-degree course, I read literature about the American war in Vietnam and found it fascinating because it combined my interests in IR with literature. Oddly, I hadn’t been exposed to American war literature before, and maybe because of that—and because little research had been done in the field—I knew immediately that this is what I wanted to investigate. Though I hesitated based on my age (41) and my family circumstances (with three young children), I applied to the degree program. Before advancing to the English PhD program, however, Ohio State required I first complete an English Master’s degree. Though it would mean more years to achieve the PhD, I embraced the additional two years of coursework that would expose me to the critical and film theories I knew—from already being in higher ed—I needed to inform my subsequent PhD research.

(Golly, I even studied the infamous Critical Race Theory!)

Early in my research, I discovered what has since informed my SoldierGirl postings. As I wrote in Posting #28, “The Story about The French and American Wars in Vietnam,” “I found that stories published and produced in the United States and elsewhere before and during the American war featured evidence of the French war, but after the American war had concluded, that evidence just, poof, disappeared.” It was remarkable to me that the stories published would so dramatically differ within a matter of a decade, that American fiction would erase evidence of the French war in favor of lamenting the psychic injury of the war done to individual American troops. I was compelled to understand why American Vietnam war fiction’s disappearing evidence of the French Vietnam war (funded by the US) would have happened: what were the social conditions that motivated publishers to publish some stories and not others and motivated readers to pay for some stories and not others? To deepen my understanding, I studied not only the Vietnam war fiction of before, during, and after the American war there, histories of the French war, and of Vietnam writ large, I also visited archives in France and the US to explore more deeply the social conditions of the times represented in the fiction.

At the same time I was reminded of the informed-by-evidence stories I wrote as an intelligence analyst, and began to see that “war stories” are not just fiction and not only written but are the many narratives we form to make sense of the world. War stories can be told, for instance, through fictional and documentary films, through memoir, through policy, through military recruitment ads and flyovers of Air Force jets during an NFL game, and through war memorials and cemeteries.

But here’s an important point: these stories are not always by design told or formulated to conceal deliberately or to tell untruths. They may end up concealing or telling. But my research suggested that Americans tend to see “war stories” as distinct from other fiction, almost exclusively told by combatants, and capable of eliciting only an emotional response from the reader. Consequently, we tend not to think about the war stories but to feel them. And that is problematic.

Fortunately, academic publishers were willing to publish my findings in various monographs, journals, essay collections, co-written books, and ultimately, my 2020 book that introduced this broader notion of “war story,” American War Stories.

It was, then, my initial investigation into why American Vietnam war fiction has not delivered fixed, stable, “universal truths” but has instead delivered messages directly connected to the zeitgeist, the order of the day, the current cultural atmosphere that has motivated SoldierGirl.

So what?

That we Americans want to feel our war stories and not think about them is hazardous, something I learned from my students as a college professor.

What I learned from them over the course of three decades tells me that before they arrived at college, they had learned seven lessons about the Vietnam War, lessons based on feeling as opposed to reason:

1.) only Americans were involved in the Vietnam War; 2.) all Americans who served in Vietnam were men; 3.) all men who served during the war were in combat; 4.) all men fought in the jungle; 5.) all men were traumatized by their dehumanizing experience; 6.) all men were mistreated on their return from Vietnam; and 7.) the 58,000 fatalities were the most tragic of any war in which the United States has been involved. Moreover, though their entire lives have been spent in a time of American war, their understandings of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are similarly circumscribed. (American War Stories 2)

The hazards of their misconceptions about the Vietnam War are manifold:

1. the Americans were not the first or the only westerners warring in Vietnam;

2. women also served in the war;

3. only one out of ten people in the war were in combat;

4. the war was fought on plains, in mountains, in rice paddies, in the air and on water, not only jungle;

5. not all American combatants were traumatized;

6. lore tells us Vietnam War participants were mistreated but there is little evidence of that;

7. and the death tolls in most US wars—the Civil War, World War I, and World War II—are exponentially higher.

This ignorance informs their voting, votes that continue to appropriate vast amounts of taxpayer and borrowed dollars to national security, therefore adding to the national debt.

I must confess: I, too, was ignorant and I am ashamed of having felt superior…despite this ignorance.

For even having been raised in a military-connected family with a father who spent two yearlong tours in the Vietnam War, and after spending four years in ROTC and then four years on active-duty when I constructed narratives, I did not even know enough to ask about these stories.

What SoldierGirl I have learned over a long period of time is that the game is rigged against all of us because it’s so easy to swallow stories whole—especially stories that make Americans look good. It’s so, so easy to feel and to feel superior.

It is much harder to think critically and to understand beyond ideology—that is, to come to understand better the actual social, political, economic facts of our current and past circumstances. It’s difficult and time-consuming to think, to ask, to research, to deal with ambiguity, especially when the end result is not so good news—that is, that we Americans aren’t swell or smart or safe or on a good path.

What I can do now is recognize these war stories, explore them as fully as possible, learn from my explorations…and write these postings as public service in a time of national need. My hope is that they will inform you and, while you and I might disagree politically, incite you to recognize the stories in which all of us living in the United States are immersed.

While you’re here in Substack, read (and subscribe to!) some provocative social commentary at Kirk Combe’s “Rant Against the Regime”