In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era
  • Robert A. Nye
The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era. By Andrew J. Huebner. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8078-5838-7. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. x, 369. $24.95.

The Warrior Image is an effort to track the image of the combat soldier in American culture between the “good war” of World War II through the “bad” Vietnam conflict of the 1960s and ‘70s. Andrew J. Huebner considers newspaper and television coverage of the three wars in this period, as well as periodicals, movies, novels, poetry, and war memorials to reveal the evolution of this image from one of toughness, loyalty, and unswerving devotion to country to a portrait of the soldier as a brave but deeply flawed and suffering victim of military bureaucracies. Huebner sees the Korean War as a midway point in a transition between the hoary belief that war is a necessary and honorable rite of passage to manhood and our more contemporary understanding of war as a necessary but often damaging and morally ambiguous, if not corrupting enterprise. The strength of Huebner’s account of this development is the nuanced way he analyzes his material. The soldiers of the “good” war were not always tough and loyal, and were occasionally portrayed as flawed men commanded by sometimes incompetent or vicious leaders. In subsequent wars, men were still displayed as possessing the requisite military virtues of sacrifice for comrades and the common good, but they did so with greater awareness of the personal costs of their sacrifice.

The American public did not see the truly brutal human costs of World War II until near its end. Hundreds of patriotic films and publications glorifying the shared civilianmilitary sacrifices saturated public consciousness. News from the front did not dwell on the horrors of death and dismemberment, nor was there much second-guessing the good intentions and skill of military leadership. Ernie Pyle occasionally damned in his dispatches the ineptness or waste of particular campaigns and Bill Mauldin’s Joe and Willy griped about officers, but a widespread if begrudging sentiment of acceptance of this war against tyranny prevailed in most representations of the war. Postwar accounts were not so kind. America’s generosity to veterans in the form of the G.I Bill could not conceal the injustices of black vets returning home to segregation, the mental and physical disabilities that were minimally treated or ignored, or the retrospective memoirs and fictional accounts of horrific combats, unshared sacrifice, and bloody-minded leaders. Huebner analyzes the most well-known of the great literary works of that era-The Naked and the Dead and Catch-22-but also treats lesser known works, movies, and poetry.

The “forgotten” war in Korea added to the image of the suffering individual soldier in popular culture. Several contemporaneous films portrayed the extremity of battle conditions and the uncertain justifications for American soldiers’ exposure to danger in that remote [End Page 1328] part of the world. The combat soldier continued to be loyal and courageous, but he was still fighting in segregated units and required an unusual stoicism to withstand the rigors of battle in the Korean peninsula. Moreover, increased media coverage of the war dwelled far more on casualties and the personal damage of warfare than had the press accounts of World War II. The first seeds of unease with the romance of the military ethos had taken flower. Huebner makes the case that James Jones’s 1962 novel, The Thin Red Line, was a projection of the evolving image of the Korean combat onto the Pacific war of 1944 with a franker, more critical account of the cruelty and heartlessness of military leadership.

The Vietnam conflict completed the shift to the notion of the soldier as victim. Both during and especially after the war in Indo-China, domestic resistance to the war, fueled by opposition to the draft, dwelled on the soldier as an unwilling pawn in a war run by political and military leaders out of touch with...

pdf

Share