Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War by Meredith Lair (review)

Images of jungle terrain, devastating combat, and the human costs of war dominate the popular memory of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. These depictions, burned into American myth via films, novels, and memoirs, have overshadowed the reality that combat was not the typical experience for most Americans who served in Vietnam, nor was it the primary characteristic of the decade-plus long U.S. presence there. Seeking to uncover a more representative picture of the U.S. soldier experience in the Vietnam War, this engaging monograph shifts attention away from combat and focuses instead on the rear echelon, where the vast majority of American troops served, working in hospitals and offices, as truck drivers and reporters, on bases large enough to be self-contained cities. Viewed from the perspective of support troops rather than frontline infantry, Meredith Lair argues, a tour of duty in Vietnam looks less like a year of hardship and more like a temporary inconvenience made palatable by steak dinners, pretty entertainers, and the chance to purchase televisions, radios, cameras, and many other sorts of consumer items at the local post-exchange. As Lair explores the disconnect between memory and reality, she addresses two related questions: Why were U.S. troops in Vietnam “armed with abundance,” and why is that not the way Americans have chosen to remember the war?

Focusing on the period from 1968 to 1973—from the height of the U.S. military presence in Vietnam to the departure of the last American combat units—Lair examines the minutia of daily life “in the rear,” taking readers on a tour of mess halls, in-country R&R stops, and P.X.’s, where service personnel could buy anything from cameras to silverware without the burden of a sales tax. More than just a play-by-play, her picture tells the story of a U.S. military command deliberately ensuring a fully-stocked experience so as to protect the morale of soldiers who often either did not understand the war’s purpose or knew their service would not live up to the expectations set by the culture of John Wayne and the memory of World War II. Boredom was an enemy to the U.S. mission on par with the Viet Cong, for it had the potential to tempt soldiers into brothels, bars, and drug houses, all threats to the efficiency of the U.S. war machine. In launching its “total war on boredom,” the U.S. military created a standard of living for troops in Vietnam that sometimes was higher than what they enjoyed at home. Thus, Lair concludes, despite the idea of war as sacrifice, the American experience in Vietnam began a trend in U.S. militarization in which a workaday structure buttressed by conspicuous consumption stands in for a sense of purpose and a clear mission. The cloak of combat continues to shroud this view, she contends, because abundance challenges the conventional wisdom about the American way of war as austere, dangerous, and decisive. Hiding the reality of abundance allows Americans to maintain their beliefs about war as hardship without having to experience it as such.

Lair’s findings are the results of impressive research. She mined Army records held at the Military History Institute and the National Archives, as well as government publications, official unit newspapers, and civilian periodicals. She creatively used the sources available to her, drawing, for example, on mortuary records to illustrate the types of goods troops had with them when they died, items they presumably had purchased at P.X.’s in Vietnam. Lair presents readers with so much data that it sometimes obstructs her otherwise vibrant prose. Lists of items within the text would have worked better in an appendix of tables, freeing up space for more soldiers’ voices to tell readers how the pools, bowling alleys, and television sets informed their senses of identity and attitudes toward the...