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To children of the 1950s, it seemed that every uncle or neighbor was a veteran of the armed forces. Almost all able-bodied young men had entered the service during World War II, and from the Korean War through the late 1950s roughly 70 percent of all draft-age males served in the military.1 By 1954 there were more living veterans in the United States, some 20 million, than ever before in American history.2 A collection of interviews with World War II vets would later be called The Hero Next Door, capturing both the ubiquity and the mythic stature of ex-servicemen in the postwar period.3 The great outpouring of predictions , prescriptions, and concerns that met the veterans of World War II had largely subsided by 1950. When no comparable discussion greeted the smaller population of 5 million Korean War–era vets, it would be left to the purveyors of culture to craft the image of the American fighting man.4 Conflicting memories of war circulated in American culture of the 1950s, just as they perhaps did in the minds of these millions of veterans. Battlefield names such as Normandy, Anzio, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and the Bulge still evoked a hushed reverence, as would Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge and the Chosin Reservoir after 1953.5 In the spring of 1950 the Dutch Masters cigar company called to mind America’s martial history in a national magazine advertisement addressed to veterans. The sanguine tone was meant to remind readers of the two world wars: “When the boys gather around to swap yarns about the past, from Chateau Thierry to Okinawa, the heart-warming goodness of fine Dutch Masters cigars is there to enchant the memory, making the comradeships—not the hardships—easiest to remember.”6 In fact, the hardships were many in a place such as Okinawa, and it was doubtful that a good cigar could “enchant the memory” of them. In a self-proclaimed “guide book to their own memories,” marine veterans recalled in 1947 a different version of warfare on that island: “Men died here not in great concentrations as on Iwo [Jima] or at Anzio [Italy]. But they died, and their deaths were very close, because you knew them personally. There was a sharp pain in your side when you heard about ‘Pappy’ or ‘Ski’ being cut to pieces by machinegun bullets. It was even sharper and deeper when you saw them go down, their arms flopping crazily as they fell.”7 These two ways of remembering war—one nostalgic, one somber—grappled vividly within American popular culture in the 1950s. Sometimes one overwhelmed the other; sometimes they coexisted; and sometimes they vied for center stage in, say, a particular Chapter฀5 the฀true฀฀ story฀of฀the฀฀ foot฀soldIer,฀ 1951–1966 the true story of the foot soldier | 133 movie or novel. Such competing mythologies marked many cultural depictions of World War II and Korea produced in the 1950s and early 1960s—but they were partly just reflections of a wider series of tensions in Cold War culture.8 Historians have long understood that social tensions pervaded a decade popularly known for conformity and consensus. The campaign to desegregate southern schools was meeting stiff, often violent resistance from local whites, especially after the Brown v. Board of Education decisions of 1954–55. White people, North and South, were often hostile to the idea of blacks moving into their neighborhoods. Senator Joseph McCarthy and other anticommunists were leading smear campaigns against members of the government , Hollywood figures, and ordinary citizens. Some Americans worried about the effects of televised violence on children, and, indeed, juvenile delinquency seemed a bigger problem than ever before. And in a shameful episode, officials in the army questioned the loyalty of prisoners of war returning from Korea to the United States in the mid-1950s.9 Looming over all these troubles, finally, was the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Despite a skyrocketing standard of living, anxieties about the military, war, and government bureaucracy roiled in American life. Particularly during the Korean conflict Americans voiced concerns over their leaders’ handling of the Cold War. In January 1951, a bad month for United Nations forces in Korea, pollsters found that 30 percent of respondents believed the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War, against just 9 percent who thought the United States ahead. Around the same time 64 percent of those surveyed supported legislation that would prevent the president from sending...

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