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Reflecting on more than two decades of experience covering conflict, the eminent war correspondent Martha Gellhorn wrote in 1959, “War is a malignant disease, an idiocy, a prison, and the pain it causes is beyond telling or imagining; but war was our condition and our history, the place we had to live in.”1 Gellhorn’s words suggest that capturing the sorrow of war is something like the journalistic quest for objectivity— rarely, if ever, attainable but always worth the attempt. Despite her own belief that war was “beyond telling or imagining,” Gellhorn told readers about warfare and helped them imagine its consequences for six decades, from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to the American invasion of Panama in 1989. She and other American correspondents, filmmakers, painters, radio personalities, poets, photographers, and television reporters of the warravaged twentieth century endeavored to convey some small sense of battle to the reading, viewing, and listening public—and many of them were skeptical , like Gellhorn, of their own ability to do so.2 Yet if they failed to convey the nature of war, they succeeded in doing something else: illuminating the culture and values of their own societies. Consequently, by the late twentieth century scholars were treating war as a cultural event—an opportunity to examine the beliefs and attitudes of human beings through their depictions of warfare.3 This merging of military history and cultural history—one something of a pariah in the American academy, the other the heir apparent to the “new social history” emerging from the 1960s—is particularly suited to studying America in the years beginning with World War II.4 There are few periods richer in war imagery than the four decades in the United States following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. In these years portraits of combat became more vivid and widely consumed than ever before in human history . Advancing literacy and technology—along with declining federal control over image making and the press—brought increasingly unvarnished images of war to millions of Americans. The popular press, novels, newsreels , magazines, museum exhibits, photographs, radio shows, television broadcasts, government films, and Hollywood movies carried portraits of war to the American home front during and after three major overseas conflicts : World War II (1941–45), the Korean War (1950–53), and the Vietnam War (1964–73). In this book I will be concerned specifically with American IntroduCtIon Beyond฀tellIng฀฀ or฀ImagInIng  | introduction cultural representations of soldiers, forming the architecture of what I call the “warrior image” from the 1940s to the late 1970s. Of course the warrior image has had a long and varied history. From ancient times to the twenty-first century, and in all the world’s cultures, people have felt the need to make sense of, glorify, or lament this most disturbing of human practices—war is, after all, “the place we had to live in,” according to Gellhorn. In the many centuries before World War II, artists and writers depicted and remarked upon the nature of warfare through the principal cultural forms of the day: stories, drawings, paintings, murals, tapestries, poems, sculptures, memorials, and songs. Throughout history people have created images of soldiers ranging from the heroic to the pitiful, and in doing so have said much about their own societies.5 A brief survey of this immense body of cultural output helps frame the issues of emphasis in my own study of modern American war imagery. In the seventh century b.c. Greeks wrote down the tale of The Iliad, an epic account of the Trojan War that mourned the slaughter of thousands in the city of Troy. An unknown Roman sculptor carved the Dying Gaul in 40 b.c., depicting a mortally wounded enemy barbarian with surprising sympathy. In the same era Chinese artists sculpted thousands of life-size clay horses, chariots, and soldiers, some deployed in poses of hand-to-hand combat (all of it found in 1974 in one of the grandest archaeological discoveries of modern history). Several hundred years later and across the Pacific Ocean, a sixth-century a.d. Mayan temple mural showed pitiful captives supplicating before resplendent warriors.6 One of the grandest premodern images of warfare appeared in late eleventh -century Europe, just a few years after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Across 30 feet of embroidered fabric, the Bayeux Tapestry (1070–80) vividly depicted that momentous clash between Norman and Anglo-Saxon warriors, in what art historians have called “a...

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