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Reconstructing warriors Myth, Meaning, and Multiculturalism in US Army Advertising after Vietnam Jeremy K. Saucier O n November 9, 2006, with the United States engaged in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the army and its new advertising agency, McCann Worldgroup, flooded television screens, radio stations, and internet websites with a fresh message, “There’s strong. And then there’s army strong.” Anchored by the tagline, “Army Strong,” the army claimed its new $200 million -a-year recruiting and branding campaign was meant to communicate, “The unique brand of strength the US Army finds and forges in its soldiers.” Projecting a distinct brand image was vital when selling a product or recruiting potential soldiers, but the tagline and the campaign also expressed, as the army believed, “the power and dignity of the US Army Soldier to our nation and the world.”1 The campaign’s signature television commercial, “Army Strong”—directed by Samuel Bayer, the award-winning and sought-after artist known for his advertising work for Nike, Coke, and Pepsi, and dozens of music videos, including Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991) and Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (2004)—maintained the look of a contemporary Hollywood production. “Army Strong” combined what were now conventional army advertising themes and images of technological mastery and cultural diversity with increasingly martial imagery and music meant to demonstrate that there was “nothing on this earth stronger than the US Army.” The commercial portrayed the army’s cultural diversity without directly declaring it. Images of African Americans, Latinos, and women among a sea of soldiers’ faces were meant to speak for themselves. Nevertheless, combat soldiers or warriors, as well as martial imagery and music dominated the commercial. There was no theme song or popular music playing in the background. Instead, Emmy award winning artist Mark Isham, who produced musical scores for television and such films as A River Runs Through It (1992), Blade (1998), and Crash (2004), worked with the army’s Soldiers’ Chorus and Field Band to compose a stirring musical score that sounded like a call to arms. Video of soldiers rais- 108 JEREMy k. SAUCIER ing a US flag was accompanied by legions of combat soldiers. As an “Army Strong” print advertisement (fig. 1) attested, these were not soldiers smiling as they enjoyed the economic incentives or educational opportunities of army life, they were warriors poised, proud, and “standing up for those” around them. Posed formally, with helmets strapped, wearing “digital camouflage” or what the army called the “instantly recognizable pattern and fabric of the greatest landpower [sic] force on earth,” they held machine guns, and a stare that suggested they were prepared for any battle.2 As an army presentation of the new campaign demonstrated, the reality of two wars and the threat of future combat deployment had to be communicated. Those who joined the army today, the presenter noted, “understand that they are joining a warrior culture and are willingly accepting the distinct possibility of serving in a combat zone.”3 Nevertheless, “Army Strong” projected more than the possibility of combat, it offered an image of an aggressive, powerful, and dominant army of warriors that should be feared. Yet the American army had not always appeared this way. More than three decades earlier, at the end of the Vietnam War, the army could hardly claim it was strong. By the summer of 1971, Americans watched and read about the court-martial of Lt. William L. Calley for ordering and participating in the March 1968 murder of nearly an entire village at My Lai, while the New York Times published a series of articles based on a leaked 1967 Pentagon study later dubbed the “Pentagon Papers.”4 Press coverage of the Calley trial and the “Pentagon Papers” revealed what some called a “credibility gap” between what Americans were being told and what was really happening in the cities and jungles of Vietnam. For many Americans, that reality had stretched the mythologized images of wilderness-hunters, frontiersmen, cowboys, and even noble doughboys and G.I. Joes to the breaking point. The Vietnam War had discredited the hyper-masculine warrior hero in the American imagination.5 As a growing number of returning soldiers testified about atrocities they had witnessed or participated in during the war, the heroic image of the American soldier eroded. Although few Americans believed that all soldiers were murderers , the horrors articulated in GI and press accounts and images of American atrocities conveyed these events as common...

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