Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present ed. by Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon (review)

Over There is a splendid, important addition to the burgeoning literature on overseas U.S. military basing. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon bring their considerable experience as authors on basing issues, especially regarding the aspects of core interest to this volume (gender, sexuality, race, and class), to this impressive volume. The interdisciplinary backgrounds of the six contributors, who draw on historical, ethnographic, gender studies, and sociological perspectives, and their familiarity with the basing arrangements in their locales of interest (Germany, Okinawa, and South Korea), make this a particularly rich contribution to our understanding of the complex dynamics of U.S. overseas military basing and the effects on the societies in which they are located.

The volume is organized around four interlinked themes or parts. In the first part Höhn,Moon, andMichiko Takeuchi examine the regulation of relations between servicemen and local women in Germany, South Korea, and Japan in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War. In the second part Donna Alvah, Christopher Ames, and Robin Riley consider how U.S. and foreign women interact in what they call the "hybrid spaces made possible by the transnational empire." In the third part Höhn andMoon return, along with Christopher Nelson, to consider more recent basing arrangements and the notion of "postcolonial agency" found in the hybrid spaces in and around military bases. In part IV Höhn discusses the U.S. military's racial crisis in the 1970s inWest Germany and South Korea; Moon examines "Camptown Prostitution and the Imperial Statute of Forces Agreement (SOFA)"; and Jeff Bennett provides a notable chapter on Abu Ghraib.

Over There is an ambitious book, although it is not until the end that the reader understands the intended impact of the volume. Höhn andMoon lament the "neglect of the overseas bases by scholars of American History and American Studies," which reveals "the extent to which the U.S. military empire is marginal to America's sense of its own history and identity" (p. 399). With some exceptions, Over There succeeds in making a valuable contribution to addressing this neglect. The neglect, however, is only partial insofar as other scholars, such as Valur Ingimundarson, have considered race, nationalism. and gender issues pertaining to postwar U.S. military basing in cases that fall outside the remit of this volume (see Ingimundarson's article "Immunizing against the American Other: Racism, Nationalism, and Gender in U.S. Icelandic Military Relations during the Cold War, JCWS, Vol. 6, No. 4, Fall 2004, pp. 65-88). Nevertheless, the comparative nature and the historical sweep of this volume make it a useful work and a valuable addition to the existing literature.

In spite of the comprehensiveness (and length) of the book, there are some surprising gaps. For instance, are the authors describing a specifically U.S. phenomenon, or are other militaries equally "masculinized" in their military behavior overseas? In this regard it might have been illuminating to extend the comparative perspective to the effects of the integration of the British and American zones in 1947 (Bizonia) or even to the "Trizone" with France the following year. The experience of the British Army of the Rhine from 1945 to 1994 could provide an interesting comparative perspective (and would support the editors' aspiration that Over There spur further research).

Perhaps more surprisingly, Over There does not consider the role of basic training in creating a permissive environment in which soldiers can develop highly sexualized, gendered ("hyper-masculine"), racially superior, and imperial notions of the world around them. Jeff Bennett comments en passant that, because of the language employed in training, "new recruits are radically de-socialized" (p. 377). This seems like an important part of the story that merited further exploration.

The discontinuation of the draft and the shift to an all-volunteer force in...