The Vietnam War challenged the collective notion of American veterans as liberating heroes and scions of democratic values, causing the nature of later recruiting and media portrayals to change. Using a wide body of secondary sources along with various memoirs and archival oral histories, this chapter will argue that the old patterns of glorification were combined with capitalistic marketing to convince the American public to sequester military responsibility to an all-volunteer-force. I will also examine the era’s popular films, comic books, and other media to uncover how the cultural feedback loop between this developing militarism and violently liberalized depictions thereof proved more powerful than actual lived experiences, fostering a willingness to conduct the endless imperial policing effort now formalized as the Global War on Terrorism.
The so-called Hollywood Marines earned their reputation cultivating the association in the public imagination between martial sacrifice in the execution of just violence with concepts of American power and morality during the Second World War. Driven by continuing Cold War tension, public aversion to open conflict, and the shift to an insular professional military, the post-Vietnam hero changed from a selfless volunteer or draftee doing their part into a more mercenary and clandestine operator concerned with ends over means. Thus the 1980s saw a rise in popularity of fictional vigilante and former Marine Frank Castle—Marvel Comic’s “The Punisher”—while real-life Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North skirted any lasting punishment for his role in the Iran/Contra scandal. Then, in the midst of a booming comics and collectibles bubble built in part on the militarization and brutalization of classic super heroes, the widely-televised First Gulf War was marketed directly to children in the form of Topps trading cards.
Recruiting material from this period also suggests a change in the meaning of service, from shared obligation to an exclusive form of premium citizenship available to a narrowing slice of a diversifying population. While the Army emphasized enrichment and fulfillment by inviting recruits to “Be All That You Can Be,” one Marine recruiting poster mocked technological dependence with the image of a single camouflaged rifleman captioned “SMART WEAPON.” The Marines positioned themselves as elite Americans, via slogans like “The Few and the Proud,” while rejecting the comforts simultaneously marketed to mainstream civilians.
The result was tension in competing interests that created a compartmentalized demand for foreign interventionism within a detached public while also inviting the willing to seek initiation as one of a few proud insiders. The underlying notion was that individual sacrifice was not a collective problem as long as proper compensation was remunerated, demonstrated by the increasing use of incentive bonuses when recruiting for demanding military specialties. In this way, military action itself became just another commodity traded in risky economic bubbles, much like the oversold comics, trading cards, and action figures of the twentieth century’s parting decades.
From Silver and Bronze to a New Dark Age: Mainstreaming Comic Book Adventurism
The stories and characters featured in comic books have risen in cultural prominence over the last century, during which time superheroes have alternately served alongside and as a challenge to popular conceptions of nationalism, masculinity, and militarized patriarchy. Closer examination of these cultural intersections with military recruiting and public relations hints at revealing many contributory origins of early twenty-first century interpretations of responsibility and authority. Opposition to the Vietnam War championed by an increasingly visible counter culture led to a die-off of traditional military comics in the 1970s. However, the tonal and market changes wrought by the dawning of the modern “dark age” of comics in the 1980s and 1990s re-introduced firearms as a featured means of exerting the will and dispensing justice. No longer limited to foreign battlefields, these characters were soon deployed to urban and pastoral domestic settings as well.
Nick Fury evolved from leader of the fictional army unit the Howling Commandos to Agents of Shield. Fury’s gunslinging ways win the day in the third-issue story “Hydra Lives” (1973), but this proves to be a ruse facilitated by harmless ammunition and casualty actors; in this late-Vietnam-era narrative, deceit and subterfuge are depicted as equally potent weapons. The 1980s saw a more overtly militaristic revival in comics, most obviously in Marvel Comic’s adaptation of the cartoon G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, which like the Agents of Shield was rebranded from an older incarnation into the saga of a diverse paramilitary organization battling a known extra-national foe. At the same time, Marvel’s Punisher—originally introduced as an antagonist who’s brutal ways brought him into conflict with the morally upstanding Spiderman—was legitimized into an anti-hero. Subtle changes to the character’s backstory in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe between 1983 and 1986 editions include a shift from “ex-Marine” to the more positive “former Marine” and the omission of certain details of his background. Punisher’s “war on crime,” while notably outside the law, is framed as a struggle against worse criminals in keeping with real-world national sentiment at the time which sensationalized both ethnic gangs and underground mafias.
Writers influenced by or commenting on this atmosphere increased Batman’s reliance on weaponized vehicles and powered robotic suits in several popular storylines. These traits were translated to that character’s multiple film appearances across 1989 to 2016 with greater prominence than his traditional reliance on shadows, psychology, and non-lethal methods. As notions of irregular warfare informed the action depicted in films and comics, superheroes themselves became increasingly regimented, often discarding the distinctive forms of organization, morality, and direct action which they had acquired in earlier war-weary eras. Sometimes these militarized and even government-backed superheroes no longer represented an alternative or parallel system of justice, but rather the pinnacle of the established system.
Depictions of individuals or small squad at odds with their superiors—or abandoned altogether by morally inferior commanders —are themselves a likely import from late-and-post-Vietnam-era cinema. Just as anti-war Vietnam movies could get by on a relatively small budget by focusing on a single squad in a claustrophobic jungle setting, and thereby present narratives that might not receive direct military support, pre-9/11 global war and covert ops could similarly focus on an elite special operations squad while exploring themes more excessively pro-war or overtly dehumanizing to Middle Easterners, Southeast Asians, and Central Americans. However, the synthetic catharsis of fictionally overcoming situations where military solutions had failed in real life offered by films like Delta Force and Rambo: First Blood Part 2 meant that policies of aggressive foreign intervention appeared to be validated.
Similar storylines of re-writing destiny appeared in many comics’ characters and storylines. The popularity of these themes contributed to the founding of the new legally independent but creatively shallow publishing imprint Image Comics when a group of artists attempted to wield the collective popularity of their drawing style as a weapon in order to break away from the major publishers in 1992. Although celebrated as the herald of a new era of creative freedom, at the time this merely amounted to the freedom to present hyper-masculine violence free of traditionalist guidance and institutional censorship that might have resulted in a refined narrative content. This shift correlates to the de-emphasis of loyalty, thoughtfulness, and group morality as masculine ideals and their replacement with unilateral decision executed via lethal violence.
Marvel introduced The New Mutants “Cable” (1990) and “Bishop” to the Uncanny X-Men (1991) as latter-day time-travelers in an attempt to integrate gun-wielders into the X-Men’s very pure strain of super-hero mythos. X-men characters wield explicitly mutant powers in battles largely amongst mutant factions over differing interpretations of mutant rights. Writers kept the new characters grounded within these themes: Bishop’s weapons channel his energy absorption abilities while Cable’s absurdly massive arsenal is also a thematic device compensating for the dampening of his own superpowers by a lifelong viral infection. Silver and bronze-age combat in X-men comics centers around the interaction of various supernatural powers with are frequently biological in origin. In contrast, the X-men’s dark-age storylines involved the more grim and fascistic anti-mutant future of Bishop and the apocalyptic mutant supremacists opposed by Cable. These struggles still often derisively devolved into a contest between forms of interchangeable rock-paper-scissors, but even the darker stories of the late 1980s and early ‘90s utilized creative problem solving and even emotional reasoning often enough to inspire readers.
Indeed, the tenants delineating super-heroic combat from its mundane military counterpart are frequently enshrined in the very slogans, catchphrases, and gimmicks of the characters themselves: Superman wields his power to uphold “truth, justice, and the American way;” The X-men “fight to protect a world that hates and fears them;” Batman’s concealed movement through the shadows facilitates his dispensation of justice as “the dark knight.” Real-world conventional militaries instead ostensibly operate in the open, in service of competing state interests.
The darkening terrain of 1980s comics was punctuated by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s landmark Watchmen, which challenges the naivety, romanticism, and unreal logic of traditional superhero narratives. Following that decade’s popularization of hyper-violent martial power fantasies, the militarized superhero teams and gun-toting vigilantes of the early 1990s fed an escapism that was not realistic but presented the ability to wield bodily power over others as more readily accessible—perhaps unintentionally so— via the personally-owned firearm. Vigilante stories in particular fed American fears of urban crime that politicians often deliberately stoked as well.
This era further coincided with a shift in how these types of stories were sold and how devoted fans interacted with their favorite products. The complete story of the capitalization of imagination and the rise of brand messaging is ultimately beyond the scope of this essay, but the overall conceptual move was from the serial stories of singular creative voices to larger multi-format properties managed by a pool of corporate talent. These properties were marketed across media from film and television to books and magazines as well as being merchandised into toys, apparel, and ultimately almost any product. Fans were thus invited to consume the brand fitting the story of their choice, and to a more limited extent judge others based on their preferred story and setting.
The Reaganomics of Entertainment, Collectibles, and Consumer Fandom
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Mark Fowler presided over a general mood of deregulation from May 1981 to January 1987, during which time the agency enacted several changes that dramatically altered the media landscape, particularly for children’s programming. Fowler’s FCC not only fought against limitations on advertising during television broadcasts targeting children, it also explicitly rescinded preexisting restrictions on “program-length commercials” and tacitly endorsed “host-selling” during such shows.
Program-length commercials in the context of children’s programming referred to the emerging production of episodic and mostly animated stories which existed not to tell their stories but to market the characters and merchandise featured therein. Host-selling is the practice of explicitly advertising the products featured in such shows or those similarly branded during or after their broadcast. These practices, especially when combined, launched huge toy brands and attendant fictional mythos like “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” and “The Transformers.” While toys based on children’s television existed before, companies in the 1980s built these new creations from the ground up to sell toys which were based in fictional storylines whose sole thinly-veiled purpose was to sell toys based on the show’s characters and settings.
In the 1970s, the ABC network had prevented Mattel from advertising Hot Wheels toy cars during a Hot Wheels cartoon. Agreements between the broadcaster and toy manufacturer also forbade the production of toys based specifically on those shown within the cartoon. Self-regulation of this sort sparked several rounds of complaints and investigation, with charges that the program itself constituted an ad. Although initial major impetus came from Mattel rival Topper Toys, there would be considerable interest in the issue over the next decade. However, critics of broadcast restrictions invoked the First Amendment to question the free speech concerns of content or plot limitations and the FCC’s existing policy vesting programming decisions with broadcast licensees as a matter of “public interest.”
Many of the program-length commercials that followed on the airwaves of the 1980s were similarly constructed along a template dividing characters into competing good and evil teams. Each faction represented a different product line and each character or play-set within those factions fulfilled a specific function or possessed a different gimmick. This enabled staff writers to churn out stories for multiple episodes quickly from the ready stock of plots offered by introducing new characters from the line, spotlighting a specific character and their abilities, and exploring the different factions’ specific traits and lore. Characters portrayed in these dressed-up marketing situations become more immediately familiar and recognizable, contributing to their use as advertising mascots for unrelated products as well.
This process further helped the entertainment properties market themselves across a variety of mediums and also invited a form of completionism. Toys were packaged with a visual checklist of all the available action figures in their range, and larger brands like Hasbro’s Transformers and G.I. Joe had ongoing alternate storylines published by Marvel Comics. An older devotee of the property might feel compelled to acquire each toy and check every box. A younger child who watched the television show and then received an issue of the comic could more reasonably request a later numbered issue from their parent’s next visit to the newsstand.
Entertainment universes could evolve to service toys with the cross-promotion of cartoons and comics, but comic book culture along with associated values like visual aesthetics and collectibility also influenced the creation of new toys increasingly meant less for child’s play than for explicit consumerist gratification. George Lucas famously recouped his relinquished film royalties in Star Wars by retaining rights to an aggressively marketed toy line and other merchandising. Through the happy accident of slow development and incremental release, demand for the original Kenner brand action figures based on Star Wars and its sequels would essentially exceed their supply from before their release through the entirety of their production run. This led to a strong consumer aftermarket as parents and collectors sought to acquire obscure figures and rarer or more popular variants of the series main characters.
Another such incarnation positioned more explicitly at the intersection of late-twentieth century dark age comics and toy marketing is Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. [MORE ON IMAGE COMICS AND THE COLLECTIBLES BUBBLE] McFarlane went on to largely abandon his role as a comic book artist to focus almost exclusively on deluxe action figures. His toy company grew to produce a host of characters from many different intellectual properties, bringing stylized hyper-realistic reproductions to a large and maturing audience.
The economic story of the latter Twentieth Century is likewise one of expansion and internationalization. Americans tended to be in favor of this intermingling when it meant a steady flow into their own country of cheap goods and novel innovations, such as Hasbro’s rebranding of the Japanese Diaclone and Micromaster toys into the Transformers line. However, many in the US disapproved whenever they felt the flow of ideas and capital was seen to favor other nations or was conducted without the their own input, benefit, or necessity. The US preached democratic self-determination backed by rugged adventurism, but interfered in nations that made determinations counter to perceived US interests and tended to foster their most right-wing elements. The US preferred stable capitalist trading partners like Japan, the source of another hit ‘80s import—the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Gaming Systems and the Death of Imagination
Alongside the boom in comics, cartoons, action movies, collectible merchandising, and the cultural influence therof, the 1980s also saw an acceleration in the distribution and popular acceptance of various forms of systemized consumer games. Arcade games and home video gaming systems readily spring to mind, but this period also saw a dramatic expansion in tabletop wargaming. These games were mostly rooted in historical or science fiction themes, remaining a niche interest but avoiding widespread public acrimony. The 1970s previously spawned the sensationalized role-playing game (RPG) “Dungeons and Dragons,” (D&D) which was viewed with suspicion for the perceived Satanism of its fantasy elements and for fears that impressionable players would commit to its role-playing inductive and internalize the deadly motivations of their fictional personas. Although these games emphasized individual imagination, they eventually developed their own burgeoning product lines of source books, figurines, and media tie-ins.
In 1993 Richard Garfield introduced a new form of game that was intrinsically commodified by design with Magic: The Gathering (MTG). The retail product consisted of an initial set of several hundred cards released in small randomized packs and larger decks. Cards represented various types of spells and the resources to use them. The spell sets were divided into elementally-themed factions on a manner reminiscent of earlier '80s toy properties. MTG further encouraged collecting and secondary market trading with a deck construction mechanic. Players needed to construct a playable deck with a greater likelihood of drawing the game’s most effective combos, instilling a need for multiple copies of certain cards. The post powerful cards were also rarer, increasingly their value in aftermarket trading. Parents sharply criticized MTG as they had the earlier D&D, questioning the influence of the game’s limited satanic imagery and its play mechanic of reducing an opponent's “life” through damage (really a backwards scoring system where the first player to zero loses).
There is a long-running debate about the potentially de-sensitizing nature of violent games, especially video games that mimic the actions and especially physical movements of committing violence. The entirety of such discourse is well beyond the scope of this essay, but several points directly apply. The first of note is that concern over violence in games became dramatically elevated following the Columbine school shootings, and that visible domestic gun violence has dominated the discussion of this issue. The role of violent entertainment culture in motivating persons wishing to more legitimately commit such acts is less discussed, as is the potential for the virtual spectacle to distract from actual acts of violence.
Video games featuring the destruction of digital enemies are as old as Pac Man, but the generation of games featured on Nintendo’s NES home console, its successor the Super Nintendo, and rival platforms broke new ground in terms of visualization of recognizable characters who could be harmed. Released to arcades in 1987 and on NES in 1988, Konami’s Contra enabled players to shoot recognizably human enemies in every direction while fighting through the jungle.
America would have to wait over a decade for its own video game platform. Microsoft’s Xbox launched in November 2001, with the first-person shooter (FPS) Halo as its flagship title. The wildly successful Halo was produced by once-independent game studio Bungie, who were purchased in whole by Microsoft in 2000 and committed exclusively to the Halo franchise. Bungie’s earlier series Marathon and Myth: The Fallen Lords were made primarily for the 1990s Apple Macintosh home computers and usually included editing software to customize or totally remake the games, a somewhat common practice to personal computer (PC) games. Later Halo titles eventually featured limited level-editing, but its customizability and that of similar games centered mainly on the cosmetic appearance of player avatars. Game developers have gradually monetized customizable appearance and equipment in many console games, while some popular PC games still spawn robust third party modification (mod) communities.
Halo and FPS games did not merely arrive on the scene. The original FPS is generally acknowledged to be id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D (1992) for MS-DOS. This World War II themed game centered around a first-person perspective wherein players ran down simulated hallways, shoot pixelated Nazis and looting treasure. One iteration in the original series even had players shooting and cartoonishly super-powered Hitler to death. Wolfenstein’s developers would go on to make Doom (1993) and to feature three-dimensional enemies as well as environments in the later Quake (1996). These games featured demonic enemies and imagery and attracted conservative ire like the earlier paper-based D&D and MTG. Doom itself seems to have formed the locus of blame for the Columbine shooting in the minds of many searching for a singular explanation for that tragedy.
The films of the 1990s contributed to a rise in more realistic FPS games on the Sony Playstation (1995) and Nintendo 64 (1996) consoles, setting the stage for Halo on Xbox and the tripartite landscape of twenty-first-century console gaming. Rare Software’s FPS game Goldeneye (1997) for Nintendo 64 was based on the same-named James Bond film released two years prior. The competing Medal of Honor series (1999) for Playstation was not explicitly based on Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan film from the prior year, but he created its story and it was produced by his Dreamworks company. Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan invoked America’s heroic near-past and through the lauded realism of its gory combat admonished the nation to validate the sacrifices of veterans, respect the horror of war, and live responsibly to maintain peace. Americans audiences eagerly received this message, save for the call to peace.
Fictionalized Combat and Commercialized Recruiting
Closer examination reveals evidence that Kurt Vonnegut’s warning in Slaughterhouse Five that “wars were partly encouraged by books and movies” broadened to encompass the majority of all media. Under the cover of all-American workers willingly performing difficult tasks for monetary and cultural rewards, film and television in the era of the AVF carried a subtle and insidious pro-military message almost intrinsic to the medium. Writ large, the unstated argument was that the largest productions with the most convincing drama and effects were produced by American film studios, and therefore American foreign policy enabling such productions was justified by its storytelling output. On the smaller scale, this meant that every plot device or moment of on-screen tension resolved through violence or emotional excitement communicated that such adventuring was justified.
The 1970s ended with the introspective and arguably anti-war films The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) achieving top-ten box office success and critical acclaim. The next decade Platoon (1986) outperformed both combined with over $138 million in domestic ticket sales. Oliver Stoner’s reflective film teased the illusion of national closure while also riding a wave of spectacle-driven action films like the year’s highest-earner, the $350 million-earning government-sponsored Top Gun. Audiences seemed to tire of graphic war critique by the next year, however, as Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) similarly focused on a small group of Vietnam-bound combatants and their relationships to the relative exclusion of the larger operational war, but grossed only $46 million to rank 26th for the year. A lone squad still struggled against a jungle-savvy foe to widespread delight, however, with Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Predator pulling in $98 million internationally and the #8 top spot. Robin William’s more light-hearted Good Morning Vietnam was #5 with a $123 million domestic-only gross.
The prior year had seen James Cameron release a hit sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien that offered a subtle Vietnam allegory with anti-imperialist undertones; insidiously, Aliens (1986) was also heavily militarized. While the story showed a corporate-backed military expedition being defeated and portrayed the arrogance of technological advantage as futile, the film’s “Colonial Marines” and their distinctive weapons became iconic in the public imagination. In the 1990s toy-maker Kenner even went on to market a line of Aliens and Predator toys, struggling to adapt the R-rated source material and stopping short of fully producing a planned tie-in cartoon. In an era of muscled silver screen strongmen, Aliens also featured strong women in both Sigourney Weaver’s lead protagonist Ripley and several of the Colonial Marines, including Janette Goldstein’s whitewashed Private Vasquez. Although women did not yet serve directly in frontline infantry units as seen in fiction, AVF force structure meant that more women than ever before were serving in uniform and in a greater variety of career fields. Cameron’s other sequel hit Terminator 2: Judgment Day also featured a determined, capable, and militarized female protagonist in Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Conor and was the number one movie worldwide in 1992, grossing over half a billion dollars.
Top Gun was a huge blockbuster produced with the support of the US Navy that doubled the sales of subtly anti-war Aliens and Platoon. Many smaller productions of the 1980s would not receive Pentagon support or approval but still ushered pro-war and often subtly racist messages with them into cult-classic status. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and The Delta Force (1986) were both escapist fantasies that eluded critical acclaim but soothed the national ego. American pride continued to be bruised not just by the Vietnam War but also bloody entanglements like the Iran Hostage debacle and the 1983 bombing of the Multi-National Force barracks in Beirut, Lebanon that killed almost 200 US Marines and allied troops. The Twentieth Century’s final decade would open with the film Navy SEALS (1990) depicting a ground combat victory for US troops in Beirut. During the climactic action sequence a building is leveled with explosives, but this time it is full of terrorists and hijacked stinger surface-to-air missiles. New York Times reviewer Caryn James knowingly observed:
“What will Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles be when they grow up? On the evidence of Navy SEALSs, they are perfectly suited to be members of an elite navy commando team. The men who fight Middle Eastern terrorists in this new action film are a mere step away from the Turtles in maturity and complexity of character."
This is especially tragic as cutting-edge research by Duke University’s Renee Ragin shows that the youth of Lebanon in this era also celebrated and romanticized small groups of clandestine paramilitary operators.
The intense television coverage of the Gulf War and other forms of commoditizing the drama of its events blurred the lines between fiction and reality in a way that was largely new. Whereas older war reporting, newsreels, and later dramatizations all existed in various states of temporal remove and interrelated veracity, the embedded broadcasts and on-screen graphics of the first Gulf War marketed a uniform interpretation of the war directly to viewers in near real-time. Two different brands of trading cards based on the war became a collectible item during the peak of the comics bubble.
Throughout this cyclone of cultural upheaval, the image presented by military recruiting itself—particularly the traditionalist Marine Corps—helped to anchor public perceptions of state and paramilitary violence in official legitimacy and democratic ideals. The old Marine Corps emphasis on the every-man aspects of junior enlisted personnel intersected with evolving AVF policy and messaging to portray volunteer service members as working-class heroes. This functioned to smooth-over scandals like Oliver North’s Iran Contra Affair with the implied assurance that the majority of lower-ranking but morally upstanding troops populating the services somehow balanced out the worst ambitions and abuses of any errant officers or politicians. Thus Aaron Sorkin’s 1989 stage play and its 1992 film adaptation A Few Good Men presented young idealistic Marines as morally superior, but naive and easily manipulated by their more self-interested seniors. In the film, leaders of the Guantanamo Bay Marine detachment direct two junior enlisted personnel to discipline a third who then dies due to an undiagnosed medical condition. The officers perpetrate a cover-up attributing the incident to hazing on the part of the two enlisted men. Demi Moore’s Navy Judge Advocate defense attorney refers to the two defendants directly as “recruiting poster Marines.”
So what did recruiting posters and other AVF marketing look like? A ready example known to anyone who lived through the era is the Army’s renowned “Be All That You Can Be” campaign. This messaging push—which won awards from the corporate advertising industry—helped to lift the Army out of its fumbled AVF initiation by combining a resonating call to individual self-improvement with deft ad placement and timing concentration. [NEED MORE HERE AND TO CONTRAST RECRUITING AMONGST THE SERVICES]
Bursting the Bubble: Reality Catches Up
Many military interventions in these decades were not celebrated victories, however, and voices on the ground show hints that military personnel themselves were aware of some creeping disconnects between their stated missions, methods, and the meaning and purpose behind them. An exploration of firsthand accounts varied across time of service, rank, role, and source type offers ready casual evidence supporting the notions of tension between AVF organization and social goals of quick, limited, and decisive war. Some of these sources also call direct attention to the role of media in how they experienced their military service and the discrepancies between popular depictions of war and the reality of what they saw.
Other themes are shared between these various recollections that further demonstrate in varying degrees the disconnect between the expectations imparted by media and reality in a modern career military. One is the professionalization of the whole armed force altering its social dynamics. This includes the crusty old non-commissioned officer trope becoming the norm, the logical end of a successful career rather than an eccentric exception; likewise, single-term enlisted troops carry some level of perceived failure. Neither is simply the “everyman” doing their part, and, few know what the end of a major conflict looks like given a diminishing pool of holdovers from more fully-concluded prior wars. Under this paradigm, deployments and medals begin to take on character of resume entries. Another theme involves the complications posed by modern military organization and technology. The simplistic and direct fulfillment of personal and group goals was challenged the sheer number of highly specific systems required to amass modern combat power. This ranges from structural segmentation of the overall military experience to the focused specialization of various equipment operators, technicians, and logisticians. The former refers to the division between recruiting, basic introductory training, specific occupational specialty training, day-to-day operations in garrison, pre-deployment workups, rotational foreign assignments, crisis response, full-blown large-scale combat operations, and recovery and reset. Each of these stages in the lifecycle of a military professional’s career is itself the focused concern of specialized staff, and any careerist serving to retirement is likely to fulfill several such roles in turn. Inquiry into the effects of supposed organizational revolutions on military affairs were nothing new, but the implementation of the AVF warrants heightened attention to the emphasis on the interplay between technical specialties, professional competence, and in-group relationships.
One high-ranking officer's description of operations and policy in final years of Vietnam War offers what would become an almost prescient view of things to come. Major General Alan Armstrong served as the Commanding General (CG) of the Marine Air Wing and Deputy CG of all Marines in III Marine Amphibious Force in Vietnam from July 1970 to April of ’71, and was later interviewed by the Marine Corps History and Museums Division in two sessions in late 1973. Armstrong’s account emphasizes several negative aspects of the late war chaos that would unfortunately come to embody more and more of US operations. These include the morale consequences of failing to inform troops or plan for their long-term wellbeing, the planing and coordination difficulties imposed by utilizing various echelons of secrecy, and also the risk shouldered by friendly forces intervening to protect overextended covert operations.
[ANTHONY ZINNI’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY WITH TOM CLANCY, “BATTLE READY” GOES HERE]
Zinni’s rank and station encouraged a somewhat aloof view of post-Vietnam reorganization as a challenge to be overcome through more perfect organization and renewed commitment. The effects of reconstituting conservative order could be much more severe on the enlisted personnel like John Williams, who served as a Navy Corpsman from 1966 until his medical discharge in 1971. Williams was interviewed by the Utah State Historical Society in 1986, seemingly motivated by his prominence as a black civil rights activist in mostly white and Republican Utah. His recollections of active service are filled with anecdotes of traumatic violence and racism internal to the military, including his own passing estimation of the systemization of racial discrimination.
Utah native Nick Lopez joined the Marines in 1984, motivated by both a lifelong desire to be a US Marine and the idle prospects of recent legal trouble. At the time of an oral history interview on October 6th, 2009, Lopez had attained the highest enlisted rank of Sergeant Major and was serving in the Marine Corps Reserve. His story offers fascinating insights into how young Americans were inspired by images of military personnel, hardware, and installations, as well as how they internalized their connection to the American mythos. He describes being motivated to join the marines by a television commercial as a child, and readily presents his service in cinematic terms as an adventure of his choosing, even from the beginning of his enlistment. He reports successfully arguing for his choice of basic training location by informing his recruiters “No, I’ve seen the movie ‘The D.I.’ with Jack Webb and I’m going to Paris[sic] Island.” Lopez waxes nostalgic about his days on “the same rifle range,” featured in Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge, another 1986 military action film eclipsed at the box office by the more critical Platoon and technocratically individualist Top Gun.
Army Black Hawk pilot First Lieutenant (1LT) Lisa Kutschera was interviewed even before the conclusion of Operation Just Cause by a designated task force historian, Major Robert K. Wright. Her account of training to fly Black Hawk helicopters and participating in Just Cause offers several examples of the the themes explored so far, all seemingly offhand and unlikely to be contrived. Kutschera describes the detached attitude of many personnel when her unit was placed into an alert status prior to launching the 1989 invasion. She notes the secrecy of planning contributing to her peers’ resignation but also how this caused her to suspect a real operation. Kutschera also discusses how her unit’s few combat-experienced Vietnam veterans reassured others in the unit with the simplistic admonition to perform their tasks as trained. The uncertainty and apprehension evokes the confusion and planning difficulties observed by General Armstrong as flowing from mission secrecy, though overcoming this can be seen to lay the foundation for a newer generation of veterans to pass on the reassurance of experience — an experience rooted in acceptance of manipulation by those with more complete information.
Major Wright interviewed many others, including the 193rd Infantry Brigade (Task Force Bayonet) Executive Officer (XO) Steve Ankley and Intelligence Officer (S-2) Chester Floyd, who discussed reconnaissance of Panamanian units, particularly anti-aircraft and mortar emplacements. The pair also mention the frustration of enemy repositioning somewhat nullifying the information gleaned from aerial scouting, contrasted with confidence gained from review and anticipated implementation of various pre-planned operations/templates for securing the canal, reminiscent of how World War II strategy in the Pacific was expanded from War Plan Orange. However, in the AVF era, this was not planning conducted by a professional skeleton staff waiting for ranks to be bolstered by a draft in response to some precipitating crisis. For the AVF, this was a continuous process of not only planning but training and rehearsal as well. In theory, even large forces could be assembled, moved, and massed against the enemy quickly. The outcome of Just Cause echoed the earlier perceived success of 1983’s Urgent Fury in Grenada and perhaps suggested to some that the late Cold War methodology of covert operations and limited interventions was translatable to a larger scale. Ankley and Floyd’s frustration with imperfect knowledge of enemy movements speaks to a more difficult and complicated reality.
It was not long before the US utilized its military in just such a concentration of overwhelming force in the First Gulf War. One raw account comes from former Surveillance and Target Acquisition (STA) sniper Anthony Swofford. Although he was would take over a decade to publish his memoir, the Jarhead (2003) wastes no time exposing the relationship between military service and popular culture. Swofford offers a typical post-Desert Storm experience as an example of “the movie cliche, the mad old warrior going through his memorabilia” on the very first page of his text; swiftly, he transitions to anticipating deployment through the medium of film, reminiscing that “we send a few guys downtown to rent all of the war movies they can get their hands on . . . we concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals.” He also notes that the directors Coppola, Stone, and Kubrick “failed” to dissuade against war with their critical films Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket.
Higher-profile veterans of the early stages of the Global War offer tantalizing evidence of the previously described influence of cultural factors on the motivations and expectations of US military volunteers of the era. These factors include positive media depictions and the celebration of established traditions, conflict-oriented fiction across a variety of media often marketed to children alongside related merchandise, as well as blurring lines of form, function, and audience.
Author Rick Bragg’s 2003 biography I Am a Soldier, Too, describes how the future POW Jessica Lynch “imagined war, and waged it with plastic pistols and pinecone grenades” as a child with her brother and sister; interestingly, her sister Brandi recalls that “out here [in rural West Virginia], you had to imagine,” while their brother Greg Jr. perhaps exaggerates when describing “probably ten thousand dollar’s worth of doll babies, toy cars, and G.I. Joes in that mud” discarded around their old home. The experience of the Lynch children suggests that even adolescents more isolated from advertising and consumerism by geography or poverty were still familiar with branded toys. It is also compelling that the Lynchs do not appear to have especially treasured these toys but rather their memories of improvised sports, outdoor adventure, and mock combat. Greg Jr. and Jessica both enlisted in July of 2001, well ahead of the September 11th attacks, seemingly for mostly economic reasons but also in keeping with the somewhat resigned patriotism of their community. Jessica was also especially motivated by a desire “to go somewhere” and recalls growing to like the feeling of overcoming challenges in basic training. She credits overall naivety and her job as supply clerk in a maintenance unit with keeping her detached from the implications of September 11th, 2001 and the US response; inevitably, when learning that her own unit would deploy as part of the invasion of Iraq, Lynch recalls feeling mostly trepidation and obligation.
Evan Wright portrays a more celebratory view of the Iraq invasion held by many marines in his account General Kill (2003). Wright embedded with First Reconnaissance Battalion as a reporter for Rolling Stone during the US march to Baghdad and candidly presents the unit as elite but still overwhelmingly young and idealistic. One young marine in Wright’s chronicle displays his naive and media-driven cultural understanding of the violence he has just perpetrated by described it as “Grand Theft Auto Vice City.” Others tell him of being inspired to enlist by a recruiting commercial featuring a dragon-slaying knight transforming into a US Marine clad in a dress blue uniform. Nathaniel Fick commanded the platoon Evan Wright spent most of his time with, later publishing his own memoire recounting his time as a marine officer. His narrative is still centered mainly on the invasion of Iraq, but he explores his reasons for joining, training experiences, and first deployment as part of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Fick recalls that he considered his decision to serve in “peacetime” an easier sell to his parents, but also tellingly ponders the 1983 Beirut bombing as “an early shot in the terror war.”
[NICK LOPEZ ALSO CROSSES PATHS WITH 1ST RECON IN IRAQ]
[NICK LOPEZ ALSO CROSSES PATHS WITH 1ST RECON IN IRAQ]
Anuradha Bhagwati offers a fitting closing voice with her account of becoming a Marine Corps officer and later founding the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN). Bhagwati recalls being inspired by Ridley Scott’s film G.I. Jane (1997) to attain acceptance through the endurance of hardship only to discover that the bigotry harbored by many in the real services could not be undone by the satisfactory completion of training challenges or job duties. Meanwhile in the fairy-tale ending, G.I Jane’s Demi Moore completes SEAL training and even goes on to cement the respect of her male peers by killing Libyans on a mission to recover a crashed satellite.
Forever War Forever After
Ultimately, these ideas are not new. Propaganda and the mobilization of art and culture towards military ends is practically written into the origins of modern entertainment culture, most obviously in the “Mickey Mouse morale” efforts during the Second World War. The popularity of these stories and their familiarity within the popular culture also speak to the function of a cultural feedback loop enabling continuing war.
Looking back we can see the roles of political response to the Vietnam War at play in film and cultural history, and also identify this as one potential origin point in the aims and means of modern U.S. culture and foreign policy. The late Cold-War era of the All-Volunteer Force was in many ways a continuance of this reaction through its many smaller-scale and shorter-duration interventions - concurrent with both an evolving and oft-obscured South-American “drug war” and escalating Middle-Eastern adventurism. As military service motivation became more economic, the reality of military experience mattered less compared to the appearance of value of that experience. Creative endeavors strove less to present religious, civic, or personal morals but rather to uphold the internal moral frameworks of the most successful entertainment properties.
James Cameron, Ridley Scott, Todd McFarlane...these late twentieth century creatives brought a boyish energy to their work, inspiring a generation. The children raised during the popularization of blockbuster cinema and the ascension of nerd culture to the mainstream would go on to serve global war, the oldest in the waning Cold War era and the youngest in the new sprawling conflict against the concept of Extremist Islam. However, they often did not find the fulfillment of romantic heroism portrayed in the stories they grew up with.
George W. Bush has often been accused of invading Iraq to finish his father's war, and in the same way, the "global war" he declared was neither wholly new nor would it be neatly concluded in a single narrative story arc. The identification of this turn-of-the new century media through-line therefore represents the beginnings of inquiry rather than a definitive conclusion. Many threads remain confusingly tattered and invite closer attention to confirm the implications of their appearance and place in the overall weave of history. One is a deeper narrative and literary analysis to more clearly expose what stories and values audiences find to be most appealing, which best serve martial or state interests, and the social and cultural effects of internalization of these attitudes. Closely related would be broader quantitative examination of the funding sources, sales figures, and overall economic impact of the action movie genre and military fetishism. Is there a military-industrial-entertainment complex?
The feedback loop:
what you really do and how you feel about < --- > <---> what most people think you do
in terms of militarizing culture:
Dehumanizing actions of war < ---> <---> alienation of romanticization of war
>Literally cut-and-pasted from my rejected 3/4 draft while I meant to do that academic thing and edit it obsessively before submitting somewhere else, but then COVID, so, you know, no time for research and writing tra la la, and I'm too lazy to edit the footnotes in, oops, ho hum. <
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