Armed With Abundance
Download and Read Armed With Abundance full books in PDF, ePUB, and Kindle. Read online free Armed With Abundance ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Armed with Abundance
Author | : Meredith H. Lair |
Publisher | : Univ of North Carolina Press |
Total Pages | : 320 |
Release | : 2011-11-28 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 9780807869185 |
Download Armed with Abundance Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle
Popular representations of the Vietnam War tend to emphasize violence, deprivation, and trauma. By contrast, in Armed with Abundance, Meredith Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, redrawing the landscape of the war so that swimming pools, ice cream, visits from celebrities, and other "comforts" share the frame with combat. To address a tenuous morale situation, military authorities, Lair reveals, wielded abundance to insulate soldiers--and, by extension, the American public--from boredom and deprivation, making the project of war perhaps easier and certainly more palatable. The result was dozens of overbuilt bases in South Vietnam that grew more elaborate as the war dragged on. Relying on memoirs, military documents, and G.I. newspapers, Lair finds that consumption and satiety, rather than privation and sacrifice, defined most soldiers' Vietnam deployments. Abundance quarantined the U.S. occupation force from the impoverished people it ostensibly had come to liberate, undermining efforts to win Vietnamese "hearts and minds" and burdening veterans with disappointment that their wartime service did not measure up to public expectations. With an epilogue that finds a similar paradigm at work in Iraq, Armed with Abundance offers a unique and provocative perspective on modern American warfare.
Armed with Abundance Related Books
Pages: 315
Pages: 320
Pages: 226
Pages: 388
Pages: 313