'What My Country Can Do to Me': U.S. Soldiers in Recent American Wars

My argument here is that the abysmal disappointment and trauma of Vietnam dramatically widened an already existing split between official discourses about wars & military possibilities on the one hand and the way young Americans were thinking about it, on the other. The official discourses for the subsequent U.S. military engagements likewise employ a rhetoric of new beginnings and the spreading of democracy. Looking at the writings and blogs of U.S. soldiers, the majority of them – except those about the Gulf War of 1991 – do not seem to share these sentiments and rather feel they are repeating the experience of their mothers and fathers in Vietnam: Once more they are thousands of miles from home, in a country whose language and culture remain alien to them; once more they find it difficult to distinguish between friends and foes, and once more they discover that the people whom they were sent to protect more often than not consider them invaders rather than liberators. In short, for many of the U.S. soldiers, the wars they are fighting do not feel like new beginnings but rather like more of the same old. President Obama seems to share these sentiments to a certain degree and appears determined to use military force only as one of many means of U.S. foreign policy. Maybe this signifies the end of the old American tradition of "rejuvenation/regeneration through violence" and opens up an opportunity for joint action of a less militant New America and for a New Europe that has – after centuries of deadly fighting – decided that war is not the first but the last means for settling differences among nations.