‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ U.S. Soldiers in Recent American Wars Walter W. Hölbling 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. 1. Introduction “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” These famous words from President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961, AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 39 (2014) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Walter W. Hölbling 116 addressed especially to young Americans, signified a “new beginning” in the relationship between U.S. citizens and their government, corresponding to the new beginning on the scene of global Cold War politics sounded earlier in the same speech: “So let us begin anew, remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” John F. Kennedy himself became the charismatic emblem of a youthful presidency, taking over the office from the ageing Dwight D. Eisenhower, suggesting a new dynamics. Thousands of young Americans, inspired by these words, volunteered for military service in the then escalating Vietnam Conflict; after their tour of duty, many of them returned disillusioned, embittered, and traumatized; Vietnam veterans keep writing a still growing flood of fiction, poetry, and personal narratives in order to come to terms with their experience. The abysmal disappointment and trauma of Vietnam dramatically widened an already existing split (ever since the Korean War) between official U.S. discourses about wars and military possibilities on the one hand and, on the other, the way young Americans - who always have to do the actual fighting in any war - were thinking about this. There have been quite a number of US military interventions since the end of the Vietnam Conflict in 1975: Gulf War 1991 (Kuwait/ Iraq), Somalia 1993, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, and most recently Syria (I leave out minor military deployments like Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Lebanon, or Lybia). The official discourses for these military engagements employ a variety of motivational rhetoricisms - there is talk of new beginnings, the spreading of democracy, of protecting the safety of U.S. citizens (and of the global community) against the supposed threat through weapons of mass destructions by (some) of the ‘rogue states’ and the ‘axis of evil.’ Reading through the writings and blogs of U.S. soldiers, not many - except those about the Gulf War of 1991 - seem to share these sentiments. 2. The American Vietnam Experience Until the Vietnam War, the dominant model for American war writing in the 20th century war is World War II - you fight a just war against a formidable enemy; after serious sacrifices you are victorious, and all the surviving soldiers go back home and lead a happy, peaceful life. Apart from the fact that this cliché did not even apply to World War II (as authors like Norman Mailer, J. H. Burns, J. Hersey, K. Vonnegut, J. Heller and others illustrate), the Vietnam War soon makes it clear that this model has not even a remote affinity to the Vietnam conflict, though many authors use it anyway, like J. Del Vecchio in The 13 th Valley. The war in Vietnam practices a strategy of containment in which no ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 117 traditional ‘victory’ or ‘progress’ are visible and the same hills, villages, towns, access routes, and bridges are fought over again and again; the one-year rotation scheme of soldiers as well as the long duration of the war leaves most of the participants with only a rather fragmented perspective and no sense of closure; swift transportation by jet from and to the world of war creates the impression of war as an event in a limited geographical space, and the high-tech speed of transition between “Nam” and “The World” give many soldiers a sensation of being caught in a surreal sequence of events; and the media coverage is as diverse as it is abundant. As an American reviewer of fiction about Vietnam puts it in 1978: “The novelist’s disadvantage is that this was a war with no center, no decisive battles; it was all circumference and it is therefore difficult to filter the thing through unified plot and point of view.” (The Nation, 25, 1978, p. 344) Accordingly, in the vision of authors like Tim O’Brien, Susan Fromberg-Schaeffer, William Eastlake, or Robert Mason, war turns into a complex metaphor for - as well as a critique of - a world in which individual as well as collective aggressive behavior seems to have become a generally accepted model of social and political interaction. By now, at the beginning of the 21 st century, in the age of ‘real time’ newsbreaks, we have become quite accustomed to the fact that war is no longer an exceptional state limited by its temporal duration, but that there is always some war going on somewhere on the globe, and the media tell us about it. In short, since World War II, war has become a spatial event that affects us even if we happen to live in a peaceful space. Not surprisingly, American fiction and personal narratives of Vietnam exist in dazzling variety and multitude, to which one still has to add other genres like poetry, drama, cartoons, graphic novels, diaries, film, and television. What all of them share is the attempt to understand - or at least come to terms with - a war that went terribly wrong by all traditional American standards. Even the “gung-ho” tales in print and on screen (e.g. Robin Moore’s The Green Berets, the Rambo sequels, etc.) testify to this endeavour, clinging, as they desperately do, to familiar patterns of military success and individual heroism that have become obsolete in the face of a new reality. The familiar beliefs of fighting a just war with a strong sense of mission in a unique historical situation are radically shaken by the Vietnam experience, which gives rise to a serious questioning of basic American values on the personal as well as the collective level. No novel presents the enormous gap between expectations and actual experience of the young American GIs in Vietnam better than Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978). Paul Berlin, 19 year old collegedropout and the 3 rd person limited narrator, sums up the crucial dilemma in the chapter “The Things They Did Not Know”: Walter W. Hölbling 118 Not knowing the language, they did not know the people. [...] They did not recognize hostility unless it was patent, unless it came in a form other than language. (309) [ … ] They did not know even the simplest things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. [...] They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind, or anguish? They did not know. They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotions squandered in ignorance. They did not know good from evil. (320-21) While Paul Berlin and his fellow soldiers represent the kind of American ignorance about Vietnam that Denise Levertov castigates in her poem “What Were They Like? ” and awared-winning journalist Frances FitzGerald criticizes in her pertinent study Fire in the Lake, the title character Cacciato, who is only 17 but lied about his age in order to join the army, symbolizes archetypal American innocence. His literary ancestors include Huck Finn, Henry Fleming of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Hemingway’s Nick Adams and Lt. Henry of A Farewell to Arms, as well as Yossarian and Orr in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, or Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. O’Brien situates his character firmly in the tradition of American war novels. One of the most touching scenes is set in a mountain landscape devastated by saturation bombing; the bomb craters are filled with water in the monsoon season, so the soldiers sarcastically dub the area “The World’s Greatest Lake Country”. During a rest, Cacciato goes fishing: He tied a paperclip to a length of string, baited it up with bits of ham, then attached a bobber fashioned out of an empty aerosol can labeled Secret. Cacciato moved down to the lip of the crater, then flipped out the line. The bobber made a light splashing sound. (283) The obvious allusion here is to Hemingway’s famous short story “Big Two-Hearted River”, where Nick Adams, back from World War I, attempts to regain his bearings in the world by the familiar ritual of trout fishing. For both youths, the ritual of fishing is meant to (re-)constitute a sense of personal identity, but its form and its significance are notably different. Hemingway’s Nick, symbolically placed between the burnt land around Seyney behind him and the swamp before him, is able to determine his position in the world - i.e., the river and his campsite - by doing the right things, or rather by ‘doing things right’, and thus establishes a working relationship with his natural environment. ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 119 Compared to this, the very material Cacciato uses for fishing - some string, paperclip, a piece of canned ham, an empty aerosol can - signifies more than just a low grotesque version of Yankee ingenuity. In the world of the 17-year old Cacciato, no piece of untouched nature is left between the burnt land and the swamp: Hemingway’s (symbolic) landscapes have been fused in the lifeless wasteland of “World’s Greatest Lake Country”. Interaction with such an environment to constitute one’s identity must take different forms, and Cacciato’s fishing becomes an ambiguous symbolic gesture: An expression of boyish helplessness and withdrawal into oneself, it also signals individual self-assertion by clinging to a familiar ritual whose situational inadequacy makes it a striking image for the youth’s despair. Soon after, Cacciato decides to leave this war and go West (in the tradition of Orr in Catch-22, who paddles from the Adriatic to Sweden) - to Paris, where the nation that took over the French colonial heritage in Vietnam gained its own independence from England in 1783. Appropriately, at the end of the novel, Cacciato, symbol of American innocence, is MIA. Different from the enigmatic Cacciato, Paul Berlin imagines his own desertion but in the end is unable to follow through with it: I fear the loss of my own reputation. [...] I fear being an outcast. I fear being thought of as a coward. I fear that even more than cowardice itself. (377) [ ... ] Even in imagination, we must obey the logic of what we started. Even in imagination we must be true to our obligations, for even in imagination, obligations cannot be outrun. Imagination, like reality, has ist limits. (378) This statement is relativized a little later when he claims that “with courage, it could have been done” - another suggestive reference to the moral uncertainty, if not helplessness, of young American GIs in Vietnam - and in most future military engagements of the USA. The concluding words of Robert C. Mason’s Vietnam novel Chickenhawk (1984) - “No one is more shocked than I” - might as well express the experience of many American soldiers in the most recent U.S. military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once more they are thousands of miles from home, in a country whose language, customs, and cultural codes remain alien to most of them; once more they find it difficult to distinguish between friends and enemies (and, therefore, tend to shoot first and ask questions later), and once more they discover that the people whom they were sent to protect more often than not consider them invaders/ oppressors rather than liberators. Even for an observer not directly affected by this war, it is heartbreaking to read the personal narratives and blogs of yet another generation of young Americans Walter W. Hölbling 120 suffering through the process of disillusionment, despair, trauma, and anger when they discover that the “just war” their government started rests on rather weak premises, to put it politely. In spite of the different political and historical contexts of the Iraq engagement, the experience of American soldiers is reminiscent of that of their parents’ generation in Vietnam; so is the media coverage, whose daily reports of soldiers and civilians wounded or killed in Iraq or Afghanistan resemble the notorious “body counts” of the Vietnam years. Domestically, looking at the flawed arguments for the Iraq war and the profits certain U.S. businesses have gained from it, events and practices also show eerie similarities to those of the Vietnam years. In 1971, Senator J. William Fulbright warned of the detrimental effects of long wars on a democratic society: When a war is of long duration, when its objectives are unascertainable, when the people are bitterly divided and their leaders lacking in both vision and candor, then the process of democratic erosion is greatly accelerated. [...] Beset by critics and doubt, the nation’s leaders resort increasingly to secrecy and deception. (Congressional Record, Senate, Mar. 12, 1971, 6395.) 3. Iraq and Afghanistan So far, no important American novel about the Iraq war has come to my attention, but the number of blogs is infinite, they are also getting published in book form (e.g., Colby Buzzell, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, 2005), together with a growing number of personal narratives of male & female soldiers, and even of a deserter (e.g., John Crawford, The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell. An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq 2005; Jason Christopher Hartley, Just Another Soldier, 2005; Kayla Williams, Love My Rifle More than You, Young and Female in the U. S. Army, 2005; Joshua Key as told to Lawrence Hill, The Deserter’s Tale, 2007), as well as oral histories (e. g. Trish Wood, ed., What Was Asked of Us. An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It, 2006). David Bellavia, with John R. Bruning. House to House. A Soldier’s Memoir (2008); Donovan Campbell, Joker One. A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood (2009); Craig M. Mullaney. The Unforgiving Minute. A Soldier’s Education (2009). A good faction about the Fallujah campaign is Bing West, No True Glory. A Frontline account of the Battle for Fallujah. 2005; a bit on the glorifying The-Marines-side but very readable are Evan Wright, Generation Kill (2004) and Sean Parrell, Outlaw Platoon (2012). Most of these texts praise the courage and endurance of GIs and Marines and the lower ranks, but often criticize incompetence and arrogance among the higher command. Most of them speak well of the ‘buddy system’, many of them also foreground the ‘fighting spirit’ of the ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 121 tough U.S. soldier variety, yet they are very much aware that this is just one of many aspects of their war experience. Sometimes, the very title of the book signifies its overall message - like No True Glory, The Unforgiving Minute, The Deserter’s Tale. Joshua Key, who entered the army as a trigger-happy patriot from small-town Oklahoma, after 6,5 months of service in Iraq does not return from a home leave but, after hiding for over a year within the US, flees with his wife and children to Canada; he sums up his war experience this way: I am ashamed of what I did in Iraq, and of all the ways that innocent civilians suffered or died at our hands. The fact that I was only following orders does not lessen my discomfort or ease my nightmares. [After I came across the four decapitated bodies by the side of the road in Ramadi, and saw soldiers in my own army kicking the heads for their own amusement, I began to dream of the incident and the rolling heads.] (214) [...] I will never apologize for deserting the American Army. I deserted an injustice and leaving was the right thing to do. I owe one apology and one apology only, and that is to the people of Iraq. (231) Few authors are as outspoken as Joshua Key, but the experience of U.S. soldiers in the Iraq war as expressed in many texts so far very much resembles that of their fathers’ generation in Vietnam and indicates that their experience in Afghanistan and/ or Iraq is very likely to produce another traumatized and disillusioned generation of young Americans. The American movie production about Vietnam and the more recent wars, unless they are of the “Gung-Ho” variety, mostly send similar messages that foreground the loss of innocence and the fundamental disillusion of the youth that followed the call of President John F. Kennedy and volunteered for Vietnam or, a generation later, were members of the National Guard and suddenly found themselves sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Films like The Deer Hunter, Hamburger Hill, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and others testify to these aspects of the Vietnam experience. To make things worse, when the veterans came back they had the feeling that they - rather than the politicians - were blamed for a war they did not start and could not win. The U.S. Census Bureau (2004) reports there are 8.2 million “Vietnam Era Veterans”; of these, 2.59 million are reported to have served “in country”; about 850,000 of them are believed to suffer from PTSD. A film by Cedric Godin, titled P.T.S.D., was completed in 2012. From the many films about Vietnam veterans, I just want to mention two - as example for PTSD Rambo. First Blood. Part I (1982), and as example for severe physical injuries Ron Kovich’s Born on the 4 th of July (1989). The first Rambo movie actually focuses on the genuine plight of many PTSD-afflicted Vietnam veterans who felt underappreciated and ostracized by their fellow Americans; John Rambo’s resistance against harassing civil authorities found wide Walter W. Hölbling 122 audience approval, even though his fighting skills already border on the superhuman. The three sequels (1985, 1988, 2008), however, show Rambo mostly as an invincible super warrior for a good cause who rescues US prisoners from the Viet Cong (against the will of US politicians), helps the Afghans against the Russians (also against the will of superiors), and a group of Burmese rebels against their cruel army (again on his own). With some benevolent interpretation, one could see Rambo (and his military commander Col. Trautman) as Thoreauvian individualists fighting against a morally questionable majority of politicians, civil authorities, as well as army bureaucrats, but the action thriller dominance definitely overshadows this aspect. 4. Movies vs. Documentaries Quite differently, Ron Kovich, author of the book on which the movie Born on the 4 th of July is based, was left wheelchair-bound from his war injuries and has been a staunch activist against war since 1972. In his foreword to the 2005 edition of his book, he wrote about the message he wants to bring across: I wanted people to understand. I wanted to share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to be in a war - to be shot and wounded, to be fighting for my life on the intensive care ward - not the myth we had grown up believing. I wanted people to know about the hospitals and the enema room, about why I had become opposed to the war, why I had grown more and more committed to peace and nonviolence. I had been beaten by the police and arrested twelve times for protesting the war and I had spent many nights in jail in my wheelchair. I had been called a Communist and a traitor, simply for trying to tell the truth about what had happened in that war, but I refused to be intimidated. In the film, Tom Cruise plays Kovich, and on the last day of filming Kovich gave Cruise his Bronze Star, as reward for his “courageous portrayal of the true horrors of war.” In the 23 years since Born on the 4 th of July came into the movie theaters, U.S. soldiers have seen sustained military action mostly in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the 2.16 million U.S. troops deployed in combat zones between 2001 and 2010, the total estimated two-year costs of treatment for combat-related PTSD are between $1.54 billion and $2.69 billion. (“The Psychological Cost of War: Military Combat and Mental Health.” Georgia State University, March 2011). From several movies & documentaries that deal with the problems of the latest generation of U.S. war veterans - e.g. Home of the Brave (2006), Grace is ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 123 Gone (2007), In the Valley of Elah (2007) etc. I have chosen Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) and Heather Courtney’s documentary Where Soldiers Come From (2011). The Hurt Locker won 6 Oscars and is based on the experience of a three-man high-tech team that defuses Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq. The film opens with a quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a best-selling 2002 book by New York Times war correspondent and journalist Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug”. All the words fade except for the last four. After the defuser of the team is killed in an explosion, his replacement turns out be not only a warproven technical expert but also a “cowboy”, i.e. he loves to take extreme risks, endangering also the rest of his team in several daring actions. After his tour of duty is over, he comes back to his girlfriend and son, but soon signs up for another 365 day rotation. The final shot shows him in his bomb-suit walking towards yet another IED, suggesting that he has become, as suggested by the initial quote, an addict to the drug of war. As quite a contrast, nothing could be further from the minds of Heather Courtney’s small-town youth in her documentary Where Soldiers Come From (2011). Growing up in Courtney’s Michigan home town on the Upper Peninsula at the shores of Lake Superior, the film tells the story of Dominic and several of his friends who decide to join the National Guard and are then assigned to a bomb-clearing unit in Afghanistan, living through very similar experiences as the characters in The Hurt Locker. After their tour of duty, they try to re-integrate into civil life and find it rather difficult, having to acknowledge the effects of the new silent signature wound of the Afghan and also the Iraq war, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). At the end of the movie, only Dominic, with the help of an art teacher, is able to rediscover his artistic self and expresses his troubles in the form of a narrative mural on the back wall of the college. His friends appear to be suspended in limbo, not (yet? ) able to cope with the change the war experience and TBI have wreaked in their lives. As Heather Courtney states on the movie’s official website: Eventually, my film becomes a story about the war at home, how it affects families, loved ones and communities here, and how the war continues at home when these young men return from a year in combat. But at its heart it is still a film about growing up. […] Many Americans, whatever their politics or feelings about war, are very far removed from the Iraq/ Afghanistan wars because they don't know anyone personally who has gone there as a soldier. I hope that my film will help viewers get to know these young men and their families, feel compassion for them, and see a bit of themselves in the people on the screen. Walter W. Hölbling 124 What I find worth noting in the last two films is that the development of the hero figures resembles very much those in the movies about Vietnam: both The Hurt Locker and Where Soldiers Come From focus on teamwork, comradeand leadership, the ‘heroes’ suffer more or less spectacularly, but there is no discernible positive effect, no reward, for all that suffering - neither for them as individuals nor for the American society they are supposedly fighting for. Rather, the boys from Michigan return from Afghanistan as prematurely disillusioned adults, and the bomb expert in The Hurt Locker is so unfulfilled by domestic family life that he leaves again for another tour of duty. 5. Conclusion In its international edition of August 29, 2011, Time’s cover story by wellknown columnist Joel Klein ran like this: “The NEW Greatest Generation. How young U.S. war veterans are redefining leadership at home”. It testified to the individual leadership qualities of these recent war veterans and also maintains that the latest generation of veterans is different from the previous ones (Vietnam, Korea, and World War II) because they receive more and better attention to their injuries, physical and psychic, than any of the earlier veterans in the USA. Somewhat in contradiction to Joel Klein’s optimism about the new greatest generation, the American ‘soldiers’ minds and bodies presented in these novels, personal narratives, and films seem to suggest that U. S. politics might be in dire need to find ways towards a society that offers its youth more visions for their future than just the option of fighting in yet another war. In spite of President Obama’s “surge” of troops in Afghanistan soon after he took office, the current US president appears to consider military force only one of many means of U.S. foreign policy. The liquidation of long-sought Osama bin Laden in 2011 also removed one (of several) reasons given to maintain Western military presence in the area, and the largest NATO meeting ever in Chicago in May 2012 was called primarily to find the best exit strategy from Afghanistan without leaving the field to the Taliban. The results of this meeting received mixed responses, and it remains to be seen whether they work in practice. Recently intensified religious(? ) fighting between Sunnis and Schiites in Syria and Iraq pose renewed challenges and question the feasibility of a complete U.S. withdrawal. It is too early to assess whether the current policy signals the end of the old American tradition of “regeneration through violence” (Slotkin) and open up an opportunity for joint action of a less militant New America and a New Europe (former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld did get it quite wrong in 2003…) that has - after centuries of deadly fighting - decided that war is not the first but the last resort for settling differences among nations. In any case, even though Karl Rove in ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 125 his Courage and Consequence (2010) claims that this is not at all what happened with the Iraq war, I believe young American soldiers were “lied into” that war and would highly appreciate not to have that experience again. References I. Primary Texts - print Bellavia, David, with John R. Bruning (2008). House to House. A Soldier’s Memoir. Briley, John (1969). The Traitors. Campbell, Donovan (2009). Joker One. A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood. Crawford, John (2005). The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell. Del Vecchio, John (1982). The 13 th Valley. Eastlake, William (1969). The Bamboo Bed. Fromberg Schaeffer, Susan (1989). Buffalo Afternoon. Greene Graham (1955). The Quiet American. Hartley, Jason Christopher (2005). Just Another Soldier. Heinemann, Larry (1977). Close Quarters. Heinemann, Larry (1986). Paco’s Story. Key, Joshua, as told to Lawrence Hill (2007). The Deserter’s Tale. Mason, Bobbie Anne (1985). In Country. Mason, Robert (1983). Chickenhawk. Moore, Robin (1965). The Green Berets. Mullaney, Craig M. (2009). The Unforgiving Minute. A Soldier’s Education. O’Brien, Tim (1978). Going After Cacciato. O’Brien, Tim (1990). The Things They Carried. Parnell, Sean & John Bruning (2012). Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan. Vonnegut, Kurt (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five. West, Bing (2005). No True Glory. A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah. Williams, Kaya (2005). Love My Rifle More than You, Young and Female in the U. S. Army. Wood, Trish (2006). What Was Asked of Us. An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It. Wright, Evan (2004). Generation Kill. Wright, Stephen (1983). Meditations in Green. II. Primary Texts - films and TV productions A Mighty Heart (2007, dir. Michael Winterbottom) Avatar (2009, dir. James Cameron) Buying the War (2007; part of PBS Billy Moyer’s Journal, docu) Charlie Wilson’s War (2007, dir. Mike Nichols) Generation Kill (2008, TV-mini series, docu) Grace is Gone (2007, dir.James C. Strouse) Green Zone (2010, dir. Paul Greengrass) In the Valley of Elah (2007, dir. Paul Haggis) Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006, docu) Walter W. Hölbling 126 Lions for Lambs (2007, dir. Robert Redford) My Country, My Country (2006, dir. Laura Poitras, docu) No End in Sight (2007, dir. Charles Ferguson, docu) Off to War (2006, TV-series docu, dir. Brent & Craig Renaud) Poster Girl (2010; dir. Sara Nesson, docu) Redacted (2007, dir. Brian de Palma) Soldiers Pay (2004, dir. Tricia Reagan, David O. Russel, docu) Standard Operating Procedure (2008, dir. Errol Morris, docu) Stop-Loss (2008, dir. Kimberly Peirce) The Ground Truth (2006, dir. Patricia Foulkrod, docu) The Hurt Locker (2008; dir. Kathryn Bigelow The Kingdom (2007, dir. Peter Berg) The Messenger (2009, dir. Oren Moverman) The Oath (2010, dir Laura Poitras, docu) The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004, 3-part TV-mini series, dir. Gilles Kepel, Melville Goodman, Stephenn Holmes, docu) Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (2004, docu) Where Soldiers Come From (2011, dir Heather Courtney, docu) Why We Fight (2005, dir. Eugene Jatrecki, docu) WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception (2005, dir. Danny Schechter, docu) III. Critical Literature Aho, James (1981). Religious Mythology and the Art of War. London: Aldwych Press. Dawes, James (2002). The Language of War. Literature and Culture in the U. S. from the Civil War Through World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Congressional Record, Senate, Mar. 12, 1971, 6395. FitzGerald, Frances (1972). Fire in the Lake. The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. New York: Little Brown & Co. Fulbright, William J. (1966). The Arrogance of Power. New York: Vintage. Heilman, Robert B. (1973). The Iceman, the Arsonist and the Troubled Agent. Tragedy and Melodrama on the Stage. Seattle: U Washington P. Hoffman, Frederick J. (1983). American Melodrama. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publ. Hoffman, Frederick J. (1964). The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination. Princeton: Princeton UP. Hofstadter, Richard (1966). The Paranoid Style in American Politics. London: Cape. Hölbling, Walter (1987). Fiktionen vom Krieg im neueren amerikanischen Roman. Tübingen: Narr. Hölbling, Walter (1993). “Texts and Contexts: Lyndon B. Johnson's Gulf-of-Tonkin Report and his Remarks at Syracuse University.” In: Paul Goetsch & Gerd Hurm (Eds.). Die Rhetorik amerikanischer Präsidenten seit F. D. Roosevelt. Tübingen: Narr. 165-175. Hölbling, Walter (2007). “The Vietnam War: (Post-)Colonial Fictional Discourses and (Hi-) Stories.” In: Jon Roper (Ed.). The United States and the Legacy of the Vietnam War. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 89-120. Hölbling, Walter (2007). “Americans and their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics.” In: Winfried Fluck, Stefan Brandt, Ingrid Thaler (Eds.). Transnational American Studies. Tübingen: Narr. 211-223. ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 127 Jason, Philip & Mark A. Graves (Eds.) (2000). Encyclopedia of American War Literature. New York: Greenwood Press. Just, Ward (1970). Military Men. New York: Knopf. Kennedy, David (1980). Over Here. Oxford UP. Lipschutz, Ronnie D. (2001). Cold War Fantasies. Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy. New York. etc.: Rowman & Littelfield. Louvre, Alfred & J. Walsh (Eds.) (1988). Tell Me Lies About Vietnam. Milton Keynes & Philadelphia: Open University Press. Lundestad, Geir (1998). “American European Cooperation and Conflict: Past, Present, Future”. In: No End to Alliance. The U. S. and Western Europe. Past, Present, Future. London: Macmillan. 245-262. McLoughlin, Kate (2009). The Cambridge Companion to War Writing. Cambridge: CUP. REMF Bibliography, which is part of the Sixties Project sponsored by Viet Nam Generation Inc. and the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville: http: / / lists.village.virginia.edu/ sixties/ HTML_docs/ Resources/ Bibliographies/ RE MF_bib_entry.html Roper, Jon (Ed.) (2007). The United States and the Legacy of the Vietnam War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rove, Karl (2009). Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. New York: Threshold Editions. Slotkin, Richard (1973). 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Bush White House http: / / www.alternet.org/ waroniraq/ http: / / www.democrats.org/ http: / / www.rnc.org/ http: / / www.newdream.org Walter W. Hölbling Institute of American Studies Karl-Franzens-University