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H-Diplo Roundtable Review
www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables
Volume XIV, No. 12 (2012)
10 December 2012
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Copyright (c) 2012 H-Net:  Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
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Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Roundtable Web/Production Editor:  George Fujii

Introduction by Michael J. Allen
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Meredith H. Lair.  Armed with Abundance:  Consumerism & Soldiering in the
Vietnam War.  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
ISBN:  978-0-8078-3481-7 (cloth, $34.95).

Stable URL:
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XIV-12.pdf
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Contents [Page numbers refer to the PDF edition]

Introduction by Michael J. Allen, Northwestern University	2
Review by Jessica Elkind, San Francisco State University	8
Review by David Kieran, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies
at Franklin and Marshall College	12
Review by Richard A. Ruth, U.S. Naval Academy	15
Author's Response by Meredith H. Lair, George Mason University	21
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Introduction by Michael J. Allen, Northwestern University

In a notoriously crowded field, Meredith H. Lair has written an
impressively original history of the American War in Vietnam. Her new
book, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism & Soldiering in the Vietnam War,
eschews the usual concerns of Vietnam War historiography-politics,
diplomacy, and combat-to focus on consumer culture, which she argues was
the most striking but seldom-studied feature of U.S. intervention in
Vietnam. "Combat was infrequent in Vietnam," she writes, "but consumerism
was universal" (146). It was also, she maintains, an important
contributing factor to the U.S. defeat there, limiting American combat
forces to a fraction of U.S. personnel in Vietnam and sapping American
unity, morale, and sense of purpose even as it overheated the South
Vietnamese economy, corrupted Southern society and politics, and supplied
enemy forces with American contraband. Equally debilitating, it caused an
unbridgeable chasm of experience between those on the war's lethal front
lines-the vast majority of whom were Vietnamese joined by the ten to
twenty percent of American GIs who saw combat on a regular basis-and the
overwhelming majority of Americans 'in the rear with the gear,' a place of
relative comfort and safety that kept most Americans, including those in
Vietnam, from ever really knowing the war or taking meaningful part in it,
then or now.  Contrary to American memory of the war with its relentless
focus on American suffering, Lair contends that most Americans in Vietnam
were strangely unharmed by their nation's disastrous policy there, making
the war more the rule than the exception in the nation's recent history.

A half-century later, Americans are more insulated from war than ever,
which may explain why they go to war so often, why they wage war so
absentmindedly, if fixedly, and why they regard war and warriors with such
ambivalence. In Vietnam and since, Lair writes, ever fewer Americans,
including those in uniform, have had any direct experience with war's most
basic realities of deprivation and death. Instead they fought their
increasingly frequent and extended wars by push-button, powerpoint, and
remote control, cocooned inside a global archipelago of military bases
where "cold beer and clean sheets, not foxholes and firefights were often
the norm" (247).  As the line between wartime and peacetime blurred, to
invoke Mary Dudziak's recent analysis, so did the difference between
homeland and war zone, with American military garrisons coming to resemble
a cross between an office park and shopping mall even as American office
parks and shopping malls-not to mention airports and schools-increasingly
came to look and feel like armed garrisons.1  As the anthropologist
Catherine Lutz has explored in her work on U.S. military bases, and
journalists like Rajiv Chandrasekaran have shown in dispatches from the
war on terror, there is little difference between Baghdad's green zone and
Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base, where CENTCOM commanders oversee the
nation's multiple wars in the Middle East in real time, just as it is not
easy to tell Afghanistan's Bagram Airfield from Creech Air Force Base
outside Las Vegas, where pilots fly drone aircraft half a world away using
satellite imagery and live two-way communication with Americans on the
scene.2 At any and all these places uniformed Americans stare into screens
showing military-aged "militants" who live and die at their discretion,
surrounded by the same brand goods, empty calories, and pop culture one
would find on any college campus, where students of roughly the same age
simulate such mediated warfare on their dorm room computers.

When viewed in this light what is most strange about American war-making
is its ordinariness.  Americans, most scholars included, have
traditionally thought of war as exceptional, not normal. And even for
those of us who have come to see permanent war as the nation's default
foreign policy-the 'new normal'-it remains difficult to shed inherited
notions of war as a violent rupture with everyday life, at least for those
charged with waging it. Thus it can be hard to recognize suburban
commuters as soldiers, just as it is difficult to reconcile America's
ubiquitous consumer electronics with its capacity for killing, or to
square "the order and abundance" of its military "with traditional ideas
about war," reputedly a realm of fog and self-sacrifice (3).

Yet American warfare is nothing if not orderly and abundant, and,
according to Lair, its abundance "first appeared in Vietnam," which in her
telling seems more a surreal consumer's emporium than the bloody quagmire
Americans typically imagine (4). Lair's portrait of the "war zone
wonderland" (182,) Americans created in Vietnam, awash in consumer goods
and mass culture with a frisson of sex and violence, resembles nothing so
much as contemporary America carried to its logical extremes, which is
precisely her point. Americans waged war in Vietnam and after, Lair
suggests, not out of necessity or at great self-sacrifice, but from an
overweening and self-serving abundance that "made it easier to go to war,
again and again and again" than to refrain from doing so, and not just for
politicians but for the well-provisioned men and women in the U.S.
military (247). According to this view, U.S. intervention in Vietnam was
no great mystery or exception; it was the logical, even inevitable,
extension and expression of an abundantly armed nation. It is Americans'
reluctance to confront this truth, Lair contends, that led them,
historians included, to avert their eyes from the self-indulgence
everywhere on display in American wars. By calling our attention to it,
Lair challenges her readers to reflect more clearly and critically upon
their proclivity for war.

For her reviewers and, I suspect, for most of her readers, this is a bold
and bracing agenda that, when coupled with Lair's careful archival
research and flair for colorful details and clever turns of phrase, will
be a welcome addition to the best literature on American soldiering in
Vietnam and over the past century more generally. All three reviewers
applaud Lair's "fascinating and original book" for its deep research and
provocative analysis, with Richard Ruth hailing it as "one of the most
important-and satisfying-recent histories of the Vietnam War." In
particular they welcome its attention to what David Kieran calls the
"long-known but surprisingly under-investigated reality of the war in
Vietnam: that the vast majority of Americans who served there did not do
so in a combat capacity," and its unavoidable challenge to the prevailing
image of American veterans of the war as victims of fierce combat and
misdirected domestic criticism.  If American soldiers in Vietnam were
discontented, Ruth and Kieran note, it had less to do with hardship and
danger than with serving in a war so radically at odds with their
expectations, which helps to explain Lair's findings that morale was
actually lower among rear echelon troops than it was among combat
infantrymen.

But if military service in Vietnam failed to conform to popular visions of
war, it proved paradigmatic in terms of the emerging consumerist models of
military service that defined the All-Volunteer Force.3  All reviewers
praise Lair's book for painting the American experience in Vietnam as
typical of longer, broader trends rather than seeing it as something
unusual or consigned to the benighted past. While her reviewers recognize
that Lair's frank assessments of American extravagance in Vietnam and
since will upset, even outrage, some readers who will rightly see in it an
implicit and at times explicit critique of American motives and actions
there, they praise her handling of individual service and collective
guilt. "Her book does not dishonor anyone's service," Ruth reassures, it
"only sharpens the extraordinary experience of combat veterans whose tours
of duty were spent outside the relative safety and comfort of these well
protected and well stocked bases." Similarly, Kieran finds that Lair's
"recuperation of the full spectrum of veterans' experiences" enables "a
more complete history of the war and a more accurate recognition of
veterans." All of which is to say that while Lair's evidence and analysis
are tough, she does not deny or disdain the possibility of honorable
service in America's war in Vietnam, nor does she explicitly condemn that
war or successive American wars as immoral or imperial, however much her
conclusions may point in that direction. Thus Lair's book will likely find
its place among that handful of classic critical commentaries on American
soldiers in Vietnam that instructors regularly turn to when teaching the
subject, including Christian Appy's unrivaled Working-Class War: American
Combat Soldiers and Vietnam, the brilliant fiction of Tim O'Brien, and
Jonathan Schell's essential reporting.4

But even as her reviewers praise the originality of Lair's study, the
depth of her research, and the wit of her voice, Kieran and Jessica Elkind
both wish that the author "had expanded her argument a bit more in some
areas," reflecting her work's unusual potential and, I sense, a certain
impatience with her unwillingness or inability to articulate its full
implications and importance, perhaps for fear of giving offense.  Elkind
voices disappointment that Lair focuses so narrowly on "internal factors"
in the U.S. military without devoting more attention to "the diplomatic,
political, and cultural atmosphere" in which it operated, and wonders how
the Vietnamese engaged in and understood American consumerism all around
them. Lair often presents the Vietnamese as stoic foils to her well-fed
Americans-"Charlie don't get too much USO," she quotes Apocalypse Now
approvingly; " his idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat"
(143)-yet we know from David Hunt that a rising consumer culture was an
important contributing cause to the Vietnamese revolution, from Mark
Bradley that exposure to that culture was one of the main cleavages within
Vietnamese society that divided North from South, and from even cursory
attention to Marxist-Leninist thought that material interests were
centrally important for all combatants, making it problematic to treat
consumerism as if it mattered only for Americans, even if they did revel
in it to a remarkable degree.5 In addition to this critique Kieran calls
for more attention to race and gender, particularly the way that women and
minorities excluded from full participation in the consumer culture Lair
describes emerged as critics of the war.  Here one might also wish for
more attention to the fact that no matter how good GIs had it relative to
the spartan ideals of popular lore or the mythic past, many still rightly
saw themselves as falling further behind more fortunate sons who pursued
college degrees or entered careers in an age of declining blue collar work
and rising inflation.  The bases soldiers served on in Vietnam may have
been more abundantly supplied than ever, but the economy they returned to
was far less desirous of their labor than the post-World War II economy to
which their fathers returned, and this undoubtedly cheapened the value of
their service in their own eyes and the eyes of others, no matter how
comfortable that service may have been.

Such comparative historical perspective may be what is missing most from
Lair's account, which pays little attention to American military history
before the 1960s. Contrary to her claims, there was nothing especially new
about Americans fighting in the way she describes. In World War II, only
800,000 Americans saw regular combat in a military of 16.3 million
people.6 Then, as now, Americans waged war with machines, not men, at
least not their own men. Then as now they profited by doing so, though
never so widely as they believed.7 Policy and profit were inextricably
linked, and not just for the powerful but for citizens and soldiers.8
Lair's work shows that this linkage was reinforced through the everyday
practices of the Cold War military, and she smartly points out ways in
which those patterns have redounded to today, as her reviewers note.  But
the conditions she finds in Vietnam were more changes of degree than of
kind.

This is not to say that they were insignificant. Few things are new in
history, and even recurrent patterns reveal something unique about a given
time and place. What I found most striking about Lair's account was not
the bounty of Vietnam era soldiers that so impressed the author -even the
most pampered rear echelon troops enjoyed few comforts not readily
available to college students and faculty then or now-but how social
provisions that were once so taken for granted as to be invisible now
appear rare and noteworthy.  For if today's soldiers are, in most
respects, strikingly ordinary, they are extraordinary in one sense: they
are among the few working people in the United States to still enjoy
state-guaranteed economic security.  That this fact is remarkable has less
to do with changes in the military than with changes in the nation it
served. The U.S. military has long been armed with abundance.  But the
nation that armed it is no longer so abundant toward the working people it
sends to war, not unless and until they become its 'servicemen and women.'
 Indeed, right about the time the Vietnam War ended, the U.S. economy
began shedding the jobs workers relied on, American businessmen and
politicians launched a relentless assault on their unions, and the U.S.
military became the only remaining large employer in the United States
that still valued the labor and dignity of working Americans and rewarded
them accordingly.  Surely this is among the reasons that the All-Volunteer
Force continues to attract recruits sufficient to wage the nation's
multiple and interminable wars. But its success in that regard is more
indicative of the poverty and inequality outside the U.S. military than it
is of abundance within it.

Participants:

Meredith Lair is an Associate Professor in the Department of History & Art
History at George Mason University, where she teaches classes on the
Vietnam War and war in American society. In addition to Armed with
Abundance, she recently published "The Education Center at The Wall and
the Rewriting of History in the Winter 2012 issue of The Public Historian.
 She is currently working on a second edition of The Vietnam Reader for
Routledge and a new research project about legacies of the Vietnam War and
the construction of American veteranhood. She received her PhD in History
from Penn State.

Michael J. Allen is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern
University. He is author of Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and
the Unending Vietnam War (UNC, 2009), which examined the political
legacies of American defeat in Vietnam through the close study of the
POW/MIA movement, and he is currently at work on a book titled The
Confidence of Crisis: Confronting the Imperial Presidency, 1968-1992,
which treats the rise and fall of antiwar activism in American practical
politics.

Jessica Elkind received her Ph.D. from UCLA and is an Assistant Professor
of history at San Francisco State University.  She is currently working on
a book on U.S. nation-building projects and the role of American aid
workers in South Vietnam from 1955-1965.

David Kieran is Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at
Franklin and Marshall College and the co-founder of the War and Peace
Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association. He is completing his
manuscript, "Sundered by a Memory:" Foreign Policy, Militarism, and the
Vietnamization of American Memory, which is under advance contract with
the Culture, Politics, and the Cold War Series at the University of
Massachusetts Press.

Richard A. Ruth teaches Southeast Asian history at the U.S. Naval Academy.
He is the author of In Buddha's Company: Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War.

Notes

1 Mary L. Dudziak, Wartime: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

2 Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle
Against U.S. Military Posts (New York: New York University Press, 2009);
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's
Green Zone (New York: Knopf, 2006); Jessica Vander Velde, "CENTCOM Unveils
New $75M Headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base," Tampa Bay Times, 29
November 2011; David Zucchino, "Drone Pilots Have a Front-Row Seat On War,
>From Half A World Away," Los Angeles Times, 21 February 2010; Elisabeth
Bumiller, "We Have Met the Enemy and He is Powerpoint," New York Times, 26
April 2010.

3 Beth Bailey, America's Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

4 Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Tim O'Brien, The
Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990);
Jonathan Schell, The Real War: The Classic Reporting on the Vietnam War
With A New Essay (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).

5 David Hunt, Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to
Total War, 1959-1968 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008);
Mark Philip Bradley, Vietnam at War (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009).

6 Gerald Linderman, The World Within War: America's Combat Experience in
World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1.

7 David Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and
War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 615-68.

8 Robert B. Westbrook, Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in
World War II (Washington: Smithsonian University Press, 2004); James
Sparrow, The Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big
Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

-----------------

Review by Jessica Elkind, San Francisco State University

In a classic Vietnam War story, American soldiers patrolling the jungle
find themselves caught in an ambush staged by an unseen, unheard enemy.
These men have spent days or weeks trudging through the tropical humidity
of Vietnam and subsisting on C rations. For these soldiers, the enemy
could be anywhere and could strike anytime. Meredith Lair's fascinating
and original book, Armed with Abundance, turns this narrative on its head.
By focusing on non-combat soldiers, her book fundamentally challenges the
conventional image of American veterans of the Vietnam War as warriors who
experienced deprivation, danger, and near-constant fear. Instead, as Lair
convincingly demonstrates, the vast majority of American military
personnel lived in material comfort and relative safety, especially those
serving in support capacities and stationed on rearward bases. For many
soldiers and sailors in Vietnam, the worst hardships they endured arose
from nagging boredom and a profound disappointment in the gulf between
their expectations of what the war would be like and the reality of their
experiences.

Lair argues that during the Vietnam War, political and military officials
tried to make the lives of American soldiers as easy as possible by
providing them with access to creature comforts and reminders of home.
They did so in order to raise morale among the troops serving in Vietnam
as well as to attract new recruits in the United States (U.S.) In fact,
the military leadership saw the very outcome of the conflict in Vietnam as
hinging on warzone abundance, so they did everything in their power to
ensure that the troops lived, ate, played, and shopped as if they were not
actually at war.  If American soldiers were well fed and were housed in
comfortable bases, they would not complain about their living conditions
and might even encourage friends and relatives at home to enlist.  If they
had ample opportunities to shop in American post exchanges (P.X.) and
participate in recreational activities on U.S. bases, they would not need
to relieve their boredom by causing trouble in Vietnam's towns and cities.
 And if they enjoyed a generally higher standard of living than they did
at home, these soldiers would not object to the violence they were
supporting or the aims of the U.S. military occupation in Vietnam.
However, though the soldiers may have enjoyed all this abundance, the
strategy pursued by military officials did not successfully address the
basic problems of chronically low morale among the troops and lack of a
clear understanding of why they were in Vietnam. As Lair explains in her
introduction, "consumer goods and corporeal satisfaction were poor
substitutes for a just and winnable cause" (7).  And as she writes later
in book, "military authorities softened the war experience but failed to
infuse it with meaning" (106).

Lair also explains why the story of non-combat soldiers in Vietnam has
been largely forgotten or ignored.  As she shows, upon their return to the
U.S., the veterans closed ranks and presented themselves as a homogenous
group of beleaguered soldiers who had all risked their lives and eschewed
the modern American lifestyle in the fight against communism. The wartime
experiences of desk clerks or cooks on rearward bases became conflated
with those of grunts on the front lines or pilots flying dangerous rescue
missions.  Personal accounts and histories of the war advanced this
narrative, focusing on sacrifice and danger as opposed to abundance and
comfort. The stereotype of Vietnam veterans served several important
functions, argues Lair. First, it preserved the popular ideal of American
military personnel as citizen-soldiers fighting to uphold their values and
beliefs rather than professional warriors fighting for a paycheck and
amenities. Perhaps more importantly, the emphasis on sacrifice and combat
seemed to justify American behavior during the war and to "clarify who
deserve[d] to win" (5). Stories about the austerity and self-denial of
soldiers legitimized the political goals of the war, cast the veterans as
heroes, and helped assuage Americans' guilt about the horrors their
country had unleashed upon the Vietnamese. However, as Lair explains,
"when abundance is understood to permeate a war zone-enough food,
ammunition, and creature comforts to stay in the fight forever-the
violence suddenly appears less restrained, the charity seems less
ennobling, and the men who mete out both appear, somehow, less heroic"
(21). When considered in this light, it is hardly surprising that few
veterans, observers, or scholars have ever focused on the material
excesses of the war in Vietnam.

Lair writes in a clear and engaging style, and her book is well organized.
Her sources are varied and extensive. Lair relies heavily on diaries and
books written by soldiers, especially rear-echelon personnel. She also
makes use of U.S. government and military documents, as well as military
newspapers, including unofficial or underground papers published by some
units. Many sections of Armed with Abundance provide statistics and
figures, for example the number of swimming pools built in Vietnam, the
types and numbers of consumer goods bought by soldiers each year, or the
volume of building materials shipped from the U.S. Lair's inclusion of
these statistics mirrors military and government officials' penchant for
using quantitative data to measure their success in the Vietnam War.

In her introductory chapter, Lair explains the importance of considering
non-combat soldiers, whose role and experiences have largely been ignored
by scholars as well as in popular representations of the war.  According
to Lair, somewhere between 75 and 90% of all military personnel in Vietnam
served in non-combat positions.  The different estimates depend not only
on varying definitions of what activities constituted combat but also on
the area of the country in which the troops were stationed, the time
period considered, and their service branch.  Lair's next chapter deals
with the tension between grunts and military personnel stationed on reward
bases or serving in support roles. The disdain that many combat soldiers
held for these men and women is evident in their nickname for them-REMFs
(rear-echelon mother fuckers).  Lair explains some of strategies that the
military brass employed to smooth over these tensions, most of which
failed.

Subsequent chapters explore the physical living quarters and conditions of
non-combat soldiers, especially the large bases constructed throughout the
country; the diverse array of recreational, educational, and entertainment
opportunities provided to the soldiers by the military; the rampant
consumerism among American troops in Vietnam; and the carnival atmosphere
of the war itself that allowed the soldiers to escape their ordinary lives
and cope with the poverty, despair, and death all around them. In her
chapter on military bases in Vietnam, Lair describes the massive
infrastructure projects of the U.S. government. She depicts non-combat
soldiers as shrewd laborers who "subtly negotiated better terms of
employment" for themselves (68). These improved terms included more
military and civilian supplies than the troops could ever hope to use and
sophisticated logistics systems to deliver those supplies to far-flung
parts of the country. The U.S. military and private contractors
constructed elaborate bases, which functioned as mini-cities. Most
American troops, including those stationed on remote bases, enjoyed hot
meals, fresh produce, and treats such as ice cream. Their living quarters
often contained radios, mini-fridges, and coffee makers. Lair's chapter on
recreation programs in Vietnam details the "war on boredom" launched by
military authorities to help occupy non-combat soldiers during their free
time.  Through R & R (usually an abbreviation for rest and relaxation)
programs within Vietnam and outside of the country, American troops had
the opportunity to play tourists. Athletic programs, swimming pools, craft
rooms, libraries, educational venues, U.S.O. shows and other performances,
and open mess clubs--which were basically bars located on the bases and
subsidized by the military--offered further diversion and distraction.  In
addition to recreational opportunities, the military provided numerous
opportunities for the troops to shop. Lair describes the P.X. system in
great detail and reveals how soldiers bought necessities as well as luxury
items, such as cameras and electronics.  She argues that consumerism among
soldiers in Vietnam served as a counterweight to Vietnamese poverty and
"seemed to affirm the superiority of American culture" (148). Finally,
Lair's chapter on "war zone wonderland" explores how many American troops
used the physical and psychological distance from their "normal" lives to
engage in behavior-from drug use and sex to gambling and selling consumer
goods on the black market-that would be deemed taboo or illegal at home.
She also demonstrates the lengths to which many non-combat troops went in
order to legitimize their experiences in Vietnam, usually by
misrepresenting their service or exaggerating their role in combat
operations.

Among the more interesting aspects of Lair's book are the scattered
passages in which she compares the experiences of American troops with
those of North Vietnamese or National Liberation Front (N.L.F.) fighters.
Particularly revealing is her brief discussion at the end of her
recreation chapter of how the morale issue affected North Vietnamese and
N.L.F soldiers (144). As Lair correctly points out, for Vietnamese on both
sides of the battle lines, the conflict was as much about independence and
the nature of their society as geopolitics. And the authoritarian
governments of both North and South Vietnam squashed dissent and so did
not have to contend with the same types of morale problems as the United
States.  Lair could have explored this issue--the differences in how the
military leadership of the U.S., South Vietnam, and North Vietnam (not to
mention the southern leaders of the N.L.F.) dealt with recruitment and
retention, as well as flagging morale-in more detail. Doing so might have
provided a starker contrast between the Americans and Vietnamese and
bolstered her argument about the uniqueness of how the U.S. went to war in
Vietnam.

She also might have considered more fully the relations between the
American military and its South Vietnamese allies. Except for the
occasional mention of how soldiers in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam
(ARVN) were generally denied the abundance and wealth enjoyed by their
American counterparts, Lair basically leaves the South Vietnamese soldiers
out of her story.  Did the ARVN, which received a significant amount of
material, technical, and logistical support from the U.S. government, try
to replicate the American model for its own troops? How did the disparity
between the material conditions of American and South Vietnamese soldiers
affect their relationships, on and off the battlefield?

These suggestions about topics that Lair might have developed further
point to my primary, if relatively minor, critique of her book-that it
would have benefited from more context about the diplomatic, political,
and cultural atmosphere in which American military leaders as well as
their troops were operating. Given their access to American products and
their relative material comfort, the men and women whom Lair describes
could have been practically anywhere in the world. Living and working
within the confines of their rearward bases-or at least returning to those
bases after providing support to troops in forward positions-these
soldiers seemed to be completely disconnected from the world and war all
around them. And that is part of Lair's point.  But her discussion depends
almost entirely on internal factors, such as the tensions between combat
and non-combat personnel and the negotiations between military brass and
the soldiers.  Surely, external factors also mattered and helped shape
U.S. military policies and practices in Vietnam. By overlooking how the
interests of American Congressional figures funding the war, the demands
of the U.S. government, or pressure from South Vietnamese military and
political leaders influenced American military decision-making, Lair seems
to leave out a key piece of the story. I do not mean to dwell on the book
that Lair did not write, merely to suggest that there might be additional
explanations for some of the phenomena she describes. In many ways, Armed
with Abundance tells the reader more about the transformations in the U.S.
military in particular and American culture in general than it does about
U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Ultimately, Armed with Abundance is a social and cultural history of the
U.S. military during the Vietnam era. Lair convincingly demonstrates how
many of the features characteristic of the contemporary American
military-the massive overseas bases insulated from the fighting all around
them, the opportunities for consumption and high degree of material
comfort available to soldiers serving outside of the U.S., and the
privatization of American warfare itself-had their start in Vietnam. She
draws explicit comparisons between the experiences of non-combat soldiers
in the Vietnam and the Iraq War. In fact, Armed with Abundance begins with
a story about a U.S. Army journalist in Iraq, who refused to partake of
the elaborate dessert bar at his base's dining facility out of a
principled stand that he had done nothing to deserve cake. The book ends
with an epilogue that describes how the wartime abundance, comfort, and
consumption that characterized the Vietnam War have reappeared during
every subsequent American military conflict.

Armed with Abundance contributes significantly to scholarship on the
Vietnam War and especially on transformations in the U.S. military since
the mid-twentieth century.  Lair's arguments are provocative and
persuasive. She challenges readers to reconsider their assumptions about
how the U.S. wages war and about the experiences of Vietnam veterans. Her
book, especially the chapters on entertainment and consumerism among U.S.
soldiers, will be a valuable addition to the reading I assign in my
courses on the American involvement in Vietnam. Although the experiences
of veterans of that war cannot be reduced to a singular tale, most
Americans in Vietnam did share access to material goods, entertainment,
and a basic level of comfort.  Lair does not argue that the war involved
no sacrifice or that the tens of thousands of Americans killed or wounded
in Vietnam were insignificant, but that there was, quite literally, a lot
more to the story.

-----------------
Review by David Kieran, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies
at Franklin and Marshall College

Meredith Lair's important book emerges from her willingness to seriously
interrogate a long-known but surprisingly under-investigated reality of
the war in Vietnam: that the vast majority of Americans who served there
did not do so in a combat capacity. Acknowledging this gives rise to the
two related questions that are critical to the study of the war and its
legacy: What experiences did define these service members' deployments,
and what does the answer to this question and its elision from
remembrances of the war, reveal about how the United States waged - and
wages - war and imagines the nature of its global military presence?  The
result of Lair's inquiry is a deeply researched and compellingly written
book that significantly contributes to scholarship on the Vietnam War, its
legacy, and the study of contemporary military culture.

Lair's central contention is that most American servicemen passed their
deployments in comparable ease on military bases in the south of Vietnam,
working quotidian support jobs in which "monotony and frustration were
often the greatest occupational hazards" (82; 30). This frustration
stemmed from somewhat contradictory impulses as soldiers simultaneously
resented their service in an increasingly unpopular and unwinnable war and
found that serving in support roles did not fulfill their Cold War
expectations of military service (89; 104-05).  Lair shows that the
military, anxious to address these problems, provided soldiers with ample
leisure activities and creature comforts; her catalogues of these efforts
- from the baking of "7,000 doughnuts each day" in Da Nang to "eighty-one
basketball courts, sixty-four volleyball courts,  [and] twelve swimming
pools" at Long Binh - are astounding (78; 33).

Yet Lair does more than tally American extravagance. Noting that "what was
new in Vietnam was all the stuff," she posits Vietnam as a transitional
moment when domestic practices of consumption fundamentally reshaped
American militarism (223).  Freshly examining familiar records, Lair
demonstrates that the United States' approach to war in Vietnam - and thus
by extension the experience of both Americans and Vietnamese who endured
it -was deeply informed by Cold-War consumer culture. Multiple forces
shaped this culture's development, and Lair illustrates how military
leaders and donut-eating, basketball-playing GIs were nearly equal
partners in creating it and shaping its contours.  Military leaders were
deeply concerned about declining morale, but servicemen were not simply
malcontents to be pacified; they were active participants who wielded
economic and structural power in a permissive environment, embraced the
opportunities that the military created, and demanded more of them (50-51;
204; 198). As Lair engagingly puts it, for these soldiers "there was no
point at which group satisfaction was achieved because, just as in
civilian life, there was always some new amenity being enjoyed by some
other unit somewhere else: a bowling alley, a pizza oven, American Red
Cross girls, or a bowling alley where American Red Cross Girls served
pizza" (100). And yet Lair also nicely captures soldiers' ambivalence amid
the apparent abandon with which they consumed; support troops were
chagrinned by their activities, and combat soldiers were at least as
jealous as they were contemptuous of the lives lived by their peers in the
rear (54; 58).

Armed with Abundance thus offers a complex account of the goods and
services that the military provided to eager American troops, how that
availability was enabled by and intersected with broader discourses of the
historical moment, and how those discourses defined the American military
experience in Vietnam.  But the book's most important work perhaps lies in
its contribution to more fully historicizing the post-war period.  Some of
these contributions are historiographic; Lair's illustration of how the
military's efforts "helped American companies penetrate the lucrative
Asian market," for example, draws attention to the war-time roots of the
economic relationships central to post-war U.S. policy towards Vietnam
(77).  More important, though, is the book's challenge to dominant
discourses of the war's legacy and both historical and contemporary
imaginings of the U.S. military's global presence. Arguing that "it is
hard to imagine what the war would have looked like if no 'restraint' had
been used," Lair undercuts remembrances of the war as having been
insufficiently prosecuted and presents consumer culture as contributing to
the war's larger failures by alienating Vietnamese people who, in addition
to suffering violence in conventional ways, were the exploited labor -
including sexual labor - that both enabled and witnessed this vociferous
consumption (142; 136; 79; 241).  Lair nicely explicates ordinary
servicemen's complicated relationships with these workers, but one wishes
for somewhat more discussion of how the U.S. military and its contractors
set about recruiting and managing them (205-209).  Nonetheless, that the
corporate and sexual exploitation of Vietnamese labor was a contributing
factor to the war's larger destruction of Vietnam is an important claim
that is richly contextualized here.

Also important is Lair's discussion of how the dominant social
construction of Vietnam veteran identity has relied upon eliding the
culture of consumption and the diversity of soldiers' experiences in favor
of a more politically useful and culturally tenable remembrance that
emphasizes combat (59-61). Lair deserves credit for compassionately
arguing for the recuperation of the full spectrum of veterans'
experiences, rightly claiming that doing so would enable both a more
complete history of the war and a more accurate recognition of veterans
(21).

Lair's assessment of veterans' experiences against the dominant
remembrance of the war is central to her broader reconsideration of the
nature of the U.S. military's global presence. By emphatically
demonstrating the capacity and consequences of American empire, she
challenges readers to acknowledge how "bounty's absence in war narratives
ensures that the American people continue to think of their country not as
a superpower . . . but rather as an exemplar nation that deploys its
citizen soldiers only when absolutely necessary" (244). Her comparisons
between base culture in Vietnam and Iraq, where "as in Vietnam, military
authorities tried to maintain troop morale by closing the gap between
stateside and war zone living conditions," illuminate the historical roots
of both the military policies and cultural attitudes that dominate
American empire's contemporary manifestations (229). These comparisons
reveal an important way in which Iraq replicates elements of the Vietnam
War, but here as well one wishes for a bit more: do the attitudes of
Generation X and millennial consumers precisely mirror those of the Baby
Boom generation? And do attitudes towards consumerism differ between the
draft and reluctant-enlistee Army of Vietnam and the contemporary
All-Volunteer force?

As the few questions that I have posed throughout this review indicate, if
there are critiques to be made of Armed with Abundance, they are that one
sometimes wishes that Lair had expanded her argument a bit more in some
areas. This is particularly so with regard to race and gender. To be fair,
Lair frames her argument as "fall[ing] almost exclusively on men because
the war story that I am seeking to reframe belongs to them" (18). While
this reframing is ably accomplished, this focus results in the book's not
interrogating base culture and consumption quite as fully as it might
have.  I am left wondering how women responded to a male-oriented,
hyper-sexualized consumer culture in which American women sometimes
figured as another form of sexualized, exploitable labor (135; 129; 171;
184).  More discussion of whether and how American women engaged with,
enabled, or resisted these power dynamics; whether the military sought to
provide educational and recreational opportunities that targeted women;
and whether women advocated for them or created alternative spaces would
have been illuminating. The same holds true for Armed with Abundance's
treatment of race, particularly given the extent of African-American
anti-war activism by the end of the war.1 Lair's claim that "the desire to
relax and consume belonged to everyone" in a Cold War culture marked by
racial inequality seems accurate but insufficient, for even if the desires
were equal the opportunities may not have been, and the book would have
benefitted from more attention to the racial discourses that informed the
provision and consumption of leisure and entertainment.

That Armed with Abundance does not push some issues as far as I might wish
- particularly when the author does not specifically promise that she will
take them up - should not detract from the recognition that this nuanced,
thoughtful book is an achievement. Meredith Lair offers a more complicated
understanding of how the United States military conceptualized fighting
the war in Vietnam, how American servicemen experienced it, and how that
history informs the production and maintenance of military empire.  She
also points to important avenues for future research. Scholars of the
war's legacy in Vietnam must grapple with how "base[s] so large that it
was impossible to imagine that [they] had never been there" have figured
into that nation's post-war landscape and remembrance and how the wartime
labor on and around those bases has shaped post-war lives in Vietnam (73);
scholars of U.S. base culture must ask how the legacy of Vietnam shapes
the intersection of militarism and consumerism in other countries and in
other moments; and scholars interested in the culture of the Iraq War will
have to contend with consumption as a key site at which the United States
has encountered and grappled with Vietnam's legacy. For these scholars,
and for all of us interested in the Vietnam War and its legacy, Meredith
Lair's book is critical reading.

Notes

1 See, for example, Herman Graham III, Brothers Vietnam War: Black Power,
Manhood, and the Military Experience (Gainesville: University of Florida
Press, 2003).

-----------------
Review by Richard A. Ruth, U.S. Naval Academy

Thalia was the Greek goddess of festivity and luxurious banquets. As one
of the three Graces, she possessed the power to bestow unlimited food,
music, and gaiety on any gathering of men that honored her name. She was
also a Muse - the patron of comedy - whose possession of a grotesque mask
allowed her to transform the most somber of souls into an entertaining
fool. After reading Meredith H. Lair's Armed with Abundance, I am
compelled to recognize Thalia over Ares, the god of war, as the divine
architect of most Americans' adventures in the Vietnam War. Lair
demonstrates that far more U.S. servicemen experienced the event as an
ironic farce of luxury and opulence than did those who endured it as a
grim tragedy of despair and loss.  And in doing so Lair has written what
is certainly one of the most important - and satisfying - recent histories
of the Vietnam War.  A ground-breaking work, this meticulously researched
and lively study has the power to transform long-held views of what the
Vietnam War was for those who experienced it.  It also could change the
popular image of the "Vietnam vet" in our society. And for these reasons
it certain to generate controversy - and maybe even anger - amongst
veterans, scholars, and those dedicated to preserving these engrained but
inaccurate images.

Meredith Lair presents a history of the war that focuses on life in the
rear echelon, the area of operation for more than seventy-five percent of
the American servicemen who served in South Vietnam.  She argues that the
U.S. military (and the Army in particular) used an abundance of
morale-boosting perks - from rich food to extensive sports facilities to
dazzling shopping opportunities - to insulate military personnel from
boredom and depravation. "The U.S. military could not provide convincing
guarantees that the war would be won, that the ends would justify the
terrible means," Lair asserts, "so it tried to make its unhappy charges as
comfortable as possible" (92).

Lair undermines the popular image of the "typical" experience in the war
by demonstrating that the exploits of a combat infantryman conveyed in
countless news stories, memoirs, and films were far from the norm. The
line of exhausted grunts slogging through the rice paddies of the Mekong
Delta became the dominant symbol of service because it was reproduced
repeatedly by foreign correspondents during the war and by Hollywood and
commemorative monuments afterward.  Lair's work transforms the image of
the typical G.I. in the Vietnam War. He is not the "ascetic
citizen-soldier" enduring constant danger and depravation in a foreign war
zone; he is a pampered rear-echelon functionary who wages a daily contest
against boredom and silly regulations.

Lair's study draws a sharp contrast between combat soldiers and support
personnel. And although both are now labeled "Vietnam vets" (and bear the
assumptions of what that tag implies), there were profound differences
between how "grunts" and "REMFs" spent their time in the war theater.  The
location and occupational assignment of a soldier determined the danger he
faced.  In fact, so great is the difference that Lair characterizes the
relationship between the two as belonging to the same side but serving in
"different wars" (23), a contrast encapsulated as the difference between
being airborne and being "chairborne" (24).  She does not utterly dismiss
the danger posed to all U.S. military personnel serving in a conflict
where roadside ambushes, mortars and rocket-propelled grenade attacks, and
terrorist strikes on urban facilities exposed all personnel to potential
harm; but the daily difficulties of the rear are characterized more by
petty harassments and the threat of boredom than by attacks from the PLAF
(Viet Cong) or the PAVN (North Vietnamese Army).

Lair highlights the example of the sprawling U.S. Army complex at Long
Binh to demonstrate the degree to which these rear-echelon soldiers were
isolated from combat and insulated by comfort.  Estimated in area to be
the size of Cleveland, Ohio, the Long Binh Post was a massive but orderly
city of 3,500 buildings, 180 miles of roads, and a regular bus service to
ferry about the 60,000 or so Americans stationed there. As the home to
U.S. Army Vietnam Headquarters it boasted eighty-one basketball courts,
sixty-four volleyball courts, twelve swimming pools, eight softball
fields, eight multipurpose courts, six tennis courts, five craft shops,
three football fields, three weight rooms, three libraries, three service
clubs, two miniature golf courses, a movie theater, a barbecue pit,
libraries, stores, and other entertainment and sports facilities. It even
built a war museum with dioramas that conjured up Disneyland's attractions
in their campy garishness. Open messes served unlimited quantities of
alcohol, and the spas that doubled as brothels sought only the thinnest of
veils to conceal their true purpose.  Lair depicts life inside this
"virtual REMF citadel" as bordering the surreal; she includes fascinating
recollections by one soldier, for example, who participated in "lazy ass
competitions" to determine who in his unit could work the least. This same
soldier got lucky by landing a job as a life guard at the base's pool, a
duty he regularly performed while stoned; he rescued drowning swimmers by
yelling "Stand up, stupid!" because the pool's deepest point was only four
feet. He seems to speak for many when he determines that victory in the
rear was measured by the degree to which he could remain isolated from the
war (43).

In a "war on boredom" soldiers struggled to remain distracted by attending
musicals at the Armed Forces Theatre, taking in Bob Hope shows, and
earning college credit through correspondence courses offered through the
United States Armed Forces Institute. They played tourist by jetting off
on well planned holidays to Hong Kong, Sydney, and Honolulu, or by driving
down to the Vietnamese resort at Vung Tau.  They practiced being soldiers
by shooting pop guns at carnival games or playing with apparatuses that
simulated a bombing run on an enemy camp. And they drank.  A lot.  Each
soldier was allowed to purchase five cases of beer from the P.X. each
month when not drinking in the many Army-operated open messes that sold
unlimited amounts of liquor to G.I.s.  They devoted enormous amounts of
time and energy to diverting their senses from the reality of the war they
had come to carry out.

The most fascinating chapter in Lair's book concerns the wealth of
consumer goods sucked up by the soldiers while stationed in South Vietnam.
Lair explains this orgy of consumerism within the cultural context of the
United States in the decades after World War II. "When these children of
plenty - or the hope of plenty - grew up and went off to war against
communism in Vietnam," she writes, "they took their standards and desires
with them" (146). The U.S. military, in recognizing that desire, sought to
ameliorate the soldiers' boredom and anxieties by engendering a system of
P.X. stores, shopping catalogs, and shipping services available to all
soldiers but used primarily by those in support positions. The
comparatively high salaries in the war theater combined with the low price
of the available high-end goods encouraged many soldiers to pass the time
by shopping. "For many G.I.'s, their war experience was made exceptional
not by what they carried," Lair writes with a nod toward Tim O'Brien's
classic novel, "but rather by what they bought" (146). Base Stores, Main
Stores, and other P.X. installations allowed rear area soldiers to acquire
nearly every food item, magazine, toiletry, and luxury item they desired.
In addition to staggering quantities of liquor, soldiers stocked their
living quarters with cameras, radios, stereos, televisions, luggage,
watches, refrigerators, electric fans, and all varieties of Vietnamese
handicraft. They could even buy new cars to await them upon their arrival
back in the United States. In my own work, I've written about the enormous
fascination with consumer goods that gripped many Thai soldiers when they
entered the American-built P.X. stores in South Vietnam.  I attributed
their obsession with accumulating consumer goods to the Thai soldiers'
relative poverty and their inexperience with foreign luxury brands. But
Lair's work reminds me that this spell of conspicuous consumption could be
cast with equal power on America's sons.  "Combat was infrequent in
Vietnam," she observes, "but consumerism was universal" (146).

Lair uses a broad array of sources to support her claims. She draws upon a
cornucopia of reports from numerous military and government archives, as
well official and underground newspapers, American and Vietnamese memoirs,
veterans' fiction, interviews, and photographs. The consistent
acknowledgement of absurdity in these disparate sources strengthens the
force of Lair's characterization of life in the rear areas as verging on
the ridiculous.

In challenging the image of the Vietnam War veteran does Lair's work run
the risk of inviting disdain for these men?  Is her book a condemnation of
the majority, a kind of exposé on the servicemen who, by no fault of their
own, found themselves dropped into this strange universe of plenty?  The
answer to these questions is no. Lair does not ridicule or blame the
recipients of this opulence. In her account, they come across as willing
but bemused subjects of a military system they did not construct,
understand, or even condone. Many in the account express guilt for
enjoying such comforts while their fellow soldiers in combat units suffer
and die.  And while Lair does detail some of the opportunists who
exploited this abundance for their gain, she makes it clear that nearly
all of the soldiers thrust into this world worked to carry out their
duties to the degree of professionalism and competence demanded by the
system.  At times her account presents them as almost victims of a Lotus
Land that has rendered them too satisfied to defy, change, or escape.

Although I am certain that some readers will be upset by Lair's recasting
of the Vietnam War experience with the themes of consumerism,
entertainment, and absurdity, her book does not dishonor anyone's service.
 Instead, her focus on the rear area only sharpens the extraordinary
experiences of combat veterans whose tours of duty were spent outside the
relative safety and comfort of these well protected and well stocked
bases.  She includes the tension generated when "the most is given to
those who risked the least" (90). She includes the outraged reactions of
combat soldiers upon discovering just how plush their rear area colleagues
had it ("They eat hot fucking chow! They eat cold fucking ice cream! [...]
They're supposed to be supporting us!") to sharpen this contrast (90-91).
She also extends the parameters of the Vietnam War experience to include
those men and women in the majority who served outside of infantry units.
In a very basic way she demonstrates that these rear area soldiers are as
important to America's Vietnam War story as their colleagues in combat
units.  In her serious consideration of their challenges, she shows how
ingenuity and esprit could flourish in the communities of support
personnel who made the combat mission possible. Lair's study allows that
soldiering need not be synonymous with suffering.

Lair writes sympathetically about the expectations and disappointments of
soldiers who had come to South Vietnam to fight but found themselves doing
everything there but combat.  In one chapter ("This Place Just Isn't John
Wayne: U.S. Military Bases in Vietnam") Lair describes the difficulty that
some rear area soldiers had in reconciling their expectations of war with
the reality of their lives amidst industrial-sized ice cream machines,
steak dinners, and "hooch maids," the Vietnamese women hired to clean the
barracks, make the beds, and shine the boots (83).  Few had expected war
to be so insulating - and fattening - that many grew resentful toward the
Army for denying them the opportunity to prove themselves as men (106).
So conflicted were these soldiers by the disparity between their
expectations and the ultimate reality that some were compelled to maintain
a fiction of deprivation by writing letters home to their mothers and
wives describing hardship generated by inadequate food and supplies
(98-99). Complaints about shortages at Long Binh Post - laughable as they
seem now - were investigated by the U.S. Army to determine their validity
and to reassure worried Stateside observers.

Lair demonstrates a gift for presenting irony with just the right amount
of subtlety. In one chapter titled "War Zone Wonderland," she describes
the transported cultural elements that transformed the war into something
more strange than tragic for legions encamped inside these isolated bases.
 Her descriptions of soldiers wiling away hours in front of television
sets as reports on the siege at Khe Sanh were interspersed between reruns
of Bonanza and Gunsmoke add a new level of irony to the phrase "the first
television war" (189). This sense of spectatorship that shaped some
veterans' experiences even extended into real life. Lair includes
recollections by a veteran who took a break from his sunbathing atop a
shipping container to watch helicopter gunships blazing away at a target
four miles distant. "It was like sitting at a drive-in theater back home.
In wrap-a-round panorama," he recalls. "The only thing I didn't have was
Myra Faye to put my arm around or popcorn to munch" (186).

One of the great ironies Lair presents is that morale was lower in these
luxurious rear areas than it was among soldiers in combat units.  Criminal
acts, drug use, absenteeism, and hostility toward military authority all
were higher among the population of pampered soldiers (95-96). Communist
forces - the Viet Cong, NVA, and civilian supporters - maintained high
morale despite seemingly grave shortages of food, entertainment, and
equipment; their fighting spirit was steadfast where the American's
faltered (142).  Is it then dangerous psychologically, as Lair wonders, to
facilitate the distinction between civilian and military life while in a
war zone?  Her study invites questions about the wisdom of continuing this
regime of excess in America's recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reading
through her description of the problems endemic to rear units (and absent
from combat units), I found myself wondering: Is suffering good for
soldiering? Is luxury bad for morale? Of course, the flip side of this
approach to rear area life seems equally unwise.  Would support soldiers
have possessed higher morale without the vast quantities of food, alcohol,
entertainment, sex, sports, shopping, tourism, and other distractions made
available to them during their tours? Lair concludes her study with a
short examination of rear echelon life in American-occupied Iraq,
demonstrating that the isolation, indulgence, and entertainment pursued in
the rear areas of South Vietnam were reproduced during Operation Iraqi
Freedom, with the considerable exceptions of alcohol and prostitution
being removed from the menu of distractions.

One aspect of abundance that Lair does not highlight strongly is its
manifestation in combat units. Her focus on the rear areas stops her from
a consideration of the strategic and economic costs associated with the
nearly unlimited supplies of ammunition available to most combat soldiers
in South Vietnam. I can easily imagine extending Lair's critique of this
culture of abundance to the real warzone; such a study would be valuable
to analyze the pros and cons - the advantages and the tragedies - of
unlimited bullets, grenades, and other small arms used against a guerrilla
force that operated amongst a civilian population.

Lair's book contributes to the growing body of studies that compel
scholars and students of the war to reevaluate the dominant beliefs about
American conduct in the conflict. Her study stands alongside Jerry
Lembcke's The Spitting Image and George Lepre's Fragging as another
groundbreaking examination of an oft mentioned but little studied topic in
the war.  It is easy to imagine Armed with Abundance influencing all
future studies of America's conduct in Southeast Asia, especially
generalized histories of the war that often give short shrift to the topic
of life in the rear.  Any of the book's chapters can be assigned to
students (especially "Total War on Boredom: The U.S. Military's Recreation
Program in Vietnam" and "The Things They Bought: G.I. Consumerism in
Vietnam") in a college course on the war to provide a fuller picture of
the American approach to war.

Last year, several students in my Vietnam War course objected to the
portrayal of American servicemen included in a section of Michèle Ray's
wartime memoir The Two Shores of Hell.  The midshipmen - future U.S. Navy
officers - felt insulted by Ray's description of the Americans she met at
a base camp in Qui Nhon. The French fashion model-turned-war journalist
(and later Viet Cong captive) expressed surprise at how unfit these
soldiers appeared to her:

How does it happen that these men who march and exercise are fat, flabby,
and often pimply?  I myself gained five pounds following the troops. And
yet I have never had so much exercise in my life.1

In their critical analyses of the memoir, my students argued that Ray's
account betrayed strains of anti-Americanism evident in some French
journalists during the war.  At the time, I found myself somewhat
sympathetic to their analyses; however, after reading Lair's study, which
includes descriptions of the efforts U.S. Army officials took to prevent
their rear area soldiers from getting fat while in South Vietnam, I
realize that the French account may be closer to the truth than my
students would have ever imagined.

Notes

1 Michèle Ray, The Two Shores of Hell (New York: D. McKay Co., 1968), 153.

-----------------
Author's Response by Meredith H. Lair, George Mason University

I would like to thank Thomas Maddux for putting this roundtable together,
and Michael Allen, Jessica Elkind, David Kieran, and Richard Ruth for
their thoughtful comments about my work.  I have found the experience of
reading their feedback both stimulating and humbling. As I was formulating
my response, I realized that this roundtable is the literal manifestation
of the conversation about the past that published historical research
always represents. I feel privileged to take part.

Armed with Abundance is concerned with the noncombat experiences of
American soldiers in Vietnam-the experiences of both combat and noncombat
troops that fell outside the realm of bloodshed and violence that we
normally associate with war. The book works from the premise that only a
small fraction (perhaps 10 to 25 percent) of American soldiers in Vietnam
served in combat. This is not an original contribution to knowledge; it is
a fact well known to scholars of the Vietnam War and to most of its
veterans. But this fact is revelatory to the public at large, which
imagines the Vietnam War to be a landscape of universal suffering and
great material sacrifice.  My goal in the book was to complicate this
typical understanding of the war by redrawing that barren landscape, but
this time including all the niggling details-personal refrigerators, maid
service in the barracks, nightly floorshows, monotonous office work,
military-run ice cream plants, oceans of beer, and so on-that tend to get
left out of stories designed to establish the heroism, tragedy, and
legitimacy of the American project in Southeast Asia.  The plot-the U.S.
military occupied a country embroiled in civil war in order to contain the
spread of communism-remains the same, but the setting is vastly different,
forcing those who imagine it to reconsider the meaning of all that
violence committed in the name of freedom. Once the material abundance is
restored to the war's landscape, then we must consider a slew of
questions: Where did all that stuff come from?  What purpose did it serve?
How did soldiers interact with it? What did they think of it? What did
they think of one another, since the abundance was not evenly distributed?
Why did it disappear from the public memory of the war? How did it
manifest itself in subsequent conflicts? And what are its implications for
understanding who Americans are, what they believe in, and how they fight?

My fellow roundtable participants offer positive assessments of my work,
and for that I am grateful.  They also offer substantive critiques, and in
those there is little with which I fundamentally disagree. Mostly, they
raise questions, which is the most any scholar can hope for-that my work
will inspire new avenues of inquiry that other researchers, especially
young scholars, will doggedly pursue. For example, David Kieran notes a
dearth of engagement with race and gender, or at least women (the book
does include a discussion of the war's role in asserting soldiers'
masculinity and how material abundance complicated that process), and I
agree. I should have paid more attention to how consumerism manifested
itself differently for different constituencies, including women and
African Americans but also different service branches and military ranks.
The reasons I chose not to do so had much to do with common academic
concerns like 'Getting Tenure' and 'Not Being Forty When I Publish My
First Book.' (I made it by two months.) But I also felt that my main task
was to offer a thick description of the noncombat aspects of the war in
order to challenge the dominant narrative I mentioned earlier.  Breaking
the war down into many small realms of experience (What was it like for
women? What was it like for African Americans? What was it like for
African American women? and so on) would have atomized my main argument,
which was to assert that service in the Vietnam War, for virtually
everyone who served there, was simply not as the public has imagined it.

Kieran also asks a series of questions related to the book's examination
of the Vietnam War's legacies in Iraq. Consumerism has changed in the last
forty years, deepening its hold on American life and easing cultural
distinctions between countries, and members of a professional military
surely regard their service differently than do citizen-soldiers compelled
to serve by a draft.  What role has abundance played in conflicts since
Vietnam? The epilogue of Armed with Abundance establishes that the
infusion of consumerism into the Vietnam war zone was not a one-off, but
rather the beginning of a new mode of warfare.  But there is more to know
about what came after, and I hope that others will join me in trying to
figure that out.  Richard Ruth takes my questions about material abundance
in soldiers' private moments and directs them towards traditional military
histories of the war. Here, again, is a book I would love to read: a
treatment of how nearly unlimited weaponry affected U.S. counterinsurgency
operations in Vietnam. And Jessica Elkind wants to know how "external
factors" influenced the creation of this alternative warscape.  I do too.
She cites American and South Vietnamese political figures and military
leaders, to which I would add contract firms themselves. James Carter's
recent Inventing Vietnam is only the beginning of a much needed inquiry
into how Vietnam intensified the privatization of American war.1

Both Kieran and Elkind raise interesting questions about Vietnamese
perspectives on the material abundance that sustained the U.S. occupation
force. Kieran would have liked to have seen more particulars on labor
relations between Vietnamese workers and their American employers, and
Elkind would have liked to learn how North Vietnamese and National
Liberation Front leaders maintained the morale of their own troops.  I
agree on both counts. The book's "scattered passages," in Elkind's words,
on the Vietnamese were late additions to my analysis, as I realized that
the self-directed nature of American morale initiatives were in stark
contrast to the communists' co-optation of Confucian principles that cast
the revolution as a morally correct extension of age-old traditions. A
Vietnam scholar with Vietnamese language facility would be in a great
position to write a similar book on Vietnamese morale initiatives on all
sides--People's Army of Vietnam (PVAN), People's Liberation Armed Forces
(PLAF), and Army of the Republic of Vietnam--as well as Vietnamese
peoples' opinions of U.S. base construction in South Vietnam. Such a study
would complicate the rather simplistic notion of PAVN and PLAF morale that
I deploy in the book-that it was unflagging and might have remained so
forever-by establishing the degree to which insurgent leaders concerned
themselves with meeting the material needs of their constituents. Indeed,
Vietnamese-language documents like the diary of Ð?ng Thùy Trâm have only
begun to address the likely complexity and tenuousness of the insurgency's
morale situation.2

These insightful critiques of Armed with Abundance are joined by several
affirming comments, two of which were especially meaningful to me.  First,
I greatly appreciate how David Kieran situates my book's contribution to
the historical literature. He writes, "But the book's most important work
perhaps lies in its contribution to more fully historicizing the post-war
period," in particular its "challenge to dominant discourses of the war's
legacy and both historical and contemporary imaginings of the US
military's global presence." I have never imagined myself to be a military
historian, but rather a social and cultural historian who studies war.
When I started researching this book, there weren't a lot of us, but more
and more scholars are crossing the divide that once separated military
topics from other realms of inquiry.  Yet even today, too much of military
history is still dedicated to questions of the efficacy and efficiency of
the U.S. military, and not enough attention is paid to the U.S. military
as both a reflection and an instrument of American culture.  Armed with
Abundance seeks to blur the lines between military history and social and
cultural history, and my hope is that this book will reach scholars
interested in post-WWII American history in general.

The second comment is reflected in all three scholars' reviews, and it
involves a recognition of the care and concern I tried to take in writing
about Vietnam veterans' lived experience.  Kieran writes, "Lair deserves
credit for compassionately arguing for the recuperation of the full
spectrum of veterans' experience." Elkind closes her piece with
acknowledgment of the balance I tried to strike in Armed with Abundance:
"Lair does not argue that the war involved no sacrifice or that the tens
of thousands of Americans killed or wounded in Vietnam were insignificant,
but that there was, quite literally, a lot more to the story." Ruth makes
a similar claim, and also an accurate prediction: "Although I am certain
that some readers will be upset by Lair's recasting of the Vietnam War
experience with the themes of consumerism, entertainment, and absurdity,
her book does not dishonor anyone's service."  Dishonoring veterans'
service or undermining the degree of their sacrifice was never my intent,
as the very personal preface to the book makes clear. But Armed with
Abundance has nonetheless been met with hostility.

As Ruth predicted, some Vietnam veterans have taken offense, and I have
received a steady stream of feedback that reflects their hurt and anger.
There have been positive comments too, though they reflect more grim
resignation ("This book is difficult to read, because the truth hurts!!"
as an Amazon.com reviewer put it) than any kind of excitement.  It is a
difficult topic to confront. As I put it in my book's epilogue, "Somehow,
when Americans imagine themselves at war, the notion of unlimited bullets
and bombs is less disconcerting than the notion of unlimited ice cream,
and the prospect of endless suffering is more affirming than the promise
of endless time and plenty." Why is that? Ruth points out that Armed with
Abundance "allows that soldiering need not be synonymous with suffering."
It is an interesting choice of words: "allows." The reaction to Armed with
Abundance from some quarters suggests that this idea is not allowed, that
it is inherently offensive, and that there ought not to be any further
discussion of material abundance in war, unless it is to argue that it
compromises force readiness.  To suggest that it compromises American
values, that it undermines the perceived worthiness of an American cause,
or that it offers some unsavory comment on the ethics of the American
military art, is to some readers beyond the pale.  And that, to me, is the
very reason we need more studies like it.

Notes

1 James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State
Building, 1954-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

2 Ðang Thùy Trâm, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy
Tram (New York: Harmony Books, 2007).

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