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Wars are not fought by politicians and generals--they are fought by soldiers. Written by a combat veteran of the Vietnam War,Not a Gentleman's Waris about such soldiers--a gritty, against-the-grain defense of the much-maligned junior officer.Conventional wisdom holds that the junior officer in Vietnam was a no-talent, poorly trained, unmotivated soldier typified by Lt. William Calley of My Lai infamy. Drawing on oral histories, after-action reports, diaries, letters, and other archival sources, Ron Milam debunks this view, demonstrating that most of the lieutenants who served in combat performed their duties well and effectively, serving with great skill, dedication, and commitment to the men they led. Milam's narrative provides a vivid, on-the-ground portrait of what the platoon leader faced: training his men, keeping racial tensions at bay, and preventing alcohol and drug abuse, all in a war without fronts. Yet despite these obstacles, junior officers performed admirably, as documented by field reports and evaluations of their superior officers.More than 5,000 junior officers died in Vietnam; all of them had volunteered to lead men in battle. Based on meticulous and wide-ranging research, this book provides a much-needed serious treatment of these men--the only such study in print--shedding new light on the longest war in American history.

Popular representations of the Vietnam War tend to emphasize violence, deprivation, and trauma. By contrast, inArmed with Abundance, Meredith Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, redrawing the landscape of the war so that swimming pools, ice cream, visits from celebrities, and other \"comforts\" share the frame with combat.To address a tenuous morale situation, military authorities, Lair reveals, wielded abundance to insulate soldiers--and, by extension, the American public--from boredom and deprivation, making the project of war perhaps easier and certainly more palatable. The result was dozens of overbuilt bases in South Vietnam that grew more elaborate as the war dragged on. Relying on memoirs, military documents, and G.I. newspapers, Lair finds that consumption and satiety, rather than privation and sacrifice, defined most soldiers' Vietnam deployments. Abundance quarantined the U.S. occupation force from the impoverished people it ostensibly had come to liberate, undermining efforts to win Vietnamese \"hearts and minds\" and burdening veterans with disappointment that their wartime service did not measure up to public expectations. With an epilogue that finds a similar paradigm at work in Iraq,Armed with Abundanceoffers a unique and provocative perspective on modern American warfare.

Veterans of World War II have long sung the praises of the PX—a little piece of home in far-flung corners of the world. Though many books on that war tell of combat operations and logistics in detail, this is the first to tell the full story of the Army Exchange System. The AES was dedicated to providing soldiers with some of the comforts they had enjoyed in civilian life—candy, beer, cigarettes, razor blades, soap—whether by operating an exchange close to where they were fighting or by sending goods forward to the lines, free of charge. The beer may have been only \"3.2,\" but it was cheap and, unlike British beer, was served cold, thanks to PX coolers. And a constant supply of cigarettes and chewing gum gave GIs an advantage when flirting with the local girls. In chronicling the history of the AES, James J. Cooke harks back to the Civil War, in which sutlers sold basic items to the Yankee troops for exorbitant prices, and to the First World War, when morale-building provisions were brought in by agencies such as the Red Cross. He then traces the evolution of the PX through World War II from the point of view of those who ran the service and that of the soldiers who used it, blending administrative history with colorful anecdotes and interspersing letters from GIs. Cooke views the PX as a manifestation of American mobility, materialism, and the cultural revolution of mass consumerism that flourished in the 1920s, serving soldiers who were themselves products of this new American way of retail and expected a high level of material support in time of war. He emphasizes the accomplishments of Major General Joseph W. Byron, chief PX officer from 1941 to 1943, and his deputy, Colonel Frank Kerr. He also tells how the PX dealt with the presence of large numbers of women in uniform and the need to meet their demands in exchange offerings. By 1945, General Byron could boast that the Army Exchange Service operated the world's largest department store chain, serving the grandest army the United States had ever put in the field, and today the PX is still a central factor of military life. Yet as Cooke shows, the key to the AES's importance was ultimately the way it bolstered morale—and helped give our fighting men the will to keep fighting.

World War II shaped the United States in profound ways, and this new book—the first in the Legacies of War series—explores one of the most significant changes it fostered: a dramatic increase in ethnic and religious tolerance. A Nation Forged in War is the first full-length study of how large-scale mobilization during the Second World War helped to dissolve longstanding differences among White soldiers of widely divergent backgrounds. Never before or since have so many Americans served in the armed forces at one time: more than 15 million donned uniforms in the period from 1941 to 1945. Thomas Bruscino explores how these soldiers' shared experiences—enduring basic training, living far from home, engaging in combat—transformed their views of other ethnic groups and religious traditions. He further examines how specific military policies and practices worked to counteract old prejudices, and he makes a persuasive case that throwing together men of different regions, ethnicities, religions, and classes not only fostered a greater sense of tolerance but also forged a new American identity. When soldiers returned home after the war with these new attitudes, they helped reorder what it meant to be white in America. Using the presidential campaigns of Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960 as bookend events, Bruscino notes a key change in religious bias. Smith's defeat came at the end of a campaign rife with anti-Catholic sentiment; Kennedy's victory some three decades later proved that such religious bigotry was no longer an insurmountable obstacle. Despite such advances, Bruscino notes that the growing broad-mindedness produced by the war had limits: it did not extend to African Americans, whose own struggle for equality would dramatically mark the postwar decades. Extensively documented, A Nation Forged in War is one of the few books on the social and cultural impact of the World War II years. Scholars and students of military, ethnic, social, and religious history will be fascinated by this groundbreaking new volume.

As a young officer candidate in the Austrian army in 1938, Francis Heller refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler. Had he stayed in Vienna, he would have been arrested by the Gestapo. He subsequently made his way to America and earned a law degree but was drafted into the U.S. Army. Heller opted for service as an enlisted man in a combat unit and so distinguished himself in combat in the Pacific theater that he received a battlefield commission and served in the occupation of Japan. Escorting German nationals home from the Far East, he witnessed evidence of the horrors at Dachau that he had barely escaped.

Ward Loren Schrantz, of Carthage, Missouri, entered the U.S. Army in 1912, at a time when military leaders were still seriously debating the future of the horse cavalry. He left active military service in 1946, after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. Schrantz served capably at a time when the U.S. military was undergoing rapid technological and strategic transformation and, as a journalist and attentive observer, left a vivid personal account of his time in the Army and Missouri National Guard.   Editor Jeff Patrick has woven three undated versions of Schrantz's memoir into a single narrative focused on the sparsely documented pre–World War I period from 1912 to 1917, thus helping to fill a significant gap in the existing literature. Schrantz's memoir is notable not only for the period it covers, but also for its lively evocation of a soldier's life during the U.S.-Mexico border disturbances of the early twentieth century. Schrantz's account demonstrates the perennial contrast between how soldiers were expected to behave and how they actually behaved; it offers colorful and authentic details not usually available from official histories. Patrick also has added an appendix consisting of the letters that Schrantz wrote for publication in his hometown newspaper, the Carthage Evening Press.   These documents yield interesting insights into the attitudes and dispositions of U.S. soldiers during this time, as well as the perceptions and opinions of the folks back home. Students, scholars, and others interested in military and borderlands history will find much to enjoy in Guarding the Border: The Military Memoirs of Ward Schrantz, 1912–1917.

Army chaplains have long played an integral part in America’s armed forces. In addition to conducting chapel activities on military installations and providing moral and spiritual support on the battlefield, they conduct memorial services for fallen soldiers, minister to survivors, offer counsel on everything from troubled marriages to military bureaucracy, and serve as families’ points of contact for wounded or deceased soldiers—all while risking the dangers of combat alongside their troops. In this thoughtful study, Anne C. Loveland examines the role of the army chaplain since World War II, revealing how the corps has evolved in the wake of cultural and religious upheaval in American society and momentous changes in U.S. strategic relations, warfare, and weaponry. From 1945 to the present, Loveland shows, army chaplains faced several crises that reshaped their roles over time. She chronicles the chaplains’ initiation of the Character Guidance program as a remedy for the soaring rate of venereal disease among soldiers in occupied Europe and Japan after World War II, as well as chaplains’ response to the challenge of increasing secularism and religious pluralism during the “culture wars” of the Vietnam Era. “Religious accommodation,” evangelism and proselytizing, public prayer, and “spiritual fitness”provoked heated controversy among chaplains as well as civilians in the ensuing decades. Then, early in the twenty-first century, chaplains themselves experienced two crisis situations: one the result of the Vietnam-era antichaplain critique, the other a consequence of increasing religious pluralism, secularization, and sectarianism within the Chaplain Corps, as well as in the army and the civilian religious community. By focusing on army chaplains’ evolving, sometimes conflict-ridden relations with military leaders and soldiers on the one hand and the civilian religious community on the other, Loveland reveals how religious trends over the past six decades have impacted the corps and, in turn, helped shape American military culture.

The Marine Corps has always considered itself a branch apart. Since 1775 America’s smallest armed service has been suspicious of outsiders and deeply loyal to its traditions. Undying faith in its exceptionalism made the Marines one of the sharpest, swiftest tools of American military power, but developing this brand did not come without costs.

Quality improvement in health care has a long history that includes such epic figures as Ignaz Semmelweis, the nineteenth-century obstetrician who introduced hand washing to medical care, and Florence Nightingale, the English nurse who determined that poor living conditions were a leading cause of the deaths of soldiers at army hospitals. Systematic and sustained improvement in clinical quality in particular has a more brief and less heroic trajectory Over the past fifty years, a variety of approaches have been tried, with only limited success. More recently, some health care organizations began to adopt the lessons of high-reliability science, which studies organizations such as those in the commercial aviation industry, which manage great hazard extremely well. We review the evolution of quality improvement in US health care and propose a framework that hospitals and other organizations can use to move toward high reliability. Adapted from the source document.

In this article, I examine how African American soldiers and veterans experienced and shaped federally sponsored health care during and after World War I. Building on studies of the struggles of Black leaders and health care providers to win professional and public health advancement in the 1920s and 1930s, and of advocates to mobilize for health care rights in the mid-20th century, I focus primarily on the experiences and activism of patients in the interwar years. Private and government correspondence, congressional testimony, and reports from Black newspapers reveal that African American soldiers and veterans communicated directly with policymakers and bureaucrats regarding unequal treatment, assuming roles as “policy actors” who viewed health and medical care as “politics by other means.” In the process, they drew attention to the paradoxes inherent in expanding government entitlements in the era of Jim Crow, and helped shape a veterans’ health system that emerged in the 1920s and remained in place for the following century. They also laid the groundwork for the system’s precedent-setting desegregation, referred to by advocates of the time as “a shining example to the rest of the country.”