The Essential American Soldier, Essay Example

Introduction

If any one factor unites American soldiers of the 20^th and 21^st centuries beyond that of actual warfare, it is that the experiences of each are vastly different. This is evident through both the revelations of veterans in letters and accounts, and in the ways society responds to them before, during, and following the wars. When the lives and circumstances of soldiers from three major conflicts – World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War – are examined, it becomes obvious that the military truly is an extension of the society which it serves. It is comfortable to believe that the U.S. armed forces are distinct operations outside of mainstream life, and go into action in a way removed from whatever the culture is undergoing, but this is completely false. Each of these wars was entered into by a “different” America, and every soldier in them was a product, and later a victim, of each different society engaging in the war. The inescapable reality is that American soldiers have uniformly been thrust into fighting to suit the needs of the present government, that the hero status once attached to being a soldier is today a relic of the past, and that the soldier’s ultimate experience is that of being a pawn in a deadly game.

Discussion

The American soldier is very much a creation of his unique time and place in history. Modern history is marked by rapid and massive shifts, dating back to technologies and industries emerging in the 19^th century that brought about greatly increased globalization and multinational interaction. Then, industry helped to create in this time an international presence never before seen in history: the United States. It may be said, then, that World War I was a violent and wide-scale conflict between the old world and the new, as the U.S. took on its most dominant role yet in world affairs. Also, this meant the creation of the modern American soldier. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that America in these years was largely determined to remain distant from the conflicts raging in Europe (Browne, Snead 7). Then, the U.S., never having engaged in a conflict of this size before, and also entering into it with minimal planning, was badly unprepared. No militia of this kind had been needed before, so it was “invented.” The effects of this sudden mobilization were extremely harsh conditions for the boys quickly recruited and sent overseas. Before this, there was a lack of organization noted by many veterans on their return home, or even earlier: in a letter from the front, a recruit writes his girlfriend that he has never imagined gambling at the level he sees it in his army post (Browne, Snead 14).

If anything defined life for the World War I soldier, it was, ironically, home. More exactly, these young men went into war with all of the ambivalence present in their native country. On one level, certainly, and largely due to last-minute propaganda, the soldier expressed national pride; we were the “good guys,” coming to the aid of a hopelessly confused Old World. To that end, popular music back home, like Cohan’s, “Over There!”, promoted patriotism and faith in the soldiers, which abetted the sense of rightness and strength within them. On another level, songs “edited” by these soldiers reveal bitter resentment, as in the lyric: “When this lousy war is over, no more soldiering for me” (Tucker 825). What was worse was that, in the relatively few years of this conflict, European hospitals were noting epidemics of extreme mental and emotional disorders among soldiers. Hysteria, resulting from what was coined, “shell shock,” was the primary concern because it was disabling troops vital on the front (Thomas 21). Depression and severe anxiety also accompanied surviving soldiers home, when they returned to a society unequipped to consider the trauma of warfare. It could be argued, in fact, that this war truly was a “rehearsal” for the next, and marked by all the problems of such uncertain directions. The soldiers were suddenly pulled away from a nation finding its new, industrial identity; thrown into a foreign arena for which they were unprepared and poorly equipped; and expected to return home and resume normal, productive lives. It would not be the first time unrealistic, and even cruel, expectations would be made of the U.S. soldier.

A different kind of dichotomy defined the experience of the World War II soldier. The world had changed, America was emerging from a crippling depression, and the enemy was clear. This was the “good war,” the one in which mature, American vigor would defeat evil and promote the American way of life around the world. The Office of War Information fed the national propaganda machine, and every able-bodied man saw it as his duty to enlist (Huebner 19). America, in a word, was coming to the world’s rescue, and the U.S. soldier would never attain a hero image of this scope again. At the same time, and aside from political maneuvers at odds with this fiercely black-and-white scenario, the realities of combat were less glamorous. As in the first war, men were returning home shattered mentally as well as physically. To his credit, President Roosevelt, unlike the Woodrow Wilson administration of the first war, was determined to try to address the real issues of veterans. Wilson ignored actual army needs in his relentless strategies to negotiate treaties, and U.S. soldiers paid the price of his disregard. The Wilson demobilization policies, in fact, excited as much outrage as the war had: “Soldiers who had survived a year in the front lines died while waiting for a ship to come home” (Venzon, Miles 199). Roosevelt, conversely, fought desperately hard for a GI Bill that would ensure benefits for all veterans, even as he gave great attention to the efficiency of the demobilization (Sunstein 15).

What both circumstances reveal, however, is that, in each great war, the soldier was both an instrument and a pawn, and not in ways restricted to combat. As the many letters from the readings make clear, these soldiers were thrown into deadly arenas removed from either social ambivalence or patriotic zeal. Equally importantly, and becoming more apparent in World War II, the very concept of fighting for one’s country was no longer a mentality to be taken for granted. In a more aware society, everyone, including the soldier, is empowered to question policies accepted in centuries past.

Nothing more exemplifies this shift in the soldier’s perceptions than the Vietnam War. This was a new kind of war experience, and in more than one way. Here, a faceless enemy, a Communist threat, was to be engaged. This meant that no real danger to the U.S. was at hand, and this in turn sparked immense social rebellion. If the World War II soldier could expect, at least away from combat, to be regarded as heroic, the Vietnam soldier was widely disdained by his own people. As veteran Philip Caputo wrote, however, there was still a culture aside from that of the counterculture, and many young men enlisted to fight as champions of a Kennedy-era, anti-Communism ideal: “We went overseas full of illusions” (4). Sadly, Caputo goes on to document the shattering of these illusions, as what was perceived as an exercise in strength and “rightness” became a gruesome fight to stay alive. Here, the soldier’s experience was likely more traumatic than in any other war, simply because foreign, Asian terrain, an unnamed enemy, and contempt from the home country combined to create a savage arena seemingly worlds away from what war is supposed to be.

Conclusion

If anything is made clear by the letters and histories of U.S. soldiers from the wars in which the nation has been engaged, it is that war is never removed from the society and circumstances surrounding it. It is never a rote operation, for it is entered into for reasons based on the realities – and political concerns – of the day, always. This translates to experiences fundamentally and vastly different, for each soldier as well as for all the soldiers in the individual wars. World War I was a sudden and badly executed engagement, and those soldiers who survived combat and disease were exposed to horrors for which they were completely unprepared. The heroic send-off of the Second World War, sadly, only contrasted with the actual nightmare of the conflict, and Vietnam emphasized how the soldier’s experience, rarely a positive one under any circumstances, could be further subverted by national attitudes and dangerously unclear aims. American soldiers have consistently been thrust into fighting to suit the needs of the present government, the hero status once part of being a soldier is today a relic of the past, and the soldier’s ultimate experience is that of being a pawn in a deadly game.

Works Cited

Browne, George, & Snead, David Lindsay. An American Soldier in World War I. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Print.

Caputo, Philip. A Rumor of War. New York: Macmillan, 1996. Print.

Huebner, Andrew J. The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Print.

Sunstein, Cass R. The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever. Cambridge: Basic Books, 2006. Print.

Thomas, Gregory Matthew. Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatrists in France, 1914-1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Print.

Tucker, Spencer. The Encyclopedia of World War I. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Print.

Venzon, Ann Cipriano, & Miles, Paul L. The United States in the First World War. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.