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War Is Not a Game
The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built
Levinson, Nan
Rutgers University Press, 2016
War Is Not a Game tells the story of this new soldiers’ antiwar movement, showing why it was born, how it quickly grew, where it has struggled, what it accomplished, and how it continues to resonate in the national conversation about our military and our wars. Nan Levinson reveals the individuals behind the movement, painting an unforgettable portrait of these working-class veterans who refused to be seen as simply tragic victims or battlefront heroes and instead banded together to become leaders of a national organization. The paperback is updated with a new foreword by the author.
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A War of Nerves
Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century
Ben Shephard
Harvard University Press, 2001

A War of Nerves is a history of military psychiatry in the twentieth century—an authoritative, accessible account drawing on a vast range of diaries, interviews, medical papers, and official records, from doctors as well as ordinary soldiers. It reaches back to the moment when the technologies of modern warfare and the disciplines of psychological medicine first confronted each other on the Western Front, and traces their uneasy relationship through the eras of shell-shock, combat fatigue, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

At once absorbing historical narrative and intellectual detective story, A War of Nerves weaves together the literary, medical, and military lore to give us a fascinating history of war neuroses and their treatment, from the World Wars through Vietnam and up to the Gulf War. Ben Shephard answers recurring questions about the effects of war. Why do some men crack and others not? Are the limits of resistance determined by character, heredity, upbringing, ideology, or simple biochemistry?

Military psychiatry has long been shrouded in misconception, and haunted by the competing demands of battle and of recovery. Now, for the first time, we have a definitive history of this vital art and science, which illuminates the bumpy efforts to understand the ravages of war on the human mind, and points towards the true lessons to be learned from treating the aftermath of war.

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Warrior Ways
Explorations in Modern Military Folklore
Eric Eliason and Tad Tuleja
Utah State University Press, 2012

Warrior Ways is one of the first book-length explorations of military folklife, and focuses on the lore produced by modern American warriors, illuminating the ways in which members of the armed services creatively express the complex experience of military life. In short, lively essays, contributors to the volume, all of whom have close personal or professional relationships to the military, examine battlefield talismans, personal narrative (storytelling), “Jody calls” (marching and running cadences), slang, homophobia and transgressive humor, music, and photography, among other cultural expressions.

Military folklore does not remain in an isolated subculture; it reveals our common humanity by delighting, disturbing, infuriating, and inspiring both those deeply invested in and those peripherally touched by military life. Highlighting the contemporary and historical importance of the military in American life, Warrior Ways will be of interest to scholars and students of folklore, anthropology, and popular culture; those involved in veteran services and education; and general readers interested in military culture.
 

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We Were Innocents
AN INFANTRYMAN IN KOREA
William D. Dannenmaier
University of Illinois Press, 1999
Known as the Forgotten War, the "police action" in Korea resulted in almost as many American combat deaths in three years as the Vietnam War did in ten. Yet for many Americans today, the Korean War brings to mind nothing more than the television series "M*A*S*H."
 
William Dannenmaier served in Korea with the U.S. Army from December 1952 to January 1954, first as a radioman and then as a radio scout with the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment. Eager to serve a cause in which he fervently believed—the safeguarding of South Korea from advancing Chinese Communists—he enlisted in the army with an innocence that soon evaporated. His letters from the front, most of them to his sister, Ethel, provide a springboard for his candid and wry observations of the privations, the boredom, and the devastation of infantry life. At the same time these letters, designed to disguise the true danger of his tasks and his dehumanizing circumstances, reflect a growing failure to communicate with those outside the combat situation.
Woven through the letters is Dannenmaier's narrative account of his combat experiences, including a vivid re-creation of the bloody battle for Outpost Harry, which he describes as "trivial and insignificant—except to the men who fought it."A high-intensity, eight-day battle for a hill American forces would abandon three months later with the signing of the truce, Outpost Harry was largely ignored by the press despite heavy casualties and many official citations for heroism.
 
From his vantage point as an Everyman, Dannenmaier describes the frustration of men on the front lines who never saw their commanding superiors, the exhaustion of soldiers whose long-promised leaves never materialized, the transitory friendships and shared horrors that left indelible memories. Endangered by minefields and artillery fire, ground down by rumors and constant tension, these men returned—if they returned at all—profoundly and irrevocably changed.
 
This intimate, revealing memoir, a rare account by a common soldier, is a tribute to the Americans who served in a conflict that has only recently begun to gain a place in official public memory.
 
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Welcome the Hour of Conflict
William Cowan McClellan and the 9th Alabama
William Cowan McClellan, edited by John C. Carter
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Vivid and lively letters from a young Confederate in Lee’s Army

In the Spring of 1861, a 22-year-old Alabamian did what many of his friends and colleagues were doing—he joined the Confederate Army as a volunteer. The first of his family to enlist, William Cowan McClellan, who served as a private in the 9th Alabama Infantry regiment, wrote hundreds of letters throughout the war, often penning for friends who could not write home for themselves. In the letters collected in John C. Carter’s volume, this young soldier comments on his feelings toward his commanding officers, his attitude toward military discipline and camp life, his disdain for the western Confederate armies, and his hopes and fears for the future of the Confederacy.
 
McClellan’s letters also contain vivid descriptions of camp life, battles, marches, picket duty, and sickness and disease in the army. The correspondence between McClellan and his family dealt with separation due to war as well as with other wartime difficulties such as food shortages, invasion, and occupation. The letters also show the rise and fall of morale on both the home front and on the battlefield, and how they were closely intertwined.
 
Remarkable for their humor, literacy, and matter-of-fact banter, the letters reveal the attitude a common soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia had toward the day-to-day activity and progression of the war. John C. Carter includes helpful appendixes that list the letters chronologically and offer the regimental roster, casualty/enlistment totals, assignments, and McClellan’s personal military record.
 

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Well Satisfied with My Position
The Civil War Journal of Spencer Bonsall
Edited by Michael A. Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Well Satisfied with My Position offers a first-person account of army life during the Civil War’ s Peninsula Campaign and Battle of Fredericksburg. Spencer Bonsall, who joined the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry as a hospital steward, kept a journal from March 1862 until March 1863, when he abruptly ceased writing. Editors Michael A. Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens place his experiences in the context of the field of Civil War medicine and continue his story in an epilogue.

             Trained as a druggist when he was in his early twenties, Bonsall traveled the world, spent eight years on a tea plantation in India, and settled in Philadelphia, where he worked in the city surveyor’ s office. But in March 1862, when he was in his mid-forties, the lure of serving his country on the battlefield led Bonsall to join the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry as a hospital steward.

             Bonsall enjoyed his life with the Union army at first, comparing bivouacking in the woods to merely picnicking on a grand scale. “ We are about as jolly a set of old bachelors as can be found in Virginia,” Bonsall wrote. But his first taste of the aftermath of battle at Fair Oaks and the Seven Days’ Battles in Virginia changed his mind about the joys of soldiering— though he never lost his zeal for the Union cause.

             Bonsall details the camp life of a soldier from firsthand experience, outlines the engagements of the 81st, and traces the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Peninsula Campaign. He records facts not available elsewhere about camp conditions, attitudes toward Union generals and Confederate soldiers, and troop movements.

             From the end of June to late October 1862, Bonsall’ s illness kept him from writing in his journal. He picked up the record again in December 1862, just before the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in which the Union suffered a staggering 10,200 casualties and the 81st Pennsylvania lost more than half its men. He vividly describes the bloody aftermath. Bonsall’ s horse was shot out from underneath him at the battle of Gettysburg, injuring him seriously and ending his military career. Although he was listed as “ sick in hospital” on the regiment’ s muster rolls, he was labeled a deserter in the U.S. Army records. Indeed, after recovery from his injuries, Bonsall walked away from the army to resume life in Philadelphia with his wife and child.

Published for the first time, Bonsall’ s journal offers an unusually personal glimpse into the circumstances and motives of a man physically ruined by the war. Seventeen illustrations, including some drawn by Bonsall himself, help bring this narrative to life.

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What Soldiers Do
Sex and the American GI in World War II France
Mary Louise Roberts
University of Chicago Press, 2013
How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways.

That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. 

While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.
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"When is Daddy coming home?"
An American Family during World War II
Richard Carlton Haney
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2004

World War II was coming to a close in Europe and Richard Haney was only four years old when the telegram arrived at his family's home in Janesville, Wisconsin. That moment, when Haney learned of his father's death in the final months of fighting, changed his and his mother's lives forever.

In this emotionally powerful book, Haney, now a professional historian, explores the impact of war on an American family. Unlike many of America's 183,000 World War II orphans, Richard Haney has vivid memories of his father. He skillfully weaves together those memories with his parents' wartime letters and his mother's recollections to create a unique blend of history and memoir. Through his father's letters he reveals the war's effect on a man who fought in the Battle of the Bulge with the 17th Airborne but wanted nothing more than to return home, a man who expressed the feelings of thousands when he wrote to his wife, "I've seen and been through a lot but want to forget it all as soon as I can." Haney illuminates life on the home front in small-town America as well, describing how profoundly the war changed such communities. At the same time, his memories of an idyllic family life make clear what soldiers like Clyde Haney felt they were defending.

With "When Is Daddy Coming Home?", Richard Haney makes an exceptional contribution to the literature on the Greatest Generation - one that is both devastatingly personal and representative of what families all over America endured during that testing time. No one who reads this powerful story will come away unmoved.

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When This Evil War is Over
The Correspondence of the Francis Family
James P. Pate
University of Alabama Press, 2006
A collection of Civil War correspondence exchanged between members of the James Carrington Francis family of Jacksonville, Calhoun County, Alabama

Six of the seven Francis brothers served in the Confederate army, as did their uncle, four servants, and other kinsmen, and all twelve members of the immediate family of Dr. James Carrington Francis and Amy Ingram Francis—as well as several members of their extended family—are represented in this volume. While the letters refer to the war and the brothers’ military service, they also shed light on this family’s struggle to survive the profound cultural, economic, and political upheaval that ensued.
 
In addition to the correspondence itself, the editor includes a thoroughly researched  introduction that provides an overview of the Francis family history before, during, and after the war, which sheds light on the historical context in which the letters were written. Also included are endnotes that document and elucidate figures and events that receive passing reference in the letters, a genealogical chart of the Francis family, and photographs of each family member.  The editor includes maps of the Virginia, Georgia, and Carolinas settings, which allow the reader to follow the progress of Francis family members during the Civil War campaigns in which they participated.
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When War Becomes Personal
Soldiers' Accounts from the Civil War to Iraq
Donald Anderson
University of Iowa Press, 2008
Donald Anderson, a former U.S. Air Force officer, has compiled a haunting anthology of personal essays and short memoirs that span more than 100 years of warfare.  Alvord White Clements—himself a veteran of the Second World War—introduces his grandfather Isaac N. Clements’s Civil War memoir; the novelist Paul West writes of his father, a British veteran of World War I, as well as of his own boyhood recollections of the London Blitz. John Wolfe details the life-changing and life-threatening injuries he sustained in Vietnam and the hallucinations he experienced afterward. Second Gulf War veteran Jason Armagost traces his journey to Iraq through the history of literature and the books he brought with him to the war zone.
     The thirteen essays in When War Becomes Personal tell the enduring truths of battle, stripping away much of the romance, myth, and fantasy.
Soldiers more than anyone know what they are capable of destroying; when they write about war, they are trying to preserve the world.
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Widows by the Thousand
The Civil War Correspondence of Theophilus and Harriet Perry, 1862–1864
M. Jane Johansson
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
This collection of letters written between Theophilus and Harriet Perry during the Civil War provides an intimate, firsthand account of the effect of the war on one young couple. Perry was an officer with the 28th Texas Cavalry, a unit that campaigned in Arkansas and Louisiana as part of the division known as “Walker’s Greyhounds.” His letters describe his service in a highly literate style that is unusual for Confederate accounts. He documents a number of important events, including his experiences as a detached officer in Arkansas in the winter of 1862–63, the attempt to relieve the siege of Vicksburg, mutiny in his regiment, and the Red River campaign, just before he was killed in the battle of Pleasant Hill. Harriet’s writings allow the reader to witness the everyday life of an upper-class woman enduring home front deprivations, facing the hardships and fears of childbearing and childrearing alone, and coping with other challenges resulting from her husband’s absence.
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William H. Emory
Soldier-Scientist
L. David Norris, James C. Milligan, and Odie B. Faulk
University of Arizona Press, 1998
Soldier and explorer William H. Emory traveled the length and breadth of the United States and participated in some of the most significant events of the nineteenth century. This first complete biography of Emory offers new insights into an often-overlooked military figure and provides an important view of an expanding America.

Born in Maryland in 1811, Emory was a West Point graduate who resigned his commission to become a civil engineer and join the newly formed Corps of Topographical Engineers. After working along the Canadian boundary, he was selected to accompany Stephen Watts Kearny and the Army of the West in their trek to California in 1846, and his map from that expedition helped guide Forty-Niners bound for the goldfields.

Emory worked for nine years on the new border between the United States and Mexico after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase and was responsible for the survey and marking of the boundary. When the Civil War broke out, Emory refused a commission in the Confederate Army, instead commanding a regiment defending Washington, D.C. Later he saw action at Manassas, in the Red River campaign, and in the Shenandoah Valley, where he served under Phil Sheridan.

This biography draws on Emory’s personal papers to reveal other significant episodes of his life. While commanding a cavalry unit in Indian Territory, he was the only officer to bring an entire command out of insurrectionary territory. In hostile action of a different kind, he was a major witness in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson and offered testimony that helped save the president.

William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist is an important resource for scholars of western expansion and the Civil War. More than that, it is a rousing story of an unsung but distinguished hero of his time.
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William Washington, American Light Dragoon
A Continental Cavalry Leader in the War of Independence
Daniel Murphy
Westholme Publishing, 2014
A Relative of George Washington, the Life and Service of One of America's Great Cavalry Leaders
William Washington began the war as a captain of Virginia Militia, was commissioned a junior officer in the Continental Infantry, and slowly rose to field command in the Continental Light Dragoons where he built one of the hardest hitting cavalry regiments to serve in the war. His chief adversary Lord Cornwallis commented, “There could be no more formidable antagonist in a charge, at the head of his cavalry, than Colonel William Washington.” Despite his connection to the commander-in-chief, he suffered his fair share of setbacks, and his relationships varied with not only his legendary cousin George, but many well-known figures of the Revolution including, Henry Lee, Casimir Pulaski, Nathanael Greene, and Daniel Morgan. Relying largely on firsthand accounts and period letters, in William Washington: American Light Dragoon: A Continental Cavalry Leader in the War of Independence, author and avid equestrian Daniel Murphy blends these primary sources with his own working knowledge of period drill, tactics, and terrain to deliver a more complete view of William Washington’s actions throughout the conflict. This perspective traces the often overlooked role of cavalry in the American Revolution and sheds new light on many pivotal battles in of the war, including Trenton, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, Hobkirk’s Hill, and William Washington’s final action at Eutaw Springs.
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A Wisconsin Boy in Dixie
Civil War Letters of James K. Newton
Selected and Edited by Stephen E. Ambrose
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
“Unlike many of his fellows, [James Newton] was knowledgeable, intuitive, and literate; like many of his fellows he was cast into the role of soldier at only eighteen years of age. He was polished enough to write drumhead and firelight letters of fine literary style. It did not take long for this farm boy turned private to discover the grand design of the conflict in which he was engaged, something which many of the officers leading the armies never did discover.”—Victor Hicken, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
    “When I wrote to you last I was at Madison with no prospect of leaving very soon, but I got away sooner than I expected to.” So wrote James Newton upon leaving Camp Randall for Vicksburg in 1863 with the Fourteenth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry. Newton, who had been a rural schoolteacher before he joined the Union army in 1861, wrote to his parents of his experiences at Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, on the Red River, in Missouri, at Nashville, at Mobile, and as a prisoner of war. His letters, selected and edited by noted historian Stephen E. Ambrose, reveal Newton as a young man who matured in the war, rising in rank from private to lieutenant.
                A Wisconsin Boy in Dixie reveals Newton as a young man who grew to maturity through his Civil War experience, rising in rank from private to lieutenant. Writing soberly about the less attractive aspects of army life, Newton's comments on fraternizing with the Rebs, on officers, and on discipline are touched with a sense of humor—"a soldier's best friend," he claimed. He also became sensitive to the importance of political choices. After giving Lincoln the first vote he had ever cast, Newton wrote: "In doing so I felt that I was doing my country as much service as I have ever done on the field of battle."
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Wisconsin Korean War Stories
Veterans Tell Their Stories from the Forgotten War
Sarah Larsen
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2008
A companion to the Wisconsin Public Television documentary of the same name, this compelling book features the stories of Wisconsin men and women who served in Korea. With unique insight they describe their experiences in camp, on the battlefield, and back home, as well as the war's lasting effects. The book is lavishly illustrated with photos, artifacts, maps, and timelines.
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The World War I Memoirs of Robert P. Patterson
A Captain in the Great War
Gary J. Clifford
University of Tennessee Press, 2012


“This memoir illuminates key aspects of the war experience: the enthusiasm for fighting, tensions with officers, tedium with regard to noncombatant work, the variety of trench experiences, the sharp learning curve that the army underwent on the ground, and the confusing nature of combat for ground troops. As the centennial of the war approaches this well-annotated memoir that connects Patterson’s individual experiences to the larger U.S. experience of the war will appeal to general readers and specialists alike.”  —Jennifer D. Keene, author of World War I: The American Soldier Experience

A journalist once called Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson “the toughest man in Washington” for his fervid efforts in managing U.S. mobilization in World War II. The World War I Memoirs of Robert P. Patterson: A Captain in the Great War recounts Patterson’s own formative military experiences in the First World War.
Written in the years following the conflict, this is a remarkable rendering of what it was like to be an infantry line officer during the so-called Great War. Patterson started his military career as a twenty-seven-year-old, barely-trained captain in the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F.). He was part of the 306th Infantry Regiment of New York’s famous 77th “Statue of Liberty” Division from July to November 1918. In this detailed account, Patterson describes in understated yet vivid prose just how raw and unprepared American soldiers were for the titanic battles on the Western Front. Patterson downplays his near-death experience in a fierce firefight that earned him and several of his men from Company F the Distinguished Service Cross. His depiction of the brutal Meuse-Argonne battle is haunting—the drenching cold rains, the omnipresent barbed wire, deep fog-filled ravines, the sweet stench of mustard gas, chattering German machine-guns, crashing artillery shells, and even a rare hot meal to be savored.


Dealing with more than just combat, Patterson writes of the friendships and camaraderie among the officers and soldiers of different ethnic and class backgrounds who made up the “melting pot division” of the 77th. He betrays little of the postwar disillusionment that afflicted some members of the “Lost Generation.”Editor J. Garry Clifford’s introduction places Patterson and his actions in historical context and illuminates how Patterson applied lessons learned from the GreatWar to his later service as assistant secretary, under secretary, and secretary of war from 1940 to 1947.


 

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