Daniel N. White Henry G. Gole, a retired U.S. Army colonel, published a fine book, Soldiering (Potomac Press, 2006) that deserves a much wider readership than it has earned to this date. Gole, son of an immigrant father from a German-speaking part of Slovenia, joined the Army in 1952 and went off to Korea as…
W.J. Astore A few years ago I was talking to an experienced U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, a battalion commander in Iraq. He compared the Iraqi situation to a Rubik’s Cube – a puzzling array of shifting loyalties, interconnected tribes, and religious sects. At the time, I thought it was a telling metaphor. But the metaphor…
W.J. Astore Nick Turse has a fine op-ed in the New York Times, “For America, Life Was Cheap in Vietnam.” In it he argues that for Americans involved in the Vietnam War, life was very cheap indeed – Vietnamese lives, that is. Turse has written a powerful book, “Kill Anything that Moves,” that documents the…
b. traven Daddy, who won all the wars the USA has fought since World War II? Well, son, there is some debate about that. Our government likes to tell us that we won them because we are “exceptional” but there are serious questions about who really won. One thing is clear, though: When we wage war on…
W.J. Astore The American way of war has often relied on massive firepower as a way to reduce American troop casualties. This was true of World War II and Korea, which were conventional “big battalion” wars, and it was also true of Vietnam, which was an unconventional war involving much smaller units. The problem in…
W.J. Astore The death on July 29 of retired Army general and professor Douglas Kinnard at the age of 91 reminded me of the vital quality of integrity and truth-telling, especially in life-and-death military settings. A fast-rising general who became critical of America’s path in Indochina in the late 1960s, Kinnard retired from the military and…
By Daniel N. White. Introduction by William Astore. The current count of American service members killed in the Afghan War stands at 2245. What did they die for? For most Americans the answer remains unclear. Also unclear is why, nearly twelve years into this war, the U.S. military continues to maintain a large (and…
In our media and our culture today, there’s an unfortunate tendency to see military service as uniquely efficacious and ennobling, and to see war as necessary and even to view it as antiseptic (notably our so-called “surgical” drone strikes). But real war is dirty. It’s as likely to infect us, to spread sepsis through our bodies…
The Contrary Perspective 