Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism

237 Pages·2021·1.539 MB·English

by  Marilyn Blatt Young, Mark Bradley, Mary L Dudziak, Andrew J Bacevich

MAKING
THE
FOREVER
WAR
A VOLUME IN THE SERIES
Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond
EDITED BY
Edwin A. Martini and Scott Laderman
MAKING
THE
FOREVER
WAR
Marilyn B. Young
on the Culture and Politics
of American Militarism
Edited by
Mark Philip Bradley and
Mary L. Dudziak
Afterword by Andrew Bacevich
University of Massachusetts Press
AMHERST AND BOSTON
Copyright © 2021 by University of Massachusetts Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978- 1- 62534- 568- 4 (paper); 569- 1 (hardcover)
Designed by Sally Nichols
Set in Minion Pro
Printed and bound Books International, Inc.
Cover design by Frank Gutbrod
Cover photo by JO1 Gawlowicz, U.S. Navy, Destroyed Iraqi T55-A main
battle take lies abandoned beside a road at the edge of an oil field following
Operation Desert Storm, 1991.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Young, Marilyn Blatt, author. | Bradley, Mark, 1961– editor. |
Dudziak, Mary L., 1956– editor. | Bacevich, Andrew J., writer of
afterword.
Title: Making the forever war : Marilyn Young on the culture and politics
of American militarism / edited by Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L.
Dudziak ; afterword by Andrew Bacevich.
Other titles: Marilyn Young on the culture and politics of American
militarism
Description: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2021] | Series:
Culture and politics in the Cold War and beyond | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020053347 (print) | LCCN 2020053348 (ebook) | ISBN
9781625345684 (paper) | ISBN 9781625345691 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781613768228 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613768235 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—History, Military—20th century. | United
States—History, Military—21st century. | United States—Military
policy. | Militarism—United States. | Cold War—Influence. | Vietnam
War, 1961–1975—United States. | Korean War, 1950–1953—United States. |
War and society—United States.
Classification: LCC E181 .Y683 2021 (print) | LCC E181 (ebook) | DDC
355.00973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053347
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053348
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Excerpt from “Body Count” in chapter 5 first published as track 4 on
Body Count, Body Count, Sire Records, 1992. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpt from Richard Rovere in chapter 10 first published in
“Letter from Washington,” New Yorker, August 5, 1950, 48.
Reprinted by permission of Condé Nast.
Excerpts “The Hearth” and “Shrapnel” from Collected Poems
by C. K. Williams. Copyright © 2006 by C. K. Williams.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
To the students of Marilyn Blatt Young
The royalties from this book will be donated to the
Marilyn B. Young Memorial Fund at New York University,
which promotes scholarship and dialogue on
U.S. foreign relations, American wars and militarism,
antiwar activism, and decolonization.
Marilyn B. Young. Photograph by Sara Krulwich (2016)
“Our continuous task must be to make war visible, vivid, an
inescapable part of the country’s self- consciousness, as inescapable
a subject of study as it is a reality.”
— Marilyn B. Young

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak
PART 1
MAKING AMERICAN WARS
1. The Age of Global Power 15
2. Hard Sell: The Korean War 39
3. U.S. Opposition to War in Korea and Vietnam 66
4. “The Same Struggle for Liberty”: Korea and Vietnam 84
5. Counting the Bodies in Vietnam 108
PART 2
UNLIMITED WAR, LIMITED MEMORY
6. The Big Sleep 123
7. Bombing Civilians: From the Twentieth to the
Twenty- First Centuries 139
8. Permanent War 165
9. U.S. in Asia, U.S. in Iraq: Lessons Not Learned . . . 181
10. “I was thinking, as I often do these days, of war”:
The United States in the Twenty- First Century 186

ix
x CONTENTS
Afterword 205
Andrew Bacevich
Selected Additional works of Marilyn B. Young 213
Acknowledgments 217
Index 219