Overview

Popular representations of the Vietnam War tend to emphasize violence, deprivation, and trauma. By contrast, in Armed 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 Abundance offers a unique and provocative perspective on modern American warfare. |Popular representations of the Vietnam War tend to emphasize violence, deprivation, and trauma. By contrast, Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam--finding that consumption and satiety, rather than privation and sacrifice, defined most soldiers' Vietnam deployments.

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A valuable work for any student of this war. Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. <br>- Choice

Armed with Abundance is a conceptually significant work that will inspire others to explore further a little studied area of military history. <br>- Michigan War Studies Review

Meredith Lair's fascinating analysis of rear-echelon life among American G.I.s dramatically challenges our most common conceptions of U.S. military experiences in Vietnam. From steaks to steambaths, swimming pools to giant PXs, the amenities provided on large bases not only belie conventional images of that war, but also stand as dramatic testimony to the desperate and unsuccessful effort of American officials to bolster flagging troop morale as the war lurched toward its final failure. --Christian G. Appy, author of Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam

Lair has laid the foundation stone for a new historiographical approach, a research field that focuses on the other aspect of warfare, the leisure culture during wartime and between battles. This research can serve as a model for the examination of similar phenomena in other wars. <br>- H-War

Author Information

Meredith H. Lair is associate professor of history at George Mason University.

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