Announcer paying with their bodies is a 2015 book by john kinder. Next on American History tv from , the new york academy of medicine, professor kinder explorers the history of u. S. Wars through the eyes of five disabled veterans. And argues that the nations struggles to meet the needs of the wounded veterans. This 75 minute talk includes graphic images of wounded veterans. Now for this evening, we are happy to welcome john kinder to talk about the history of american war here it this is part of a series of lectures we have had throughout the year. Legacies of war, medical innovations and impacts, which commemorates the american entry into world war i. For the talks this evening, dr. Kinder will look at the way hollywood has shied away from graphic war wounds and how military propaganda is used to downplay wars relentless consumption on life and limbs. In this talk, he will explore the history of american war through the eyes of five disabled veterans. What emerges is a portrait of a nation struggling and often failing to mitigate the human costs of military conflict. We welcome dr. Kinder from Oklahoma State university where he is a professor of history and american studies. He is the author of paying with their bodies which came out two years ago. From the university of chicago press. He is currently completing a book on the history of zoos in world war ii. Please welcome Professor John kinder. [applause] professor kinder thank you. Let me just arrange this really quick. Ok. First off, i want to thank the new york academy of medicine for inviting me to speak with you this evening. This is a real pleasure and i look forward to the day im able to come back here, hopefully soon as a researcher. To use this amazing collection. I want to point out from the start that i am not a physician. Im a historian and a cultural historian at that. Which means when it comes to war, im less interested in medical advancement, the nuts and bolts of putting people back together, than in how we make sense of wars trauma. The extent to which we grapple with what has happened as we head into battle and then come home injured. Thats what im about. With that in mind, i thought we might begin today with looking at hollywood, which i consider ground zero for military mythmaking. Its 1949, four years after the end of world war ii and the sands of iwo jima has just reached theaters. Anyone here seen sands of iwo jima . Most of you, good. , itthose of you havent stars john wayne in his most iconic role, john stryker. Hes a marine. Part father figure. Part dictator. Hes tasked with leading the young platoon in a series of assaults culminating in an attack on the japanese stronghold in iwo jima. It is in interesting film. At the time it was released, critics praised it for the realism of the onscreen combat. U. S. Marine corps participated in making the film in hollywood. Today, the film is best known for its ending. For those who have not seen it, i apologize because i am about to spoil it. Nearing the top of the mountain, stryker pauses to have a cigarette and is shot through the chest. And it happens so quickly, you dont really know what is happening. One moment they are all there, celebrating, and then, the unthinkable has happened. John wayne is dead. How can this be . And despite the ending, the film was catnip for the generation raised in the afterglow of world war ii. And even today it is easy to understand why. Why the film was so appealing. Sands of iwo jima makes war seem heroic and honorable. It seems like a fasttrack to manhood for those brave enough to follow in john waynes footsteps. Plus, and this cant be discounted, and this is what i really want to hammer home the , movie makes john waynes final seconds appear painfree. Strykers death is instantaneous. His corpse is kept at a view of the camera. They crowd around him, so you really dont see anything. Perhaps john strykers organs were ripped apart as the bullet passed through his chest. Perhaps his back exploded in a volcano of blood and bone. Perhaps as he tumbled backwards, groping at the place it entered his body, he evacuated his towels bowels. But well never know. Prior to the 1960s, hollywood shied away from showing those sorts of wounds in intimate detail. People died quickly with little more than a little squirt of chocolate syrup to signify theyve been hit. Chocolate syrup in black and white looked like love. Raised on a diet of john wayne films, you would never know enemy gunfire sometimes american spines, faces, brains, and genitals. This sanitized vision of wartime violence can be chalked up by the hollywood code which restricted bodily trauma. You werent going to see it in hollywood. But i think john strykers systematicemise is of a larger trend in American Culture. That is an unwillingness to a to acknowledge what happened to bodies in military conflict. We just dont think about it. We dont see it. When it comes to bodily trauma, Many Americans live in a world of willful ignorance. Tv journalists rarely speak about get shots, about severed limbs. They are more likely to speak about losses and casualties. As if the whole point of war was not to injure the other side. Visit the memorial in washington dc and you would be hardpressed to discover what happens when americas 400 plus thousand war tour though in the virtual no less than tom hanks assures , us they gave their lives for freedom. We have that. We dont know what happens, but we are told their deaths are good. They meant something. None of this can be blamed on some conspiracy. There is no larger force acting to keep this information away. As comforting as that thought might seem to some of us. Yes, in wartime the federal government maintains a long tradition of censoring the worst of the slaughter in order to maintain civilian morale. Just think about world war ii. World war ii was a conflict in which 50 Million People were killed and yet americans at home did not begin to see photos of g. I. Corpses until 1943. And even these were free of all signs of bodily mutilation. They were basically men who had been killed and were laying down in the sand. Their faces absent, you cant see them. Todays technology has rendered most forms of censorship updated. In 2009, a ban was lifted. As well see, there are exceptions to this pattern of emptiness and absence. Some americans have shared intimate details of their physical and mental trauma. On the whole, American Culture has long engaged in what i like to think of as a kind of selfcensorship. Many of us do not think about wartime suffering. And there are lots of reasons why. Thinking about it is unpleasant. Doing so would politicize the suffering. Supporting the troops, we are told, means focusing on the positive. Focusing on the good things. And because, and this is my main theory, we have been trained not to care. War, for the vast majority of americans, has been and continues to be out of sight, and out of mind. Thus i want to spend our time , together tonight to take a brief tour of the history of american war. Our guidepost will be five u. S. Veterans, some famous, others forgotten, whose bodies were permanently altered during wars. What emerges is a portrait of a nation struggling and failing to come to terms with the human cost of military conflict. What emerges is a portrait of war that looks different than what you would see in a hollywood movie starring someone like john wayne. Thats what i want to get a sense of tonight. Well start in the civil war. On may 3, 1863, private Joseph Harvey was fighting in virginia when he was hit in the face by a shell fragment. The burning piece of metal took off part of his lower job, lower jaw, fractured his cheekbone and destroyed one of his eyes, leaving behind a gaping hole. Harvey fell into southern hands and was held prisoner for 11 days before doctors worked on him. It was a month and a half before he saw any real doctor. He was discharged on the account of physical disability in 1865. Two years later. Harvey took a job as a night watchman. When this photo was taken the following months, liquid and saliva continued to leak from the wound and much of his face was numb. I found harveys story in a 6000 page history of medical and surgical advancements of the civil war. And i chose harvey to show you for a few reasons. For starters he fulfills any of , our expectations that we have of our disabled veterans. He was injured in battle and he suffered a physical wound, one that remained visible after the war ended. He also embodies many cliches that we gravitate towards when we are talking about disabled vets. Some wounds never heal. War lives on in the bodies of those who fought. Thats quite literally the case in Joseph Harvey. Scholars often talk about how of germanica site memory. Traumatic memory. These are like portals to an earlier time. Evidence that the past is never really passed. That was the case for Joseph Harvey. He would never be able to move on from the war. He would never become what he once was. Not as long as it continued to dribble from the hole in his face. Harvey is sometimes, i like to think of him as our stereotype of a disabled veteran. Hes injured, it is visible, it happened in battle, it lives on in his body. Yet for all of that, harvey is also something of an outlier. During the civil war, twice as many troops were killed by disease as by battle wounds. Dysentery and malaria and typhoid fever killed many. They left many survivors permanently impaired. As one might imagine medical , technology was crude during the civil war. Sometimes, in fact, the cure was worse than the sickness. This is a 21yearold pilot from maryland who lost an eye and much of his upper jaw after injecting mercury to treat a bout of pneumonia. It poisoned him and the surgeon had to remove much of his face. Advancements in transportation and manufacturing enable both equip to deploy and eventually to blast apart troops with unprecedented speed. It was the point of civil battles. If we only focus on men like Joseph Harvey, we miss another part of the war story, even all, the kind of everyday dangers that plate warmaking to this day. So for the 10,000 or so Union Soldiers that suffered wounds to the face, thousands of others that we dont really like to think about were permanently disabled are from the battlefield when they were hit by trains, when limbs fell on their head, or when they were. Icked in the face by mules in the decades following harveys death, american struggle to come to terms with the civil wars legacy of destruction. End, however,s something very strange began to happen, something we dont really think about, which is that growing numbers began to see the grown conflict as an aberration. It was the last outburst of approval age. Of a brutal age. Civilizations, by which they met what, would be short and wars survivable. Nooks a nation with their repeat the deadly formula of mass armies and Industrial Age weapons. Not the guns and the bombs would only get more lethal. This was the prediction. Thatoptimistic protected International Arbitration would replace largescale flood letting. Least, military physicians would take some comfort in the medical essence they had learned from harvey and thousands like him. That masshe dream warfare and mass casualties would disappear in the 20th century. Which brings us to world war i. And our second disabled veteran, horse vitamin. Horace pittman. He rose to become more one of the most famous africanamerican artist from the 20th century. They was september 30, 1918, barely a month after the ceasefire. His regiment was fighting north of paris when he was hit by german machine gun fire. Bullets smashed through his right shoulder. He spent hours awaiting rescue. It fell into a ditch and was pinned beneath the corks for hours beneath a corpse for hours. After months of treatment, he was discharged with a steel plate in his shoulder, a partially paralyzed right arm and a pension of 22. 50 a month. Over the next decade he scraped by working a series of odd jobs, spinning is nice decorating painting he took up , using his left hand to prop up his right arm and guide the brush across the canvas. His death inf 1946, his portraits and seems about American Life has been featured in magazines like time, newsweek, and vote. Vogue. When the u. S. Center world war i in april 1970, many believed that men like him to not belong in uniform. That alone wilting rivals on the front lines. I certainly would not be the first person to bring up the army of the fact that the United States wage the war to make the world safe for democracy with the white supremacist army. Racism was baked into all aspects of military life during from segregated recreational facilities to the violent harassment of blacks in uniform to the odious race signs set shape decisions of wartime positions. Theres a diagnosis of africanamericans with extraordinarily high rates of hysteria, poor emotional control, and venereal disease. And forike davenport many of others like him, africanamericans in their view lacked intelligence and the emotional discipline to be effective fighters. Instead, black bodies were sued for one thing, manual labor. Suited for one thing, manual labor. Fighters onlylth saw action when was put under his command. Refused to fight alongside their africanamerican countrymen. There were so successful in routing germans that they want a citation from the french government. Quarter million new yorkers cheered as they marched in a tickertape parade of fifth avenue right password we are tonight. Such displays were not enough to alter the nations in the military systemic valuing a black bodies and black lines. 13 africanamerican bits were lynched after world war i. Countless more be harassed, their houses set aflame. Picked and was able to survive the red summer of 1919. However, it would take another world or before the commanderinchief decided to desegregate the u. S. Military. So despite this, despite the 369 record, military Leader Source of men of color had little place in the war unless they were janitors, stevedores, or the targets of american firepower. This is story up until world war i and into world war ii. You might not recognize the name of our next veteran, but its likely that many tonight are familiar with his work. Perhaps the most famous disabled American Veterans of world war. I never saw action overseas some 50,000944, as troops landed on the beaches of normandy, he is serving as an Army Instructor in North Carolina when it effective explosive blew off both of his hands. To walter reedt Medical Center and washington, d. C. , where he spent months recovering from his injuries, and this was agonizing. He was worried about spending the rest of his life as an amputee, as he wrote in his autobiography, and im quoting here, for disabled veterans in bugle tatian was not a realistic prospect. For all i knew, i was better off dead, and i had plenty of time to figure out if i was right. This was his attitude. I want to pause to point out this term he used, rehabilitation. It meant something very specific. Adopted in world war i, rehabilitation was an integrated ,et of practices, orthopedic jobs training, psychological counseling, that was aimed at helping disabled veterans reintegrate societies as economically productive workers. He was conceived as a moderate a modern approach to the problem of the disabled veteran. It was seen as an alternative to the days when government largess was confined to pension and old soldiers homes. Today we take these sort of things for granted. We take for granted the idea that if youre wounded in the war, the government help you which back on your feet and get you working again. The idea of relocation has been the backbone of federal policy , buteterans to this day during world war i, this was considered an experiment, and that if it was successful, would transform war itself. Writing in october 1917, and aging Teddy Roosevelt opined, the cripple, in the sense of being a helpless or useless cripple, largely be eliminated, and out of this war will have come another step toward the better and more just life. World war i era we build tatian did not live up to this lofty promise but with each new war, have allw cohorts recycle is same old promise that you get from Teddy Roosevelt, which is that todays Wounded Warriors have the best care ever. Advancedthanks to technology and research, the disabled veteran will soon be a thing of the past. And they literally believe this, reach new war who have no such thing as disabled veterans. If you are going to do more, we will put you back together, get you a job, and you will be even better than you were before the war. Teddy roosevelt believed this 100 years ago. And we are still hearing this today. Back to harold russell, one day while en route become you happen to see a documentary film about a world war i vet who had been successfully rehabilitated. He was intrigued and after some training, he went on to star in his own film called diary of a sergeant, which is shown performing there is tasked with his iron hook prosthesis. This documentary called the attention of director william wonder who tapped him to act along side Fredric March andrews investors of our lives, a melodrama about three or four attempting to transition to fit to civilian life. It was considered a critical and Box Office Smash for his for trail as a former quarterback who lost both his hands in a naval attack. He won two academy awards, one for best supporting actor and another or bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans. Focuses on his character, homer, and his anxieties about hurting his family, especially his fiancee, and, with his disability his most poignant scene, he is struggling to take up his books and wilma sort of talks him into bed as if he is the baby. Were not really sure its going 5, 10, 20 years down the road. We since hes going to get married, maybe things will be better, but there is still a lingering sense of doubt. ,et the trajectory for russell his transformation from depression tofrom rehabilitation, seem to mirror the optimism of postworld war ii victory culture. Veteran forabled what some now call the good war and he seemed to embody so many traits of it. Few veterans have carried as much symbolic weight is that of our fourth figure. 1967, navy20 6, ii wasjohn Sidney Mccain i down by a surfacetoair missile. He ejected at 500,000 hour, breaking both arms in his right knee in the process. Waiting in a shallow lake, he was attacked by locals and was later trucked to a colonial theon, which was nicknamed hanoi hilton. Medical care, as you can imagine, was extremely scarce. Doctors help reset his broken bones. He lost one third of his body weight to dysentery and forced starvation. He was the son of an admiral, yet he consistently thwarted his captors efforts to use him as a political on. They wanted to turn him into this propaganda figure. At one point he even refused to go home early, saying that he had no right to do so ahead of other men. , thehen came the torture beatings, the agonizing night spent in stress positions. Mccain tried to commit suicide twice, but as he later wrote, every man has his breaking point, and i had reached mine. He signed a confession, thanking the vietnamese people and calling himself a black criminal. Mccain spent a total of 5. 5 , for as prisoner of war decades later, he still has limited flexibility in his knees and has difficulty raising his arms much higher than we can see in this photo. Noted for his difficulty in fixing his shirt collar. Mccainsn talk about cannot talk about his experience without talking about war and politics. After the war, pows, many of whom were assumed to be brainwashed, returned home under cloud of suspicion viewed this is fishing came from collaborating with the enemy, or at least the sense that it might have done so. John mccain, by contrast, was a national hero. His broken body and prematurely white hair evidence of his willingness to suffer on americas behalf. It is important to point out that the politics of the disabled body saturated wartime culture. On the one hand you have figures like ron coby, who was paralyzed from the waist down by a gunshot to the spine. He and plenty of others on the antiwar left displayed their disabled bodies as signs of protest the inhumanity of the vietnam war. So you have that on one side. Meantcains injuries were to symbolize something different. The civilized faith. Faith that the war had been worth it. Faith in duty and country and righteousness of american so today his identity as an x p. O. W. Central to his lyrical credibility. It is the hammer he uses to beat down or doubters, those who would cut and run in places like afghanistan and iraq, where you cannot understand mccain and his political clout without understanding his disabled body. Recently, recordings of north vietnamese propaganda broadcasts featuring john mccains voice have been circulating online. The Mainstream Press has largely toward these broadcasts, and for good reason. For one thing, mccain long admitted to taking taping false confessions after days of abuse. Some of the darker corners of the rightwing internet have seized upon the recordings as evidence of what they had long maintained, that mccain was a songbird. ,e was a traitor deserve to be and im quoting, hung by the neck until dead. I would ask, i dont want to make any assumptions, but i would ask that you set aside for a moment whatever you think that john mccain his politics, and lets just focus on what it takes to make that kind of claim. There is a lack of empathy, sure, almost a sociopathic defense of the military code of conduct which requires pows to resist to the utmost of their ability. But to those who would say this kind of things about mccain, i see something more insidious going on, which is a failure to take the body seriously. Those who would criticize mccain or anyone who breaks, and i hate this term, breaks under torture, to so with the believe that winds are more powerful than bodies. That is strongwilled can hold out against virtually anything. But this simply is not the case. This is oner, and thing i like to empathize again and again in everything i do, bodies matter. Burn them, mutilate them, start them, torture them, overpower them, exposed them to heat or cold or humiliating gaze of others, and even the strongest of us who do things, will feel things that we never thought possible. So to make this claim about mccain are anyone, i see it as a reluctance to take the body seriously. That is dangerous. That is the fourth, and were coming to the fifth. I want to knowledge my trepidation about including rfid disabled vet of this evening. Oft follows is the count Sexual Violence, a story so recent that i could not locate a photo in the public domain, and i am not sure i would show it even if i could. Katie links as sina joined the navy at the age of 21, serving on board a missile destroyer. The following year, she was raped at night point by one of her shipmates in the San Diego Hotel room. Reported the assault to her superiors, but according to her mother, was told, its not that we dont believe you, but he outranks you. The trauma drove her from the navy and she was treated for depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. All the while living in fear that her rate this was never prosecuted and would attack again. She published what was to be the start of her memoirs on her facebook page. I will just read a little bit. I would like to dedicate this book to the United States navy and all the men and women who bravely served our country when he middle with humility and have been raped and were brave enough to tell someone, whether anything came of it or not. But she did not finish the book. Casina, thene lynn only 24, committed suicide, and she used a gun. Her story is significant on several levels. She is a member of what has always been the largest cohort of disabled veterans and disabled americans. That is those with invisible injuries. Although there is no such thing as a purely mental trauma, the brain is after all part of the body, most disabled veterans dont look like Joseph Harvey or harold russell. Of the reason that disabled vet can stand you to struggle in the United States. To make a larger struggle, white is seemingly so easy to legacy of lead violence. We dont see many disabled fetes for what they are. They pass by us, they are invisible. Her case shines a light on a long underreported legacy of American Military culture, and that is the ubiquity of Sexual Violence, both against perceived enemies and against others, other americans in uniform. Very but it 2012 department of Defense Survey found that nearly one quarter of active ute women had experienced some form of sexual assault. Only about one in seven were reported to higher ups and one in 10 went to trial. Expect, female Service Personnel are far more likely to be rate than their male counterparts. Men make up roughly 90 of the military. They represent the largest population of rape victims in the u. S. Military. So there is a huge number of men who are raped in the u. S. Military as well as women. There is a name for the psychological toll of these kinds of attacks. Mst. Ary sexual trauma, or the Veterans Administration defines it as psychological, resulting from a physical assault of a sexual nature, battery of a sexual nature, or Sexual Harassment which occurred while in service. Symptoms include depression, difficulty sleeping, self dedication, and not surprisingly, heightened rates of ptsd and high rates of suicide. Claims for sexual trauma related ptsd are granted at lower rates than those connected to nonsexual psychological trauma and the myth that mens dont get that men dont get raped has proven to be especially intractable in the military, when filing disability claims. Charactervors at Sexual Violence in military as a twopronged assault. There is the original rape, followed shortly thereafter by the command rape, the threats of retaliation, the unwillingness of commanders to take action. The Boys Club Mentality that would rather shame the victim and prosecute the perpetrator, and many who have been interviewed about this say that the command rate is far more traumatizing in fact, in their minds, than the original thing. Just one of tens of thousands of casualties of the war on terror. Lives traumatize not by radical islam or whatever the u. S. Claims to be fighting today, but by a rape culture in which, according to one journalist, nothing feminist is well is welcome. So what does this all at up to . But does the history of america . Ore look like byant to begin to wrap up bringing up a couple of broad interpretations. Perhaps the most generous would be to think about the history of america more as a story of progress, or medical progress at the very least. That can be little doubt todays surgeons would be able to close the hole in harveys face or restore the sum of the movement to convince damaged shoulder. The upper trajectory of things Getting Better is not a recent development, although war supporters often treated as such. During the early years of the iraq war, news often gushed about the latest of elements in Reconstructive Surgery and prosthetic divine design. The medical miracles in to put torn apart. Rhead i see these kinds of stories as part of the apparatus of american innocence that accompanied all u. S. Conflict, or at least early on. The expectation that americas wars are different, that they are better, more righteous, and whatever warmer military failings have now been resolved. That you go off to war, its not your daddys war, its something better. So that is one interpretation. Another interpretation would be to highlight by contrast the resounding failure of efforts to eliminate disability from the calculus of american war. 100 years after Teddy Roosevelt addicted the passing of the cripple this was his term the u. S. Is no closer to solving the problem of the disabled veteran that in generations past. According to a 2016 senses, more than 4 million American Veterans have the Service Connect disability, of which one it for certain afghanistan and iraq. Produce ateems to least an acknowledgment of new categories of disability from military raintree to sexual trauma. So it is not going away. Ourddition, several of figures hit and an often ignored aspect of the american war story and that is the history of division and violence between u. S. Citizens in wartime. Many of us are raised on the notion, the myth that americans set aside their differences, that they come together in times of military conflict. Antagonism over race, sexuality, over who belongs, dont simply fade away when people put on a uniform. Dictated thatism African Americans were not worthy of fighting alongside their fellow countrymen. More recently, the u. S. Military has struggled to reflect the diversity of the nations it has meant to protect. Repealing 2010 of dont ask dont tell is a step in right direction, at least in my mind. However, the recently announced transgender van along with skyrocketing mst rate suggests that the fiber for justice within the military and civilian life, is far from over. I think our five bodies point to the need for what i call in my book a new veteran knowledge he. By this, i mean a field of study aimed not only at improving the lives of disabled veterans but also asking tough questions about the value underlying so much of the work on their behalf. What does it mean to readjust in the wake of traumatic impairment . To what extent does the u. S. To smoothse veterans over anxieties about past and future conflicts . As the armed forces increasingly outsourced their Functions Private contractors, how will the social contract between veterans in the federal government evolved . This will require activist groups, veterans, and hopefully people like you. Concludeote, i want to by drawing attention to another category of bodies, the title of my talk is a bit is leading. Its not just five. These include the bodies of american enemies, those killed and maimed as collateral damage. Those whose painandsuffering is into force americas opponents to the bargaining table. Americans dont typically spend much time fretting or at the history of asymmetrical violence, about how even in failed military campaigns the United States dishes out far more death and destruction than his other sustained than it has ever sustained. There was not a lot of handwringing in the highest circles about how many outside the u. S. Would be killed if americans took up arms. A patrioticyond instinct that so many of us have to buy or ties the lives of our own. If you are american, prioritize the lives of americans. It hinges on an almost pathological indifference to human suffering. Tens,ingness to sacrifice hundreds, perhaps even thousands of them, so that one of your own can be saved. Journalist eric jackson has called this calculus the west moreland mindset. The reference to an infamous quote in general a reference to an infamous quote general William Westmoreland in vietnam delivered in 1974 in a documentary, hearts and my. Edit an astounding image astounding moment in the film, sitting on a peaceful riverbank, westmoreland declared, the oriental doesnt the same price online as does a westerner. Peter davis cuts to the scene of a vietnamese woman trying to crawl into the grave of a loved one it is a chilling in westchilling morelands, seeming indifference here. But i believe jacksons characterization is a bit unfair. Not because with moreland didnt deserve it, but because so many do also. We could just as easily point to Andrew Jackson or Henry Kissinger or even madeleine albright, who, when asked in 1996, a 500,000 iraqi children who die because of u. S. Sanctions, replied that, the price is worth it. We could point to the architects that causedwar nearly 200 thousand civilian deaths in the first 10 years. If includes the factors that infrastructure damage and disease, the number tops 500,000. And of course future generations might speak about the trump mindset, one that would have us totally destroy north korea, or example, on the off chance they might do something. If we really want to take more seriously, we need to think about the bodies and lives of all those involved, not just those who fight on americas behalf. At the very least, i hope and think that putting the body at the center of the american war story reminds us that the nations martial history is much messier, more devastating to reflectivemb, more of who we are as a people, both ill, if we think about military sexual trauma, and movies like sands of iwo jima, would lead us to believe. And i hope we can have a conversation about this. [applause] [indiscernible] you started out talking about how the media and many different areas focus on not informing people about the severity and the horror of war. One of the things ive always sort of heard or thought is that war in the past was perhaps more gentlemanly or this then war in the present. Certainly the destructive power of armies has increased, so in that sense it would be true. I wonder is it really true in the past, armies were any less focused on causing death and destruction to their enemies than we are now . Quicksand is a terrific question. Is, were wars in . He past more gentlemanly there is a sense that they were more rulebased. There were more some shins about when a battle would take lace. You would set a time and field and go off and fight. There would maybe be a moment to go collect the dead and wounded and so forth. That continued into the civil work. You can see moments of that even into world war i and so forth. The problem is, by the time you get to the u. S. Civil war, so many things are changing. Youre having so many more people who are fighting. You haveple who so much more powerful weaponry, and the destruction is almost beyond anything that can be controlled. Which, theres a sense in there still seem to be some rule to how or would befall. All these sort of things apply history and of u. S. The history of or the west, theres almost two kinds of force. There is war between other nations come other western nations, and wars between western nations and people of color, or who are viewed as savages. So rules about slaughtering the dead, abouting the utter destruction, these things fall out the window. There were different sets of tools, weaponry that was viewed as uncivilized could only be viewed used against people of color. By the time you get to world war of, there isense still a real expectation that war would have the set of clearcut rules and would be gentlemanly, and over 40 years, that gets worn down. Scholars have looked at when thinking about what transforms modern war is the development of aerial bombing. Aerial bombing, if you read memoirs from the early 20th century, frontline soldiers rail against real bombing more than any other thing. Decide exactly what you were saying, i understand war in which im fighting someone who is running for the. I know when the war is going to happen. I know theyre going to come this way, watch co. That way. There is a logic to it. Someone flies overhead and maybe they are even trying to bomb something a mile away, and they drop a bomb, and because of wind, it hits me. And i cant do anything about it. Theres a real sense of powerlessness. There was a real sense in which the logic of the machine has taken over the logic of people. Morehis gets even more and accelerated, so by the time you get to world war ii, yes, there still are there is still a sense in which there are occasions in which this gentlemanly war is still around, but he gets beaten out by the machines and by the level of construction. I am hesitant to fully embrace the idea that war and the past was ever that much better than it is today. But there are certain moments, sometimes technological, sometimes ideological, these kind of tipping points, and one is the development of aerial bombing, but along with that, development of gas. Gas, it any kind of weapon that you have that is not meant to hit someone, is meant to hit anything. That goes from machine guns in civil war to gas to eventually leads to the atomic bomb. You are not aiming at anyone in particular, which is why there insuch an emphasis today transforming ideas about bombing , ideas about work, by digitizing emphasizing control. For going to have a Surgical Strike on north korea, its not going to be this thing that is out of control. There able to contain violence, aim the violence, focused the violent, and thats the kind of for that maybe i can get behind, versus war in which were just going to randomly kill until they give up. That is why theres such emphasis on surgical attacks and decapitation. This is the language of making more accessible once again. Are you able to get into the question of the volunteer army and therefore, how not taking body seriously becomes not taking the bodies of people who feel they can only get into the army as a way forward . That is where this all in sup. In some ways my book is wrestling with this question of coming out of the civil war where there is such destruction, a that 600,000 people killed, Million People severely injure. By the time you get to world war i, many people are saying we cannot do this again. We cannot have forced like this in the future, not with improved technology and so what. How can you remove the calculus of disability from war . It is too remove remove the significant of those bodies, and the political will behind those bodies, and the development of the all volunteer force in 1973 is the culmination of that. One lesson that many in the government and the military took from the vietnam war was this. The u. S. Did lose in vietnam. The u. S. Lost on the streets of new york and washington, d. C. This is because enough people at home said, wait, maybe i might be willing to pay with my body for a good warlike world war ii. Maybe i might be willing to do this if i think i might actually s. Fighting nazi but this war in vietnam, theres no good thats going to, that. Its not going to work. So those in the aftermath of the war said, how do we get rid of those people, those voices . Draft, then wehe have a war over here in a rat, a bunch of people are getting killed, its going on for 10 years. What do i care . Im not going. The people that are going are signing up. That is on them. It is a small number of people, we dont know them. I live in oklahoma. There is a larger percentage of veterans there, so veterans are more speakers present, but even in oklahoma, its nothing like in the past. By developing the all volunteer force, what you really do is get rid of so much of the anger at home and so much of the feeling of individual investment in war. What happened now is that the u. S. Can fight wars for 16 years , and they just kind of keep going. For the vastle, majority of people, they have absolutely no impact on them. This trend is even going to get more exaggerated with the development of robotics and corporate armies. In the future, in the 21st century, a u. S. Military is largely going to fight wars with machines, computers, and with the four. Youre not going to have big parades rallying against that. They are going to go off and get killed. So it is a recipe for having your war while also having a contented nation home, or nation that doesnt really care. Part of what i do in my work is try to think about, if those are the conditions, how do i get people to care about these things . Im not a veteran. I have family who are veterans, but how to i get ordinary people who are raised in this environment with the dont really think about is having anything to do with them, how do i get them to care about the plight of disabled veterans, homelessness, military sexual trauma . Violence onstory of all sides. And its very, very difficult. To can say that hollywood is better, hollywood is much more andsed on homecomings violence at home. But the conditions have changed. When john wayne was fighting in the sands of iwo jima, theres a real sense that the generation and watch that film would be going into military. It was important for them to have a sense of what the americasas and why wars are worth fighting. Today it is very difficult. Thats kind of the situation we are in. The death designation of mst, was at the military itself . That is termed the Veterans Administration uses. The reason i was interested, it seems unusually transparent in these days, because i remember when shellshocked was a ptsd but now we just have for civilians and for people in military. I wondered if that was a political decision or if in fact it is indistinguishable from civilian trauma, or do you think it minimizes the role of war when soldiers are described as having ptsd . That is often a political designation. A number of veterans groups, disabled veterans groups have been very invested in keeping control of these terms. They want to define what disability is, who disabled veterans are, what counts as a disabled veteran. There was a lot of lobbying to say invisible injuries count, too. Traumatic brain injury, counts also. There is almost a hierarchy of injury. The things that are most important. An injury to the body that is visible, that ranks number one. Especially if it comes to wartime. Below that, maybe an injury to physical but that has symptoms and so forth. Maybe at the bottom, kicked in the face by a meal. A person kicked in the face by a meal might require as much or much more there be an pension work than a person at the top, but because pensions and these disability ratings are always political, you have to lobby the government to get funding and so forth. They want to control what a disabled veteran is, a heroic vision of a disabled veteran and so forth. Actually in as strange place. I dont think i convey the complexity of the military today , just for the purposes of this talk. The military in many ways has been on the cutting edge of a lot of this research. Increasingly they are invested in this idea of military sexual as an important obstacle for what they want to do going forward. The military knows that its not going to have a high numbers for ever. It knows that its membership is going to be increasingly diverse, coming from an increasingly different background and having increasingly different sexual and gender identities. It is important for the u. S. Military is going to work to be able to address the complexity of all their issues and so forth. So the military tends to be, at least when it comes to definition and pronouncements, quite good about recognizing things and being quite blunt about it. Thats part of the reason, because veterans groups and others hold them accountable. The american region, Wounded Warrior project, all these , or havee incredibly been incredibly powerful at lobbying and raising awareness, drawing attention to Veterans Issues and soap. They tend to be quite good at pushing u. S. Military to recognize a lot of these issues. Said, traditionally, historically veterans groups have tended to sort of say, there are disabilities, and then there is the rest of the worlds disabilities. And if the government has to find one of them, they find fund us. Their argument is quite simple, which is, you might be disabled because we are born that way, or we you might be disabled because you stepped off a curb at the wrong time, or you simply had a heart attack. I was disabled because i put my body on the line in service of my country. My disability is a product of national service. If anyone is one to be funded, we are going to be funded. For this reason, disabled veterans groups have, and sometimes in the past, been hostile to joining forces with nonveterans disability groups, and that is a mistake. That worked in the 20th century and the 19th century. Thats not going to work in the 21st. Because they are small. The u. S. Military represents a smaller and smaller portion of the country, the saloon groups are going to be much better. Its not in the veterans groups best interest to remain isolated. , thoseed to reach out who are addressing military sexual trauma to reach out to those addressing sexual trauma in all walks of life and not be so careful about reserving or sanctifying their disability as somehow different. Muche military evolve, so these groups evolve. I am intrigued by the term you use, the corporate army which you see as the future. It makes me think about, what does that mean for it seems to me like in the civil war were veterans given by the time they got to world war i, they said were not going to give them pensions anymore, were giving them the dole. If we have a corporate military and the government is no longer involved in rolling the military but merely paying for it, what happens to rehabilitation, the idea of getting these veterans back to what do you think would happen . In theink many people u. S. Military would say you are a private actor, you sign a contract, you are not like someone who entered at 18 because he or she wanted to go to college or one to serve his country or wanted to get away from a small town. I think the u. S. Military increasingly tries to draw division between those two groups. And for the most part, the United States, throughout the 20th century, has always involved private workers, contractors and that sort of thing. A lot of times they were doing things like setting up basis or cooking the food, doing the laundry, all these kinds of jobs. We dont want marines who are trained to kill to be spending their time setting up tents. We will hire people set up the tents and have the marines do the marine thing. Increasingly, and 21st century, the u. S. Military is hiring corporate contractors to do marine things. Military, but , ordinaryly within citizens would say we owe something to these disabled beerans who deserve to rehabilitated. That is the very least we can do. , that wasorate actors the will of the marketplace. More. Et paid a lot know about what kind of insurance they have. I imagine it is quite good. Today, one of the big issues tends to be that a lot of people who are in the u. S. Military are saying, wait a minute, im only getting paid a couple hundred dollars, where they are getting paid five or 10 times as much, and we are doing the same thing. I think thek rehabilitation will be private. I dont think it will be governmentfunded, but who knows . Successful at so making inroads into the u. S. Military, and so successful at blending what was this clearcut division between the citizen soldier and what used to be called a private mercenary, this has become so blended that 20 years down the road, who knows, their corporate contract, the private contract should distinguish them. The question would be, i think a lot of americans believe the u. S. Has a moral duty, if you want to even frame it that way, to rehabilitate those who are injured in war and soap work. As to americans feeling a moral duty in war and so forth. , dont think Many Americans im guessing, but i dont think Many Americans would say yes, yes we do. You talked about this dissociative attitude toward the , making it easy to nazi veterans. Is that to not see veterans. Does that exist elsewhere in the western world . Say it is a peculiarly american attitude, because that is my answer most things. Beeal answer should probably , i dont know. I havent studied, i havent done enough comparative work to actually say that with any sense of security about that. That said, i will plunge ahead and give my best guess. Of that attitude stems from the fact that with the exception of the civil or an exception of 9 11, most most american war takes place over there. Thats why the phrase is so useful. Over there, and in fact, just a couple of weeks ago, South Carolina republican senator Lindsey Graham was talking about the future attacks in north korea and he said if theres going to be a work, its going to happen over there. Theres not going to be killing here. Killing is going to be there. Well, if you go to great britain, england, france, australia, the war takes place here. Have moreid you injured bodies, you had more people, injured civilians. People who were not even in the military. For the most part, in the United States, if youre injured in world war ii, you might go to a , you might britain be there for months. You might stay there, so you might not get home for a year and a half, since that moment of injury. So a lot of time has gone by in terms of healing, in terms of experiencing the open wound and that sort of ring. But that is not the case in france, spain, across the entire global south. Buffer theceans have United States from so much of the violence of the wars it has taken part in. , ando for that reason because of the civilian attacks, it would be my strong, strong guess that the United States attitude is maybe one little bit of american exceptionalism. I hope you will join me in thanking john tinder. I want to thank everyone for joining us this evening. X thank you. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] a tweet from madman across the water, asking about an issue that still resounds today. His question is about how many people were fathered by u. S. Gis in vietnam, and how were they treated 45 years after the u. S. Departure . Emr ourould be featured program. Join the conversation on race book on facebook and on twitter. Cspan, where history unfolds daily. In 1970 nine, cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. American history tv is on cspan3 every weekend, featuring museum tours, archival films, and programs on the presidency. The civil war, and more. Heres a clip from a recent program. We almost destroyed the noncommissioned officer corps by the time i came in the army in 1970, by multiple tours in casualties in vietnam and people to set aside to get out. Its something we have to watch right out is ripped of todays headlines. The mcos on the border is what holds the military together. Werecovered what good ncos in vietnam and determined over the next week five years that my job as a military option was to create environments in the unit that produce good in ceos, and hopefully that had something to do with turning things around, and we need to be worried about that now. You can watch this and other American History programs on her website, where all our video is archived. history. Ww. Cspan. Org next, historian and biographer Richard Brookhiser addresses the question about George Washington in 1777. Could the british subdue the american rebels by capturing their castle the capital, philadelphia . It was washingtons actions in moments like this that ultimately led to his selection as the First American president. The New York Historical society hosted this hourlong event