This 90minute event was hosted by the american historical society. We have a terrific panel for you today. Just by way of introduction, i want to sort of explain how this panel came to be. And that is that we were all participants in an neh Summer Institute on veterans in society, ambiguities and representations. Think the subtitle there is incredibly important, right . Ambiguities and representations. It represents some of the confusion that might exist about who counts as a veteran, what it means to be a veteran, how that meaning has changed over time and how society has miss understand that change over time. How all of these things connect with nonveterans in society. So the Civil Military divide, which is seems to be growing ever greater. And so all of these issues were brought together in a threeweek Summer Institute down at virginia tech, in washington, actually. And where we explored with about 20 other colleagues from a variety of disciplines some of these issues. One of the big takeaways or one of the Big Questions that we were talking about is whether it would make sense to talk about Something Like veterans studies as a subdiscipline or as its own field. Is that something that actually should exist . Does it make sense to think of veterans history as a discreet subfield of history . Can you think about it is there enough shared in common and enough unique about that population that it needs to be treated that way . Also, do our understandings of excuse me. My goodness. Its chilly outside. Do our understandings of veterans lives and experiences benefit from being separated out this way . Does that help with our analysis . So the institute itself benefitted from a really multidisciplinary diverse set of people who are doing a variety of things that could be part of this sort of new idea of veterans studies and i think we have them wellrepresented here with history discipline. Its divided between the idea of sort of research and practice, right . And so you have people who are working on Veterans Issues in an academic sense using traditional kinds of historical inquiry like documentary research, oral history and material culture and trying to use these things to try to understand the past history of veterans groups, experience and their postwar integration into american life, but you also have practitioners who are looking at things like how do student veterans integrate on campus . What kinds of issues do they have when they come back to school using a g. I. Bill and how do those experiences then how can those experiences both be histo historyized and also how do you use their experiences and relate to their experiences and help them use their experiences to integrate on campus . And so veteran studies theoretically could be a very diverse multidisciplinary space where concerns about things like Foreign Policy, public policy, public history, oral history, military history, literature and art all meet together under one sort of umbrella heading and provide better avenues for understanding this population. So our three panelists today will combine those kinds of experience and their experiences and tell us more about the kind of work that they do. In sort of all of these areas. And force us to consider what it means for an individual in different times and places to be a veteran. To look at how it means what it means to be accepted among other vets in social constructs as a veteran. And how these kinds of veteran issues intersect with public poll and Foreign Policy discussions like those that get centered here in washington. How Historical Research can take shes issues into bridging the sort of greater Civil Military divide. And so well welcome you to think about these sort of issues and this sort of idea of a veterans studies or a veterans studies subfield of history as we explore these topics and hopefully well have a good fruitful conversation about that as we go forward. Before we go before we go straight into the discussions, i want to introduce our three panelists here. Excuse me. Ill start ill just give you a little bit of information about them based on the order in which theyre going to speak today. So starting on the far left, drew darrien is a professor of history at Salem State University. He specializes in 20th century United States history and oral history. Hes the author of becoming new yorks finest. And a history of the temple sinai in brookline. He served as the director of the student soldier cataloging the thats found salemveterans. Com. In 2012, he helped found and continues to teach in the salem state veterans learning, veterans Scholars Learning Community in which a cohort of firstyear veterans take linked classes and history writing, public speaking and interdisciplinary studies. You see a nice mixture of practice and scholarship there. Then immediately on my left, elena friat is a phd candidate at the university of new mexico and shes working on her dissertation, remembering new mexicos war, history in member of 1942 to 2012. She has presented at many conferences. She has prior to relocating to tampa, florida, she worked as a historian for the air force Research Laboratory in albuquerque, new mexico, and shes contributed to a lot of publications for the laboratory, including a 100year history of science and technology in the u. S. Air force. In the middle is sarah meyers. A professor of history at st. Francis university. Public history, war and society. Shes also director of a world war ii museum. It houses archival histories and interviews. One battling contested airspaces, the american Womens Service pilots of world war. Brian a ii. Gendered identities and militarization in the Second World War in the gender in the Second World War, the lessons of war. So we have a great deal of expertise to share with you this morning this afternoon. Excuse me. Drew . Thank you. And thank you all for being here today. I look forward to you joining in our conversation. Im going to begin with a little bit of personal narrative here. I first came to Salem State University in 2004 as the american wars in iraq and afghanistan seemed to be reaching something of a crescendo, but, of course, here we are 14 years later and many of the goals of what was then dubbed Operation Enduring freedom and Operation Iraqi freedom remain as murky as ever. What was most striking to me about my first few years at a Public University in a state known for its educational rigor and intellectual discourse was how few of my civilian students were thinking deeply about the blood and treasure being expended on behalf of oef and oif. Some students might certainly make connections between these contemporary wars and those conflicts they were studying in the classroom, but there was really little sense of urgency and there was certainly an absence of vigorous discourse about what was unfolding. In an age in less than 1 2 of 1 of the population serves in the armed forces, too many of our fellow citizens have either grown comfortable with war or simply ignored it entirely. Nowhere should this be more unsettling than at an institution of Higher Education. The other conspicuous dimension of teaching in the age of war is that hundreds of thousands of veterans have made their way to our classrooms, in part thanks to the g. I. Bill. And yet much in the same way there has been far too much silence about these wars, our student veterans have occupied a quiet, if not invisible place on our College Campuses. Our universities have been pretty good about honoring veterans through celebratory flagwaving events, but have created fewer opportunities for learning about their experiences of war, homecoming or transition to civilian life. Few of our civilian students have ever spoken with a veteran, let alone engaged in any kind of deep listening to his or her military experience. Surely it cannot be healthy for a democracy to undergo perpetual war and to do so as soldier and civilian grow further apart from one another. In 1776, samuel adams warned of this particular danger, commenting about the Standing Army of the American Revolution that, quote, men have been long subject to military laws and to the military customs and habits, may lose the spirit and feeling of citizens. And even citizens who oh so admire the heroism of the commanders of their own army lo look up to them as their saviors. As an oral historian, i viewed the contemporary citizensoldier divide as an opportunity. In 2007, i started training my undergraduate and graduate students to conduct oral histories with student veterans, both as a means of cataloging the American Experience of war in the 21st century but also as a vehicle for generating more discourse between soldiers and civilians. One of the central tenants of our project was to depoliticize it, to try to the degree possible to create a blank canvas for our veterans to paint with their own individual experiences. Now, of course, we had our own set of topics and questions that we intended to ask, and that made complete objectivity impossible, but id like to think that we were guided by a principle of creating a forum for veterans to represent their own experiences, trajectories and viewpoints. One of the major themes to emerge from these conversations has been the inordinate challenge our veterans face in juggling the multiple dimensions of their identity. As students, as soldiers, as citizens. What we heard time and time again were the ways in which the culture of the military was, in fact, antithetical to that of Higher Education. We know that the military has welldefined roles and tasks, a very clear chain of demand and puts a premium on following orders and not questioning authority. Where as we also know all too well the university is founded on an ethic of skepticism, doubt and challenging inherited wisdom. For many of our veterans, college was therefore an alien world. The military may have entailed danger, extremes of physical deprivation and psychological trials of epic proportions, but its clarity of purpose, reward system and bonds of solidarity dwarfed any satisfaction that many of these veterans could find on a college campus. At the same time, each of these students came to the military and later to the university with a personal history, one that was defined by family, region, race, religion and gender that in turn shaped their individual perspectives as citizens. We also ought to note that some of these veterans, in fact, secured their citizenship through military service. But the larger point here is that coming to the university was not just about the double consciousness of being a veteran on the one hand and a student on the other hand, but as an individual citizen with a very particular life history and understanding of the world. Add to that complexity the uniqueness of a veterans branch, boot camp, years of service, mos, rank, deployment and random mix of military peers, what you have is a profoundly rich and diverse set of stories that really renders meaningless any singular representation of the oef or oif veteran. Rather, what we have is a much richer tapestry, a kaleidoscope of veteran experiences with various meaning and interpretations. For some veterans, oef and oif were just wars. They were wellexecuted and they constituted a noble american mission. For other veterans, the wars were ill conceived from the start, founded on false principles and represented a misguided placement of military resources. The vast majority of veterans identified rich and deep bonds of solidarity, and those, in fact, often crossed the lines of race, class and gender. And yet where as some veterans viewed the military as colorblind and gender neutral, others reported deeply entrenched hierarchies of race and gender. Some veterans viewed the military as a pure mayper tockc. For others it was riddled with nepotism and favoritism. So the veterans reported that the military equipped them with vocationally transferrable skills, while others might note a general ethic of discipline, responsibility and accountability, but pointed out that the military taught them very little in terms of transferrable skills in their areas of interest for work. Some veterans demonstrated a great depth of knowledge of international affairs, cultural sensitivity and a thoughtful respect for afghan and iraqi citizens. Other veterans exhibited a more superficial understanding of the regions to which they were deployed, and in some cases failed to recognize the humanity of the victims of war. As a collective group, these veterans were a bundle of contradictions, but an equally important point is that individual veterans could express these contradictions within the same interview. Or in some cases they were able to delineate how their own views had evolved over time. Oef and oif veterans certainly represent a multiplicity of voices. That said, i do think there are some commonalities among these veterans. In addition to the aforementioned challenged of replicating the militarys clarity of purpose and goal setting, the majority of our veterans expressed various levels of trauma associated with combat, the stress of simply being in a war zone or the disconnect between military life and what they found on the home front. The stress and trauma of war is certainly nothing new. It is a universal theme in veterans literature going all the way back to homers the odyssey. What render oef and oif trauma unique is the fact that the United States has an allvolunteer military with a great gulf between civilians and those who serve as well as a certain kind of fogginess in defining achieving what victory might look like in either iraq or afghanistan. That militarycivilian chasm and the elusiveness of defining success in these wars has surely deepened the emotional scars of war. What i think one really hears in these oral histories is a plea among veterans not to be celebrated, honored or even thanked for their service but, rather, simply to be heard and to be understood. And so what ive done for today, thanks to the generosity of my colleagues, is ive gathered together excerpts from five representative interviews that are about two minutes in length each that i think speak to some of the most representative themes that ive identified thus far, and hopefully will make some connections to the work that youre going to hear from sarah and elena. So i want to preemptively thank you in advance for giving your ear to these veterans for about ten minutes. And i very much look forward to hearing from you your perspective about what we can all do to more accurately represent our veterans, both historically and in the contemporary world. Thank you. At age 19 can you hear that . Barely. Its not playing through the mike. Do you want me to hold the mike up here . Yeah. Okay. Both the mikes . I turned 19 in iraq, and at age 19, i had an m4, i had a pistol on my hip, you know, i had a grenade, and when i walked up and down the streets of iraq, i was, like, the law, more or less, you know . If somebody looked at us funny we had full right to go over there and question them and ask them, hey, what are you doing . Are you counting us . Why are you counting the number of people . Now im back home, hi, im jack lynch. I go to sunlen state. I felt useful. I felt like i was actually accomplishing something with my life over there. Yeah. As weird and little sense as it might make, i felt like i was being a good marine, and that means, you know, im not going to lie, there have been nights im trying to go to sleep and ill lie awake in my bed just thinking about iraq for hours. Looking at the clock, oh, its only 12 00. Look back, its 3 30. Just go to bed. And i cant. Youve lived in a hot zone with somebody for 15 months and, you know, every day you have to say a prayer hoping that today is not the day or, you know, knowing that the person standing next to you would lay their life down for you the same way, you know what i mean . You guys just met. So for me its a family. Its not to this day i would die for them. Because of everything ive got going on, ive developed slight ocd, so my psychiatrist says that its the loss of control. And because i was so used to being overseas and everything was, you know, and now being back home because i feel like my world is just kind of in chaos, that whenever i feel like my house, everything, if you move something, were going to fight. Especially if i go to look for it and its not where i put it, i literally get so angry and its insane how angry i get. Even at the grocery store. Everything gets lined up on the checkout belt. If somebody puts something, like, why would you do that fix it im very anal. She said its because of control issues. A bad rap sometimes. Oh, we absolutely do. My old armory used to be right outside of northampton, massachusetts. And if you know anything about that area, its a very, very, very liberal area, and i couldnt tell you how many dirty looks ive gotten. I couldnt tell you how many times ive been called names and ive been yelled, like, driving by and my windows down and i hear people yell shit at me out there. Its sad. I understand the Antiwar Movement and i, you know, i respect their side on it. Some things i do believe, though, are necessary, and trust me, there is a saying out there, its a soldier above all who prays for peace. I would love for it to be over. Just because solely for my own selfish reasons of i am sick of seeing people, young people get killed. Like weve talked about earlier, i dont agree with the war, i dont agree with our motives and why our country has gone there, and to them i say, especially my job, my job i find bombs, i pull them out of the road so people dont get killed. And my main motivation for deploying, and i want people to know this, my main motivation for deploying was to keep people alive. Regardless of who they are. Whether theyre civilians, whether theyre afghan army, whether theyre our own coalition and our own forces and the other countries that have come to afghanistan to help us, nato forces. Thats why i deployed. Not for anything else. I was motivated to go after 9 11 for revenge, i guess you could say, but getting over there and seeing all of these things happen, i was there to take care of people. Thats ultimately why i really wanted to be there. When it came down to my first deployment, rfi issue, thats when they had just started issuing sports bras and underwear to females. And then they cut our clothing voucher down to like 800. And now theyre just because its like females, a lot of us that are actually complaining about the uniform, because im a small person. I actually get into a small uniform and i still have to use the drawstrings because it will fall off of me. And so those are some of the problems we had. They didnt accommodate you guys . You had to deal with it . I remember when we got the new vests, the smallest they had was a small. Im short. Im like 52, 53 and on top of that you handed me a small vest that could possibly be a medium. Thats almost like a dress on me. So im like, no, i cant. No. I cant even no, no, im not wearing this. I said yall are going to get me killed over there. I dont want it. Give me the old vest. Ill take an extra small or a small in the old vest. Im not going then because youre going to get me killed. They said we can order an extra small vest. Im like, yeah, that would be better. There were about eight of us that needed extra smalls. We had to wait and i think we got those two days before it was time for us to leave. Thats unreal. Oh, yeah. My anxiety and my depression, they tell me, oh, you use that as a crutch or as an excuse. No, its a part of who i am now because i have it. You dont understand it and youre not trying to. So youre just making false accusations. Do you feel that people dont understand Mental Illness or dont want to understand it . People want to understand but scares to ask and talk about and ones who dont care and dont give two craps about it and be like, oh well, thats you. You need to get that fixed you need to work that out type deal. Its not something you can fix or work out. It takes years for that to happen. Especially if you have stuff built up from before and then add on, thats going to take years of resolving. Id have to say that through all of it, it has changed me as a person. I think just to be a little bit more empathetic. A little bit more understanding. A little bit more culturally sensitive than, you know, had i never experienced these things. People that i was, you know, i served with and am still associated with, i would say, you know, its a mixed bag. You know, you have ive actually had quite a few friends that have didnt end up in good spots. They were physically wounded and thats just a risk that is associated with the nature of the business, but, you know, mentally, ive had four or five guys that ive served with that have committed suicide, and thats a big problem. Because like i mentioned, there are things that change in you that you dont necessarily recognize right away. Unless you address those issues it really gets away from you. Its unfortunate that it has to happen. It doesnt have to happen but it is unfortunate that it does happen. There is a lot of misperceptions out there about the military community and the veteran community as a whole. Not all of them bad. Some of them are good. But i think that in general, especially in the University Environment or the school environment, you know, when youre taking classes with the, you know, with veterans and different people, we spend a lot of time understanding, you know, trying to understand other peoples cultures and Everything Else like that, but, you know, very seldom do we look at the person sitting next to us and try to understand them better. So i think that this types of things like this really go a long way to help. Thanks. Where should the downloads go . The downloads. Right here. Yep. Slide show. It would probably be a good idea to minimize that. There we go. I dont know. Okay. Well, thank you all i dont know if you all can hear me. Thank you all for coming. Im going to try not to read too much from my paper. I think we tend do do that. Id rather hear what you have to say and participate in our conversation. Forgive me if i forget something. What im talking about today is a piece of my dissertation. And the sort of events that im references today are mostly centered between about the early 1980s up through the early 2000s, in interest of time, but also because they really speak to how new mexicos veterans, particularly those who were imprisoned by the japanese after the Philippines Campaign in 1942, really sought to remember their war and their experience of war in a way that differed significantly from the way, for example, hollywood or the United States as a nation chose to commemorate world war ii. And as a bit of a jumping off point, in 2015, President Trump made a disparaging remark about john mccains war service and he said that mccain was not a war hero, that people thought mccain was a war hero because he had been a prisoner of war. And to him, if youre a war hero, that means that you dont get captured. So that raises an interesting question about, well, if you do get captured, how do we remember you . How are you commemorated in your hometown, in your state, in the National Community . Where do we see those representations of prisoners of war . The answer to that question very briefly is we dont. We dont tend to see representations of prisoners of war as subjects that seem worthy of commemoration. But when we take a look at new mexico, the opposite is the case. New mexico as a state had a significant number of soldiers who were in the philippines. Of the 10,000 u. S. Soldiers who were taken prisoner by the japanese in 1942, 1,800 of those came from new mexico and about half of those returned home at the end of the war. About 900 or so were killed during the campaigner or they were killed or died as a result of malnutrition, disease, starvation, other physical ailments, injury while they were imprisoned in these p. O. W. Camps both in the philippines and the japanese mainland. Taking a look at this map that gives you a sense of the spread throughout new mexico of how many communities were affected by the imprisonment of those soldiers. Nearly every community in new mexico had soldiers who were in the philippines who were captured and with a casualty rate of 50 , most of them experienced loss. And small that may not seem significant when you think about how many soldiers overall were killed in world war ii, you know, upwards of 400,000, but in very small Rural Communities in new mexico, having two soldiers go to war and only one of them come back, that was a heartbreaking statistic for those particular communities. And new mexico has really centered loss and sacrifice as their at the center of their war time history. Survivors, though, have seemed hesitant to themselves recognize that loss. This image here shows the white flag of surrender being raised in santa fe. One of the returning soldiers Manuel Armijo carried the flag and raised it at the state capital at san jose and said were ashamed of this flag. There is no honor in this. We surrendered because we were weak. And he and his fellow soldiers were sort of the lone voices in that because people around them, their family members, their friends, community members, Community Officials said, no, we do need to honor you, we do need to remember your sacrifice. There is no shame in this. The communities in new mexico have really worked to sort of turn this from a story of loss to a story of honor. And so new mexico has written the story of heroism for these p. O. W. S. In their monument, their memorials, their ceremonies, they shape this version of masculinity that embraces victim hoo victimhood, bodily weakness and submission. Some scholars have done work that suggest war time citizenship for men at least was based on how masculine those individuals were perceived to be. They were soldiers or workers. They did things for their country that required strength, required power. And p. O. W. S cant claim that. Well, we spent our war in a prison. We spent our war doing nothing. So how do we represent that for everyone else . And secretary of war Henry Stinson perhaps would have id sided with this view that trump has that perhaps there is nothing all that honorable in being a prisoner of war because when new mexicans and others had others who went to the secretary of war and we want them to be promoted just like everyone else is being promoted. Just because theyre stuck in a p. O. W. Camp doesnt mean they cant receive the benefits of increased rate. There is no way to distinguish between those who by virtue of having fought to the last might be deserving of a reward in form of promotion and those who surrounded in circumstances under which they might have been reasonably expected to resist. This gives us a sense that of what he believed surrender and capture reflected about the fortitude of p. O. W. S, and that they had none. That proposed bill eventually came to fruition under a different stylist. Civilians were upset by the fact that stinson rejected this bill. They sent all sorts of letters to their representatives and said, for example, whether he could resist a relentless foe for long without ammunition, food or medicine. And those men captured offered the best they had in defense of their country. But hollywood to a degree echoed stinsons insistence, you know, really truly courageous men should fight to the last. The 1943 film baton showed the, quote, unquote, brave deeds and noble sacrifices of men in the final days before surrender. And all of the men, of course, do ied died in the defense of the peninsula. This is a quote from a film critic who wrote in the new york times, he credited the filmmakers with for making a picture about war in true and ugly detail and giving a shocking conception of the defense of that bloody point of land without insulting the honor of dead soldiers. But what the film really ignores is the true and ugly detail that thousands of men were captured and so he tacitly suggests the real heros were the ones who fought and died to the last, not the ones taken prisoner. Franklin roosevelt credited the defenders with buying the United States time to build its arsenal, but the National World war ii memorial in d. C. All but the surrender is all but missing from the panels. This i dont know how well you can see this panel. I cant see it very well either, but it was the best representation i could find. The title of this is liberation and its supposed to remind visitors of the malnourished poorly treated americans who found themselves in prisoner of war camps. Because its titled liberation works instead to recall the moment when mcarthur famously returned to baton and freed the captives. So it emphasizes the liberatesers, not those captured. The p. O. W. S in thiss panel rathr than the survivors of an unimaginable horror. Its really district to see this representation as one that recognizes the sacrifices of the p. O. W. S instead. These representations along with some more sort of local representations of the war, give us a sense that we have a difficulty accepting a wounded male body in commemorative and public spaces. This is a screen shot from Roadside America where people can go and leave reviews of things they see as theyre driving around the country. If you visit this website and you look up or if you look up new mexicos baton monument, it reads that the creepy baton death march monument is a perhaps too realistic rendering of half star world war ii american soldiers. An individual posted his own photograph of the monument with a comment, sort of a walking dead effect, only this really happened to american soldiers at the start of the war. So he at least acknowledges that its a memorial to a real event, but comparing it to a Television Series about a Zombie Apocalypse makes its reality a lot harder to grasp. The monument was built to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the start of world war ii. The planters of the monument were the men themselves. This is an image of the monument as it is today and as it was built in the early 1990s. And you can see that they chose to use the suffering male form. I dont think i can enlarge on any of the detail, but what you see on the left is an emaciated, starved half naked man being supported by a uniformed man who is probably not all whose physical appearance probably isnt all that different under his uniform. And the baton survivors chose to represent themselves in this way. They wanted to show people what it was really like in the camps. They wanted to represent their constant hunger, their malnourishment. And they didnt want to shy away from showing what their experience was really like. Another monument just down the road shows the male form similarly, and that the model on the left is the clay model that the artist used before she put clothes on them because she wanted to make sure she had the bodies correct. She wanted to make sure they werent huge muscled super strong men because the clothes wouldnt lay properly. If you wanted to show that they were starving and hungry underneath, the bodies had to show that as well. You can see in the middle the one man is being supported by the other two, that he can barely walk. And so these monuments have also been visited by some visitors who seem to also not know how to respond or react to them because of the way that they represent male bodies. One visitor wrote in response to this particular monument, its pretty cool. But followed up with an awkwardly inappropriate death march monument advice, avoid getting bayonetted, keep moving. So hes not so much reflecting on what the monument represents but its almost as if the visitor some visitors who are perhaps not familiar with the history, not used to seeing memorials and monuments like this dont quite know how to respond to this type of reality of what war does to the male body. And so new mexicans valorized service and they do these Services Every year on the date of the original surrender in april of 1942. And so for amijo, the man i spoke about originally who raised the white flag. The white flag of surrender reminded people that the surrender happened. It happened once. It could happen again. They retell the story of the surrender. Attendees are reminded of the experiences of the men from new mexico who were imprisoned. Theyre joined by members of the Filipino Community. To focus on surrender, what happened to these men while they were in the prisoner of war camps. To emphasize the physical degradation caused by war instead of emphasizing victory. You dont really see victory represented in any of these memorials and monuments. They focus on this the experience of those individual men, the experience of those men together, how they had to support each other in order to make it through their p. O. W. Experience. And you see it every year when they continually again and again raise that white flag of surrender to position surrounder and loss at the center of their story rather than victory at the conclusion of the war. So thats very brief and very fast sort of summary of my dissertation, but i hope its in of to foster some interesting discussion after sarah presents her work. I think i can go to exit. Thanks. Yes. Okay. Ill close mine out. This is yours . Okay. Im not really sure what to do. Maybe slide show and present. I think thats what i did. Thanks. Okay. And im also looking at a similar time period as elena because im looking at world war iiera program where there were from 1942 to 1944, there was a group called the womens air force Service Pilot program. It was with the Army Air Force as it was named at the time and it was the womens unit represented within that branch of the service. And so what i look at this for talk today is how these women were the only womens unit that did not receive militarization, meaning they did not receive military status or benefits in 1944, like during the war, and that what they did was they organized themselves and fought for veterans status in the 1960s and 1970s and they were successful in 1977 in there was a bill that passed through congress. So they received veterans status officially as of 1977. And so what im looking at here is how a specific group like this program, how these women organized themselves and claimed the title of veteran and then how they faced a very large scale act of resistance by various groups throughout the country who were contesting the definition of the term veteran and who had the right to that term. So im kind of just playing that out in this one story. So this is a part of a larger book manuscript on this program. So im just going to look at it for the 60s and 70s primarily. This is a picture here im going to look at how these women organized around reunions and this is also going to be the way that they construct their own representations of how they see themselves as veterans and how they define it. So just to kind of throw some key themes at you that kind of also fit along with what elena and drew have talked about here, within this battle that im getting ready to explain are military service and citizenship and how these are directly linked. Also looking at identity and representation as veterans and actively seeing yourself as a veteran and also asserting your rights to that title. And then the larger gendered memory of war. Because for this story, the women still were fighting for veterans recognition as of a 2015 2016 battle over the right over which veterans can be inearned in Arlington National cemetery. So looking at military service and ties to citizenship. Military Service ThroughoutAmerican History has been directly linked to citizenship. There have been various groups throughout our history that have linked to this. Im not going to go into all of the background for you, but there have been a lot of historians who have talked about how africanamericans or women or gay and lesbian service men and wiomen have tried to use military service to get what they consider to be full skipped citizenship. So civilians have all looked at this and so they are no exception. They also fit into this. They as well as other womens units during world war ii saw themselves in many ways as trying to achieve full equality in American Society. For the wasps specifically, they were talking about their rights to different job titles and career opportunities, but for various women groups have had all different reasons. So what these women are doing, theyre disrupting the gendered ideas about who is a soldier during world war ii, but they also disrupt ideas about who is a hero and who is a veteran. And so they construct this identity of themselves as military pilots during the war and then in the postwar period they see themselves as veterans, even though they only had civilian status until 1977. Their strong sense of comradery that they developed during world war ii is what they kind of use and channel through these yearly reunions, which you can see pictured here. That they have in these reunions they talk about, you know, what they did during the war and reminiscing, as other veterans groups do, and then eventually what that turns into is a large scale effort to get military status and benefits. And so in the 60s and 70s, as they are constructing this plan to try to get veterans status, what they discover is that as you can kind of see in our panel here, the term veteran is one that is highly contested. Its not necessarily easily defined and its not easily, like, categorized. So what the wasps find is that in this atmosphere of womens liberation and vietnam and the kinds of things that are going on historically that they have to fight a lot harder than they thought that they were going to in this struggle. And so what happens happens is congressional debates in the 1970s, there are veteran organizations who fight actively against these wasps receiving the title veteran. They construct these male veterans construct their own definition of veterans that is in direct opposition to that of the female pilots. So in the process, the male veterans are somewhating themselves as stakeholders of the title veteran. The wasps organized and executed strategies to prove the military nature of their program. So they talk about how they followed military rules and regulations, that they went through the same basic training of men except basic combat. They were stationed on bases throughout the continental United States and had military assignments. They organized and were trying to prove this military status. And what ends up happening is they illuminate masculine privilege and contested understandings of what this all means. As an example of this, robert lynn, who was an American LegionDeputy Director at the national headquarters, he provided testimony in congress in which he literally read from the United States code, specifically section 101 of title 38. And the quote is, the term veteran means a person who served in the military, naval, or air service, or who was discharged or released under conditions other than dishonorable. And he contended that if the wasps were to receive this title specifically, that it would lower the value of the term. And that if they were granted this status, the word veteran would, quote, never again have the value that presently attaches to it. So is the wasps are not only, you know, threatening and upsetting definitions about military service during world war ii, but theyre also threatening ideas about what it means to be a veteran and trying to prove their rights. So in 1977, the congressional bills pass through congress, were signed into law. And so they successfully had veteran status. But what happens is they still have to continue to fight for that status even after theyve received it. And so the example that i wanted to talk about here is of this 20152016 struggle for internment at Arlington National cemetery. This is a photograph from stars stripes. It is a photograph of wasp elaine harmans daughter terry harman receiving the flag at her military funeral at Arlington National cemetery in 2016. And basically, like you can look into the details. Or we can talk them later. But the gist is there is a special memo that came out that announced that the policy towards certain veterans groups, which included the wasps, would no longer be allowed to be inturned at arlington for reasons of space and other issues. So elaine harmans family had to fight, again for her right to this title of veteran. And again the wasps had to rally and prove that yes we do have a right to this term. And if we want military funerals, we should have access to them and things like that. And so they were successful because the house and Senate Unanimously passed a bill. And obviously, you can see the photograph here. But this is just the part of a larger story of today how women are still battling against gendered assumptions, sexual harassment, their rights to military spaces, including combat, elite forces, and even burial at Arlington National cemetery, and how all of this is in a constant state of negotiation and construction. So thank you, guys. So id like to start by thanking our three panelists for three terrific talks. [ applause ] i think we would all like to hear what you have to say. And so we want to open up the floor to any questions or comments about any of these issues. Yeah . Resistance based in the p. O. W. Camp versus collaboration or resistance in the p. O. W. Camp. So is there a dedicated difference of memory between the two situations . I dont know because i have not explored that in my research. Because and thats a good question. And for this particular project, im really looking at how new mexicans are remembering their war within the state. And so far none of literature and the sources ive found speak to any discussion amongst the soldiers themselves about resistance or collaboration, at least in this particular instance, in these particular p. O. W. Camps. That literature i think exists more that ive seen for p. O. W. Camps in europe. And i havent seen that in any of the writings of the soldiers that ive read or any of the recollections or the interviews that theyve done. But im going to make a note of that and see if i do a more concentrated search what i might be able to find. Because that would add an interesting dimension though this project, i think. Speaking of the 1800 from new mexico, do you have any idea of an ethnic makeup . Given my understanding. My understanding was always that it was largely the hispanic mexicans from the villages, the hispanic mexicans from albuquerque. And i wonder if that whole ethos of hispano mexico which has been conquered already doesnt fit in here something. Indeed it does. Because the majority of that 1800, there is officially as in looking through, say, records that exist in the National Archives of their actual military records, which are somewhat incomplete for these particular units, its a bit difficult to parse through those and see. Their ethnicity is not always identified. But not a historian, but there was a researcher in new mexico who went around and gathered information from all of the families. And the majority of those 1800 were hispanics. There were several native americans as well. I think probably no more than 20, 20 to 25 or so. And so i am taking a look at the effect that sort of that ingrained there is a significant cultural awareness and sensitivity to this idea that these are individuals who have been conquered. And there is a little bit of discussion in some literature as well as the statements of some of the survivors as well that they felt that they had been sent to the philippines because they spoke spanish, because they would blend in, because they would be familiar with the customs of the people who they were [ inaudible ] right. And there is some discussion they were sent there on purpose because they werent necessarily considered the best or the brightest of americas soldiers and what they had to offer. And it wasnt necessarily anticipated that they were going to be fighting any grand battles, that they were almost fodder for whatever the japanese had to throw at them. That is informing a good part of this project. And it does complicate the way that theyve chosen to commemorate themselves, because there was this sense that they had been left behind on purpose, that they had been forgotten by the u. S. Government, that this was the way the u. S. Government treated people from this particular part of the country. And in quite a few of the letters back and forth from their families and their friends to representatives and to government officials, they said this is the way the southwest has always been treated. We people in the southwest feel that we have been forgotten and left behind. So you see that theme echoed throughout their communications with each other. New mexico was a state less than 30 years. Yeah. I think that in those sculptures that you showed of military men in prison camps, but theyre also remembered in the iron man march that takes place in new mexico. The iron man march . Do you mean the bataan the one that they have every year in las cruces . They call it the Bataan Death March. And they call it now the iron man march. Its a plan where they first of all they are very strong in the Filipino Community in this country. And they send out notices and so forth of the march going, you know, to take place. People have to train for it. Its it takes place in the desert. Youre talking about the one that is in las cruces, the White Sands Missile range . Okay. I was there a couple of years ago, and they called it the bataan memorial death march. So ive not heard of it called the ironman march. There are several marches across the country. Thats why im wondering okay. And so thats why i think of celebrating their position in American Society and in the military in general. Now, of course some people would think that in fact have said as much that when i cant remember his name right now, but the soldier who deserted in afghanistan and became a prisoner of war of the taliban for five years, right, and then came back and then was honored by the president of the United States, that thats another example of we should honor our p. O. W. S. And he got a promotion and back pay in addition. Right. It was not a sentiment that was widely held. No, no, it wasnt. And it still isnt. He lost the promotion. He was dishonorably discharged. Right. Do you find i would assume that the students that come back are undergraduate. How do you deal with the ignorant to be generous and stupid to be more honest comments that might come from the graduates, 18, 19, right out of high school who may not be sort of familiar with the worldly sense that some of these veterans had. How do you deal with that interaction . Ive seen this play out in my class a lot. And it has gotten a little bit interesting. Yeah, there is no shortage of ignorant comments coming from multiple sources on our College Campuses these days. But we dont often think about veterans as being a marginalized group. But i think given that they represent such a small part of society and are so culturally removed in their experiences that in many ways might be an appropriate label. Im not sure that i personally have to deal with it as much as the veterans themselves do. Ive had students who report that, you know, having any kind of military paraphernalia like a camouflage backpack, putting it down on the floor and having other students move away from them, or turning to them in class when were discussing something related to military or diplomatic history and expecting that theyre going to give a reactionary response to that because theyve assumed what their politics are, those kinds of things happen often. One of the things that meredith mentioned in my introduction is that i serve in a firstyear learning community for veteran students. And part of the value of that is that we have a kind of immersion process for our students so they take four linked classes. They take a seminar in freshman students focused on Veterans Affairs and writing in the fall. And then they take my course in history, which is the u. S. And the world in a public speaking class in the spring. And all the faculty who teach in that learning community are fairly well grounded in Veterans Issues, work with counseling services, and veteran support services on campus. But the real value i think that exists in the learning community is the cohort itself and their capacity to be with one another, to have points of commonality, to be able to identify with their common struggles, which are so different from the typical 18 or 19yearold student. And i think its really that support system that has served them best. Chelsea . I have two questions i suppose. The first one is that a requirement that all veteran students go through that particular the course load . Is that a requirement . So thats a great question, which i think will get to the heart of some of the problematic nature of defining who is a veteran. First of all, a student has to selfidentify as a veteran. Now given the kinds of financial and other support that comes with the gi bill, youd be pretty remiss not to, although that occasionally does happen. On top of that, there are students who dont want to consciously represent themselves as veterans. They see themselves as fully civilian. Theyre proud of their service. They want to move on from that part of their life. We also have some students who are active duty, rotc, and we have debates about whether or not we ought to allow them in the community. And then we even have students who come from military families but dont themselves serve, but feel like they want to participate in this experience. So weve had to make some distinctions in terms of policing those boundaries. The other challenge is that because the support system is in place for veterans who have largely gone to war, been deployed, have been in a combat zone, what we find is that there are lots of other military folks that at our university, even lots of other veterans who dont have those experiences. So if youre gearing your curriculum that is centered around ptsd, and you have a certain consistency of students who havent experienced that, you have a bit of a disconnect. On the other hand, some of the issues i was speaking to before about this cohort makes it really supportive and flexible. And there is a certain amount of mentoring that goes on with the veterans themselves. A different question in a really wonderful way. I appreciate that you mention students who didnt serve in a combat capacity, because i found it a little bit jarring that every student represented in your video was a combat veteran or who had deployed. And i was curious, in your research, in your work hour, do you represent and do you represent the students that didnt serve in that capacity, like maybe the wasps for instance, because i find that represents a much larger portion of veterans than you realize. And almost the entirety of the air force. Absolutely. And just for purposes of clarification, two of the veterans represented were not in combat, but were deployed and served in support roles in combat zones in iraq and afghanistan. And i think what youre pointing to is that there are maybe some internal and explicit hierarchies of veteranness. And you have sort of at the very top, those who served, were deployed, saw combat, and maybe even were injured in battle. Not debilitated in ways that would maybe rob them of their masculinity, but those are at the very top. And then you have those people who are in more Service Support roles. For the purpose of our learning community and the purpose of this project, anyone who has veteran status qualifies. The video almost feels like it sensationalizes war in a way. And i wasnt sure if you were aware of that . Because everybody who talked in that video mentioned a combat, being in a combat capacity or being deployed. And it feels a little bit disingenuous just as a comment. So thats interesting. And id like to think about that. I guess, you know, weve done dozens of interviews. Part of what i wanted to do for today is to speak to the final comment that i made at the end where i was trying to identify some commonalities of experience. And i think trauma of being in combat and being in a combat zone, or simply even having been in the military which has its own hierarchies of power and then trying to transition to civilian life can put inordinate stress on a human being. And thats a commonality of experience. I would welcome you to go to the website itself and you can look for interviews with veterans that are organized either by theater of war, by branch of service, and then those that are organized thematically or top pi topically, and hopefully youll see a more representative depiction there. Just since you briefly mentioned the wasp too, how more broadly in American Culture and society, the memory there is a gender memory of war that im look agent for the wasps. But there is also a specific memory or ideas currently about the word veteran or soldier when you hear those things. This is outside of my area of research, but it might be something that you all would be interested in there. Is a lot of good academic articles that have been published recently about the vietnam war series that was on pbs and whose voices were represented and whose were left out, and what kind of a message that sends and why maybe, you know, certain organizations wanted to portray it in certain ways. So it opens up to really interesting conversations. So thank you. I wasnt sure. Hi. Im heather scarlet, and im here from kent State University in northeast ohio. And i guess my first question is for sarah myers. When you study the reunions of the wasps, how exactly do you go about doing that . Since they were more or i guess more private events and not, like, big military parades that would be held. Letters, videos, content . Yeah, so the records about the wasp reunions specifically are at Texas Womens University in denton, texas. So the way that i primarily have gone about this in my research has been through oral history interviews. There have been over 200 interviews that were conducted by archivists at Texas Womens University. I also have conducted my own. And in those interviews, i or the other interviewers asked questions about what they did at the interviews and or at the reunions, im sorry, and how those kind of played out, or what they reminisced or how those went down. There is also evidence of, like, programs for the reunions that talk about specifically what they did. Obviously, its impossible to get at every aspect of it, and youre still just trying to, you know, decipher whats representative based off the sources that you have. But what i found is asking them through the interview specifically and then also actually through newspaper coverage of the 1970s militarization bills in congress, the reunions are actually mentioned a lot in those articles because theyre talking about how they, you know, orchestrated this large scale effort that lasted over a decade, basically. So thank you. I want to interject here for a second and ask my own question. The chairs prerogative moment here. All three papers i think really speak to this idea of the importance of listening to veterans as they talk about their service and how they choose to remember or commemorate their service. But they also all speak to the idea that there are significant disconnects between how veterans remember their service, how the rest of society chooses to remember wars and experiences that they collectively sent veterans off to, to experience, and then they all speak to this idea that within this sort of large umbrella idea of veterans, there is a lot of disconnects between how different individuals choose to remember their service. So does your research does any of your research give you ideas of how to negotiate those disconnects . And how do you bridge some of those divides . Does that make sense . To anyone. Who wants to answer first. Do you want to . No. I need to think about it. Are we stumped . Well, i mean its difficult. Im sorry i didnt catch your name. But ive been thinking about your comment and this question of representativeness in the particular clips i chose, because this is something we struggle with all the time. And part of what im doing is pretty multilayered. There is what im doing as an oral historian archivist. There is what im doing as a professor and instructor and mentor, and then there is what im doing as a researcher. So as oral historian and an archivist, i simply want to catalog these stories. As i said before, what im really trying to do is to give each narrater a blank canvas to fill in the way that he or sees fair. At the same time, i cant divorce myself as a scholar, as a researcher, and as an historian. And as i mentioned before we come to that project with a set of structured questions and issues that we like them to engage in. In oral history, this is the practice that Michael Fritsch refers to as shared authority between interviewer and narrater. We have to give these veterans space to talk about their experiences as they understood them, but of course as responsible historians, we dont accept that uncritically. So if all i were doing is taking their interviews and depositing them in an archives, which i am doing at my universitys library, then there would be no commentary or efforts to engage in representativeness on my part. But if im going write an article about that, if im going structure a website, if im going put together a representative tenminute video, i have to make some choices. And those choices are going to either expand or constrain who gets included in that category. Yeah, i think that it also speaks to our larger work as historians, just to build on what drew is saying in trying to choose and select individuals whose voices we feel like reflect the collective group, what we think they represent. I once had a wasp who i was interviewing ask me, well, we all had such different experiences in the service. How are you going to write a whole book on all our different experiences . Youre not going to represent my story very well if youre just focusing on me or if youre only focusing on this other person. And so just trying to do that through my own work, i would also just use an example that is interesting to me is during the 1960s and 70s, the women themselves are using the language of the Womens Liberation Movement. So the wasps are siting equality and equal pay for equal work and all these different things. And yet when theyre interviewed about it, beginning in the 1980s through the present, most of them that ive read or interviewed myself will argue that theyre not the word specifically feminists, but that they support womens equality. And they separate themselves from the Womens Liberation Movement specifically by doing that. And so its very intriguing as a historian from that perspective to also be engaging in something where theyre clearly participating in the movement and taking advantage of the movement, but distancing themselves from it decades later. In response to merediths question about these veterans who have different experiences of war, i think there is a particular instance in new mexico where you see not just the veterans different experience of war come out, but their memories of it, the way they want it to be remembered, and also the way that their families want it to be remembered, because their families lived through the war but in a very different way, because they lived through this uncertainty, this not knowing where their sons or brothers or husbands were or what had happened to them. And so they almost say, well, but i know you were the one that was there, but here is how i think we ought to remember it here, and here is what is acceptable and not acceptable. And one sort of story that represents this pretty well is that in the 1940s, there was a prisoner of war camp for japanese americans that was located in just outside of santa fe, new mexico. And in the 1990s, the Japanese American Community wanted to commemorate that particular camp. And they wanted to do so by installing a marker at the site of the camp. And the site of the camp is such that it santa fe is pretty mountainous. And there was a part of the city where you look down on the rest of the city. And thats where this camp was. So that as youre looking at a marker, for example, you would be looking out over the rest of santa fe. And before of course you can build anything inside of the city for commemorative purposes or any other purposes, you have to get all sorts of approvals from various councils. And there was quite a protracted debate in santa fe about whether or not this site should be commemorated and preserved. Most of it was razed over for development in the 1950s and 60s. So there was not much of it left. But the japanese American Communities worked really hard to obtain some recognition for what had happened in the United States. And families and families of the bataan survivors and those who had died got very upset that the Santa Fe City Council would even consider allowing such a marker to be put in place. And at first it was supposed to be some sort of big expansive educational thing. And it ultimately boiled down to a rock with a plaque on it. But it was in the newspapers that reported the incidents that happened at the City Council Meetings that people were ejected from these meetings. People were getting pretty violent. They were threatening the mayor. The mayor ultimately stopped being the mayor after this because he had had enough. But that debate that was in large part fuelled by family members who were so bitter about what their fathers had experienced in world war ii really shows not just how these vets have a different experience of war, but the family members of those veterans are brought into that and they have a different experience of the war. And theyre the ones who in large part, if those veterans have died or passed away, they are doing that memory work. And theyre trying to create these or prevent the creation of these sites that emphasize particular components of the war. For these families, it was really anathema to have anything commemorating the japanese American Experience, even though the japanese American Experience had nothing to do with what had happened in the p. O. W. Camps in japan. For them that was one and the same. If it was japanese, it couldnt be there. Whereas there were veterans and family members of those annoyed family members who were saying move on. Its okay to have that there. I know that theyre not the same people. I know that theyre different people. And for others they just couldnt they couldnt tolerate it at all. And still today that site is sometimes vandalized. People have gone up there and put graffiti up on the stones. So this even though the site was built, there are still continuing conversations about, you know, how well that represents the veterans and their wishes for commemoration. Do we have any other questions . Yeah . Im just each of you at various points in time talked about citizenship military service. And just and that that in case of Bataan Death March survivors as well as in the case of the wasps is that soldier is claiming citizenship at the same how can i say this that it privileges and models a type of citizenship. And in your statement by students, all right, and that is, well, i want to i think you said something to the fact that that i dont want this to be political, but it is. The minute you put students citizen soldier on that, right, what in fact is the responsibility. And so i was just wondering in each of your research, right, of how you can contribute to the larger discussion about what it means to be a citizen and not to privilege one type of experience over another. Yeah, thats a great question. And ill share with you a funny and fairly embarrassing anecdote. When i first started this project in 2007, i put posters up all over campus thinking that this is a phonetically pleasing title, and it encapsulates these multiple parts of these students identities. And my colleague avi chomsky, cho teaches immigration history immediately came into my office and said drew, you do know that some of these veterans are not yet citizens, dont you . And i said yeah, im aware of that. But its still a clever title. The other thing that i think youre getting at, and i was i think i was trying to get at with the samuel excuse me, with the sam adams quote was that in this moment of protracted war, weve almost used military service as a substitute for citizenship. That our veterans are uber citizens simply because they have served, and there are no other duty, rights, or responsibilities beyond that. Part of what im trying to suggest is that now of course you cant divide it into three simple parts. But that there is this third part to a veterans identity beyond his or her service and his or her having been a student. And thats being a citizen, having a particular view of the world which comes from growing up in a particular family in a region of the country, being exposed to certain kinds of politics, being in foreign race, class, gender, and religion. And one of the things we really worked toward with our students and the vets learning community is to think about what citizenship looks like in the second mission, right . Part of what i identified earlier was the absence of gratification of the kinds of tasks that are required in Higher Education when one compares them with what these veterans had done in the military. And we try to help them to understand that civic engagement, Political Engagement can be as deep and meaningful and satisfying and rewarding as what they did in the military. You go for it. Okay. Soy love your question a lot. And im still thinking of the best way to articulate it. But i would say that, okay, so for the wasps in this example, its im using during world war ii, im using the ideas that there is still obligations of citizenship for men, right, because of the draft and combat. During world war ii. And so there is all these discussions about citizenship within the context of world war ii with regards to that. But i would say that it changes and transitions during the 1960s and 70s when these wasps are actually fighting for it. Because they dont fight for it during the war. So when theyre fighting for it that theyre speaking about citizenship in terms of the militarized state in which we live. And looking at how within the current even looking at the current militarized state or militarization of the u. S. Currently, that theyre kind of buying into these narratives also about just the idealized or romanticized ways people viewed veterans in the past, and seeing them as like the ideal citizen soldier, right, who fought in combat and sacrificed so much for america. Like the greatest generation myth thats thrown around a lot. Theyre kind of using that narrative of citizenship where its still seen for much of the American Public as sort of this ideal role that you can play as a citizen, right, like youre sack fiegs yorificing your live country. Special team like linda kerber, but i love your ske question so much. I think well have to allow that question to act as our last word here. Please join me in thanking our panelists. [ applause ] and thank you all for attending. January 30th marks the 50th anniversary of the start of a vietnam wars tet offensive where vietcong and north Vietnamese Forces attacked more than 100 cities, town, and outposts across south vietnam. American history tv will be live thursday at 7 00 p. M. For a discussion on the battle with mark bowden, former stars and stripes photographer john olson, and three marines who fought in wai. Live coverage here in cspan3. Thursday, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and george shultz, and former deputy secretary of state testified on u. S. National security strategy. You can see our live coverage beginning at 10 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan. The president of the United States. [ applause ] tuesday night, President Donald Trump gives his first state of the Union Address to congress and the nation. Join cspan for a preview of the evening starting at 8 00 eastern, and then the state of the union speech live at 9 00 p. M. And following the speech, the democratic response. Well also hear your reaction and comments from members of congress. President trumps state of the Union Address tuesday night live on cspan. Listen live with the free cspan radio app and available live or on demand on your desktop, phone, or tablet at cspan. Org. Next, a discussion on food history. Curator, scholars and historians from the university of toronto and the Smithsonians National museum of American History discuss archives, research, oral histories, and Museum Exhibitions on the topic. This was part of the annual American Historical Association meeting. Its 90 minutes. So now its my pleasure to introduce our moderator, professor daniel bender, the Canada Research chair of global culture, a and professor of history and food studies at the university of toronto. Dan, take it away