Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality

Abstract

We are watching a movie about American soldiers at war. A small unit is about to engage the enemy. They form ranks and the sergeant calls the roll, reeling off a list of names (the camera shows their faces one by one) that is obviously intended to repre- sent the mixture of ethnic, regional, and (usually) racial groups that compose our heterogeneous population. movie might be Bataan (1943), A Walk in the Sun (1946), Fixed Bayonets (1951), All the Young Men (1960), Dirty Dozen (1965), Pla- toon (1986), or Saving Private Ryan (1998). melting pot roll call has become a basic trope of the war movie, a cinematic cliche ´. But it also expresses a myth of American nationality that remains vital in our political and cultural life: the idealized self- image of a multiethnic, multiracial democracy, hospitable to difference but united by a common sense of national belonging. Here, for example, is the response of a reporter to the explo- sion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1985: The shuttle crew, spectacularly democratic (male, female, black, white, Japanese- American, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant), was the best of us, Americans thought, doing the best of things Americans do. mission seemed symbolically immaculate, the farthest reach of a perfectly American ambition to cross frontiers. And it simply vanished in the air (Morrow 23). 1 Virtually all of the ethnic and racial types in the Challenger roll call appear in the roll call of Bataan, the prototype of the combat-film genre. To its roster gen- der has been added, a reflection of the new status of women as a group seeking admission to first-class citizenship, and an antici- pation of the gender integration of the army that would fight in the Persian Gulf War of 1991.