post-Vietnam Era Research Articles

Are we allowed to win this time: new warrior culture in action and government betrayal in the American Rifleman 1975–2023

The emergence of New Warrior culture in the post-Vietnam era has largely been unexplored by sociology of culture. While recent research on the NRA has explored significant aspects of gun culture such as advertising, narratives, as well as ratings of gun empowerment etc., less work has investigated how the NRA facilitated changes not only in gun culture but in the “systems of social relations” between gun owners and the government but also in “systems of meaning” in how gun owners understand their guns. This paper argues that the NRA’s use of Native American warrior narratives, combined with other New Warrior narratives, maps onto Swidler’s unsettled time. Merging classic warrior narratives based in service to the nation alongside extensive use of Native American warriors, the NRA leveraged warrior narratives as a way of facilitating the transformation of warrior identity from one who defends the nation to one that is prepared to fight their government. In this way, the NRA was able to communicate antigovernment narratives without openly embracing the conspiratorial antigovernment ideals espoused by some factions of the militia movement by changing warrior cultural narratives from defending the nation to fighting against its government.

Countertopographies of copper: Martha Rosler, Chris Kraus and the Great Arizona Copper Strike of 1983–1986

Chris Kraus is often read as a chronicler of women artists’ experience: their frustrated desires, stifled creativity and stolen labour. But while these are the struggles that her protagonists face, the novel sets such struggles within the pressing context of American Empire's expansion and reorganisation in the post-Vietnam era. The juxtaposition between these levels is what generates the drama of Kraus’ work. Foregrounding these juxtapositions, this article situates Kraus’ novels within a longer tradition of feminist conceptual artists like Martha Rosler who took the labour and domination of predominantly white middle-class housewives as a standpoint from which to attempt to understand the expansion of US-backed global capitalism. Specifically, the article draws on the concept of ‘countertopographies’ developed by feminist geographer Cindi Katz to argue that Rosler and Kraus’ work offers a form of ‘countertopographic aesthetics’. That is, they both turn to the sphere of the reproductive as a site from which to map the uneven effects of global capitalism, while also foregrounding their own uneasy relationship with the imperialist project of mapping itself, by drawing attention to the ideological practices and limits of their very mappings. To illustrate this claim, the article concludes by turning to a partially buried event in Kraus’ Summer of Hate (2012): the 1983 Clifton-Morenci Copper Strike, a crucial but often overlooked flashpoint in the roll-out of neoliberalism. This eighteen-month strike was fought by a largely Mexican-American workforce, and the Women's Auxiliary, who joined a long history of working-class housewives like the Housewives’ Committee of Siglo X in Bolivia in becoming strike leaders. I argue that the strike is both crucial to the conjecture that Kraus’ narrative traces, and also illuminating of the limit point of the protagonists’ politics and the form of mapping that is possible from such a perspective.

Military Service, Education, and Mortality Across Cohorts from World War II to the Post-Vietnam Era

Military Service, Education, and Mortality Across Cohorts from World War II to the Post-Vietnam Era

Reading O’Neill Creatively: Perspectives and Offerings

Reading O’Neill Creatively: Perspectives and Offerings

The Oil Obsession

Oil Money recounts the evolution in U.S. relations with the petroleum-exporting monarchies of the Persian Gulf following the mid-1970s “oil revolution.” David Wight details the ways in which principals in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter presidential administrations fretted about while ultimately adjusting to and, arguably, gaining from the new order of higher oil prices, the staged takeover of the western firms’ operations, and the vastly increased rents (“petrodollars”) that royals and revolutionaries now commanded. He handles a complex story dexterously. He makes great use of Treasury Department records, and, while concentrating on the Persian Gulf producers, takes us on a side-trip to mid-1970s Cairo where the Americans dreamed of petrodollar investments playing a lead role in the liberalization of the Egyptian economy. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury William Simon sold the Saudis and Kuwaitis on investing in Treasury securities. U.S. (and European) bankers chased after deposits to meet the insatiable global demand for loans to pay for oil. President Nixon and Crown Prince Fahd signed wide-ranging agreements in 1974 in support of Saudi Arabia’s defense and development, thus launching another so-called “special relationship.” Then there were the weapons. Arms exports to Saudi Arabia and Iran, which began in earnest in the 1960s, grew exponentially after 1973 as part of Nixon’s post-Vietnam era “twin pillars” strategy, where the two allies were to assume a greater share of the region’s security burden, soaking up more of those petrodollars in the meantime. American architects, bankers, contractors, crooks, engineers, and Fortune 500 executives would descend on the domains of the Al Saud in unprecedented numbers. Container ships loaded with building materials, cars, and consumer goods clogged the kingdom’s harbors, while the capital, Riyadh, expanded at dizzying speed.

Who improves in trauma-focused treatment: A cluster analysis of treatment response in VA patients undergoing PE and CPT

BackgroundAlthough most veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) benefit from evidence-based treatments, questions persist concerning the profiles of those at risk for poor outcomes. To help address these gaps, this study analyzed a large clinical cohort of veterans receiving prolonged exposure (PE) or cognitive processing therapy (CPT). MethodsCluster analysis using Ward's method with Euclidian distances identified clinically meaningful subgroups of veterans in a national cohort (n = 20,848) using variables maintained in the electronic medical record. The clusters were then compared via one-way analysis of variance and Tukey's HSD on indicators of treatment progress including PTSD symptom change, clinical recovery, clinically significant change, remission, and treatment completion. ResultsEffect size differences on clinical outcome measures for PE and CPT were negligible. Less than half of veterans achieved at least a 15-point reduction in PCL-5 score and half completed treatment. We identified 10 distinct clusters. Higher rates of PTSD service-connected disability were linked to poorer outcomes across multiple clusters, especially when combined with Post-Vietnam service era. Non-White race was also linked with poorer clinical outcomes. Factors associated with better outcomes included a greater proportion of female veterans, especially when combined with recent service era, and longer PTSD diagnosis duration. ConclusionsThis study suggests the need to improve PTSD treatment outcomes for non-White and male veterans, examine treatment response in Post-Vietnam era veterans, and consider ways in which the service connection process could hinder treatment response. The results from this study also indicate the benefits of integrating elements of clinical complexity into an analytic approach.

Jackson–Vanik Amendment and Development of Soviet-American Relations in 1972-1975

The article is devoted to one of the key subjects of the detente period – the history of development and adoption of Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974. The significance of the human rights problem in the USSR, in particular – the right to emigrate, for the development of American-Soviet relations at the peak of detente is shown. Special attention was paid to trilateral negotiations between the Soviet leadership, Nixon and Ford administrations and the legislators headed by Senator Henry Jackson. The Amendment, adopted in December 1974, created serious obstacles for the development of trade and economic relations between the superpowers, and it had a number of negative political consequences also. The Amendment constituted the issue of human rights in the USSR as one of the important components of the U.S. foreign policy, created a negative background for the American-Soviet dialogue, which significantly complicated the outlined convergence of superpowers and contributed to the curtailment of detente.The political struggle around the Jackson-Vanik Amendment became the quintessence of detente. Each of the parties involved regarded the Amendment differently: Soviet leaders saw it as a rude interference in the internal affairs of the USSR; Kissinger saw it as an untimely and too radical in form and methods attempt to transform the Soviet system; Jackson saw it as a good way to increase his popularity by exploiting a popular in the post-Vietnam era theme that was naturally consistent with American national values and traditions. Both the Kremlin and Jackson had a fairly clear set of concessions that they could make. However, in the context of the systemic crisis of power caused by Watergate, the US administration did not have enough resources to bring them to a common denominator. The Soviet leadership soon also faced new economic and political challenges, and the problem of restoring trade relations with the United States ceased to be a priority.The Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974 became the watershed separating the “high détente” from its downward phase. Its real significance far exceeded its immediate meaning embedded in the arguments of its creators. It was not an accident that the Amendment was not canceled in 1987 after the USSR liberated its emigration policy. After the collapse of the USSR American leadership used it as a political leverage against Russian Federation. Boris Yeltsin appealed to Bill Clinton multiple times in 1993-1994 requesting removal of discrimination measures in trade and economic relations inherited from the soviet times. The Amendment was not cancelled it was only temporarily suspended. It was officially canceled only in 2012, but only in order to give way to a law that allows the United States, at its discre tion, to impose sanctions on individuals allegedly responsible for human rights violations in Russia (the so-called Magnitsky Act) and remains an obstacle to the development of equal Russian-American economic ties.

Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire. By Montgomery McFate (New York, Oxford University Press, 2018) 487 pp. $45.00

McFate came to prominence as an early advocate of U.S. military engagement with anthropologists in order to grapple with “adversary culture” after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She was an architect of the “Human Terrain System” that embedded social scientists within the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2006 and 2014. She has deplored and sought to reverse what she sees as a historical anomaly of estrangement between the military and academia in the post-Vietnam era. She continues to advocate for this approach as a professor at the Naval War College and as an author of books like this one, which seeks to develop practical lessons for military anthropology from various historical episodes—ranging from Donald Barrows’ ethnographic work for the U.S. military in the Philippines from 1901 to Don Marshall’s in Vietnam in the 1960s and a half-dozen other examples drawn mostly from British imperial experience. In this way, this book resembles a more sober and extended version of John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago, 2002), which sought counterinsurgency lessons from Malaya and Vietnam; Nagl and McFate were in fact both contributors to David Petraeus’ Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago, 2007), another quasi-anthropological product of the Iraq War.Although McFate’s avowed intent is to build bridges between academia and the military, she admits that this book, as “written primarily for a military audience,” is unlikely to contribute much to the bridge-building goal (11). The book is peppered with military acronyms and insider observations; it is also full of capsule lessons in basic social science for those presumed to be unfamiliar with, or indeed hostile to, such an enterprise. It has a military tone, too, given McFate’s technocratic approach to social science, which often feels decidedly less anthropological than reminiscent of economics or quantitative sociology. She regrets anthropology’s failure to develop “a scalable, adaptable theory of society that could be used operationally by the military” (38, 328). In an essay on Ursula Bower’s “military leadership” of the Naga during World War II, she yearns for a neat formula such as Fisher’s “fifty-seven key findings pertaining to cross-cultural military leadership” (106–107).1 She commends Gregory Bateson’s highly scientistic ideas about the manipulation of cultural pattern as he applied them in service of the Office of Strategic Services. She even inscribes Tom Harrisson’s idiosyncratic unconventional warfare in Borneo as a sophisticated species of “qualitative, inductive pattern recognition” (172).More comfortably for most anthropologists, McFate acknowledges that these unified field theories nearly always break down in practice and that there is no replacement for deep cultural knowledge, a necessary complement to, or often replacement for, “firepower,” and thus alien to the American “way of war.” But although McFate, like any good ethnographer, pays close attention to this kind of context, she gives relatively little credence to the radically different contexts in which military ethnography takes place. She equates anthropologists’ feelings of responsibility for their subjects with the military’s concern for the “host nation,” without taking much account of what being the “host” of a violent military intervention by another nation actually means. When she says that “the social conditions of the host nation must be considered as part of national strategic objectives,” readers can only wonder which nation’s objectives are in question (323)—assuming that a unitary nation is to be considered in the first place. Because she deliberately eschews case studies of Iraq and Afghanistan, though constantly seeking lessons for those enterprises, McFate is not able to reflect much upon U.S. military intervention in deeply divided societies.McFate may or may not be correct to imagine that the military’s objectives would be better achieved with more anthropological awareness. It is at least arguable that deeper cultural engagement in a complex and fractured (not to mention war-torn) society might exacerbate rather than resolve the “morasses” to which recent U.S. military interventions have led. But what is even more puzzling is why she imagines that anthropologists outside the military ought to embrace these objectives. In her view, anthropologists have a role “analogous to that of professional soldiers”; they have “an obligation as citizens to reduce the errors caused by a lack of socio-cultural knowledge and thereby improve their execution” (39–40). Her book shows some anthropologists behaving in just such a way. But apart from the major changes in the culture and politics of academia since the 1960s, which have driven academia and military further apart, her own narrow, technocratic account of what “socio-cultural knowledge” can do, without a proper consideration of the military and political contexts of its application, is unlikely to draw them back together. Quite the contrary.

“Blood Politics: Reproducing the Children of ‘Others’ in the 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act”

This article examines the u.s. Congressional debates in 1981 and 1982 over the Amerasian Immigration Act (aia), which provided preferential immigration status for the Amerasians of Southeast Asia. The debates exposed conflict on issues of American identity, race, and nation and the gendered nature of u.s. immigration and citizenship policy. This article considers how lawmakers on both sides of the debate justified accepting the Amerasians as American children or rejecting them as Asian. In each case, lawmakers in the post-Vietnam War era struggled to reconcile the physical appearance of the Amerasians and their racial hybridity with an American national identity. The aia is evidence of the confusion. While the bill defined Amerasians as children of American citizens, it failed to grant them American citizenship. This article argues that although the rhetoric of inclusion and kinship within the aia recognized the Amerasians as children of American fathers, the exclusion of citizenship from the bill formalized their status as the children of “others,” and thus foreign children. Ultimately, the bill exposed the problematic existence of mixed-race populations in the United States, and a history of exclusionary immigration and citizenship policies against people of Asian descent.

Historical Perspectives on Colorectal Trauma Management.

The authors discuss the history and evolution of management of traumatic wounds to the colon and rectum, summarizing early management parallel with the history of armed conflict followed by the increase in research and management interest by civilian centers in the post-Vietnam era. They explore the strong opinions of the early thought-leaders such as DeBakey and Ogilvie, detailing factors that may have impacted their views. The current literature on optimal management of both colon and rectal trauma is reviewed, including the contentious debate over which patients may benefit from diversion. Current organ injury staging and clinical practice guidelines are also reviewed, as well as lessons learned by the U.S. military in recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Understanding of the evolution of colon and rectal trauma management, as well as the current literature, will help surgeons in their decision-making and management of these challenging injuries.

Experiences with VHA care: a qualitative study of U.S. women veterans with self-reported trauma histories

BackgroundWomen veterans in the United States, particularly those with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or a history of military sexual assault, have unique health care needs, but their minority status in the US Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has led to documented healthcare disparities when compared to men. This study’s objective was to obtain a richer understanding of the challenges and successes encountered by women veterans with self-reported service-related trauma histories (particularly those with a history of military sexual assault and/or posttraumatic stress symptomology) receiving VHA care.MethodsThirty-seven female Vietnam and post-Vietnam (1975–1998) era veterans were randomly selected from a cohort of PTSD disability benefit applicants to complete semi-structured interviews in 2011–2012. Grounded-theory informed procedures were used to identify interview themes; differences between veterans with and without a history of military sexual assault were examined through constant comparison.ResultsAt the time of the interviews, many women believed that VHA was falling short of meeting women veterans’ needs (e.g., lack of women-only mental health programming). Also common, but particularly among those with a military sexual assault history, was the perception that VHA’s environment was unwelcoming; being “surrounded by men” yielded emotions ranging from discomfort and mistrust to severe anxiety. A few veterans reported recent positive changes and offered additional suggestions for improvement.ConclusionsFindings suggest that while at the time of the interviews gains had been made in the delivery of gender-sensitive outpatient medical care, women veterans with a history of military sexual assault and/or posttraumatic stress symptomology perceived that they were not receiving the same quality of care as male veterans.

Firearm Injury Encounters in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), 2010-2015

IntroductionFirearm violence is an issue of public health concern leading tomore than 30,000 deaths and 80,000 nonfatal injuries in the UnitedStates annually.1To date, firearm-related studies among Veteranshave focused primarily on suicide and attempted suicide.2-5Herein,we examine firearm violence among VHA enrollees for all manners/intents, including assault, unintentional, self-inflicted, undeterminedand other firearm-related injury encounters in both the inpatient andoutpatient settings.MethodsInpatient and Outpatient encounters with one or more ICD-9-CM firearm external-cause-of-injury codes (E-codes) from1/1/2010-9/30/2015 were extracted from the VHA’s Praedico™Public Health Surveillance System, including demographics, era ofservice/eligibility, encounter type, and deaths. Firearm E-codes wereclassified for manner/intent based on the CDC’s Web-based InjuryStatistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS™) matrix.6Outpatient/emergency department (ED) data were exclusively fromVHA facilities (a single pediatric patient seen as a humanitarianemergency was excluded from the dataset). Inpatient data includedVHA facilities and some records received from non-VHA facilities.VHA rate of hospitalization for firearm-related admissions wascalculated using the total VHA acute-care admissions for the sametime period as the denominator.ResultsDuring the time frame examined, 5,205 unique individuals wereseen with a firearm E-code. Of these, 4,221 were seen in the outpatient/ED setting only, 597 in the inpatient setting only, and the remaining387 had encounters in both the outpatient/ED and inpatient settings.VHA firearm admission rate was 1.63 per 10,000 VHA admissions,compared to a national rate of 1.96 per 10,000 in 2010.7Table 1 showsthe breakdown of encounters by manner/intent. Unintentional was themost common firearm injury manner/intent. Overall, the median age atinitial encounter was 54 (range 19-100 years), and 96% were male. Thehighest percentage served in the Persian Gulf War Era (2,136, 41%),followed by Vietnam Era (1,816, 35%) and Post-Vietnam Era (716,14%). The greatest number of patients with a firearm-coded encounterresided in Texas (453), California (349), Florida (326), Arizona (214)and Ohio (212).ConclusionsUnintentional injuries were the most common form of firearminjury among VHA enrollees, representing over half of alloutpatient/ED firearm encounters and more than twice the numberof firearm hospitalizations compared with any other manner/intent.Limitations include that not all U.S. Veterans are VHA enrollees;miscoding and misclassification of firearm-related injuries may haveoccurred; and data from non-VHA outpatient/ED encounters andsome non-VHA hospitalizations are not available to our surveillancesystem for analysis. Additional study is needed to further understandthe epidemiology of firearm-related injuries among Veterans andinform VHA leadership and providers

The US Army's Postwar Recoveries

ABSTRACT: The US Army's typical postwar recovery process, which can last a decade, is characterized by increased strategic commitments, insufficient resources, and conflicting priorities. The most traumatic aspect of recovery, personnel turbulence, often manifests in the discharge of experienced leaders and technicians, generational discord, tension between policymakers and commanders in the field, insufficient maintenance, inadequate training, and social problems. As past examples illustrate, future success depends on how well today adapt to an austere postwar environment. ********** What all Army operations will have in common is a need for innovative and adaptive leaders and cohesive teams that thrive in conditions of complexity and uncertainty. (1) As the US Army transitions from full engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan to the uncertain and complex operational environment predicted by Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) planners, it must again undertake the historic process of military recovery. If the previous two centuries of Army history are any guide, this process will probably take almost a decade. And in the service's long institutional memory, the years after demobilization are always dark ages--long stretches of austerity, hollow forces, internal tensions, and public hostility. Despite their grim reputation, periods of recovery have often served to inform discussions about current military issues. During the revolution in military affairs debate, analysts studied the two decades between the World Wars for insights on their own era's policies, doctrines, and technologies. (2) In the 1990s, the broken Army of the post-Vietnam era was romanticized as the incubator of the prodigal soldiers who had led it to victory in Desert Storm. A few years later that same Army was cited as a warning of the dangers of military overextension in Iraq and Afghanistan. (3) Perhaps because have served as sources of inspiration, literature on the Army's experiences after every war is extensive; however, there is very little analysis of postwar recovery as a distinct military phenomenon. This comparative study of the Army's recoveries from past wars illuminates some of the current and future problems likely to be faced even though it provides no easy solutions. The Complexity of Recovery For the last decade, the US Army's vision statements have defined the impending environment as complex and uncertain with adaptation and innovation as crucial abilities for professional soldiers. Today's planners, who are experts in current military affairs, have the daunting task of preserving the Army's present capabilities while simultaneously anticipating future contingencies. Planners make both immediate and imminent decisions on everything from spare parts to schools and post exchanges to personnel. They not only need to identify, retain, and place the next war's William T. Shermans and George C. Marshalls but also to purge today's Beetle Baileys. They must concurrently fulfill existing missions and plan for the near and long-terms. And they must do so under conditions of austerity that include restricted budgets, personnel cuts, and a civil-military atmosphere too often characterized by miscommunication and mistrust--just as they have in the past. In this unstable environment, the past can be both a guide and a trap, a postwar invitation to seize a few examples of strategic success--the blitzkrieg, amphibious war, AirLand Battle--as the road map to a future D-Day or Operation Desert Storm. The benefits of such an approach, perhaps more inspirational than practical, must be balanced by studying the unified themes, the problems, and the shared experiences of the Army's postwar recoveries as provided in this article. The US Army is, was, and will always be a hierarchical, top-down organization overseen by a federal agency. The inevitable consequence is a focus on the study of postwar recovery based on Washington-mandated institutional and organizational changes. …

A Long Walk Home: The Role of Class and the Military in the Springsteen Catalogue

This article analyzes the themes of class and military service in the Springsteen canon. As a member of the baby boom generation who narrowly missed service in Vietnam, Springsteen’s reflection on these heretofore unappreciated themes should not be surprising. Springsteen’s emergence as a musician and American icon coincide with the end of conscription and the introduction of the All-Volunteer Force in 1973. He became an international superstar as Americans were debating the meaning of the post-Vietnam era and the patriotic resurgence of the Reagan era. Because of this context, Springsteen himself became involved in veterans issues and was a voice of protest against the 2003 Iraq War.

Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight? Technological Change, Tactical Developments and the Demographic Composition of the American Military

According to the consensus among the public, policy-makers and academics, the poor are both more likely to enlist in US armed forces and to pay with their life the price of US security. In addition to moral considerations, this topic is important also for its policy and theoretical implications: a military primarily composed of the poorest segments of a society can, among others, alter policy-makers’ incentives to resort to force as well as affect its performance in the battlefield. In this article, we question this consensus. First, the causal mechanism underlying existing research is based on unwarranted assumptions. Second, the empirical evidence supporting this argument relies on aggregate data (e.g., average or median income by zip-code) that do not permit to reach definitive conclusions about military personnel’s socio- economic background. We address these problems by drawing from recent works on the evolution of modern warfare and change in military technology in order to develop a demand-side theory of military personnel that we test on individual-level data gathered from the Department of Defense and the NLSY97 survey. We argue that the 1970s U.S. Offset Strategy has promoted a dramatic change in warfare (the 1990s information technology-driven Revolution in Military Affairs) that has progressively led, on the one hand, to a more capital-intensive military and, on the other, to a more selective recruitment process. According to our theory, we expect those coming from poor and disadvantaged segments of the American society to be less likely to meet the requirements of the military. Consistently with our argument, in contrast to the post-Vietnam era, we find that those who enter the U.S. military are not statistically different from the median household with regard to education, cognitive abilities, parental income and other socio-economic indicators.

American Civic Action: The National Campaign Plan and the Failure to Win ‘Hearts and Minds’ in El Salvador

From 1979 until 1992, the United States government intervened in the Salvadoran Civil War to defeat ‘communist revolution,’ establish a moderate, centrist government, and prevent its overthrow. One of the primary means to accomplish American goals in El Salvador rested on a thorough application of counter-insurgency. In particular, American and Salvadoran strategists used civic action programmes to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Salvadorans and gain their allegiance. In 1983, whilst the war was at its zenith, the Salvadoran military launched an important counter-insurgency effort that attempted to reverse the government’s fortunes. Unfortunately, these plans failed to affect decisively the outcome of the conflict. Regardless, given their failure in the largest American intervention in the post-Vietnam era, they continue to remain a fundamental aspect of American counter-insurgency doctrine.

Vietnamese Characteristics of Social Consciousness and Values — National Character, Differences between North and South, and Gaps Between the Vietnam War Generation and the Post-War Generation —

This article explores the characteristics of Vietnamese social values identified in the Asia Pacific Values Survey’s 2013 Vietnam survey data. The questions used in this article fall into three categories: politics, international relations, and economics. I analyze the characteristics of Vietnamese with respect to three aspects. The first aspect is Vietnamese characteristics at the national level by comparing Vietnam with other nations. The second aspect is differences between the North and South areas. The third aspect is differences between the generation that experienced and remembers the Vietnam War and the young generation of the post-Vietnam War era. The most interesting group is the older generation of the South because they grew up in a democratic and capitalist society and now live in a communist society, and they experienced the Vietnam War. I mainly elucidate how their characteristics are different from or similar to those of other Vietnamese groups.

Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South ed. by Khyati Y. Joshi and Jigna Desai (review)

Reviewed by: Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South ed. by Khyati Y. Joshi and Jigna Desai Sarah Griffith (bio) Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South. Edited by Khyati Y. Joshi and Jigna Desai. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. 320. $95.00 cloth; $28.00 paper) The essays collected here have two primary purposes. First, the authors set out to destabilize the black-white binary often applied to studies of race and ethnicity in the southern United States. Second, by positioning the region (essentially the Confederate states that seceded from the Union) at the center of dynamic global economic and migration networks that stretch across the Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic, this collection challenges contemporary narratives of southern exceptionalism and national myths built around a region perceived as static and unchanging. Broken into three parts, the collection includes ten essays that highlight the experience of Asian and South Asian Americans past and present. The first section, “Disrupting Race and Place,” examines the racializations of Asian Americans from the nineteenth century to the present. Through ships’ manifests, census records, and vital records, Vivek Bald recounts the economic circuits that shaped the lives of Bengali peddlars in nineteenth-century New Orleans and shows how they negotiated existing racial stereotypes and ideas about “the Orient” to their benefit. Leslie Bow examines the interstitiality of Asian Americans in the Jim Crow South and emphasizes the way economic and social mobility remained intertwined with black-white racial binaries through the 1980s. Expanding on their 2008 essay published in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Amy Brandzel and Jigna Desai compare the vocal protests that emerged among Asian Americans in the aftermath of the 1982 beating death of Vincent Chin with the relative silence that followed the 2007 Virginia Tech campus shooting by Korean American student Seung-Hui Cho. The authors critique media portrayals of Cho and the lack of political mobilization by Asian Americans in the aftermath of the event. The second section, “Community Formation and Profiles,” includes a comparative analysis of early-nineteenth-century federal and [End Page 152] state laws that had lasting impacts on the settlement and longevity of Chinese communities in Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah (Daniel Bronstein) and an examination of the shifting sociopolitical and transnational linkages that shaped Vietnamese communities in Houston during the post–Vietnam era (Roy Vu). Through their investigation of current demographics, Arthur Sakamoto, ChangHwan Kim, and Isao Takei contribute greatly to our understanding of the geographic distributions and socioeconomic characteristics that shape Asian America today. Khyati Y. Joshi rounds out this section by exploring the way Hindu Americans in metro Atlanta have challenged inaccurate and disrespectful depictions of Hinduism through community action and engagement. In the final section, “Performing Race, Region, and Nation,” Jennifer Ho shows how Asian American literature set in the South is reshaping more traditional, East Coast–West Coast narratives, our ideas about “southern literature,” and what it means to be a southerner when told from an Asian American perspective. Jasmine Kar Tang uses the stand-up comedy of Henry Cho to show how individuals find ways to control representations of racial subjectivity and locate articulations of belonging through their public performances. Margarite Nguyen’s essay “‘Like We Lost Our Citizenship,’” uses English and Vietnamese language sources to show how Vietnamese and black New Orleanians overcame a history of sometimes violent ethnic divisions between the two communities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Afro-Asian alliances brought attention to the marginalization both communities faced and challenged stereotypes of the Vietnamese refugee as permanent outsider. As a person who grew up on the Pacific Coast and relocated to a southern city undergoing the very changes discussed in these essays, I was eager to review this title. While academic jargon distracts the impact of some essays, taken as a whole Asian Americans in Dixie succeeds in revealing the complex nature of race, community, and Asian American identity and experience in the South both past and present. [End Page 153] Sarah Griffith SARAH GRIFFITH teaches in the History Department at Queens University of Charlotte and recently published her work in the Journal of American History. Her first book...

Renewing the Motivational Power of the Army's Professional Ethic

Abstract: The US Army currently faces challenges not unlike those of the post-Vietnam era and the post-Cold War period. Subsumed within these challenges is a more critical overarching one; simply stated, will the Army that emerges from this transition period in 2025 be an effective and ethical military profession, or just another large government bureaucracy? The former can defend the Republic and its interests abroad, the latter cannot. How to understand and think about this challenge is the topic of this commentary. ********** The new understanding of modern, competitive professions holds that, contrary to what we might have learned from Huntington's Soldier and State, the idea that once a profession, always a is not true. In fact, modern, competitive professions in the sense they might still exist as organizations, but their culture and behavior, and that of their individual members, becomes other than that of a profession. Applying this fact to the US Army as a military profession, we must recall it is by design an institution of dual character--a bureaucracy and a profession--with constant and intense tensions between them. The Army has only been a military profession for roughly half of its two hundred and forty-year existence. For example, in the early 1970s, after Vietnam, the Army was not a profession mainly because it had expended its corps of non-commissioned officers who were later so instrumental in professionalizing the junior ranks of the new all-volunteer force. A decade later, however, the Army of Desert Shield/Desert Storm was the world's model of military professionalism. So, in the case of the Army Profession, to means the institution would duplicate the behavior of a large, government bureaucracy, treating its soldiers and civilians more as bureaucrats than as professionals. As a result, soldiers would be unmotivated by a personal calling to honorable service, being instead micro-managed within a centralized, highly-structured organizational culture. Sadly, were this to occur it would be the antithesis of the Army's current doctrine of mission command within a professional culture. The current potential for the Army to lose this internal struggle for cultural dominance, and for the profession to die as such, is heightened by ongoing defense reductions. All defense reductions are pernicious toward the military's professional character. They will, as they have in the past, strongly reinforce the unremitting de-motivations of the Army's bureaucratic character and undermine the essential professional character, e.g., with highly centralized, impersonal micromanagement for force and personnel cuts, and fiscal resources allocated to do more with less. Further, beyond current defense reductions, if other recent events are accurate indicators--the too frequent moral failures of senior leaders, the institution's as yet unsuccessful campaign to expunge sexual harassment/assault from its ranks, the necessity for Secretary of Defense to appoint a new flag officer as his Special Assistant for Military Professionalism, attempts within the Congress to reduce commanders' legal authorities, etc.--the Army Profession is already struggling to maintain its professional character, at least from the perspective of the American people and their elected representatives. Given this confluence of events, the best chance for Army 2025 to come through this post-war transition as a military profession lies in the renewal of the motivational power of its ethic. Only professions can use a normative, principled ethic, which is far more than compliance-oriented rules and regulations, as the means of social control for the performance of both the institution and its individual members. Thus, the power of the ethic, its internalized attitudinal and behavioral expectations shared Army-wide, is critical to effective and ethical practice at both the individual and institutional levels. …

Racial differences in the progression to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma in HCV-infected veterans.

The race of patients infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the United States may be associated with the risk for cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, previous studies are too small to provide convincing data regarding the effect of race on cirrhosis and HCC risk after accounting for demographic, clinical, and virological factors. We used the Veterans Administration (VA) HCV Clinical Case Registry to identify patients with confirmed viremia between 2000 and 2009 and with at least 1 year of follow-up in the VA. We identified cirrhosis and HCC cases through early 2010. Cox proportional hazard regression models were performed to examine the effect of race on the risk for cirrhosis and HCC while adjusting for patients' age, gender, period of service (World War I/II, Vietnam era, post-Vietnam era), HIV coinfection, HBV coinfection, alcohol abuse, diabetes, body mass index, and antiviral treatment receipt and response. There were 149,407 patients with active HCV viremia. Of them, 56.3% were non-Hispanic White (NHW), 36.1% were African American (AA), 6.0% were Hispanic, and 1.6% belonged to other racial groups. After an average follow-up of 5.2 years, 13,099 patients were seen to have a recorded diagnosis of cirrhosis and 3,551 had HCC. Hispanics had the highest annual incidence rates of cirrhosis and HCC (28.8 and 7.8%, respectively), whereas AAs had the lowest rates (13.3% and 3.9%, respectively) compared with NHWs (21.6 and 4.7%, respectively). There were differences among NHW, AA, and Hispanic patients in the rates of HIV infection (2.1, 2.5, and 6.0%, respectively), HCV genotype 1 (50.0, 50.6, and 64.2%, respectively), obesity (28.0, 25.4, and 30.9%, respectively), diabetes (8.7, 16.1, and 16.1%, respectively), and absence of antiviral treatment (81.1, 89.6, and 82.1%, respectively). However, adjusting for differences in demographic and clinical factors did not change the magnitude or direction of the race effect. Compared with NHWs, Hispanic patients had a higher risk of having cirrhosis recorded (adjusted hazard ratio (HR)=1.28, 95% confidence interval (CI)=1.21-1.37) and HCC (1.61, 95% CI=1.44-1.80). In contrast, AAs had a lower risk of cirrhosis (HR=0.58, 95% CI=0.55-0.60) and HCC (0.77, 95% CI=0.71-0.83) compared with NHWs. Hispanics with HCV are at a significantly higher risk, whereas AAs are at a considerably lower risk of developing cirrhosis and HCC than are NHWs. These associations persisted even after adjusting for a range of factors including HCV genotype, HCV treatment, diabetes, and body mass index.