How White Men Won The Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America by Joseph Darda (review)

Abstract

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the celebration of military personnel and veterans continues unabated. One can hardly attend a sporting event, board an airplane, or drive through a small town without either witnessing or being asked to participate in some celebration of military service. As scholars such as Andrew Bacevich have noted, these uncritical celebrations have made it easier for the United States to engage in perpetual warfare. Appeals to veterans’ exceptionality have also, Joseph Darda explains in his important book How White Men Won The Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America, become “an unassailable method for undercutting black activism in sports” (186). This phenomenon, Darda argues, is the product of a half century or cultural work, undertaken by liberals and conservatives, that has imagined veterans as an aggrieved and, notably, white population whose needs must be privileged. In response to “the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements,” he argues, “White men discovered that they could reclaim [their] standing [by] alleging that the government had neglected them to meet the demands of people of color and women while leaving them for dead in Vietnam. . . . The legitimate suffering of some vets gave them a figure through whom they could articulate a racial grievance without acknowledging it as racial” (34). Darda’s work is indebted to a generation of scholars of Vietnam’s legacy who precede him, including Marita Sturken, H. Bruce Franklin, Susan Jeffords, and Kathleen Belew. As a result, on first glance some of the texts he chooses to analyze and some of his specific points about them will be familiar to readers conversant with this literature. This is to be expected, to some degree; there is only so much one can say about Rambo, First Blood: Part II. Where Darda excels, though, is in his ability to locate these texts within the larger assertion of an aggrieved white identity. He begins by illustrating how the Vietnam War was constructed as a traumatic site for white veterans, eliding the experiences of servicemembers of color (43-44, 47, 52). In his strongest chapters, Darda provides compelling readings of a range of cultural products while also attending to their production and reception. Noting that Larry Heineman’s Paco’s Story beat out Toni Morrison’s Beloved for the National Book Award in 1987, for example, he argues that Heineman nonetheless “maintained that the war novelist had no home in American literature, that critics looked down on him . . . . for reminding them of a war that they wished to forget” (65). Through such analyses,