MAKING THE FOREVER WAR A VOLUME IN THE SERIES Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond EDITED BY Edwin A. Martini and Scott Laderman MAKING THE FOREVER WAR Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism Edited by Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak Afterword by Andrew Bacevich University of Massachusetts Press AMHERST AND BOSTON Copyright © 2021 by University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978- 1- 62534- 568- 4 (paper); 569- 1 (hardcover) Designed by Sally Nichols Set in Minion Pro Printed and bound Books International, Inc. Cover design by Frank Gutbrod Cover photo by JO1 Gawlowicz, U.S. Navy, Destroyed Iraqi T55-A main battle take lies abandoned beside a road at the edge of an oil field following Operation Desert Storm, 1991. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Young, Marilyn Blatt, author. | Bradley, Mark, 1961– editor. | Dudziak, Mary L., 1956– editor. | Bacevich, Andrew J., writer of afterword. Title: Making the forever war : Marilyn Young on the culture and politics of American militarism / edited by Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak ; afterword by Andrew Bacevich. Other titles: Marilyn Young on the culture and politics of American militarism Description: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2021] | Series: Culture and politics in the Cold War and beyond | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053347 (print) | LCCN 2020053348 (ebook) | ISBN 9781625345684 (paper) | ISBN 9781625345691 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781613768228 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613768235 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States—History, Military—20th century. | United States—History, Military—21st century. | United States—Military policy. | Militarism—United States. | Cold War—Influence. | Vietnam War, 1961–1975—United States. | Korean War, 1950–1953—United States. | War and society—United States. Classification: LCC E181 .Y683 2021 (print) | LCC E181 (ebook) | DDC 355.00973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053347 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053348 British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Excerpt from “Body Count” in chapter 5 first published as track 4 on Body Count, Body Count, Sire Records, 1992. Reprinted by permission. Excerpt from Richard Rovere in chapter 10 first published in “Letter from Washington,” New Yorker, August 5, 1950, 48. Reprinted by permission of Condé Nast. Excerpts “The Hearth” and “Shrapnel” from Collected Poems by C. K. Williams. Copyright © 2006 by C. K. Williams. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. To the students of Marilyn Blatt Young The royalties from this book will be donated to the Marilyn B. Young Memorial Fund at New York University, which promotes scholarship and dialogue on U.S. foreign relations, American wars and militarism, antiwar activism, and decolonization. Marilyn B. Young. Photograph by Sara Krulwich (2016) “Our continuous task must be to make war visible, vivid, an inescapable part of the country’s self- consciousness, as inescapable a subject of study as it is a reality.” — Marilyn B. Young CONTENTS Introduction 1 Mark Philip Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak PART 1 MAKING AMERICAN WARS 1. The Age of Global Power 15 2. Hard Sell: The Korean War 39 3. U.S. Opposition to War in Korea and Vietnam 66 4. “The Same Struggle for Liberty”: Korea and Vietnam 84 5. Counting the Bodies in Vietnam 108 PART 2 UNLIMITED WAR, LIMITED MEMORY 6. The Big Sleep 123 7. Bombing Civilians: From the Twentieth to the Twenty- First Centuries 139 8. Permanent War 165 9. U.S. in Asia, U.S. in Iraq: Lessons Not Learned . . . 181 10. “I was thinking, as I often do these days, of war”: The United States in the Twenty- First Century 186 ix x CONTENTS Afterword 205 Andrew Bacevich Selected Additional works of Marilyn B. Young 213 Acknowledgments 217 Index 219