The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (Perspectives on the Sixties series) - Hardcover

Moser, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813522412 ISBN 13: 9780813522418

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Richard Moser uses interviews and personal stories of Vietnam veterans to offer a fundamentally new interpretation of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement. Although the Vietnam War was the most important conflict of recent American history, its decisive battle was not fought in the jungles of Vietnam, or even in the streets of the United States, but rather in the hearts and minds of American soldiers. To a degree unprecedented in American history, soldiers and veterans acted to oppose the very war they waged. Tens of thousands of soldiers and veterans engaged in desperate conflicts with their superiors and opposed the war through peaceful protest, creating a mass movement of dissident organizations and underground newspapers.

Moser shows how the antiwar soldiers lived out the long tradition of the citizen soldier first created in the American Revolution and Civil War. Unlike those great upheavals of the past, the Vietnam War offered no way to fulfill the citizen-soldier's struggle for freedom and justice. Rather than abandoning such ideals, however, tens of thousands abandoned the war effort and instead fulfilled their heroic expectations in the movements for peace and justice. According to Moser, this transformation of warriors into peacemakers is the most important recent development of our military culture.

The struggle for peace took these new winter soldiers into America rather than away from it. Collectively these men and women discovered the continuing potential of American culture to advance the values of freedom, equality, and justice on which the nation was founded.

About this title

About the Author:

RICHARD MOSER has published work on popular memory and Vietnam. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he teaches American history at Middle Tennessee State University.

From Library Journal:

Moser (history, Middle Tennessee State Univ.) conducted 75 interviews with those involved, to varying degrees, with the substantial protest against American involvement in Vietnam. Drawing on additional unpublished archival material and taking into account the considerable Vietnam antiwar canon, Moser provides a vigorous analysis of the protest movement among veterans as well as within the military establishment. He chronicles well the operations of the influential Vietnam Veterans Against the War, as he does the now-familiar activities in the combat zone that fueled antiwar feelings, including interracial hostility, drug abuse, and mutinies. His study complements An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (LJ 4/1/90) and Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (LJ 9/15/95). Highly recommended.?Richard W. Grefrath, Univ. of Nevada Lib., Reno
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0813522412
• ISBN 13: 9780813522418
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232