Aaron B. O'Connell

Cultural history of the Marines during and since WWII. O’Connell emphasizes the Marines’ grasp of PR, used in service of their overwhelming and constant sense of being under threat, more often from other services than from actual hostile combatants. However, there was also plenty of actual trauma and PTSD, given that Marines faced more combat exposure than other services and also adopted tactics that emphasized speed of victory over safety of fighters. So the homefront involved political maneuvering to position the Marines as the true guarantor of manhood versus both civilians and other services—the others liked planes and nuclear bombs and other tech, while the Marines focused on the fighting man as a man and a soldier. This also required the Marines to carefully manage their perceived relationship with violence to keep from becoming offputting to civilians, especially women—O’Connell calls their claim that brutal training was a fatherly way of making boys into men “tender violence.” It didn’t work all that well in practice, as O’Connell’s discussion of high domestic violence and alcoholism rates indicates, but it definitely achieved its PR objectives. I was surprised to learn how dirty the Marines played in politics, leaking top secret military reports to their congressional supporters, and it was also a reminder how longstanding the conservative self-positioning as victims really is.… (meer)