American Soldier

American Soldier
Author: Tommy R. Franks
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 640
Release: 2009-03-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0061739219

To America, he was a hero. To his troops, he was a soldier. Now hear his story. Each new era in American history has given rise to a military leader who defines the nation’s proudest traditions—of leadership and honor, of vision and commitment and courage in the face of any challenge. From Washington and U.S. Grant to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Norman Schwarzkopf, these men have captured the nation’s imagination, and entered the small pantheon of

An American Soldier in World War I

An American Soldier in World War I
Author: George Browne
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0803213514

George “Brownie” Browne was a twenty-three-year-old civil engineer in Waterbury, Connecticut, when the United States entered the Great War in 1917. He enlisted almost immediately and served in the American Expeditionary Forces until his discharge in 1919. An American Soldier in World War I is an edited collection of more than one hundred letters that Browne wrote to his fiancée, Martha “Marty” Johnson, describing his experiences during World War I as part of the famed 42nd, or Rainbow, Division. From September 1917 until he was wounded in the Meuse-Argonne offensive in late October 1918, Browne served side by side with his comrades in the 117th Engineering Regiment. He participated in several defensive actions and in offensives on the Marne, at Saint-Mihiel, and in the Meuse-Argonne. This extraordinary collection of Brownie’s letters reveals the day-to-day life of an American soldier in the European theater. The difficulties of training, transportation to France, dangers of combat, and the ultimate strain on George and Marty’s relationship are all captured in these pages. David L. Snead weaves the Browne correspondence into a wider narrative about combat, hope, and service among the American troops. By providing a description of the experiences of an average American soldier serving in the American Expeditionary Forces in France, this study makes a valuable contribution to the history and historiography of American participation in World War I.

What Soldiers Do

What Soldiers Do
Author: Mary Louise Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2013-05-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226923096

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways. That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.

Outsourcing Duty

Outsourcing Duty
Author: Michael Robillard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022
Genre: Civil-military relations
ISBN: 0190671459

"Are contemporary soldiers exploited by the state and society which they defend? More specifically, have America's professional service members been uniquely exploited insofar as they have disproportionately carried the moral weight of America's collective war-fighting decisions since the inception of the all-volunteer force post-Vietnam and particularly since 9/11? In this work, Michael Robillard and Bradley Strawser argue that many of American soldiers have indeed been exploited in this unique way. By offering their original normative theory of 'moral exploitation'; the notion that persons or groups can be wrongfully exploited by being made to shoulder an excessive amount of moral responsibility, moral risk, and exposure to 'dirty hands', Robillard and Strawser make the case that such a state of affairs indeed describes America's present relationship with her military. By offering a thorough and in-depth analysis of some of the exploitative and misleading elements of present-day military recruitment, the pernicious civil-military divide existing between military members and the civilian principle both within the organs of government and the public at large, and the stifling effect that 'Thank You for Your Service', 'I support the troops' culture has had on serious public engagement concerning America's ongoing wars, Robillard and Strawser offer a tour de force of eye-opening arguments on the demoralizing state of affairs for the American soldier. They conclude by arguing for several normative and prudential prescriptions to help close this ever-widening fissure existing between America and its military and existing within America herself. In so doing, their work gives a much needed and urgent voice to America's other 1%"--

The American Soldier, 1866-1916

The American Soldier, 1866-1916
Author: John A. Haymond
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2018-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476632081

In the years following the Civil War, the U.S. Army underwent a professional decline. Soldiers served their enlistments at remote, nameless posts from Arizona to Alaska. Harsh weather, bad food and poor conditions were adversaries as dangerous as Indian raiders. Yet under these circumstances, men continued to enlist for $13 a month. Drawing on soldiers' narratives, personal letters and official records, the author explores the common soldier's experience during the Reconstruction Era, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War and the Punitive Expedition into Mexico.

The American Soldier

The American Soldier
Author: Philip R. N. Katcher
Publisher: Gramercy
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1990
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780517014813

A history of the uniforms worn by the United States Army from colonial times to the present day.