Angry Planet - A Journey into the Jungles of ‘Pulp Vietnam’

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

PULP EPIC. MALE. MAN’S ILLUSTRATED. MAN’S ADVENTURE. BRIGADE. VALOR. You’ve seen these magazines before. You either grew up with them or you’ve seen their bizarre covers online. There’s always a man with rippling muscles, sometimes he’s fighting a pack of weasels, other times he’s eying a scantily clad dame. Sometime’s there’s a Nazi, sometime’s there’s a woman in an SS uniform with a few buttons missing.The Pulp magazines of the Cold War shaped the culture and thinking of an entire generation of men. The sons of World War II veterans learned a fantasy version of the war from lads mags and then took those fantasies with them when they rushed headlong into their own war: Vietnam.Here to tell us all about the Pulp magazines and how they shaped our perceptions of the Cold War and Vietnam is Gregory A Daddis. Daddis is a retired Army Colonel who served in both Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. He’s a professor of history and the USS Midway Chair in Modern History at San Diego State University. His new book is Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines.Recorded 10/29Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. That women are attractive, but they're also dangerous. And because the feminist movement is posing a challenge to gendered hierarchies in Cold War America, that, you know, I think that contributes to this understanding of women being dangerous and using their bodies as well. weapons of war. And I think, you know, the exotic oriental narrative, I think, again, is just a longstanding cliche and trope that that far predates the Cold War magazines, that this, these sexes attitudes of women from darker races being forever sexually available, as obviously wrongheaded as that is, I think has long been a part of Western European culture and probably has its roots and, you know, European imperialism and colonialism. One day, all of the facts, about 30 years' time, will be published.

When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with infinity, and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Pulp epic, male, man's illustrated, man's adventure, brigade, valor. You've seen these magazines before.

You either grew up with them or you've seen their bizarre covers online. There's always a man with rippling muscles. Sometimes he's fighting a pack of weasels. Other times he's eyeing a scantily clad dabe. Sometimes there's a Nazi. Sometimes there's a woman in an SS uniform with a few buttons missing. The pulp magazines of the Cold War shaped the culture in thinking of an entire generation of men. The sons of World War II veterans learned a fantasy version of the war from

Ladsmaggs and then took those fantasies with them when they rushed headlong into their own war, Vietnam. Here to tell us about the pulp magazines and how they shaped our perceptions of the Cold War in Vietnam is Gregory A. Dattis. Datas is a retired army colonel who served in both Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. He's also a professor of history and the U.S. Midway Chair in Modern History at San Diego State University. His new book is Pulp Vietnam, War and Gender and Cold War Men's Adventure Magazines. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me out. I appreciate it.

All right. Let's do a, we like to do basic definitional stuff at the top of the show. So what is a pulp magazine? What defines a pulp magazine? So the pulp magazines are really what were known as low brow cultural art back in the, this version in 1950s and 1960s. They grew up out of the 1920s and 30s, some of the men's magazines that you saw, like Esquire and others that certainly were popular during World War II.

We think of the barred girls in World War II being part of Esquire. And so these magazines, after the publishing boom in the early 20th century, really started to take hold in World War II. And then afterwards became part, I think, of the Cold War culture and the fact that they really have an impact in terms of their distribution. rates and what they're focusing on in terms of their popularity. So what would you say are like the hallmarks of a Pulp and Men's magazine? Really, they're the heirs of the men's magazines that really take hold in the early

20th century. If you think about Argosy, which is popular in the early 1900s, Esquire in the 1930s, Esquire is founded in 1933. Those are kind of cultivating an upper middle class male audience. And these men's adventure magazines that really are popular. in the post-World War II era. And I think Esquire certainly has a lot to do that with that. If you think about the popularity of the Barger Girls in World War II with Esquire,

that really sets the stage. But what the men's adventure magazines do, the pulp magazines, is really focus on more of a lower working class audience than an upper middle class audience. So they're alternatively known as the pulps or the slicks. They have a kind of a slicker outside cover and then more of the pulps themselves, were just known for their kind of lower production value and really become popular in the 1950s. And in some states, Nevada as an example, by the time you get to the late 1950s, they're selling at distribution data that puts them at 9% of the population data.

Stag magazine is publishing in those incredible rates by the end of the 1950s. So they're incredibly popular during the height of the Cold War era. And what defines a good Pulps story? What are the kind of stories these magazines are telling? Sex and Adventure. And what I looked at in the Pulps was kind of this combination of storylines that melded together what I thought really brought out the essence of the pulps. And that was the heroic warrior and the sexual conquer. And so really what these magazines are focused on or these hyper-masculine manly men, oftentimes with, you know, bare-chested and obviously muscular, they're always on the forefront of frontier or in the heat of battle, and they're

oftentimes rewarded for their heroic deeds with sex. And so this is really, I think, one of the few, if only venues in pop culture in the 1950s that kind of combines those two images of men in one cultural venue, the heroic warrior and the sexual conquer. That's what it offers to its readers. And I think that's what makes them so popular during the Cold War era. This is a little bit of a tangent, but it's something that struck me as I was reading the book is like a big part of the story of comic books, especially in this era, is the moral panic that arises out of them, right?

We can't have young men reading these comic books that are horrible and violent and too sexual. Were pulp magazines at all swept up in any of that? Or were they kind of... Yeah, it's really interesting. I think that's a great insight is that read a different way that these pulps are really a form of escapism, right? That if you think about the Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man, those kind of come out of those

nuclear era anxieties, right? Gamma radiation with the Hulk or, you know, these radioactive spiders that transform these young men. But I think the pulps are also feeding into these really deep anxieties of men not measuring up in the post-World War II era. There's a lot of fears here. There's a lot of social change. We're seeing the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. There's concern about kind of this first wave feminism that you see in the 1950s and 60s.

And so there's a really deep thread within these magazines of men just not being able to handle the domestic response. of post-war life. And so, you know, you have magazine articles that will talk about the mental castration of husbands and how men are being converted into housemaids and how these women are waging an all-out campaign against their mates. And so I think the comic books and the pulp magazines together, if you read them slightly a different way, they're really resting on a lot of these Cold War anxieties that men are feeling in the post-World War II era. And who was writing these stories? You know, this stuff starts, really gets going after World War II, right?

So is it being written by veterans most? Not mostly, but certainly some. You have a number of World War II veterans that are sharing their stories. Some of the pulp writers and pulp artists are veterans themselves. Walter Kalin, as an example, was a World War II veteran and then became a very popular pulp writer. But you also have, interestingly enough, a lot of pretty famous writers that are contributing.

Mario Kuzzo, who's writing under a pen name, the author of The Godfather, writes a whole host of Pope magazine articles. They also have a number of pretty famous authors, Mark Norman Mailer, a number of pretty significant World War II military historians, SLA Marshall, Tragaskis and others who are writing. So it's an interesting combination of veterans that are sharing their stories, what we would consider, I think, to be more kind of upper middle class highbrow, you know, journalists that are writing in the magazines. And certainly by the time you get to Vietnam,

you have some full-blown Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists that are writing in the pulp like Malcolm Brown. So it's a pretty wide band of authors that are contributing here. Yeah, I think that's interesting because it's like a career path for writers that we don't really have today, where you could be someone that's writing your serious fiction, like your Puzzo or your Norman Mailer, and then be supplementing your income, sometimes making the bulk of your income, churning out pulp stories.

Absolutely. Right. And the artists do the same thing as well. So, Mort Cuncelor, who's, he was on the cover of the book, is an incredibly famous pulp artist, but then we'll go on afterward and really make his mark by paintings, mostly of the Civil War era and kind of becomes a pretty well-respected and certainly widely known artist.

for Civil War prints. How explicit are the articles and pictures inside of Pulp Manup magazine? Certainly as you go on, they get more explicit, so you really don't see, you know, the photographs are more seductive than actually, you know, they won't show full frontal, you know, frontal nudity until way into the late 1960s. And much of the magazine articles themselves, especially when they talk about sex or more innuendo than anything else, so they're not as explicit. They kind of leave the reader to mostly his young imagination, right? But as you get farther into the 1960s, they'll certainly get a little bit more explicit.

But early on in the mid to late 1950s and early 1960s, it's more innuendo than anything else. Now, when you get to the magazine articles that are telling stories about battle and campaigns, they'll get pretty explicit. They'll certainly tell a heroic tale, but you'll actually get down to some pretty nitty-gritty details about these stories of American soldiers being in battle. I'm trying to think I had to ask this. Was there any truth to any of these stories,

or was it generally just... What I'm trying to think of is, like, is there a certain amount of veterans and maybe even the culture processing the horrors of war or reshaping the horrors of war to make them easier to touch? to digest, or is it all just kind of pulp garbage? No, I don't think it's pulp garbage at all.

I think there's a lot of truth, if you can call it truth, in these magazine articles. But I think a lot of veterans are certainly genuinely and honestly sharing their stories and their experiences. I think like many of the stories that I would argue we still talk about war, that we kind of move gently across the ugly side of war and don't really share the actual horrors that these articles will discuss the difficulties that Americans face, but it's always, at the end of the story, there's a heroic young lieutenant or sergeant that saves the day. So it's interesting, right? I think these magazine articles will follow along with much of the Cold War culture that is

looking back on the experience of World War II and already starting to craft this narrative of the greatest generation, that these were young, heroic Americans, citizen soldiers that were patriotic and accepted the call to duty and went forth and saved the world from totalitarianism and Nazism and fascism and all that. Yeah, so I think there's a bit of a, you know, very much being in line with pop culture at the time that they want to share their stories, but they're also doing a way where they're not sharing the full horrors of war. And I don't think that's really out of step with anything that's popular in the Cold War culture. And what effect do you think that this had on that generation of men, especially those like that, like the baby boom generation, especially?

I think what it does is, and this gets really difficult, right, when we talk about the influence of comic books or video games of how do you evaluate the impact of a cultural product. What I got out of these magazines when I was doing research and then kind of comparing them to veterans' experiences or at least how veterans were. sharing their experiences. What I found is that these magazines set an example or set certain expectations. So when you saw somebody that was being hypermasculine or even if you saw somebody in Vietnam, when you get down to the mid to late 1960s and these young readers are now deploying to Vietnam, when you see sexual violence, when you see men treating women badly, there's expectation that somehow that is normal. And so you have this kind of consistent. message within these magazines that military service is linked to sexual entitlement. And I think

that helps normalize expectations about what Vietnam will be like. And what it does, I think, is set up some pretty big opportunities for disappointment and frustration. And does it lead to opportunities for actual violence when people get there? I think so. And here we need to be really, you're really careful, right? And I tried to be. I didn't want to make you the argument because I don't think it's valid that if you read the magazines, you were going to automatically go to Vietnam and participate in sexual violence. I just don't think that's true. But again, what I do think these magazines did was constructive vision of war that was out of step with reality. So war is supposed to be traumatic and disorienting. But because these magazines,

in their portrayal of wartime just drifted so far from reality. I think it set the readers up for some pretty big disappointments in terms of what war was going to be like. And so when they were disappointed that Vietnam didn't offer them the opportunity to become a hero like they read about in the magazines, they then turned towards the population to get at the other possibility, right? that if magazines were putting together these two threads of heroic warrior and sexual conquer, that if you couldn't be the heroic warrior in Vietnam, then maybe you could be the sexual conquer.

And so I think then it's not that implausible to think that many GIs then turn to the second half of that equation, the sexual conquer form women, as a way to kind of satisfy their need for control in this incredibly disorienting and traumatic environment, which was Vietnam. Yeah, I think it's really important. This is something I struggle with and think about a lot because I'm a big, I'm a big video game player. And, you know, the more, every generation has a moral panic about a new art form, right? And I don't think that video games, there's a direct causal link between video games and

violence, right? At the same time, art does move us. And there's a reason we enjoy it. And I think it would be, I think it sells art short if we don't acknowledge that it does have an impact on our lives. And sometimes that impact is a negative. But I also think, you know, that you can't draw a direct line between, say, a person who reads a Pulp War magazine and then goes off to war and then, you know, kill them. Yeah, I don't think that's accurate. But I think what's interesting here is that when you look at some of the studies that,

have been done on sexual violence and rape in Vietnam, some of them will argue, right, that the pressure cooker of combat is the reason for these incidents of rape and that it's a way for men to satiate their sexual desires in this really stressful wartime environment. And I think exactly what you're saying, it misses the point of how these perpetrators understood themselves and their actions. And I don't think we can dismiss that there's a cultural, component to that, that art form, how we see ourselves. Those two things are linked, I think. And again, it's not saying that if you watch a video game or if you read a Pulp magazine,

you're going to do certain actions. But I do think there is something to be said about the linkages between how we see ourselves and what we see is acceptable and how we consume culture and art and other forms of entertainment. I think that culture, art, everything we're talking about, help set up what norms are. Right. And if you see everything consumed by images of sex or violence, I mean, in our culture now, I think we have plenty of images of both without pulp magazines.

You know, we're not going to run out. And I do think that, you know, right now we're also huge into apocalyptic fiction of one kind or another. And that's also setting sort of a background noise for everybody. Yeah, I'm sorry, get it. No. Yeah, I think if you look at the popularity of, you know, the Walking Dead or those other type of, you know, cultural products from today, I think they have a almost a direct line back to, you know, space aliens and the other in pop culture in the 1950s, right? It's, it's, again, an outgrowth of the anxieties that we're feeling at the time, right? In the Cold War era, we're seeing the communist other as this evil entity capable of mind control.

I think, you know, the early 1950s invasion of the body snatchers and those types of movies. And I think those, the popularity of science fiction in the 1950s is related directly, I think, to those fears of communism. Just like I think these stories of zombie apocalypse today are directly linked to our fears of either the terrorist other or, you know, fears of, you know, government that has overstretched its bounds, right? And, you know, the popularity, I think, of the zombie apocalypse narrative is that here are individualistic, strong communities that are operating without a government and able to beat back this faceless hoard of the evil other, right? And so I think the cultural context, the larger political context, I think is important for understanding the cultural context. Can we talk a little bit more about the specific portrayals in the pulps? You kind of detail the particular ways that they, pardon me, you detail the particular ways that they depict communism. But I wanted to talk a little bit about that, but also women, because there's a couple, like, I would say, stock characters that women kind of fall into in these stories.

Can you talk about both of those? Yeah, absolutely. I think the easiest way to describe the communist in the pulps is there a nice replacement for Nazis. You know, I read somewhere that one of the books I was just do research that Stalin was just Hitler with a better mustache, right? And so what the popes did was just basically replaced the simplistic good versus evil of World War II in that narrative. And there's take out Nazis or Japanese militarists and replace them with communists. And so that's how the narrative kind of unfolded in the magazines is that America was on the side of good, obviously, These communists were basically taking up the global domination mission of the Nazis, and that's what made most of the adventure stories work.

That oftentimes it was either an ex-Nazi that had turned into a communist or a communist that had just replaced the German threat from World War II. And that made a lot of these articles, I think, easy to read, made the storylines capable of being wrapped up very quickly, right, that you could, you know, that the hero could save the day and put a nice bow on the package at the end of the story, and that was easy. In terms of women, I think it's certainly related to that. And there's, as you mentioned, multiple constructions, right? And one of them is directly tied to communism. You see a lot of these red seductresses, so communist women that are kind of using their very, bodies as luring weapons of war. There's one magazine article from Manz Illustrated in 1963 that talks about, you know, it's an expose that goes inside a sex school for spies and talks about

how these women are using their bodies and sex as a weapon. And the article actually calls it sexological warfare. So it's directly related to the communist threat. So I think that's certainly a big one. I think right behind that is the exotic Oriental, that men believe. believed in these magazines that if women might be dangerous, but in the right locales, they're also sexually available. And the exotic Orient is certainly the best place to get sex that can't be found in suburbia of America. And then occasionally, you'll kind of see, you know, sexual warriors that are operating side by side with men. But mostly it's, you know, women that are using their bodies for evil purposes, which I think is really problematic.

if you're a young reader that's not experienced in sex. Sex is alluring, but it's also dangerous. So what do I do with women? They're desirable, but they're also dangerous. So how do I square that circle? And I think it leads a lot of readers with this kind of warped version of what women are like and what the relationship with them is supposed to be. What is the genesis of seeing women that way?

I mean, I think you can go all the way back to, you know, are just our frontier narratives even, right? That the damsel in distress narrative goes all the way back to kind of John Smith and Pocahontas. You know, this white savior male, I think, is part of the American narrative in a sense. I think it's, again, directly related to Cold War anxieties, that women are attractive, but they're also dangerous. And because the feminist movement is posing a challenge. to gendered hierarchies in Cold War America that, you know, I think that contributes to this

understanding of women being dangerous and using their bodies as weapons of war. And I think, you know, the exotic oriental narrative, I think, again, is just a longstanding cliche and trope that far predates the Cold War magazines, that this, these sexist attitudes of women from darker races being forever sexually available as, as, as, you know, obviously wrongheaded as that is, I think has long been a part of Western European culture and probably has its roots in, you know, European imperialism and colonialism. This is something, this idea of like the formation of a kind of man in the post-World War II era is something that you talk about that goes beyond just the pulp magazines, right?

This is something that's reinforced across the culture. Can you talk about like the other places that you were seeing that that weren't just these kind of men's magazines? Yeah, to me, this is what was fascinating about the pulps is that, you know, as I argue early on in the book, that I don't think that the men's adventure magazines have gotten much serious discussion in many histories because they're just seen as kind of throw away pop culture art, that they're just kind of this off brand. And it's just really weird men that are reading these magazines. And in fact, I think they're very much in line with larger pop culture during the Cold War era. If you think about some of the films that are out during the day that, that, that, that, talk about many of the themes that are in the men's adventure magazines, the Manchurian candidate, about mind control and anxieties about this lurking communist threat, which are part and parcel of pulp magazines. If you think about novels like Revolutionary Road, which talk about male concerns about living in suburbia and growing up in suburbia, that's part of the

magazines. If you just think about John Wayne movies coming out of the post-World War II era, that's part of the magazines. So they're kind of pulling on all of these threads that are in pop culture. And again, what I think the magazines do differently is that they combine the warrior component of it with the sexual conquer component that you just don't see in any other venue. Can we talk about how they changed too? Because I thought this was interesting. There's like there's different areas of them, right?

There's the immediate like post-World War II pulp mags. and there's kind of the Korean War era and then the Vietnam War era. Like what are the distinctions between those three? So I think coming out of World War II, it's, it's, it's, the magazines are focusing on veterans telling their stories, sharing their stories with each other. I would argue a way to deal with what we now know is post-traumatic stress that here is a safe space for veterans to read about their experiences and the experiences of others. There's a lot of veterans' letters to editors.

in these magazines. There's plenty of kind of columns where veterans can reach out to others. You know, if you're in this unit, please contact me, that kind of thing. And so this, I really think, solidifies the heroic warrior narrative. I think by the time you get to Korea, and then most certainly when you get to Vietnam, this is where the pulp starts struggling with that narrative, because Korea demonstrates clearly not as ably as the Vietnam experience does. But Korea showcases that there might be limits to American power and that war is ugly and it and it might not lead to the unconditional surrender of your enemy. It might lead to some stalemate that is really unsatisfying. And what does that mean for those that are participating in it? And then so by the time

you get to Vietnam, this is the thing where the magazines ultimately start to break down. The storylines just are increasingly out of step with American pop culture. If you think about the countercultural revolution in the mid to late 1960s. If you think about the anti-war movement, by the time you get to the latter stages of the Vietnam War, that heroic warrior, sexual conqueror construct is increasingly out of step with how Americans, young Americans, see themselves. And I think that really kind of serves as a death knell for the magazines because they're just seen as not just conservative, but kind of really antedated and just kind of against what most young Americans are seeing themselves or how they're seeing themselves.

Right. It reminds me of the Green Berets starring John Wayne, which comes out in 1968, right? And it feels like this dissonant film compared to what's going on in the streets and what's being what everyone's seeing in the news, right? So it feels like the pop culture becomes, in these pulp magazines, becomes untethered from the reality. the people are experiencing. Yeah, if you think about the time, by the time the Green Berets come out, John Wayne's portrayal of American soldiers

is not heroic. It's provoking ridicule, especially from soldiers in the field that are seeing the magazine. It's not an admirable performance as soldiers are looking at it. And clearly, if you look at some of the critics, they bash the film as really being out of step

with that narrative. And so, you know what, ultimately what happens to the public, is they kind of break into and the warrior piece of it turns into the soldier fortune magazines that are popular in the 1980s. And most of the magazines themselves, like Stag, turn into what are known in the mid-1970s as skin magazines like Pennhouse and Wii and that type of thing. So all the adventure stories ultimately filter out of these men's magazines that kind of turn into the skin mags and those that are seeking out that heroic warrior will ultimately end up reading

magazines like Soldier of Fortune. That's kind of interesting to me. The way the way the thing kind of dies is it becomes out of step with reality and then like most of the mags pivot towards sex. Right. And then anybody that's going after that heroic warrior thing is really doubling down on the power fantasy built up by magazines like Soldier of Fortune. And that's what turns into the Rambo, right?

And that kind of hyper-masculine, 1980s, everybody was, you know, if you think about Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone and even into the 90s with Stephen Segal, they're all ex-Soyal forces soldiers coming out of Vietnam who've gone through the hard time of the 70s, but are now back with a vengeance in the 80s. And so, you know, clearly what's in the pulp magazines is still attractive in the 1980s and 90s. Well, Rambo is a really fascinating example, too, because what's the first Rambo movie about? It's about a soldier who returns to, returns, he's like wandering through a small mountain town and is picked up as a drifter by the police and basically harassed into going on a rampage. Right. This was a, this was a really good movie, I think. And then by the third movie, he's liberating the mocha. Well, the second movie he goes and rescues all the people.

POWs, which was, you know, a huge cultural thing post Nixon. And then by the third movie, he's liberating the Mujah Hadin. And it just, they become more and more surreal and disconnected from reality as they go along. And this first movie is this great commentary on the way society is treating veterans and like PTSD and all this stuff that just completely is washed away in the, throughout the end. And by the time you get to the 80s, we kind of circle back around to this construction of the

the new American man that's in the pulp of these idealized versions of men's bodies and masculinity and, you know, the focus on the individual warrior and heroism is now back at the center of the storyline. And so you see kind of this militarized version of masculinity reappear in the 1980s and it's incredibly popular. I mean, you know, Rambo's on his part of political speeches during the Reagan administration era, right? So it's interesting that as much as we may be uncomfortable with the militarization of masculinity and manhood, we kind of can't seem to kick that habit, right?

Well, it also seems like it's part of this reactionary cycle, right? Where, when I think about World War II, I think about, especially like in pop culture, I can't remember the name of the movie. It always escapes me. but there's this great movie that came out like right immediately after it that is about the experience of people who fought it and it's very harrowing and sad and the characters are traumatized by this war,

this war that we think of as the good war, right? And it's kind of like one of the only real honest depictions that we have in pop culture because then it immediately gets subsumed by this fantasy of the, new of the of the of the of the new man and like masculinity and then after vietnam that that fantasy gets kind of crushed and washed away again and then in the 80s we have it comes back we're not with with taxi driver or coming home or even the deer hunter we're comfortable with rambo and predator and you know missing in action although i will say that there are moments in the post or immediate post-World War II era where we do see more honest appraisals of young men coming home.

I think the most famous is the best years of our lives, which wins the 1946 Academy Award, the story of three veterans coming home and dealing with alcoholism, dealing with an unstable job market, or dealing with physical wounds of war. And I think it's one of the most honest portrayals of kind of reintegrations of veterans back into society that we've seen in quite some time. That's the movie I was thinking of. That's what it was. There's these two great scenes that haunt me from it.

One where the gentleman's drunk and dancing with the woman and talking about what it was like in the war, but having to abstract it, like not being able to talk to her about it in a real way. And then the gentleman who doesn't, who has the hook for the hand, being accosted in the diner. Right.

are just like you see that the movie came out in 1946 and it boggles the mind because we created this story of the war so quickly after it was over and immediately in those kinds of depictions washed away yeah and adventure is not at the heart of these stories it's the difficulties of reintegration and so the popes will lean more towards the heroic version rather than the difficulty said veterans actually faced it is interesting though even in the best years of their lives, that women still have a role to play. They're the caregivers. They're the ones that will ease men back into society and will still be that stabilizing force in the home that will allow these men to regain their place in society. Well, yeah, that's interesting because

women's role during the war, they'd taken on so much. Right. Right. And so again, there's this reactionary movement to try to kind of reaffirm what a woman's role is that's reinforced by these magazines, but also this wealth of women's magazines that comes out at the same time. Yeah, and I think that's where you really start to see, you know, reactions like Betty Ferdan speaking out against these magazines that are trying to put women in a very specific space and kind of limiting that space to the home. So even though women may have an important role to play in confronting communism by raising strong young children who were able to not be tantalized by communism, their political responsibilities stop at the front door.

So did you read any of this stuff growing up, or was it a little bit of past your time? No, I actually did not. I'd seen Soldier of Fortune growing up. My first introduction to the magazines actually was the final semester I was teaching at West Point. A colleague in mine, Jen Keesling and I were co-teaching a course on war and gender in modern America. And we hit the Cold War era and I just started looking for pop culture representations of American soldiers in the Cold War era. And I came across American Manhood, which was actually more of a bodybuilding magazine than it was an adventure magazine and just headed down the rabbit hole. So what's left? Is there anything left that you see in the current culture?

And you also have experience that most Americans don't. I mean, you were actually in war yourself. Was there anything that shaped your view of war before you actually experienced it? Yeah, I think so. And I think probably like many, it was pop culture, right? I grew up, I went to West Point in the mid to late 1980s. I graduated in 1989. So, you know, movies like Full Metal Jacket were very much a part of our understanding of what either basic training was going to be like or what war was going to be like.

probably not even realizing that at the time as a young man that, you know, Kubrick was creating really an anti-war film. We all saw it as something very different. I certainly think that my understanding of kind of heroism and masculinity came from those big 1980s movie stars. You know, here, I think pop culture is having a hard time today wrestling with what to do with the story of the American soldier Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to tell a story. that is inspiring, right? It's difficult. Much of the, I would argue,

pop culture representation of veterans in Iraq and Afghanistan really centers on the broken veteran and PTSD. Although you're starting to see some of that come back again to the heroic narrative. You think about the popularity of the recent film The Outpost,

which really focuses on the heroism of young men and, you know, working together in a very small, you know, the same type storyline out on the edges of frontier between civilization and savagery. And so I still think that tension remains with us of what story do we want to tell and how can war still be meaningful for us as we tell those stories. I also think, and I think we have a new thing that's going on right now, I think, where we have two different media environments. Because I'm willing to, but there's probably

quite a few people listening to this podcast that have never heard of the outpost and I've never seen it. So I think that you have two kinds of war movies that are being generated for people right now, such as there are war movies out. And there's the kind of the anti-imperialist anti-global war on terror thing going on. And then the like what I would call like stuff like the outpost, but then also more dishonest extension of that is like the tactical warrior culture, building up of the special operations forces kind of stuff that's coming out at the same time, right? And it feels like increasingly, and this is a problem not just in pop culture, but the two sides aren't communicating or talking to each other. We aren't watching each other's movies,

right? Right. And I think it's also, you see it in kind of the militarization of these militia organizations. I would call them more domestic terrorist organizations personally. but, you know, if you think about the popularity of military gear and dressing up, it's kind of militia cosplay in a sense, but these young men trying to find meaning in these kind of militia organizations. And this is, I think, problematic, right? That if we, if military service is the best path to manhood is within our popular narrative, then if we can test that idea, and I think we should, well, then how do I,

then become a heroic young masculine man. And I think that may help explain some of the popularity of these young men who feel that once again society is moving too quickly, that men are under assault, that heterosexual young men are under assault by all these changing conceptions of sexuality and gender that we're experiencing right now. And I would suggest that there's a pretty strong link to those types of young men seeking solidarity in these militia groups and dressing up like their soldiers. And, you know, the battleground is not overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's in Michigan or Minnesota. And they're defending what they believe to be our important ideals and kind of get us back to the traditional America where men were in power and

and women were on a lesser stage of within the hierarchy, you know, the political hierarchy. Gregory Dadis, the book is Pulp Vietnam War and Gender and Cold War Men's Adventure Magazines. It is excellent. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about it. Well, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt. Jason Fields and Kevin O'Dell is created by myself and Jason fields. If you like the show, like, subscribe, follow us on all the places that you follow podcasts and get podcasts. Leave a comment or a star rating on iTunes. It helps other people

find the show. And we've also got a substack. Angryplanet.substack.com, not just for the Glenn Greenwalds of the world. If you like our show, then for $9 a month, you get two, count them two bonus episodes. The next one is going to be a very, intelligent person talking about all of the wars that climate change may bring us. That will be out a little bit later this week. You can follow the show on Twitter at Angry Planet Pod. I'm at MJ Galt on Twitter. Jason is at JQ Fields.

Kevin is at KJK Nodell. We're on Facebook too. We'll be back a little bit later this week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then. Thank you.