America’s Wars in Vietnam and Iraq

Abstract

This chapter reviews American wars in Vietnam and Iraq from critical social and political history sources and from people who experienced these wars. How America remembers and renders accounts of itself, relative to how others remember America in these wars, is key to learning whose war knowledge gets attention and whose wars languish unacknowledged. The chapter reconstructs the wars from memories of ordinary people close to or distant from combat, rather than positioning war only as a matter of state interests, military strategies, and geopolitics that collateralize people. In doing so it considers three contemporary paintings that can convey ideas related to Americans and their post-911wars