Meredith Lair, assistant professor of history, has published Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War.
Her publisher, the University of North Carolina Press, explains that "Popular representations of the Vietnam War tend to emphasize violence, deprivation, and trauma. By contrast, in Armed with Abundance, Meredith Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, redrawing the landscape of the war so that swimming pools, ice cream, visits from celebrities, and other 'comforts share the frame with combat . . . With an epilogue that finds a similar paradigm at work in Iraq, Armed with Abundance offers a unique and provocative perspective on modern American warfare."
November 19, 2011