Manliness and Victimhood in the Culture of the Korean War

Manliness and Victimhood in the Culture of the Korean War
This paper, drawn from my book The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), will argue that popular and literary treatments of the Korean War departed, in a variety of ways, from World War II-era cultural conventions. Many of those treatments, in turn, anticipated depictions of the American soldier popularly associated with the Vietnam War. The culture of the Korean War emphasized soldiers’ isolation from the homefront, their victimhood and individuality (broadly conceived), and the changing terms of their masculinity.
During the Second World War various image-makers in the press, Hollywood, and government agencies had celebrated the foot soldier for his selfless contribution to a team effort. In these renderings military life appeared orderly and democratic, the soldier undamaged or perhaps bettered by his service. Even the grievously wounded seemed intact specimens of manly vigor.
Many writers, filmmakers, photographers, and poets of the Korean War era, however, conveyed an evolving awareness of the enormous costs of armed conflict. These purveyors of culture described soldiers as cynical, distressed victims of government policy or overbearing officers, war as a grim, chaotic business, and combat as a brutalizing experience. They disparaged the expanding federal bureaucracy that landed American boys on far-off shores, and often condemned the military leadership—and the homefront public—as distant and heartless. In so doing, image-makers of the Korean War era revised the terms of masculine virtue, adding sensitivity, compassion, and vulnerability to the more familiar soldierly traits of toughness, stoicism, and resilience. This updated warrior image of the 1950s found wider dissemination, later, in the more dramatic context of the Vietnam War—but it did not originate there.