Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-And-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture

by Carol Burke

Book Overview

For decades scandals about women in the military have persisted, from Tailhook and Aberdeen to reports of sexual assaults and misconduct in the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Army, and, recently, in the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807046604
• ISBN13: 9780807046609
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Beacon Press (MA)
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

The Proud, the Few, the Disfunctional

Author Carol Burke is not afraid to jump into a controversial topic and throw everything she has at it. Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight starts out by quoting the woman-hating and profane marching songs of some basic training units. She describes the perverted and disgusting hazing that first-year service academy students are subjected to. She explains how a Navy admiral who didn't fit the mold was ridiculed, criticized, and threatened until he finally committed suicide. This is not the military that the Pentagon wants us to see. Burke's observations and conclusions, however, are not to be dismissed. The military is a macho culture and in an all-volunteer force, those who join are either compelled to by economics (lack of training and opportunity for better jobs) or are attracted by what seems to be the last bastion of the ultra masculine he-man, no-girls-allowed crowd. Burke investigates why this should be and how it is neither good for the military mission nor sustainable. Burke's style is readable and entertaining. She takes the lid off the military's embarrassing secrets and proceeds to shock and awe. Much more disturbing than the overt misogyny of the marching songs Burke cites, are the numerous lyrics that mention napalming and killing children. This sounds like a disfunctional organization rather than a training ground for tomorrow's heroes. Camp All-American is well-researched and there is an excellent bibliography. A single exception may have been the story she tells of the bedtime ritual at the Naval Academy, in which plebes say goodnight to their superiors and then to Jane Fonda, followed by a profanity. The only source for this story is an anonymous academy faculty member. As I was reading the book, which was published in early 2004, I wondered how Burke would explain Abu Ghraib in the context of her military and prison studies. As luck would have it, the online magazine Salon did an interview with her and it's still available in their archives. In it she addresses that very subject. The Lord of the Flies mentality did not surprise Burke, nor did the fact that everything was meticulously photographed. She mentioned, as she does in the book, that as society changes and technology advances, the military will find that gender is no longer an issue. Torture, on the other hand, probably will be.

The View From a Female and Folklorist

The present day military training procedures were originally developed by the Greeks as a way of training men to fight in their Phalanx. In that society the separation of the genders was even more complete. This training procedure has been followed, not without some minor change for a couple of thousand years. And the change that has come in, has come in reluctantly on the part of the military. After all, the training procedure works. That's why it is still followed by nearly every army in the world. Ms. Burke chronicles the story well. She sees things from a female and folklorist point of view that is different that what I would see. She comes to two recognizable conclusions. First the American Military is dysfunctional. Yup! No doubt about that. And to think that this is the military that wins. Imagine what the others must be like. Go read Len Deighton's book "Blood, Tears and Folly" about the screw ups in World War II. Second, she would like to see a bunch of changes in the military. Yup! Let's change it. But let's change it slowly. Bad as it is, the current system has worked for a couple of thousand years. Be careful you don't produce something even more dysfunctional in an attempt to be politically correct. Finally she talks about Jane Fonda. Yes, she's probably right about that too. I hear that her new movie is pretty good. It's undoubtedly silly, but I'm not going see Hanoi Jane in a movie.