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Who Is the Soldier? Documenting American “Grunts” from Dispatches to Restrepo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2019
Abstract
This article compares the ways Michael Herr in Dispatches (1977) and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger in Restrepo (2010) represent American soldiers in the context of military professionalization following the establishment of the AVF. These works are seminal landmarks of the grunt's-eye-view genre, but they produce the average soldier's subjectivity and identity very differently and, in turn, foster different relationships between their American audiences and this figure. Herr, I argue, represents the “grunts” of Vietnam as we all while Restrepo’s directors portray the Army platoon in Afghanistan as a collective who?. I show how the subtle aesthetic changes to documenting the average infantryman reflect and enforce the logics of professionalization as well as the intensifying distance between the American public and those who fight America's wars.
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References
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