Focus 580; Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century

This morning in this hour of the show we will take a little trip to in a metaphorical sense to Fayetteville North Carolina a town that in many ways has been shaped by war not because war has been fought on its soil but because this country has fought wars other places. Fayetteville is the home or neighbor of a very large military installation Fort Bragg and it will be talking this morning with Catherine Lutz. She is an anthropologist. She's professor of anthropology at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and has authored a book that looks at the ways that the presence of the base has shaped the town of Fayetteville. Her book is titled Home Front a military city and the American 20th century published by the Beacon Press. And we'll be talking this morning about the book. And as we do of course questions comments are welcome. Anyone listening can call in if you're here in Champaign Urbana where we are the local number is 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line that's good. Anywhere that you can hear us and that is 800

to 2 2 9 4 5 5 3 3 3 wy allow toll free 800 to 2 to WY a law professor Lutz. Hello. Hi how are you. I'm fine thanks and thanks for talking with us. Sure. So what what what was the story that you were trying to tell here with the home front. I was trying to tell the story of how Fairfield has been shaped by the military but it's really treating fat cells a kind of microcosm of the rest of the country. There are really literally hundreds of places like it that have military bases but in another sense it really mirrors the rest of the nation and also and in lots of respects by looking at say a fall of hope to see a sharper relief. Things are that are happening everywhere across the country. And as an anthropologist did that dictate a particular kind of approach that would have been different from that taken by somebody who who came from some other discipline.

Well yes I use the methods of anthropology but also the methods of history. But what I did as an anthropologist was basically to go to Fayetteville and just try and meet as many kinds of people and I could I went to a wide variety of places walk through the mall went to the government meeting. Basically the method of anthropology being just slightly an appropriately friendly and is walking up to people and starting to chat and then people sometimes gave me a long interview and those were really just fascinating and a lot of the book is in the words of the people say it so it is it is Fort Bragg big as military installations go yes it's one of the largest in the country and North Carolina as also has a I don't know how it compares with other states but it seems to have a lot of. Not only does he have this this one is one of the biggest in the country but it also has a lot of other bases also in the state of North Carolina too. Right hand camp which is also one of the large base but there are nearly a

thousand domestic military bases a small march so North Carolina's got a good number but most states can claim quite a few. The base and I guess it was before it was Fort Bragg it was called Camp Bragg. Right and I think that this was 19 18 when it was the established order or one that brought it to the city. How is it that it ended up being there in North Carolina or was it something that people locally there were interested in or was it a case that the government decided well we need to have this base. And that seemed like a good place. Well it was a combination of things. Hey if Bill had been the second largest city in the state. One point early in the in the 19th century. But it's fallen on hard times. And so the city's boosters went out really actively campaigning for this face and at the same time the U.S. government was looking for a very large tract of land to to test its its new

artillery guns which shot very long distances and so they were in need of land and they and they picked areas around the country where they were relatively sparsely populated but still displaced quite a few people. And then I guess that is one of the issues that you know you deal with who ends up being displaced. There were people living on the land that came to be can't brag and then Fort Bragg. Right. And there were hundreds of families and churches and and you know a communal community and so those people suffered a real hardship. What's interesting is to see that when they went looking for places that are relatively sparse populations and little infrastructure that tended to correlate Unfortunately with areas of of the states that were poor and then had more African-Americans. Those are the areas that had been relatively neglected when various kinds of public monies were being allocated. So it was.

That was also what but can't play soon to be in an area that was heavily African-American. Well did those people was there some compensation or did someone just come along and say well you just have to move now. Well they didn't have any choice but they were compensated for the land but not for the loss of their community and their churches and the network of friends and families that they had in the area. How did the the coming of the camp. How many people came there that weren't there before how did it affect that the population of the area. Well initially there were not huge numbers of people who came for one was over before they completed building camp Greg. So the base basically stayed quite small until the war were to their only 3000 soldiers there through that whole interwar period. So the the city of faithful remained a kind of vibrant while it had its own economy it had textile mills and manufacturing and it

became that as its main economic base to work to and suddenly. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers came through and that the town was changed forever to that point. You know it's interesting to see that. If you look at the mindset the way the people thought about the military thought about the need for the military thought about military preparedness. If you compare the mindset after Pearl Harbor with the mindset before that in fact there was a big change and there that before hand before the U.S. got involved in World War Two there was there was not necessarily great enthusiasm for the military. How did people there in Fayetteville think about the base say say before Pearl Harbor. Well what's interesting is that when the boosters went out looking for the base went out recruiting it they failed the first couple of times they tried. And one point in the newspaper I found a quote which basically said well it's a good thing we didn't get the base.

If we had there would be soldiers prowling through the streets. Looking to make mayhem and looking to take our daughters and our wives. And it's just as well we don't have it. And then of course there are many people whose point of view wasn't really much articulate is a newspaper who may have also not been very happy about that. But there were some people who are going to benefit from it and who eventually did again get to make some money from selling real estate and selling things soldiers. I guess that that they're you. You come to what is one of the big questions and I suppose that you anywhere that you're looking at a town that's near a large military installation you have to ask what are the tradeoffs you would expect in Indeed the presence of the base would mean that there would be soldiers there that would have money in their pockets and they would be spending it in the community. On the other hand there are some downsides and that is that

you know there may be trouble related to their being there maybe the kind of businesses that would cater to them that the local Chamber of Commerce would be high on. And then there's also the issue of costs. Other sorts of costs that the presence of the soldiers create that the community simply has to bear that are not reimbursed by the government. Now if you look at those things on balance. Is the economic impact positive or is it in fact negative. Well what I the way answer that question is by saying basically it depends on who you're talking about. There are some people who benefit and others who bear but most of the cost. And here's how that works out. People who own businesses can take some profits from them. But small businesses even are very vulnerable to the what I call the warthe cycle which is a kind of twin to the business cycle so that when

troops deploy there's a sudden implosion of economic activity and small restaurant owners small business owners can suffer or go under. The people who also suffer there are retail workers who are pay are the lowest category of the lowest paid category of worker as the census notes. And so those people are already on the best of circumstances are our working poor. But when when the soldiers deploy it becomes that they often have no savings and they really go under. So a portion of those people don't get any kind of help usually. So that the costs are the kind of job a job that that kind of basic creates are low low paying jobs. And then again the tax base is quite low. There's a huge amount of land which is no federal property pays no taxes and that also leads to pretty poor public services compared to

neighboring communities that have better tax base. Our guest here this morning I should address again is Catherine lats. She's professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and is the author of this book that we're talking about the title is home front a military city and the American 20th century it's published by the Beacon Press and is about Fayetteville North Carolina. That is neighbor to Fort Bragg one of the country's biggest military installations. And she looks at what the presence of the base has meant for the town. Going back to 1989 when it was first set up and coming up to the present and questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Did you talk a little bit about how. People some people say the before World War 2 thought about the base and might have had mixed feelings about the the presence of all the soldiers. Once the United States entered the war did people think differently did their attitude about

the presence of the soldiers changed because now there was there was growing public sentiment for the American involvement in the war and there was some sense in which it was everybody was was in this thing together right. Yes definitely there. There are people who tell stories about the incredible stresses that the war played on the city but how people responded with incredible resolve and then the hard work people did a lot more work each day. And I'm talking about the civilians. And some of them took soldiers into their homes because there wasn't enough housing for them or for their families on base. So they took in strangers say. They did kind of double or triple duty days doing many women who had worked before. I went to work on a story in the community and so that was really it. It was difficult for them but yeah people remembered it's a time of a lot of work

but a lot of common spirit. How did they feel about fraternization the involvement of local girls and young women with the soldiers. Yeah well there was a lot of fear about that and that was the sentiment that I mentioned earlier about. Talking about the the world one period and there was certainly a lot of concern that as one woman told me she said. We were very friendly to the soldiers but our parents didn't want to be too friendly socially. They were being warned particularly about the enlisted soldiers so there was a bit of a class bias and some of that they were would be OK if they met and socialized with the officer class but the enlisted class was with another matter. Yeah they apparently there were there were opportunities a there were dances where young women could go and I'm sure that they were chaperone and all but they could go and and mingle with the officers and that was pretty much OK but

depending upon perhaps depending upon what the what the social class and social standing of that young woman in her family was right they might have not been too keen about the idea of dating an enlisted man I'm not sure why an officer is necessarily better. Maybe have to do with that officer and gentleman by act of congress thing all right and also that there were more likely to have been called educated. Wow. Race certainly is a theme that runs through here and at the time the U.S. military was still segregated. The white troops and the African-American troops lived separately. And of course segregation would've been a fact of life and in Fayetteville at the time. How did did the presence of the base somehow. Intensify the issue of race or friction or around race. Did it make it somehow

more important then it might have been if the base wasn't there. Well yes I think in certain ways it did. And this is true both of race and of and of class because of what these all of these people did was disrupt the status quo of social relationships that people had and social hierarchies that at work separated a class and race. And so what I found in the looking in the archives was that in city council meetings people began to talk about the need for more careful and more detailed laws regulating who could eat with whom and what having separate entrances to restaurants for whites and blacks. So that was clearly responsive to the threat that these new people and including particularly soldiers from the north who hadn't experienced quite the same degree of racial discrimination or racial segregation. Obviously it was still a problem in the north but the city had to clearly

had called itself a challenge and then tried to clamp down on on race mixing. And I suppose that there would also have been have been black soldiers who would have been there also that ordinarily would not. Would that have meant that that the African-American population of the area would have been more than it would have been otherwise would have been more had there. That is there would have been more black men there say because the base was there then there would have been if the base you know had not been there. Oh yeah that definitely that the baby brought black soldiers and soldiering is what gives people citizenship that is that they don't normally have kids and so that was part of the threat that that black man in uniform was making a claim on citizenship that that he was seen by some whites as not deserving. So there were there were racial problems across the country throughout World War 2. So black

soldiers who were lynched in uniform. I found the account of a of a soldier who was killed downtown Fadhil by a white military policeman. And I think those kinds of stories have tended not to be told and some of these more recent Salvatore histories of World War 2 it just doesn't quite fit with the idea of the good war and one that had. It was just a war against fascism in the war against Nazi ism. But in fact the fight against fascism fascism had to be fought at home as well. And this young man private at Fort Bragg paid for that with his own life. That was a remarkable story in the book. Well was it was that something that did that got coverage at the time in the more mainstream media that existed it was it something that people point out the irony that here it is we're battling fascism and we're fighting this great evil and we're fighting for the freedom of

the world. And yet here at home the reality doesn't doesn't seem to square up with whether it is that we say that we're all about right. Yeah it was. It was covered very very briefly in the local paper. That was a big headline that said shootout on a bus in downtown Fayetteville and then disappeared from the newspaper. But the African-American press which at the time was a very vigorous and large force in American. In American society there were millions of readers daily readers of the black press. They took up the cause and between their work and the NAACP there was a petition to the War Department for an official investigation and that that did occur. Unfortunately it is sort of whitewashed the matter but it resulted in a in a large archive of material that has a look at this in the National Archives and also very fascinating material there.

We're almost at the midpoint here of this part of focus I like to get introduce our guests. Catherine Lutz is professor of anthropology at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the book that she's written that's all about Fayetteville and how it has been shaped by the presence of Fort Bragg. The book is titled Home Front a military city and the American 20th century is published by the Beacon Press. Questions are certainly welcome. Three three three toll free 800 1:58 WLM one of the things that's that's interesting I think is the way in which the the presence of the base has made Fayetteville probably a more cosmopolitan kind of place than it would have been otherwise in part because servicemen. When abroad they they went to Europe they went to Asia and some of them married women from there and then their wives came back and they settled in the United States. So here now the Fayetteville would have this. This community of people who were new to America that

again otherwise they probably wouldn't have had. How did that contribute or did that in deed end up changing the way people thought about the the other there. Yeah. I didn't get a chance to finish answering the question you asked earlier about what are the cost benefits are of having the basin and that this is certainly one of the benefits. This is the most cosmopolitan diverse and interesting city in North Carolina and I've had include Chapel Hill in Raleigh or Charlotte. It's really a very very interesting place where we can with people having many different kinds of experiences and not just soldiers. But again these families of soldiers have come from elsewhere. And people from town have traveled for other reasons. It's not nearly as provincial as people might imagine a quiet southern town being. There's also the fact that the the town has a much larger middle class than it would

otherwise have because the military there in general military spending across the country tend to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. And then the way that happens is a kind of complicated but basically military spending creates a smaller number of jobs than does social spending and a lot of the military budget goes into the profits of the military industries. So a few people profit the shareholders of those companies the higher the high paid labor the engineering and technical labor that that works for let's say Raytheon that those people can become big becoming wealthier through the military budget. On the other hand some of these military personnel cities like Fayetteville you find people working at minimum wage and really again the gap between the rich and the poor gets wider through that distribution of the military budget. But the soldiers themselves are. That the bulk of soldiers

earn a reasonable kind of middle class wage. The gap between the highest and the lowest paid worker in the military is 1 to 8. When I'm in a civilian world that's one to can be one to a thousand. So in some ways the military is. This is the most socialized sector of American society. The soldiers themselves occasionally refer to it as again a small sort of socialist society. Really good benefits and so on. So in that way having soldiers in the mix of faithfuls economy creates a strong middle class and that's always good for democracy because you don't have these inequalities exacerbating and polarizing. Polarizing the community and I would expect that too if you ask How are things different today from say the period of World War 2. I would guess that two major differences and they certainly would have impact on the community would

be that there are more military personnel who live off of the base and that they're probably also more military personnel who have families. And I'm I would expect that those two things would have have it in many different ways a fairly profound impact on the community. Yeah the big change occurred in 1973 with the all volunteer force and then suddenly people were able to see that many people began to marry and have them bring their families with them to the town. Although those people continue often to retain residence in another state where there might not be a state income tax and so they don't vote in local elections often until they retire. And that has tended to make for the lowest for a pretty weak local democracy. On the other hand because those people go. Paper that the lowest voting registration rate of any city in the in the state. But

again those people are looking for better schools. Unfortunately Texas they still don't know how them to find that. So what people also point out is that a soldier used to make their social life on base. They now make it back at home. Their faith and to their family men or family women their stay at home and so there's a little more there's more restaurants in town as people you know socialize off base or live off base. But yes it's got a mixed story. You know that here you would have people who they would be spending money they'll be going out to eat they'll be buying furniture and clothing and going to the movies and things like that so they will be putting money into the local economy and yet they're the you know their contribution to the tax base is probably less than it would be other places right. And they're often younger families and those families tend to have a B are associated in any place with higher public costs. They draw more in terms of.

The use of the courts the roads the schools and of the public public facilities. It must have been a palpable letdown for the community after the war. I'm sure on the one hand everybody was very happy the war was over but at the same time there was a real contraction in the military and people there certainly must have felt it. At the end of World War at the at the end of World War Two. Oh yeah. And General every one of these sort of expansion and contraction has had a pretty dramatic effect on the economy and the city has just closed down and the people have to adjust. So it's not like any other economy. How did when when the World War 2 ended and then we got into the cold war and people started thinking about the fact that yes maybe there still would

be war that we still did have an enemy but that things were different and people's concerns about nuclear weapons and nuclear war started that started to get hold of people and shaped the way that people thought. It certainly shaped the way Americans thought and affected what they were worried about. And that came out in the popular culture in a lot of interesting ways. How did that how did that manifest itself there in Fayetteville and did real people really start thinking differently once we got into the cold war and people were worried about the possibility of nuclear war. Well what struck me is that very few people who I spoke with seem to have been especially concerned about that and concerned about the problem of living close to nuclear you know close to a military base. It could become a target of nuclear weapons I think most people were fairly realistic across the country and they knew if there

were a full scale nuclear war that it didn't quite matter where you were that that the gig would cry and be happy. So but what was interesting was that what I found was that people in Fayetteville lived a much more intimately with the idea of nuclear war in the form of war games that were played on the base and that sometimes built over the boundaries of space. And so they saw they saw the military much more up close engaged in both nuclear war games. This is amazing. A war game called Operation Flash burn that occurred in the early 50s in which the Army was trying to demonstrate its capability of fighting a nuclear war. It had been under quite some time. Stress at that point. General Eisenhower then President Eisenhower despite being an Army man had cut the Army in half and had basically counted on the air force feed into the service that was going to be

at the center of his his strategy of nuclear warfare. So they were playing war games that were meant both to practice the new techniques of war but also to convince other services in the president that they were that they shouldn't suffer for their cause and that they had a vital role in nuclear warfare. That was interesting to read about. You mention the fact that that people who are living near the base didn't necessarily feel more threatened because the base was there than other people because everybody felt threatened. Right. Did it though. I wonder did it necessarily make you might it in some cases have made them feel safer or somehow more confident. That is because they did have contact with the military and they saw them there and that it. It might give them the feeling that well no matter what happened here we have this military and they're ready and they're capable and they're they're good people and they're you know they will do what they need to do.

Oh I didn't hear people think that way either. I think it just became a kind of normal background noise to most people's lives through this period. You know just a kind of a sense of risk that now being next to a military base wasn't going to make you feel any safer. When Vietnam happened it was their protest against the war and and against the presence of the military there. Well this is what most surprised me a lot of the research that I did through the whole century was to see that era and to see what happened then and that you know most people would assume that an army town would have been a place where you would see very little that you would have seen. A lot of hostility towards the idea of dissent but in fact there was a tremendous amount of dissension within the military and there were nearly 2000 court martials at Fort Bragg soldiers in

1968 alone. So that's remarkable loss of a wall. Soldiers. The Department of Defense did a survey that showed that nearly half of all low ranking soldiers had been what they call a dissident or disobedience to the orders. And when you add drug use to that in the survey it was over 55 percent. And they found that the majority of the people who were dissenting against the war were not draftees and they weren't new soldiers. They were volunteers people who volunteered to serve and they were people who were returning from the war. People who had been there seen it and came back in and told stories and of what they had seen. And and there were civilian dissenters as well who came from often from some of the local universities including U.N. and Duke. But the soldiers who were really at the core of the anti-war movement and in Fayetteville. Well about 15 minutes left is what people are listening if you do have questions comments want to be involved in the

conversation. You can do that easily by calling us. Don't wait till the very end. Our guest this morning is Catherine lats. She's an anthropologist. She teaches at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and she has written the book home front a military city and the American 20th century its about Fayetteville North Carolina which is neighbor to a very large military installation Fort Bragg. And the book looks at what the presence of the fort which has been there since 1918 and what that's meant for the town of North Carolina and not not just what it means with this specific relationship between this base and this town is but how that's that story has probably been played out over and over again a lot of other places around the country as well. The book is published by the Beacon Press. And again the number here locally 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. As to as you say it seems that with a town like this next to a very

large military installation there's going to be cycles of sort of up and down. And when you look at impact on the community particularly economic impact depending on what's going on in the world. So it sort of up and down up and down and up and down in the in the area in the area say since the end of the end of the Vietnam War and really isn't the end of the Cold War. There is there has now been a contraction in in defense number of bases around the country have actually closed in fact we had one here in our neighborhood we had a an Air Force Base that's close by here that was closed a number of years back and that community has faced a real challenge dealing with the closing of the base and what that's meant for their economy. So Fort Bragg hasn't closed but how have things changed there for the town say in the post Cold War period.

Well Fort Bragg really benefited from the end of the Cold War in terms of the amount of money that went into it. Even though the military budget dropped by 18 percent initially overall. It grew back and it was nearly to the average of the Cold War level by by the end of this decade. By 2000 2001. So even though a lot there are a lot of base closings and individual communities suffered some dislocation of the military budget as a whole did not stay permanently contracted. And at Fort Bragg in particular was I really got a lot of additional funds because it has the airborne and special operations perturb considered the units which are the the face of modern warfare of course post modern warfare some people would say in fact they're they're involved now in Afghanistan. Absolutely. I think that's you know hero to mention the fact that we had this we had an air force base in the

Rantoul Air Force base that had had been there I believe it had been there since World War around time World War One. So it had been there a presence for a long long time and I'm sure that the folks there thought he would be there forever I guess and until the day came when they got that bad news that the base was going to close I suppose did do people there and failed do they. Do they even consider the possibility that Fort Bragg might close or did or do they did they believe and maybe with justification that it's always going to be there. Yeah I think there's very little fear that the base would close. It's probably down at the very very bottom of the list of any base federal base closings. But I think you know some communities that didn't have the base closings rebounded quite well and found that again some of the costs of being a military based community they no longer suffered the cost that they lost some of the advantages but the the cost had already

been so normalized and accepted that when they ended people that don't look now we've got we've got in general higher paying work that we've been able to bring in. We've got tax paying property where we didn't before and so some communities have found it to their benefit. I think that the folks in rental here are our neighbors have have done very well I know that it's been very difficult and they've gone through some tough times but and it has necessitated some creative thinking and I'm not sure that the governor was always all that helpful. They still have some problems on their hands including us. There's a building there that I think was once I think before the Pentagon was built it was the biggest office building in the world that still there and it has a lot of problems with you know with environmental impact and you know they've got this big white elephant that they can't use for anything else but there are some problems with dealing with so obviously there are still some things left for that for the folks in Rantoul But by and

large they seem to have done done pretty well. Right we do have unfortunately a huge national legacy of environmental problems that are the result of weapons production and weapons testing during the Cold War and since then there are even areas that one Defense Department writer has called national sacrifice zone by which you mean areas that are so polluted that we have to call them just the price of winning the Cold War. And I think it's a fairly tragic term. Though I gather there are many places like that that where the cost of cleanup is is phenomenal. Is that is that a problem there or is it not not so much of a problem. Well these are particular places where they were doing the beta closings that try to turn them over to civilian uses and finding that nobody wanted it no one wanted to build a school on top of a toxic waste dump and then prices

elsewhere too. Former US military bases in the Philippines where there is mercury in the in the water table. Places like Micronesia where there's the whole poles that are still on inhabitable because they were the site of nuclear waste nuclear arms testing. We mentioned a bit ago that the that Fort Bragg now is home to some of the most elite military units those that operate with high levels of security and secrecy. I'm sure in the past it was difficult to know if if you were connected to the military or even you were just concerned because they were your neighbors. What those people were doing you know maybe would have been all that easy but now I think probably now the the level of of of secrecy is even higher that that here you would know that people who were in these units would say we're in Afghanistan but you would know what they were doing you would know where where they were you would know when they were coming home you would know virtually nothing. How how

does that sit with people there knowing that the soldiers are there they're in danger and that they know almost nothing about what's what they're up to. Well I think over the course of 60 years many people have come and gone around the country to accept the idea of secrecy at the cost of doing doing more business and. I think there are some unfortunate effects of that on our democracy. Things are coded secret that have really nothing to do with national security so much as with protecting saving face or protecting the reputation of a people who've made mistakes both in the civilian and the in the military sectors of the defense industries and defense institutions. So but people in town I think are very very accepting of that. They believe that that that they shouldn't know certain things. And I think

that's a new definition of citizenship that that has emerged over the course of the 20th century the idea that a good citizen is someone who's naive or is not knowledgeable about what the government is doing and I. I find that one of the the heavy costs of those long years of war preparation and war because that secrecy occurred throughout the 20th century not just during wartime. So it isn't the case that people who live and fail most people have on if not a daily basis then a couple times a week they have in a regular sort of interaction with personnel from the base. Yeah so it's pretty much all the time you see so you're you're there in town you see soldiers out the seamen the seaman MacDonald see him in the mall see you know that it's that sort of there's always this feeling that you're there really they are there sharing your space with absolutely this vast you're pumping gas and the person next to you and camouflage and big heavy bike boots and.

When shopping in the mall and carrying their babies in after work. And yeah it's very much this is the scene of everyday life. And if there is there the sense that we are sort of all the same or is there some real sense that that me Mr. civilian guy is is very different that there is somehow a big gap in someway between me and the person who is there in wearing their camouflage and filling up the car at the gas station. Well I think it's been quite a bit of time writing about this in the book and I think it's really fascinating. The pundits I think we've heard over the last 10 years the pundits saying that there's a tremendous gap between the military in the civilian world and what I've found in Fayetteville is that it's a much more blurred boundary because there are people who are for example in civilian clothes who are in some ways really part of the military world because they were veterans or they are people who are

civilian employees of the Defense Department or they are selling you know they 80 percent of the sales in their record shop are to soldiers. So in some ways those people are. The boundaries are quite blurred and conversely you'll see people who are in military uniform who will be in that uniform for a very short amount of time and go back to civilian life. And so I think the the idea that there is a gap is is way overblown. There are plenty of stereotypes and assumptions on both on both sides that can create some hostility. For example the assumption that all soldiers think the same that they're all and that and that's one of the more more pernicious kind of assumptions. And for example there are soldiers I practice soldiers who were libertarians and that there are plenty of people in the service who think we should be. We should be a purely defensive force we shouldn't be out there mucking around in the world.

There are people who are in the military because they want the college benefits and that's still the number one reason people give for joining the military is to get that good college benefits. And so those people are. Not going to make a knot there because it's a calling that they're there they're doing a job for a very short period of time and maybe anti-authoritarian even. And then there's people who really believe that violence is the way to get things done in the world. The people who are ardent nationalists and some people who are talk to one soldier who told me he'd been all over the world in various conflicts and said I'm an internationalist so I could live anywhere. I said he said I love the USA but I'm an internationalist on the world citizen. So incredible diversity of view within the military. But civilians sometimes resent a kind of supra citizenship that they see soldiers getting and the extra benefits they see them getting

discounts in stores for example and the military people sometimes retort in return. Join the military you can have the same benefits but as it really is the kinds of social welfare benefits that the military gets are one which many people feel should be something that that all Americans have. For example many European countries give all of their citizens. You know universal health care and so on. So it's a very interesting politics of relationship between the military and the civilian world. Yeah well I think we're about the point where we'll close out and I want to say thanks very much we appreciate you giving us some of your time this morning and talking about homefront. Great Well thanks so much for the chance to talk about it.