The Portrayal of Child Soldiers in Documentaries and Hollywood Film

People in the United States are becoming increasingly mindful of child soldiers, with film being a critical means of bringing about awareness. However, awareness can be dependent upon media representation since most individuals in the U.S. do not have direct experiences with child soldiers. The purpose of the present study is to discover how the media has portrayed child soldiers in Hollywood films and documentaries, with an emphasis on the portrayal of violence, the role of women, and the reintegration experiences of child soldiers that are shown. Through a combined qualitative and quantitative content analysis, this study explores the depictions of young children in armed forces as a way to better understand society’s perception of child soldiers. Five Hollywood films and five documentaries were selected at random from an initial pool and viewed by two coders. The coders discovered that while women were portrayed more often than expected, the unique challenges faced by female child soldiers were not represented with great accuracy. Reintegration was depicted in most films; documentaries were more likely to focus on long-term reintegration and Hollywood films were more likely to focus on short-term reintegration. Hollywood films were also more likely than documentaries to portray violent action and show changes in the attitudes and emotions among the child soldiers over time

The Lives of Soldiers in World War II

An examination of soldiers\u27 quality of life during World War II. This is done through comparing and contrasting the letters of two different soldiers

U.S. rural soldiers account for a disproportionately high share of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan

A study by the Carsey Institute found that among U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, those who are from rural America are dying at a higher rate than those soldiers who are from cities and suburbs. According to U.S. Department of Defense records, rural youth enlist in the military at a higher rate than urban and suburban youth and in all but eight states, soldiers from rural areas make up a disproportionately high share of the casualties

Separate but Equal? Gettysburg’s Lincoln Cemetery

The most well-known cemetery in Gettysburg is, of course, the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. Another cemetery in Gettysburg that receives less attention is the Lincoln Cemetery, currently located on Lincoln Lane. This small cemetery is home to around thirty Civil War veterans. Why were these men not buried in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, a cemetery created for all veterans of the Civil War? The answer: they were African-American. While they were allowed to fight for their freedom, even in death, these men were still not equal to the white soldiers they fought beside. [excerpt

What Makes a Man?: A Historiography on the Common Soldier and Masculinity

The American Civil War ended with Union victory on April 9, 1865, in the front parlor of the McLean House in Appomattox, Virginia. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant ensured the southern states would return to the Union and begin the process of Reconstruction. Union soldiers, flushed with victory, reveled in the knowledge that their cause triumphed, that their masculinity and honor was upheld while the southern men were forced to reconcile with their failure as soldiers and men. This victorious sentiment and love toward the Union Army has transcended the celebratory jubilees in which northern soldiers engaged in the years after the war, emerging through the words of historians into the late twentieth century. For generations, historians focused on the broader wartime actions and achievements of generals and politicians compared to the soldiers who did the actual fighting. This changed, however, in the mid-twentieth century. [excerpt

Sensation Seeking and Perceived Need for Structure Moderate Soldiers’ Well-Being Before and After Operational Deployment

This study examined associations between sensation seeking and perceived need for structure, and changes in reported well-being among deployed soldiers. Participants (n = 167) were assessed before and after a six-month deployment to south Afghanistan. Results indicated that although well-being declined in the soldier sample as a whole following deployment, the degree of decrease was significantly different among soldiers with different personality profiles. Differences were moderated by soldiers’ level of sensation seeking and perceived need for structure. Results are discussed in terms of a person-environment fit theory in the context of preparation and rehabilitation of deployed military personnel

\u3cem\u3eUnited States v. Hodges\u3c/em\u3e: Treason, Jury Trials, and the War of 1812

In August 1814 a number of British soldiers were arrested as stragglers or deserters in the town of Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Upon learning of the soldiers’ absences the British military took local physician, Dr. William Beanes, and two other residents into custody and threatened to burn Upper Marlboro if the British soldiers were not returned. John Hodges, a local attorney, arranged the soldiers’ return to the British military. For this, Hodges was charged with high treason for “adhering to [the] enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” The resulting jury trial was presided over by Justice Gabriel Duvall, a Supreme Court Justice and Prince Georges County native, and highlights how the crime of treason was viewed in early American culture and the role of the jury as deciders of the facts and the law in early American jurisprudence. Contextually, Hodges’ trial took place against the backdrop of the War of 1812 and was informed by the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr

“You Bring It, We’ll Bring It Out” Becoming a Soldier in the New Zealand Army : A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology at Massey University Manawatū, New Zealand.

The transition from civilian to soldier is a process of identity acquisition. Based on participant-observation, this thesis follows a cohort of new soldiers through the first year and a half of their careers in the New Zealand Army, from their first day of Basic Training to their first overseas deployment. Both the Army as an institution and its individual soldiers are explicitly self-reflexive, and I use not only academic theory but also soldiers’ own theories of identity and identity acquisition to make sense of the experience of becoming a soldier. I show that although recruits undergo change in becoming soldiers, they simultaneously retain pre-service identities. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, I argue that civilians join the Army because of a shared “primary habitus”, a pre-existing identification with action, productivity and continual self-improvement through facing challenges that forms recruits’ earliest embodied understandings of themselves. The relationship between this “practical” habitus and the new soldier habitus to be acquired is key to understanding the civilian-soldier transition. While civilians draw on and thus fulfil the primary practical habitus in becoming soldiers during initial training periods, once socialised they find the Army much less challenging, and therefore may find that their need to be involved in meaningful action is not met. Although the practical habitus is behind and can make sense of the cohort’s actions, it is a mode of identity that has not often been recognised as such by academics, due to the fact that they do not share it. However, I show that it is more important in generating soldiers’ practice than the modes of identity that are usually employed to understand them: gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality. Therefore, I argue that anthropologists should not limit analysis to traditional axes of identity

Emasculated Men: The Perception and Treatment of Shell-Shocked Soldiers During World War I

World War I differed from wars of the past in a variety of ways. Thus, it created a host of modern medical and psychological problems for soldiers, military leaders, and physicians to overcome such as shell shock. Since shell shock was a relatively new phenomenon in warfare, the medical and military communities were uncertain about how to interpret its appearance and decrease its occurrence in their armed forces. As a result, shell shock fell victim to several social constructs of the time. One of the main societal factors that fueled the negative stigmatization of shell-shocked soldiers during the war was militarized masculinity. Using a variety of primary sources including military recruitment posters, medical journals, and other military and medical records, this paper aims to contribute to the current historiographical literature on the period by focusing exclusively on how societal perceptions of masculinity ultimately influenced the American and British military’s attitudes towards shell-shocked soldiers and determined the types of treatments used by medical practitioners to relieve soldiers of their debilitating and “effeminate” symptoms

Risk Taking and Force Protection

This paper addresses two questions about the morality of warfare: (1) how much risk must soldiers take to minimize unintended civilian casualties caused by their own actions (“collateral damage”), and (2) whether it is the same for the enemy\u27s civilians as for one\u27s own.The questions take on special importance in warfare where one side is able to attack the other side from a safe distance, but at the cost of civilian lives, while safeguarding civilians may require soldiers to take precautions that expose them to greater risk. In a well-known article, Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin argue that while soldiers must rank the protection of their own civilians above their own protection, they must rank their own protection above that of enemy civilians. Avishai Margalit and Michael Walzer responded that the only morally relevant distinction is between combatants and non-combatants, not the identity of the non-combatants. The present paper concludes that Margalit and Walzer are correct. Although soldiers may take extra risks on behalf of their own civilians, the minimally acceptable risk for enemy civilians is the same as the minimally acceptable risk for their own.In response to the first question, the paper emphasizes two chief points. First is the equal worth of military and civilian lives, which implies a weak form of “risk egalitarianism”: even if morality often permits people to transfer risk from themselves to others, transferring large risks to others in order to spare oneself from smaller risks is morally wrong, because indirectly it treats oneself as more valuable than the other. Second, I explore the possibility that soldiers belong to a profession in which honor may require them to take risks for civilians. This is particularly true when the risks to civilians come from the soldiers’ own violence. The second question is whether soldiers’ special obligation to protect their own people (not other people) creates a higher minimum standard of care for their own people (and not other people). I answer no, because the special obligation is to protect their people from enemy violence, while the dilemma is whether to protect civilians from the soldiers’ own violence. The responsibility to protect the innocent from violence of one’s own making is a universal, not a special, obligation. Thus, in both questions 1 and 2, the fact that soldiers themselves create the violence that endangers civilians plays a crucial role in the answers.The concluding sections address two crucial loose ends. First is the question of whether soldiers might in fact be more valuable than civilians (including their own civilians) because they are not only human beings, but also “military assets.” The paper answers no, because this way of thinking involves illegitimate double counting of the soldier’s value, coupled with a refusal to double count the value of anyone else. Second is the related question of whether minimizing military casualties might turn out to be a military necessity because the civilian population is deeply casualty-averse, and the war effort requires their political support. Again the answer is no: otherwise, the less will to fight a country has, the less moral and legal obligation it has to fight well