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

Rating:
Summary: The Proud, The Few, The Disfunctional
Review: 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 dirty little 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 recently and 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.

Rating:
Summary: A complete waste of time and money
Review: I must first apologize to anyone who has purchased this book in the past three months. If I had written this upon finishing Burke's diatribe perhaps I could have saved you some of your hard-earned money.

My time is limited, so I will simply say that Ms. Burke distorts reality beyond recognition; portraying the marginal as the typical. Her research was either shoddy, or more likely, she discarded any findings that didn't conform to her agenda.

This is probably the first book I've ever read that I can truly say is not worth the paper upon which it is printed.