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In the giddy optimism that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the attendant disintegration of the Cold War, commentators, particularly from the American right, looked to a rose-tinted future in which the United States bestrode the world as its only superpower. In recent years, Hollywood has produced a steady stream of films that focused upon the role of America in various unilateral and multilateral military interventions. The question is how these films work to produce or unsettle particular established or consensual views about the inherent ‘righteousness’ of U.S. military actions and, as a result, how they undermine or reinforce traditional understandings of the benign meta-narrative of American history. This chapter focuses on two films: Three Kings (1999), which immediately disturbs the conventional view of the Persian Gulf War, and Black Hawk Down (2001), which shows the devastating impact that modern weaponry and warfare can have on the human body.

This film is based on true deadly events encountered by US troops in Somalia in 1993 that began when a rebel army shot down an American helicopter. Scott was interested in the story because of the theme of people caught on the edge of society, revealing human behavior stretched and challenged. The production was staged in Morocco. It took four months of diplomacy to bring this to a reality and even involved Colin Powell, then US secretary of state. Two thousand extras from twenty-four African communities were employed as well as a large cast of American actors, including Sam Shepard, Josh Harnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, and Eric Bana. As many as eleven cameras were used to shoot the intricately choreographed battle sequences. This highly respected film won the Academy Award for Best Editing and Best Sound.

Post-Vietnam Hollywood combat filmmakers set aside the most common musical trope of earlier war movies: the military march. Instead, new musical tropes were developed, initially in the 1980s Vietnam cycle. A particularly unstable musical register, here called veil music, uses musical texture rather than melody or meter to expresses a range of equivocal combat states, most related to the foreignness of the battlefield for the American soldiers at the center of these films. In the Vietnam cycle, veil music is connected to moments of moral liminality, when surprising acts of violence might be done. Examples from Platoon and Full Metal Jacket are discussed. Veil music in war films set in the Middle East often characterize the Arab other by way of untranslated singing voices, putting exotic musical tropes to rather generalized uses characterizing the foreign other. Examples from The Hurt Locker, Black Hawk Down, and Three Kings are analyzed.

Having set aside the military march, serious post-Vietnam war films have explored other strongly metrical musics. Three World War II films have turned to triple-meter, or waltz-time, themes. Band of Brothers and Flags of Our Fathers alike use tuneful waltz-time music to support a sentimental transgenerational agenda linking fathers and sons. The Thin Red Line supports the philosophical ruminations of soldiers with a group of triple-meter melodies that create a zone of quiet reflection. Twenty-first-century war films use beat-driven music to excite the audience physically and also to characterize new sorts of soldierly action—such as work at a computer—as exciting combat action. Beat-driven combat film scores for Black Hawk Down, United 93, and Green Zone are compared. Finally, an extended combat sequence from The Thin Red Line scored to a stately ostinato musical cue is considered as an extreme case of music taking the place of diegetic sound.

This chapter examines African war novels published since 2000 against the backdrop of the literary history developed in the rest of the study. The chapter focuses extensively on novels that eschew the easy formulas of child soldier narratives that dominated African fiction in the late 1990s and returned metropolitan audiences to a cliché of Africa as heart of darkness. By contrast, Nuruddin Farah’s Links offers a complex meditation on the ethics of humanitarian intervention and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of Yellow Sun reinvents the domestic novel, extending the project of a people’s history central to the literature of the Nigerian Civil War. Furthermore, both authors engage with the influence of journalistic depictions of war, and thus Farah offers an important response to Mark Bowden’s bestselling Black Hawk Down.

This introductory chapter provides a background on the role of cinema in representing US national identity. According to Professors Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, “individual films often serve to represent the national to itself, as a nation”. The cinematic experience of films constructs imaginary bonds that hold the peoples of a nation together as a community by dramatising their current fears, anxieties, pleasures, and aspirations, allowing them to recognize themselves as a singular body with a common culture. Films such as Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Down, and We Were Soldiers indicate that pre-existing views on war were managed in order to turn to patriotic constructions of US national identity, and a call to arms that led to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. As such, Hollywood played a significant role in the production and maintenance of an aggressive response to 9/11.