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This chapter explores the political debates surrounding the passage of the 1966 Cold War G.I. Bill, the first G.I. bill of the Vietnam era. Unlike the earlier World War II and Korean Conflict wartime G.I. bills, the 1966 bill covered all noncombat Cold War veterans and, therefore, proved to be far less generous. Politicians from Great Society liberals to fiscal conservatives deemed that these later veterans had not earned the right to more substantial benefits because they had not faced fire directly. The bill made no distinction between veterans serving in peacetime conditions and Vietnam combat veterans. Consequently, Vietnam veterans were left with a G.I. bill significantly less generous than the one awarded to their predecessors. This chapter reveals how the 1966 bill fell prey to the nuances of both the liberal and conservative economic philosophies of the mid-twentieth century and left a legacy of bitterness among Vietnam veterans.

Chapter 4 demonstrates the ways that best-selling Appalachian-set fiction in the Vietnam era produced the region as authentic, promoted regional identity, and trained high middlebrow readers to recognize Appalachia's denizens as stand-ins for racial Others who call forth touristic, missionary, or imperialist responses. Both best sellers mentioned in this chapter imagine Appalachia as both a romantic and nightmarish departure from the normative. Readers of Catherine Marshall's pastoral Christy (1967) found affirmation for their missionary outlooks and felt compelled to vacation in the novel's East Tennessee setting. James Dickey's Deliverance (1970) attracted fans among southern and academic highbrow readers, outdoor enthusiasts, and readers desiring a raw and pristine land peopled by white Americans uncorrupted by mass society. Surprisingly, fan mail indicates that the seemingly stereotypical representations of regional people found in both novels helped generate and maintain regional identity among certain readers. Descendents of out-migrants from Appalachia were drawn to Christy as evidence of their humble but colorful heritage, while homesick out-migrants from the broader South managed to find in Dickey's depraved hillbillies a comforting glimpse of home.

Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) introduced a new sort of movie music resounding across Hollywood war films for the last thirty years: the elegiac register. Composer Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, heard repeatedly in Platoon, proves the musical source for this slow, strings-only, contrapuntal, harmonious, sad, and mournful music. This chapter describes this new sort of movie music in musical terms and identifies moments in later films when composers model their original scores directly on Barber’s Adagio. Film form often follows musical form when elegiac music is used. Multiple scenes from combat films are described visually and sonically, showing how the elegiac register has been put to varied ends: to foster reflection in combat film audiences, to put a pause on the action, and, most significantly, to frame the repeated images of dead and injured American soldiers’ bodies which lie at the heart of the cultural work done by serious war films in the post-Vietnam era.

This chapter dives deeper into the five elements of fighter pilot culture, the various ways in which they expressed themselves, and how the culture evolved through various contexts — from World War I through the Vietnam era. It looks at aggressiveness as the element that sets fighter pilots apart, citing key figures who illustrated this tenet such as Kiffin Rockwell, the first American pilot to shoot down a German aircraft; Victor Chapman, the first US pilot to be killed in aerial combat; and Colonel James Jabara, the first US pilot to achieve ace status in Korea. The chapter also tackles individualism, pointing out that preference for solo flying and self-reliance reflected a key component of fighter pilot culture. A fighter pilot could easily feel isolated, encased in the cockpit, and alone at the controls of a powerful machine of war. Next, the chapter discusses the third core element of this culture: technology. It highlights how the fighter pilot culture is tied specifically to technologies that enhance the role of air-to-air combat — giving more importance to agility and maneuverability over other characteristics such as range or payload. Focusing on the element of heroic imagery, the chapter describes how fighter pilots tended to talk of themselves in heroic terms. Furthermore, it looks at the tight-knit community of fighter pilots that often sees itself as under threat from outsiders and is carefully guarded. Last, the chapter tackles how masculinity is intertwined with all these defining elements.

Changing intellectual and geopolitical conditions by the early 1970s led to the re-emergence of grand strategy, among others, as a popular concept. John Collins authored the first entire book on grand strategy to be published in the United States, although today it is largely unremembered. A number of prominent authors began or made their careers writing about and developing their own idiosyncratic ideas of grand strategy, including Edward Luttwak (who defined grand strategy as military statecraft), Barry Posen (grand strategy as a cause-and-effect chain to produce security), and to some extent Paul Kennedy (defining grand strategy as very-long-term strategy). Each of these newly evolved concepts differed from its contemporaries, and each remains popular in its own way to the present day.