Research

Occupying War: U.S. Militarism and War Culture since 1989 is a cultural study of contemporary warfare that explores how key developments in U.S. militarism, specifically the rise of occupation-style warfare and the professionalization of the AVF following the Cold War, shaped the U.S.-led campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and across the greater Middle East. The project, which originated in Cawley’s dissertation, indexes and reads films and literary works about these campaigns, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), “Jarhead” (2005), “Occupation: Dreamland” (2005), “Restrepo” (2010), “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012), Redeployment (2014), The Corpse Exhibition (2014), War Porn (2016), “Reimagining Masculinity” (2019), and Love Is An Ex Country (2021), alongside military reports, government documents, news media coverage, archival research, and original interviews. By showing how these works reconfigure key features of Vietnam-era war culture as well as intersect with post-Cold War military reforms, Occupying War offers an essential account of contemporary war culture that explains why occupying militarism is an overlooked yet driving force behind the “whiteness” and “permanence” of today’s wars.

Occupying War marks important new terrain for the field of war studies. The book does not claim that a particular literary work is inherently bad or that there is some ideal way to present armed conflict on screen. Instead, it shows how the assembled archive and the subgenres it brings into focus — from “grunt” documentaries by American filmmakers to surrealist occupation stories by Arabic writers — intersect with the material conditions, ground strategies, defense policies, and political logics that characterize U.S. militarism in the age of permanent conflict — from debates over teaching CRT at Westpoint to the counter-insurgency practices used in Iraq.

Introduction No More Vietnams Wars: War and War Culture after 1989

Chapter 1 “Their Lives Were Our Lives”: Documenting American Soldiers from Dispatches to Restrepo

 Chapter 2 “Have a Plan to Kill Everyone You Meet”: Facing America’s Enemy from Apocalypse Now to Zero Dark Thirty

 Chapter 3 “Something Was Missing”: Telling an Occupation Story from Redeployment to The Corpse Exhibition

Chapter 4 “Here or There?”: Setting the Scene from Going After Cacciato to The Corpse Washer

Chapter 5 “A Foothold As Small As a Word”: Redefining War from Evidence of Things Not Seen to Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

Cawley also writes about works by other major authors and filmmakers of the 20th and 21st century, including Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, Paul Celan, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as lesser-known and emerging artists and related subjects and fields, including cultural studies, Marxism, documentary art, national identity, and English pedagogy.