Research
Occupying War: Lessons from Contemporary War Culture is a cultural study of the US-led campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and across the greater Middle East. The project 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 and intersect with post-Cold War military reforms, Occupying War offers an essential account of contemporary war culture that explains why the strategic and profound transformation of American militarism after Vietnam is an overlooked yet driving force behind today’s wars.
Occupying War also offers useful terrain for the interdisciplinary field of war studies. The assembled archive and the subgenres it foregrounds — from “grunt” documentaries by American filmmakers to civilian occupation stories by Arabic writers — provide critical lessons for studying contemporary warfare, especially for those who want to bring the systemic causes and ongoing effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into focus. In short, this archive makes a case for understanding the age of “forever war” and “global terrorism” as the age of “occupying militarism,” a reframing that offers original insights and directions for war studies, among other fields and contexts, including current peace movements.
Introduction No More Vietnams Wars: US Militarism and War Culture after the Vietnam War
Chapter 1 “Their Lives Were Our Lives”: Documenting Soldiers from Dispatches to Restrepo
Chapter 2 “Have a Plan to Kill Everyone You Meet”: Facing the 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?”: Mapping the Warzone 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, American studies, Marxism, documentary art, and English and writing pedagogy.
