Research
Occupying War: Lessons from Contemporary War Culture is a cultural study that explores how key developments in U.S. militarism 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 salient features of Vietnam-era war culture as well as intersect with post-Cold War military reforms, Occupying War is an essential account of contemporary war culture that explains why the dual efforts to professionalize the all-volunteer force and wage occupation-style campaigns after Vietnam are overlooked yet driving forces behind today’s wars.
Occupying War also offers new 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 key lessons on how to study contemporary U.S. militarism, especially for those who want to bring its ongoing histories, costs, and impacts 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 important insights and directions for war studies, among other fields and contexts, including peace movements today.
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?”: 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, Marxism, documentary art, national identity, and English pedagogy.
