Pulp Vietnam

Military, War, and Society in Modern American History

by Gregory A. Daddis

In this compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish GIs' expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. By examining the role that popular culture can play in normalizing wartime sexual violence and challenging readers to consider how American society should move beyond pulp conceptions of 'normal' male behavior, Daddis convincingly argues that how we construct popular tales of masculinity matters in both peace and war.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, War, 20th Century, Sociology

376 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2020

Reviews

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well illustrated, semi-academic text that takes an indepth look at pulp magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s, and how the stories they published may have influenced men's behaviour during wars, most pointedly the Vietnam War.

(When I say 'semi-academic', I just mean that the book has the thoroughness of an academic study, but not the structural rigidness of such texts. In short: it's easily readable.)

Daddis has worked through what must be a small mountain of magazines, and uses many examples to construct an image of what these magazines saw as a 'real man'. Generally the stories were written by seasoned pulp writers who hadn't seen much action themselves, but the idea underpinning all their writing: war makes a man. Young boys grew up with endless stories of the heroic deeds of their own fathers during the Second World War, laced with a sad misogyny. Pulp stories would generally only present women as 'lovelies', prizes to be won during conquest. Furthermore, the stories were filled with barely concealed racism and orientalism. Daddis makes a strong case for the pulp magazines not being directly responsible for civilian abuse, murder and rape, but for them to be part of rape culture. The stories promised war to make men out of these boys, with beautiful foreign ladies throwing themselves at them. When this inevitably didn't happen, it can't be unthinkable that some of those men would vent their frustrations on the local populace.

The first three quarters of the book give a good overview of the kind of stories that were published, and there is quite a few that made me laugh in their cheesiness. But it's the last quarter where things get serious, turning into a mix of the bizarrely uncritical stories that were published during the Vietnam War, and the very real atrocities that were being perpetrated by a sizeable chunk of US soldiers. It is not an easy read, but only goes to strengthen Daddis' central thesis.

Recommended for anyone interested in toxic masculinity, its prominence during the Cold War and the Vietnam War especially.

(Kindly received an ARC from Cambridge University Press through NetGalley)

[Rebecca Crunden]

⤑ research tag: in an effort to organise my shelves, I'm going to be labelling the books I'm using for study purposes as I tend to dip in and out of these.

Will be coming back to this one, great research and super interesting!

[Little Timmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well researched and written about this theme of history. Recommended

[Tim Verleg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Het boek bevat te veel herhaling. Verder niet echt mijn interessegebied, maar dat is natuurlijk erg persoonlijk. Wel is het goed in het leggen van verbanden en invloed van eerdere oorlogen (WWII en Korea) en de relatie daarmee met Pulp magazines. En natuurlijk in het benadrukken van hoe anders Vietnam was

[Erik Riker-Coleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting exploration of the construction of Cold War American masculinity and way this played out in the Vietnam War. The book is rooted in a deep exploration of the now-vanished genre of "men's adventure" magazines, which one reached a large readership, especially among working class white men--the central demographic among the US military in Vietnam. Daddis notes the way "macho pulps" (as he terms them) interwove themes of military heroism and aggressive heterosexual "conquest" in ways that may have shaped the mindset and expectations of many US military personnel in Vietnam. The "macho pulps" were basically unknown to me, aside from their spectacularly lurid illustrations--Daddis's examination of them certainly provides an interesting window into post-WWII US media and gender. He ventures a little bit farther afield in his arguments that the kind of masculinity cultivated by the pulps had direct effects on the actions of US troops in Vietnam--he can point to evidence that the pulps were apparently widely sold in military exchanges, as well as evidence of their broader sales rates, indicating that they were relatively widely read; it remains uncertain whether their content directly affected individual men's beliefs and actions. Daddis infers (logically, I think) that readers must have made informed decisions to consume this content and that this must indicate some degree of affinity and/or influence--however, it's somewhat speculative (which Daddis seems to acknowledge in the text). You might take parts of it with a grain of salt--it's a really interesting book regardless.

[Brian Laslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for any scholars interested in the experience of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in the American War in Vietnam.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pulp Vietnam promises much more than it delivers, especially for a scholarly book. I cannot find one original idea anywhere in it. Instead, it takes what Daddis considers pulp adventure magazines and force feeds them through the template of the Red Scare, civil rights, and women's history. Yes, this is something of a requirement in today's academe, where those three topics dominate and are required of scholarly authors writing on post World War II culture. They constitute the context. All of it. No mention of the impact of things such as the polio vaccine, the interstate highway system, the explosion in private and commercial aviation, the space program, suburban America, and even transistor radio and television as well as computers. Just the Big Three. Daddis dutifully complies in this book. It's not that the Three don't merit study. But there was a wider context as well that was equally impactful on modern culture and adventure magazines.

Speaking of adventure magazines, of which I am fond, Daddis mainly refers to four or five throughout this study. In particular, he includes snippets and quotes from Male and Stag. These were postwar pulps that were exploitive and, actually, the sort of B-grade magazine of adventure in comparison to the respectable giants of the genre, Adventure, Argosy, and True. Daddis does mention these latter three, but the overwhelming majority of his study is given over to the likes of Stag.

Another problem is that I don't feel I received a very good idea of really what was going on with adventure magazines more generally in the context of Vietnam. For Daddis, this book is all about war and combat stories, plus the publication of pumped up fact based stories of real life survival in Vietnam. I think it was true that the majority, maybe 60 or 70 percent of the content of adventure magazines, shifted to grim war tales during this time. But somewhere around 30 to 40 percent continued with the historical roots of the genre and topics such as lost worlds, dark jungle exploration, mapping untamed wilderness, and searching for the remnants of past civilizations. Daddis doesn't touch these. And that is a questionable decision, because those subjects were the ones, for example, that Hollywood movies and newly emergent television programming adopted. Not so much the grim and bloody war stuff.

Quite simply, I don't feel that this book was written to satisfy the potential audience of readers interested in the history of pulp adventure stories (by the way, in the 1950s, these magazines where shifting to more glossy, silky pages to accommodate what some would say is increasing amounts of gore and sexual titillation). Instead, this looks more like something needed for academic promotion that fits within the areas of already accepted academic confines.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book. It's premise: Let's look at some of the most popular magazines aimed at young men during the 1960s and see what messages they sent to their readers - who often became soldiers in Vietnam. These adventure magazines are typically ignored now, because they were so decidedly low-brow pulp that served as neither quality literature nor quality analysis. But that's not the point here - the point is how the shaped the mindset of a generation that came of age reading them.

The image they gave was one with all the substance of cardboard where it was Good Guys fighting for Good Things who win because they display Valor. There are neither complexities nor nuance here. And the rewards are obvious: heroism, honor, and manhood. Oh, and romance. Yeah, these pulp stories didn't just portray a one-dimensional view of war, but threw sex in it as well. Here, women were rewards. They were comliant - and Asian women were especially submissive. Oh, you had to watch out for bad women, those seductive, spying temptress types. (Daddis notes, that even John Wayne was a largely sex-less character on the big screen. He won the fight but rarely got the girl). Again, everyone is all good or all bad, and people should know their roles. There was little talk here of PTSD or the moral troubles of war.

So, yeah, this didn't set them up well for Vietnam. Wars were complex and amoral. It wasn't all Good Guys and Bad Guys. You didn't feel much manhood. Sexual violence was common. The pulps actually maintained their popularity until the late 1960s with soldiers, at which time their popularity collapsed, and most of the magazines folded. People weren't buying the cartoon-ish stories they were selling. Instead, magazines more overtly sexual did well. Playboy was always #1 with soldiers, and people kept buying that, and other magazines moved in the direction of skin. Another directoin emerged in 1975, as the old adventure magazines collapsed: Soldier of Fortune magazine. This time, it was more about vengence and retalitation. It was, you might say, the original dark'n'gritty reboot.

It's a good book, but I felt Daddis pressed his points too far. Yeah, the magazines primed men to feel a certain way toward the war, but without the magazines, they would've felt largely the same. The magazines were just part of an overall culture. One example of pressing things too far: in the conclusion, on the bottom of page 233, Daddis quotes a marine commander who spoke of the "manliness of war." Daddis notes that this guy maybe never read the 1960s men's magazines, but his attitude reflected them. Wait, wait, wait, wait - you can't actually tie him to the topic of your book, but well (hand wave) you'll tie him to it anyway. C'mon!

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men's Adventure Magazines by Gregory A Daddis is accessibly written research into the role that men's pulp magazines played in shaping men, masculinity, and in particular the negative aspects of both.

The examples are far more numerous and disturbing than I had expected even though I vaguely remember these magazines from my youth. Though Daddis makes clear, on more than one occasion, that whatever causality exists is just part of a larger cultural tapestry there is no doubt that the portrayals in the fiction and the "advice" in the nonfiction contributed to how many men of the period came to see masculinity, war, and women. These pulp images reflected much of the mainstream concern that men were being emasculated and society was being feminized, so to what degree these publications led or followed the concepts, they definitely contributed to bringing them to the blue collar and military men.

While many of the stories and columns were infuriating and startling, and I'm guessing that most readers will find the ones that speak to them the most, I found some of the material that masqueraded as advice or help columns to be most disturbing. For example, in a publication from 1966 a quote reads (this quote occurs early in the book and colored my reading of the rest of the book): "Many women, young ones in particular, are 'sexually reversed' in their actions, that is whatever they say can be taken to mean the opposite. 'I absolutely don't want to sleep with you' for example, means precisely the opposite." The quote is from the magazine itself, not Daddis paraphrasing. In other words, men are being encouraged to rape women, in popular national publications aimed at young men. 1966 folks, this is not ancient history and those same readers then raised boys of their own, so the cycle repeats, only the message has been reshaped and distributed with a bit more subtlety, though the results remain the same and have, over the past three years, lost any claim to subtlety.

This is highly recommended for readers who read sociological texts on masculinity as well as any reader who wants to better understand how to take in any form of popular culture actively rather than passively. While much of what Daddis does here requires the distance of time to grasp, the basic processes can and should be used when we watch, listen to, or read any type of popular culture. We can no longer be passive consumers molded by the work, we must engage and make conscious decisions about what we internalize and what we reject.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[GuyGrand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daddis (San Diego State University) provides a compelling account of the attitudes towards war and martial masculinity in the "macho pulp" magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. Courting mainly working class (and presumed white) male readers, these magazines promoted a strict idealization of a type of militaristic service that dangerously tied into ideas of colonialism, the "savagery" of overly sexualized women, and a conqueror ethos that paid little attention to nuance and the experiences of others. Though he doesn't use the word, the war stories and ideas about manhood in these magazines (with titles like STAG, MALE, and BLUE BOOK) resemble exploitation films in their lurid reduction of complex issues into sensational adventure stories that focus on violence and sexual elements.

Daddis aptly points out the somewhat complex line these magazines had to walk, though, in their navigation of Cold War-era taboos (over issues like miscegenation), and their eventual retreat from gung-ho, pro-war positions once public opinion over the Vietnam war began to turn. Through overwhelming examples from the literature (to the point where some sections feel repetitious), the book shows how these pulps sold men on a set of nationalism ideals, exoticism, and sexual prowess, while at the same time providing almost an almost wholly inaccurate account of the experience of going to war, and in the process probably helped promote dangerous attitudes of superiority between G.I.s and the people of Vietnam (especially their allies in the south). He is good on charting the fictional pulp version of the Vietnam war versus the reality, especially when adding the voices of veterans who later protested the war, as well as Vietnamese women, back into the conversation.

The pulps are an exemplary set of "bad objects,"and Daddis rightly criticizes them, even as he informs on their once massive popularity and probably wide sphere of consequence.

[Aryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to start this review by saying that I do not have any type of academic background in the history of the Vietnam War, or gender studies. My thoughts and opinions are entirely based on the experience of reading this book as an interested layperson. With that out of the way, on to the actual review.

In Pulp Vietnam, Daddis introduces the reader to the men’s pulp adventure magazines of the Cold War era. These magazines contained stories that glorified what Daddis refers to as “militarized masculinity,” and explicitly linked military and sexual conquest. The pulp magazines didn't invent these concepts, but their wide circulation and dedication to those ideas certainly helped generate a common language to talk about these cultural norms. The lived experiences of recent veterans who did not find combat to be a path to manhood or crowds of women waiting to grant them sexual pleasure while overseas were never addressed by the pulps. As the young men who read these magazines were drafted to Vietnam, they experienced severe disillusionment.

Prior to this book, I had no knowledge of the genre of pulp adventure magazines, let alone their reach. Daddis is careful to point out that the consumption of these stories cannot be labeled as the cause of violent and racist behaviors exhibited by GIs in Vietnam, but they did help create an image of the world where that violence was normalized. The enduring importance of these fantasies in American culture probably shouldn't have been so surprising to me, but it does make me re-evaluate how we currently portray war and memories of combat today. While I occasionally felt bogged down and as though the book was dragging, it was definitely interesting and made a clear argument. Recommended for people interested in cultural history or the creation of norms around gender expression.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review.

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always been fascinated with cold war era cultural oddities, and this book fits the bill! A good text (with great images) of the men's adventure magazines of the 1950s-70s that influenced a generation of kids who fought in Vietnam (and Korea and other Cold War conflicts). These magazines promised a rapid ascent into manhood by way of war-hero antics and exotic sexual conquests.

Of course Vietnam was not their father's war, which must have created dissonance and anger among a lot of the troops. The harsh realities of war were probably a shock after how these magazines had portrayed it to their young audience.

Interestingly, I see some subtle parallels in attitudes today from some of my older friends: wanting to go back to "the good old days" of the 1950s when women stayed at home raising kids, fathers could pay for homes on one salary, and "men were men" (and further describing war-hero/adventurer/conqueror sentiments). It makes me wonder if they read these magazines as kids and have idealized notions of the perfect 1950s American Dream that really never existed.

This book is easy for anyone to read and understand, and is well-researched with copious footnotes. One of the best reads I've had in a long while!

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prior to this monograph, Daddis was best known for a trilogy examining the operational-strategic failures of the U.S. Army in Vietnam. This work, the seed of which was planted by teaching a class in war and gender at West Point, deals with the social-psychological failures of that war, via the lens of the men's adventure magazines of the Fifties and the Sixties, and how their message that war would make you a man collided with the realities of conflict in Southeast Asia. The short version is that the "advice" being handed out was probably a net negative, particularly in regards to contributing to collateral violence visited by American military men on the female population of Vietnam: Sobering stuff. Daddis, who retired a colonel from the U.S. Army, calls for healthier and more realistic avenues to develop character, but having been "there," knows that he's setting a tall order.

A personal note is that I can remember the tail-end of this period on the cusp of being an adolescent, when I'd go with my dad to the barber shop, and while there would be comics for the kids, they'd also be mixed with magazines like this. Since I always read ahead of my age group I think my response was "really?" Even then I knew wish-fulfillment when I saw it.

Highly recommended.

[Mike Cross · Rating 4 out of 5]

On what you may think of as a niche topic, the author goes all in and really brings the subject into light with regards to culture of the time and its influences. Very, very well written, organized, and edited, just a pleasure to read by an outstanding author.

[RYAN PHAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not realize that low-brow men's masculinity was so open about having such a strange masculinity that was based off being a warrior or an economic breadwinner in the early Cold War.

They were apparently scared of Vietnamese people and really into scantily clad women.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exploration of masculinity, not very focused on women.