UC Santa Barbara

“Blowing in the Wind: Media, Counterculture, and the American Military in Vietnam,” examines the experiences, perceptions, and behavior of American military personnel serving in the Vietnam War, focusing on their knowledge of, and attitudes towards, the countercultural movements that occurred in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Over the course of six chapters, this dissertation explores the attitudes of American troops towards five of the most significant countercultural movements of the Vietnam era: the civil rights movement and Black Power, the antiwar movement, women’s liberation, the Chicano movement, and the Asian American movement. The project emphasizes the importance of media and popular culture, which delivered news of the stateside movements to the troops and provided a forum for them to contribute their own thoughts to ongoing societal debates. Media outlets not only helped to alter servicemembers' perspectives but also served as a conduit for the expression of those changed views. The dissertation thus highlights the ability of popular culture and media to function as powerful intermediaries between the civilian and military spheres. It relies heavily on two bodies of underutilized source material: popular culture and media, and self-conducted oral histories with Vietnam veterans, primarily minority veterans and those who served in rearward support positions. This project makes several scholarly contributions to the existing historical literature on the Vietnam War. First, it brings together two previously distinct historiographies: scholarship centered on American GIs’ experiences of the war, and work on each of the domestic racial and social movements of the Vietnam era. Second, it contributes to the growing body of scholarship that centers the “non-combat” moments of war. By shedding light on the troops’ awareness—through media and popular culture—of the countercultural movements occurring in the United States, this work challenges standard narratives that position the troops stationed abroad as fully removed from American society. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that, as news coverage of domestic U.S. campaigns for racial and social justice increasingly made its way overseas, American GIs developed more complicated feelings about the Vietnam War, about gender roles, about class and racial hierarchies, about civic duty, and about their own place in American society, with some eventually adopting the antiwar sentiments and other countercultural outlooks that were gaining traction back home. On the whole, however, the troops’ embrace of oppositional outlooks was limited and nuanced. Many servicemembers adopted moderate or practical versions of stateside protest positions that could be incorporated into and made compatible with the realities of military life. Like the erosion of domestic support for the Vietnam War, changing attitudes within the armed services contributed to a decline in troop morale and thus carried the potential, at least, to undermine the U.S. government’s ability to wage the war. In the end, the limited nature of servicemembers’ embrace of the counterculture, coupled with the willingness of military leaders to address some of their concerns, prevented these changes from degrading military readiness. Nevertheless, this story sheds powerful light on the nature of the counterculture and of the broader American society in which it unfolded.