Between 1980 and World War II, South America experienced the unsettling first stages of modernization. During this half-century of economic, political, and social change, the armies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru underwent a process of professionalization as European military missions transformed their officer corps into copies of French and German officialdom. In so doing, European officers inculcated their ideals and values, thought and self-perception?their professionalism?in countries historically vulnerable to militarism. ø Based mainly on a comprehensive examination of European and South American military literature, this study describes the significant contribution of European military professionalism to South American professional militarism. Nunn not only details the workings of the French missions in Brazil and Peru and the German missions in Argentina and Chile, but gives great emphasis to the themes and topics that most concerned the European mentors and their overseas disciples. He demonstrates convincingly that much of their professional literature was based on a yearning for an idealized past, discontent with an unsatisfactory present, and apprehension about a future that might threaten the most cherished of traditional officer-corps principles and aims. ø The study ends with World War II, yet is makes an important contribution to our understanding of South American history since 1940. The military organizations of the four countries considered here confronted what they perceived to be the major problems of their modernizing nations with solutions learned from their European teachers. Since 1940, they have resorted to golpes de estado?most notably the post-1964 institutional golpes?in order to impose forcibly some of those same solutions. Thus, despite increased U.S. influence, many of the programs implemented by military regimes in the latter half of this century bear the indelible stamp of "yesterday's soldiers."

Yesterday's Soldier chronicles my journey as a young man, thrust from the world of religious life in a Massachusetts Roman Catholic seminary to the US Army, training to be an Infantry Officer during the Vietnam War. I entered religious life in the Congregation of Holy Cross in Massachusetts in 1963 with the intent of being ordained a priest. I lived in a strict male religious community very much like a monastery. Upon graduating from college there, Father Superior decided that I had only a "partial vocation," and released me from my vows and further advancement to ordination. This memoir shares my experiences in the US Army, from basic combat training to infantry advanced training to Infantry Officer Candidate school. It was at Officers Candidate School where I faced the hardest decision of my life to make--to become a non-combatant conscientious objector, risking the Army's punishment and imprisonment for that decision. Surviving the Army's systematic punishment ("the Treatment") during the long months of waiting for a decision in my case, I defied the will of my family, the demands of my church, and faced criminal charges by the US Army. Eventually, I was sent to Vietnam as a Conscientious Objector, where I dealt with more Army discrimination, the hazards of war, and connecting with the Vietnamese people.

Though persistently overshadowed by the Great War in historical memory, the two Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 were among the most consequential of the early twentieth century. By pitting the states of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro against a diminished Ottoman Empire—and subsequently against one another—they anticipated many of the horrors of twentieth-century warfare even as they produced the tense regional politics that helped spark World War I. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this volume applies the social and cultural insights of the “new military history” to revisit this critical episode with a central focus on the experiences of both combatants and civilians during wartime.

Contains thirty-seven narratives, drawn from letters, diaries, private memoirs, and oral histories in which American veterans describe their experiences serving in conflicts from the First World War to the twenty-first-century war in Iraq.

The senses -- The dirty body -- The foot -- The wound -- The corpse.

In 1946, World War I veteran and self-described “buck private in the rear rank” Gerald Andrew Howell finished a memoir of the experiences of his squad from the 39th Infantry Regiment, 4th Division, and their “moments of horror, tragedy, humor, amour, [and] promiscuity” in Europe. This was “the old Army as it used to be,” Howell explains—the saga of the “down-trodden doughboy.” A few months later Howell was dead, his manuscript unpublished. Jeffrey Patrick discovered the memoir and the author’s correspondence with publishers and took on the task of bringing it to publication at last. Yesterday There Was Glory is an unpretentious account of men at war, from training camp to the occupation of Germany. It includes graphic descriptions of the battlefield, of shell fire, gas attacks, and lice. “Between the attacks the men would lay in their wet holes and pray for relief. But no relief came,” Howell remembers. He recalls much more than the horrors of combat, however, chronicling the diverse collection of heroes, professional warriors, shirkers, and braggarts that made up the American Expeditionary Forces. Howell and his comrades longed for wounds that would allow them to escape the war, but resolutely engaged the Germans in hand-to-hand combat. They poked fun at their comrades, but were willing to share their last can of food. They endured difficult marches, pursued “mademoiselles” and “frauleins,” and even staged a “strike” to protest mistreatment by their officers. They were as “ribald as any soldiery in any army,” Howell admits, but “underneath this veneer, they were really patriotic, steadfast and sincere.” Patrick provides an editor’s introduction and annotations to explain terms and sources in the memoir. Howell’s account preserves the flavor of army life with conversations and banter in soldier language, including the uncensored doughboy profanity often heard but seldom recorded.

The book tackles the subject of the military and politics in Latin America from a broad historical perspective, drawing on literature in the field and other information based on personal interviews with officers.