As a writer, Philip D. Beidler has often drawn on his combat experience in Vietnam and his deep engagement with American popular culture. His essays tap these sources in powerful, truth-telling ways. In American Wars, American Peace, another voice emerges, distinct yet also tied to Beidler’s wartime memories and his love of literature, film, and music. It is the voice of one of the “baby-boom progeny of the ‘Greatest Generation’ who at home and abroad became the foot soldiers” not just in Vietnam but in the Peace Corps, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and beyond.

Beidler has ... Read moreexperienced enough of history to question “the kinds of peace that one empire after another has tried to impose on the world at whatever immense costs.” As he reflects on terrorism, patriotism, geopolitics, sacrifice, propaganda, and more, Beidler revisits his generation’s “inherited vision of national purpose”—and he asks what happened. These essays are a sobering wake-up call for even the most informed and conscientious citizen.