Unconventional Combat

Unconventional Combat illuminates the current generational transformation of the U.S. veterans' peace movement, from one grounded mostly in the experiences of older, White men of the Vietnam War era, to one increasingly driven by a younger and much morediverse cohort of Post 9/11" veterans. Participant observation with two organizations (Veterans For Peace, and About Face) and interviews with older men veterans form the backdrop for the book's main focus, life-history interviews with six younger veterans-all people of color, four of them women, one a Native Two-Spirit person, four of whom identify as queer. The book traces these veterans' experiences of sexual and gender harassment, sexual assault, racist and homophobic abuse during their military service (some of it in combat zones), centering on their collective "situated knowledge" of intersecting oppressions. As veterans, this knowledge shapes their intersectional praxis, which promises to transform the veterans' peace movement, and also holds thepotential to provide a connective language through which veterans' anti-militarism work organically links them with movement groups working on racial justice, stopping gender and sexual violence, addressing climate change, and building national and international anti-colonial coalitions. This promise is sometimes thwarted by older veterans, whose activism includes a commitment to "diversity" that often falls short of creating and maintaining organizational space for full inclusion of previously marginalized "others." Intersectionality has increasingly become the analytic coin of today's emergent movement field, and the connective tissue of a growing coalitional politics. The younger, diverse group of veterans I focus on in this book are part of this larger shift in the social movement ecology, and they contribute a critical understanding of war and militarism to progressive coalitions"--