Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America.

The violent nature of American society is an increasingly frequent topic of conversation. From police precincts to school PTA meetings, from board rooms to university sociology classes, from the gymnasium to the supermarket, people are troubled by what they hear, see, and read about America's culture of violence. Unfortunately, James William Gibson's comprehensive book does little to discredit the fearful conclusion that America is becoming a more volatile, more dangerous, more armed society.

Warrior Dreams is an extraordinary account that at least partially explains how America has become so prone to violence. Gibson's focus is on what he calls the "New War" that has been raging in America since the late 1960s and early 1970s. According to Gibson, this New War is primarily a male-oriented phenomenon, one fundamentally rooted in the American failure to win the war in Vietnam. This defeat is characterized as a "truly profound blow . . . which had subtle but serious effects on the American psyche" (p. 10). The overall effect was an American crisis of self-image, a crisis that undermined America's basic notion that it won its wars because morally it deserved to win. Gibson goes on to highlight several other factors that exacerbated this identity crisis.

First, the controversies that engulfed the Vietnam War "discredited the old American ideal of the masculine warrior hero for much of the public" (p. 5). No longer, it seemed, did the pictures of …