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Everybody's coming back a hero: Reflections and deflections of heroism in the Gulf

Abstract This article examines the construction of the Gulf War veteran as a hero in the immediate post-Gulf War period (considered here as February 1991 to August 1991) and his relationship to gender, American national identity and the Vietnam War. President Bush and members of the media constructed the Gulf veteran as inherently masculine, moral and professional. This image replaced the violent Vietnam veteran stereotype, as well as the subsequent feminized, victimized figure. The article closely examines the relationship of the Gulf veteran to these Vietnam stereotypes. With an allegedly ideal sense of duty and morality, the Gulf veteran was characterized as a reluctant warrior, a man who did not like violence but, out of necessity, was willing (but not eager) to use it. He lacked the feminine qualities associated with the veteran as victim trope of popular Vietnam War representations, being positioned in between the extremes of masculinity and femininity. He represented a United States that was transformed from its Vietnam predecessor: the silent, impotent or paralysed Vietnam veteran now appeared articulate, virile and physically robust, with many public figures referring to General H. Norman Schwarzkopf as an example of this model of masculinity. Finally, the article scrutinizes some challenges to the heroic discourse of the time. Although many Gulf soldiers did not feel that their personal experience in the war warranted a heroic label, it dominated the public narrative. What were these men objecting to? How did the non-combative nature of the war present a challenge to the construction of heroism? In what ways were women and femininity excluded from this construction? The article scrutinizes the construction of the Gulf War as a masculine rite of passage that healed a broken American masculinity from the Vietnam era and made heroes out of American soldiers.