Chris Lombardi’s fantastic new book is called I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters, and Objectors to America’s Wars. It’s a wonderful history of U.S. wars, and both support for and opposition to them, with a major focus on troops and veterans, from 1754 to the present.
The greatest strength of the book is its depth of detail, the rarely heard individual accounts of war supporters, resisters, whistleblowers, protesters, and all of the complexities that catch so many people in more than one of those categories. There’s an element of frustration for me, in that one hates to read about generation after generation growing up believing war is good and noble, and then learning that it isn’t the hard way. But there’s also a positive trend discernable through the centuries, a growing awareness that war is not glorious — if not the wisdom that rejects all war, at least the notion that a war must somehow be justified in some extraordinary way.
