Originally published on July 26, 2021 (Episode 215)
Introduction
Throughout their history, Americans have often found themselves fighting “unexpected enemies—foes from different cultural backgrounds, who fought in unfamiliar ways, and against whom they were unprepared to fight.” In The Other Face of Battle: America’s Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat, a group of military historians examines three exemplars of such conflicts, weaving them together with an analysis of both discontinuity and continuity in the American way of war.
The Other Face of Battle takes its inspiration from John Keegan’s classic text The Face of Battle, but turns its lens towards American wars that have defied clarity, convention, and easy victory. These are the conflicts where U.S. soldiers have confronted enemies who rejected Western rules of engagement, measured triumph in terms alien to their American enemies, and dissolved any sense of symmetry between opposing sides. From colonial woods to the mountains of Afghanistan, these “forgotten wars” reveal not glory but confusion, insurgency, atrocity, and stalemate.
Yet they are hardly marginal episodes. Irregular and intercultural warfare has been central to the American military experience from the beginning. If we want to understand what combat has meant to Americans, and what it still means, we must grapple with this other, perhaps more unsettling face of battle.
With me to discuss the book are three of its four co-authors: David Silbey, David Preston, and Wayne Lee.
About the Guests
David Silbey is Adjunct Associate Professor and Director of Teaching and Learning Cornell in Washington, with expertise in modern military history.
David Preston holds the General Mark W. Clark Distinguished Chair of History at the Citadel and specializes in early American military history.
Wayne Lee is the Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at UNC–Chapel Hill, where he focuses on warfare and violence across cultures.
For Further Investigation
The Other Face of Battle: America’s Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat (Oxford University Press, 2021)
John Keegan, The Face of Battle — the classic study that inspired this project
Wayne E. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500–1865
David Preston, Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution
David Silbey, The British Working Class and Enthusiasm for War, 1914–1916
Listen & Discuss
What does the study of forgotten wars reveal about America’s military past? Share your reflections in the comments—and consider forwarding this conversation to a friend who follows military history.
