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- [00:00]
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John Armenta
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to New Books Network. My name is John Armenta and I'll be your host for this episode today. I'm with Brenda Boyle, professor emerita of Denison University and author of American War stories, published in 2021 by Rutgers University Press. Brenda, welcome to New Books Network.
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Brenda Boyle
Hi there, John.
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John Armenta
So before we get started, can you tell us a little bit, a little about your work and what led you to write this book?
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Brenda Boyle
Well, I was raised in the military. My father was a career army officer, and it was clear in a very large family that we all had to find our way to college. And so I earned, I guess, an rotc, four year Army ROTC scholarship and went to college that way. I was then commissioned as an Army Intelligence Tactical Army Intelligence Officer and went to West Germany, what was then West Germany, to serve my time. And during that time I also did a master's degree in International Relations. And much later I. I did a MA, another master's, and a PhD in English at the Ohio State University. And. And it was then that I. It became clear to me that I needed to. To work on military fiction, war fiction.
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John Armenta
And
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Brenda Boyle
so it was when I began teaching this war fiction that it also became clear to me that my students really didn't know much either about the wars that were being warred in their name or they didn't know that much. Now, because I was raised in an army household and my father spent two tours in Vietnam, I might have been more aware, but I really didn't know about the fiction until I got to grad school. So that was really the impetus. And this was a subsequent book that I had written, my second monograph. And it just had become clear to me that the stories that I allege in this book train us in ways to think about the military were very broad and wide and in. In the least expected places. And so, yeah, I wanted to explore that.
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John Armenta
Okay, thank you. So let's dive into the. The subject matter of the book. And it is about war stories. But early on you say that the traditional idea of a war story is a little too limiting. Why is that and what makes them too limiting?
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Brenda Boyle
Well, as I write in the introduction, I think that makes it easier for civilians in particular to sort of see that as not applicable to them. I had an experience that really drove this home for me when I was teaching, and. It was a class about war fiction. And I walked into the room, and this is at a small liberal arts college. I walked into the room and I could hear a student say, she's a woman. As though women in particular should not be interested or compelled to understand war stories. But it seems to me that it becomes easy to shelve, as I say in the introduction, to shelve these stories, to see them as distinct, as tales written by veterans about their experience, even though fictionalized, and that it becomes very easy to see that as not part of my life. And so after I had taught for like 30 years, I started to see this. See this pretty clearly. Yeah,
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John Armenta
I have heard similar stories from women who teach military history as well. So what role do war stories play in American culture? And I guess also political culture? And how do war stories Work to teach American values.
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Brenda Boyle
Well, and this is part of the contention, the argument that I'm making in the book, and that is that these war stories, which I see as very broad and in all sectors of public and private life, that they instruct us. They instruct us, and sometimes we don't know that we are being instructed. So some might say this is propaganda, but I think it's persuasive argument that is put forward. And so it doesn't feel like the bashing over the head of propaganda, but it is still seductive. It's very seductive. Especially because they invoke what I say are American values.
- [09:34]
John Armenta
Thank you. And before we get into the chapters and the texts, you examine more directly, why did you choose these particular texts for this study? Because. And as we'll get into in the interview, it is a very wide range of different types of texts that you are studying here.
- [09:54]
Brenda Boyle
Yeah, yeah. I wanted to have a range that wide range, and they were actually just, you know, stories that interested me. I have subsequently. I subsequently have a substack that I call Soldier Girl, and I continue to write about these stories. I've got 50 some stories written about. So. So the book doesn't really cover the wide range of other stories that I could have done, but these were just pursuits that I had followed. And I was very interested in the Vietnam War, which is how I began my scholarly work. And so I've written a lot about the Vietnam War, and it took me into archival work where I found, you know, as you can read in the first chapter, you know, semantics, even semantics. And I wanted to illustrate that as well, that even the words we choose and the diction we elect can, you know, can flavor the conversation.
- [11:43]
John Armenta
Right. Thank you. So let's get into that with talking about your first chapter. But before we get into the text, you examine there a fairly simple question that you. That you ask in the beginning of the chapter and complicate right away. When did the US War in Vietnam begin? And why is the answer to this question important for understanding the stories that are told about it?
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Brenda Boyle
Right, right. I mean, this was a. This was a really compelling question for me that this war was never declared. So when did it start? And, you know, I don't think I land on a date because, as I say, you know, it could go back as far as the 1920s. And, you know, films made about featuring Vietnamese people, you know, represented them as, you know, as brutal and simple and needing saving. I'm currently reading Tales of the South Pacific. I'm working on an essay about masculinity and war stories. And I see that representation in there as well, that representation of native people as being simple and barbaric. A bit barbaric. I think it is very difficult to. To date when this war began. And to an extent, I wanted to look at some of the early days where I could find archival work about the exchange between the French and the Americans in Vietnam. And by the way, another reason why I wanted to look at this is because I've spent some time in some French archives and am very compelled by the French war in Vietnam and understanding that and what was the relationship between the United States and the French during World War II and, et cetera. So, yeah, I wanted to go look at the archives.
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John Armenta
And so what did you find in those archives, in particular about the U.S. information Service and trying to set up a reading room in Saigon? What was the goal of the US Government here, and what problems did the French authorities have with it?
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Brenda Boyle
Well, basically, I would say that the French wanted total authority in Saigon. They were offended that they hadn't been asked to supervise South Vietnam by the authorities after World War II, and they were really trying to recolonize Vietnam after the war as well. So, you know, the Japanese occupied Vietnam for a time during the war, and then the French Vichy government was wacky. And so I wanted to see what were the exchanges, even the. The superficial exchanges between French and American folks, State Department folks, about who was supposed to rule. And I think that the French were really threatened by the Americans setting up that reading room because it would expose Vietnamese people to American ways of thinking and American ways of doing. But I think that in the exchanges, we can see that the Americans thought they could just do colonialism better than the French were doing it. And so I saw this combat, this battle over who could do. Who could be more manly. And so that's what I mean about the semantics, just the. The use of language in the exchanges, in the, you know, the State Department reports. And. Yeah, so I found that there was a lot to work with there. And, you know, I don't know if you've done archival work, but you don't always find what you want. You don't always find what you. What you suspect might be in there. And I didn't find what I was looking for, but I found this other stuff that I thought was really compelling.
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John Armenta
Yeah. And in terms of this. This other stuff that you found really compelling is like, a theme that comes up in that chapter is, is masculinity and manliness. Why are These American and French officials so caught up around this. And again, what is it about showing each other who's more masculine? How is the situation in Vietnam getting tied up in that?
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Brenda Boyle
Well, I mean, I could say a lot about that. My first book was about masculinity in the American War, but I think for a couple of reasons, France didn't come out of World War II looking very shiny. As I said, they had the Vichy government that accommodated the Japanese in Vietnam, and. They felt like. Well, and also at the same time, NATO was being set up, and the French and Americans were really at cross purposes in regard to NATO. And so it felt as though in the documents, it felt as though they were. The French were trying to prove themselves as most manly. They had tried to set up a South Vietnamese military, and they were failing at that. They were failing at the. At World War II. And so it felt like, you know, the Americans came into the scene and said, boy, we. We're the big boys here. We're the manly men, and we can do this. We can do this better than the French have. It's all implied, but it seems to me that it's pretty clear. And there are quite a few researchers who also find that. So, yeah, the Americans just thought they could do it better. And I have found that repeatedly in the fiction as well.
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John Armenta
And this is what you call the American exceptionalism, right?
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Brenda Boyle
Exactly. Yeah. Right. That is an evocation of the American exceptionalism, that. That in this particular way, they're going to be more manly is what I mean by exceptionalism.
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John Armenta
Got it. Thank you. So, kind of staying on the subject of the war in Vietnam, chapter two turns to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. So how has the memorial itself told a story about the war in Vietnam?
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Brenda Boyle
Well, I mean, it certainly has told a story. It's told a story of collectivity. That's the American value that I assert in this chapter. But it also. And I think some of this has to do with Reagan coming in at about that time, insisting, even before when he was a candidate, insisting that it was a noble war and that nobody should be ashamed of the war. And so, as a consequence, I think the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been used not only, as I assert, to stage war, paradoxically, but also to insist on not the collectivity that by definition, a military is, but on the individual anguish and tragedy of the peoples whose names are on the wall. And so I think it has been used, paradoxically, to. It was founded on the idea that. That we should just recognize veterans. And yet it has been used to promote More and more and more war, I would assert.
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John Armenta
Yeah, well, that's really interesting. Can you say more about that? How does a memorial for veterans help promote war itself?
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Brenda Boyle
Well, firstly, it's on the National Mall. And the National Mall tells a story. Right. And it tells a story of triumph. It tells a story. And The World War II memorial does that to an umpteenth degree. But I think a lot of it has to do with the way Vietnam veterans in particular have been represented, especially since the diagnosis of ptsd. And that was, that didn't happen until seven years after, after the war ended. But I think, you know, and this is, this is part of what my students know that's in quotation marks, know about the Vietnam War, that it was the most tragic, that it was the most heart rending, that all veterans have ptsd and that, you know, that, that, that we shouldn't, we shouldn't blame them, the individuals, that we shouldn't really blame anyone. And I think that especially with the additions to the wall. The wall is designed by Maya Lin was just supposed to be this black, shiny granite wall. And you know, the, the veterans had to have a flag. They had to have a standard conventional bronze statue of soldiers. Much later, a statue of women were added. Mostly nurse. Well, they were nurses. And I think all of those things, all of those additions and the way the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been used, It becomes a staging ground for war.
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John Armenta
And, and continuing on that. How have US Presidents used the, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a stage to tell their own stories about war?
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Brenda Boyle
Yeah, yeah, they definitely have used, I mean, that, that's part of why I would insist that it has been used as a staging, as a stage, because, you know, they go there on Veterans Day, they go there on Memorial Day, and they always have a rhetoric that supports the individual soldier and it sort of gives them leeway to excuse themselves for getting us involved in wars and.
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John Armenta
Right, no, I absolutely agree with that point. And by talking about the veteran, we are able to avoid talking about the politics that led to the actual war itself.
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Brenda Boyle
Exactly. I mean, look at what's happening now. Yes, that's, you know, in, in terms of the Iran war, how can you possibly deny our troops the support they need?
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John Armenta
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, definitely want to talk about that at the end because. Yeah, all these, all these lessons keep playing through. But one last question about the, the, the, the veterans memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is you, you also claim that the memorial itself did work to connect the war in Vietnam with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How did that work?
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Brenda Boyle
Okay, I'm going to have to remind myself of that.
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John Armenta
You were mentioning letters that were left on the wall, supposedly by a veteran from either the Iraq or Afghanistan war.
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Brenda Boyle
You're right. You're right. Yeah, yeah. And those have been. Those have been cited as, as thanks to the, to the Vietnam veterans who founded the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation. And, and, and those letters often say thank you to the veterans of the Vietnam War because you called our plight to attention. Is that what you're thinking of?
- [29:17]
John Armenta
Yes. Yes.
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Brenda Boyle
Oh, yeah. And apparently a GWAT memorial has been approved and was approved, I think, like eight years ago or seven years ago. But I, I haven't seen anything more about it.
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John Armenta
Yeah, it is. The little I know about it. It's still in the, the fundraising stage.
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Brenda Boyle
Yeah, the, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial took no time. It took like two years to raise the money, most of which came from corporations, most of which came from defense contractor corporations. So, you know, there's some reasoning there for why defense contractors want to see war continue.
- [30:19]
John Armenta
So I want to move ahead a bit in the book and look, look at your discussion about exclusion and integration in the armed forces. And so in chapter four, you look at how three groups who have previously been excluded from service in the military, specifically African American men, women, and LGBTQ people. And so what do their. The stories of their exclusion and then inclusion. And then we could also say later exclusions tell about egalitarianism in the U.S.
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Brenda Boyle
well, the military is represented as the most egalitarian. It's the most approved large institution, American, large institution for quite a long time, since 73, since the establishment of the all volunteer force. And what I see happen is that the phrase military judgment gets used when they want to discriminate. And so at the same time that the, you know, what is the saying from Vietnam? We don't see color, we only see green or something like that, meaning the military uniform. This phrase, military judgment, has been used repeatedly to exclude, discriminate against these folks from volunteering. Now, African American men were ostensibly admitted in 1948. After World War II. That took a while. That took a while to integrate. And, you know, women weren't admitted till 1976. Well, they weren't admitted to the academies until 1976. So I wasn't eligible. I started college in 1975. And then, of course, we know about. The DADT policy, don't ask, don't tell. That made it very difficult for gay and lesbian people, queer people, to serve. And then, you know, this whole bugaboo about Transgender folks serving. So what I'm suggesting in that chapter is that while we insist that anyone can join, anyone can volunteer. Well, not really. And we have a long history of that. We have a long history of faux egalitarianism and then using military, you know, the phrase military judgment to. To discriminate. And that gets used repeatedly.
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John Armenta
And why. Why does the military want to portray this. This image of egalitarian egalitarianism. Sorry about that. Yeah. Why is it in the military's interest to have that image for itself?
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Brenda Boyle
Oh, it's crucial. It's crucial to think that anyone not only can, but should volunteer. Right. And of course, we know that, like, obesity prevents a huge number of cisgendered men from joining. It used to be that tattoos, visible tattoos, would prevent. Used to be. And now we're changing that. You had to have a clean shaven face if you were a male. And so it's really important for publicly, civically, for the military to be represented as open to all. And yet there are a lot of exclusions, a lot of ways to exclude people.
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John Armenta
Yeah. And I, I find it interesting that the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegset, you know, they. He loves this story, you know, they. And. But he uses the story as a way to exclude, you know, whenever he talks about standards, you know, like, this is what he's doing there is like, we can let anyone in and anyone can succeed so long as they, you know, meet our measuring stick. But of course, I've made the measuring stick.
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Brenda Boyle
There's the military judgment. You can't challenge it. You can't deny it, you can't inspect it. You can't make me justify it. I'm just going to use that phrase, and then the thing is dead.
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John Armenta
Exactly. All right, moving on. In chapter five, you talk about the military's relationship with certain sports, especially football, and the work to equate patriotism with being a warrior. And I think football takes a big, you know, plays a big role here because it is a very, you know, violent and combat oriented sport. Even the language we use about. About professional football, as is full of that. How does that work? What is the issue that you have with that equation between patriotism and being a warrior?
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Brenda Boyle
Well, it insists. It becomes exclusionary. It insists that. Here's a version. Here is the version of patriotism that needs to be enacted, that, you know, that it needs to be brawny, it needs to be forceful, it needs to be violent, it needs to be all of these things that equate to warrior, which is interesting because the soldier's creed, which I open the chapter with, doesn't always say that kind of stuff. You know, it doesn't say it, but it is certainly implied. And when I found out that Jeff Flake and John McCain had done this study that found that the military. So the assumption is that the. The NFL is so patriotic that it will pay or host all of the symbols of warrior patriotism at their games. When I found out that The Flake and McCain report found that the military was paying the NFL and multiple other organizations, from college football to high school football, paying them to host these representations, it became clear that this is a version of patriotism that the military wants to have affiliated with it, with the military, U.S. military, and that it is willing to pay to have that idea normalized and frequently, frequently normalized. And of course, they couldn't account for the money that they had paid and they couldn't gauge the effectiveness of the payments, but. But they were willing to. To give it a shot, so to speak.
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John Armenta
And, and what happens when a. A player like Colin Kaepernick refuses and publicly refuses to take part in these patriotic exercises?
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Brenda Boyle
Right. I mean, and, and of course, it wasn't until 2009 that NFL players were even required to stand at attention on the sidelines as the Star Spangled Banner was played. And yet they could also elect not to even be on the field. So the idea of warrior patriotism is so normalized, so frequently seen, that when somebody like Colin Kaepernick doesn't do it. Oh, my, oh, my. He is he. And. And to. And to kneel is somehow seen as offensive because you should be erect, you know.
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John Armenta
Yeah. And as I remember, it was that originally he was sitting down and it was in conversation with a, an army veteran that said, take the knee as being a little more. I forget the actual language, but the kneeling was supposed to be a sign of protest as opposed to a sign of disrespect, of just. Rather than just sitting on the bench.
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Brenda Boyle
I remember that now.
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John Armenta
And it's also all this stuff about the sports and the military. I'm in San Diego. The Padres park is just a couple blocks away from where I live. And the. This is a military town. And there's always a lot of military props being used on, on, you know, like in, during. During the games. And then Sundays are always like military Sundays. You often see companies from the Marine Recruit Depot that are just graduating as, you know, like, sitting in the, in the bleachers and it's. Yeah, it just really. It's a Reminder that the military is really infused in this town, not just sports in general.
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Brenda Boyle
Absolutely. And, and another thing that I, that I talk about in that chapter, the, the recruiting ads, you know, that, that, that make it patent how connected the recruiting is to being an NFL team, being a football team. And you know, so they walk, there's a series of tunnel ads that, where they are, these people are walking through this darkened tunnel with light at the end. And, and they are supposed to be a football team.
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John Armenta
And yeah, the idea of a teammanship comes up a lot like being part of something bigger than you and then going out for the win, all that.
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Brenda Boyle
Right, right. So that really conflicts with the, you know, the individualism stuff, but that conflicts with the, the individual named on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. And, and we have this competition between collectivity and individualism that I've always been very interested by how it plays out in the military.
- [43:49]
John Armenta
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So as we begin to wrap up there, taken together, how do texts like these, and, yeah, these texts in particular and ones like them work to extend the ideology of militarism into Americans lives, like into their daily lives?
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Brenda Boyle
Well, Foucault, Michel Foucault, talks about how control happens. And control, he says, does not happen by way of repression or suppression, but instead multiplication. And so what I am asserting is that these kinds of stories happen in so many different parts of our lives, repeatedly, frequently, that militarism is just normalized. Cynthia Enlow talks about this as well. And you know, so it's in a TV show, it's in a football game, it's at the memorial. It's, you know, it happens in just so many ways. And one of the things I didn't get to talk about was, was the difference between American Sniper memoir and film and Lone Survivor, memoir and film, and how they, I think probably more people saw the movies than read the memoirs. And, you know, these are stories that get told repeatedly. And I think that's how militarism gets normalized. And that's why my students would think they know so much about the military and yet don't know much at all, but feel confident about how much they know.
- [46:09]
John Armenta
And since you mentioned her, I interviewed Cynthia Enlow a while ago for New Books Network about her new book. But picking up where you left off about why so many people, especially younger people, don't know much about the military, even though militarism is in all their lives. In the time since you published this book, do you see any other stories of militarism that we should be aware of that are hiding in plain sight.
- [46:43]
Brenda Boyle
Oh my goodness. That's what my substack is about. And it's about the stories that are normalized. So I wrote a list. The law of war, international law and how the military needs to abide by it, despite what the current so called Secretary of War alleges, what the DoD Secretary does, what he or she is responsible for, junior rotc. So this is, you know, junior ROTC already exists in thousands of schools and they're amping up, trying to normalize to teenagers. DoD schools, DoD schools and who they are, what they do, who they serve, war monuments including Arlington, and how Arlington gets used, the fact that the US Military should be nonpartisan, why that exists, who or whether service members can disobey illegal orders. And of course the military industrial complex, which is vibrant and there are, especially now with AI getting involved. It's painful to see happen.
- [48:54]
John Armenta
Yeah. All right, so thank you for your time and I know you have retired from teaching, so besides the substack that you have, and we'll put a link to it in the show notes, is there anything else that you're working on?
- [49:12]
Brenda Boyle
Yeah, I'm working on a, I'm trying to promote a memoir that I have written and so far, not having luck with that, I'm also working on a couple of essays that I was asked to write for some Cambridge readers. So I'm writing about Vietnam War drama, which is fascinating and very understudied. And I think that's because plays are ephemeral and war and masculinity. So that's why I'm reading Tales of the South Pacific as an example of World War II masculinity studies. Yeah. So I, I keep my hand in, in lots of stuff.
- [50:15]
John Armenta
Well, thank you for your time and I, I, I look forward to, to, to reading more of that as well. And so, so like I said, you know, we'll put a link to your substack in the show notes here. And I, and from New Books Network, I'd like to again thank Brenda Boyle, author of American War stories published in 2021 by Rutgers University Press. Thank you.
- [50:40]
Brenda Boyle
Thank you, John. Thanks so. Much.