Arguing that "a government's power grows in the bloody medium of war," Lutz (Unnatural Emotions), an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sets up Fayetteville, N.C., as a microcosmic, historical case study. The town is host to Fort Bragg, where the U.S. Army's crack 18th Airborne corps, a combat-ready unit, is stationed. Lutz begins her story with the founding of Fort Bragg in 1916 and the dismantling of Fayetteville's socially complex, multiracial farming community. This eventually led to complicated economic arrangements in which civilians were dependent upon the base for work, with little other economic advantage to the community. (Loss of sales tax, for instance, for goods bought at the tax-exempt PX amounted to $12 million in 1999.) Racial and gender inequalities that the base fostered during WWII as well as the role it played in supporting drug trade and prostitution during the Vietnam war are examined. Moving into the more recent past, Lutz's analysis of the effect of a war-preparedness economy and mentality upon civilians, basic norms and infrastructures is impressive. Drawing from a wealth of interviews with residents, whom she quotes extensively, Lutz backs up and contextualizes pronouncements on the poor state of the schools, public transportation and the environment. While Lutz writes from an overtly progressive position, any reader will find her conclusions ("the distinction between civilian and military [in post–Cold War base towns] has worn down, rather than intensified") provocative. (Nov. 21)
