MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This research project focuses on the celebratory and seemingly endless news coverage of surprise military homecomings. A staple of local and national news diets, the stories nearly always follow the same script: an oblivious family member is at work, in school, or at an event when their parent or significant other, purportedly not due back in the U.S. for some time, suddenly makes a choreographed surprise appearance, often in costume. Some stay home permanently; others return to service. The soldiers and sailors who surprised their loved ones had been in the country for at least a short time before the reunion. This meant that they could have spent that time with their families if not for the military’s need to craft – and the journalist’s need to cover – what Boorstin (1961) would have called a “pseudo-event” to herald their arrival. Collaborations between military public relations officials and journalists, he adds, convert “personal sorrow, fear, and abandonment into commodities for public consumption.” They take place at a time when war for citizens of the United States has become “the new normal,” as Andrew Bacevich has argued (quoted in Keller, 2010) and when we are now more likely than in the past to perceive the events of the day through a militarized prism (Carruthers, 2011, p. 264). Our research gauges and explores the narrative that emerges from news coverage of the reunions, guided by Achter’s (2016) assertion that “permanent war intensifies the need for narrative moments of closure” (p. 88). Our first “soak” in the texts reveals an admiration from journalists of the prefabricated nature of these events and an intertextual fascination with how much coverage they draw in addition to the sense of closure described by Achter.