‘Casualty Aversion’: Media, Society and Public Opinion

Abstract

’suppose they gave a war...and nobody came’. So ran the ironic caption to a bold red and black poster produced by an anti-Vietnam War activist group styling itself the ‘Committee to Unsell the War’. Fear of throwing an unpopular war is the spectre that has haunted American political elites ever since US troops left Vietnam in 1973. The past four decades have seen a proliferation of efforts to capture what diagnosticians consider an enfeebling affliction of the American body politic. The condition is variously described as casualty aversion, avoidance, phobia, shyness or sensitivity, or patholo- gized as a syndrome — named inter alia after Vietnam, Somalia, body bags or Dover, the US Air Force base through which soldiers’ corpses pass en route to hometown burial.¹