"Fayetteville’s story," says Catherine Lutz, "is America’s story."

Lutz should know. She’s an anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina, and author of Homefront: A Military City and the American 20^th Century (Beacon Press), published last fall. She spent six years interviewing people on and off the post, ransacked heaps of mostly forgotten historical records, and her book shows great empathy for the city, its people and its experience. (A mini-review: I strongly recommend HomefrontI to all who want to better understand the reality and impact of American militarism on our society. It’s also well-written.)

Even so, Lutz and her book are controversial here in Fayetteville. She’s been repeatedly denounced in the local paper here as a left-wing ivory tower intellectual who hates the military, Ft. Bragg, and Fayetteville.

But if she is quick to admit she dislikes war, Lutz insists she likes Fayetteville, especially the people, and her book is not a hatchet job. When she spoke about it in February to a packed house in the Cumberland County Library auditorium here, her overall message was positive, and her reception was respectful, even welcoming.

"I think the city has gotten a terrible rap," she told a local reporter. "It’s been dealt a bad hand of cards, and it’s tried to do the best it can with the cards it has."

Paradoxes and Contrasts

This effort has produced paradoxes and extreme contrasts."Fayetteville is both a city of cosmopolitan substance and humane striving," she wrote, "and the dumping ground for the problems of the American century of war and empire, the corner of the American house where the wounds of war have pierced most deeply and are most visible."

It’s the visibility that may make the toughest problems for Fayetteville’s boosters. The official monuments to the military presence here, above all the shiny Airborne and Special Operations Museum just a few blocks from Quaker House, present a carefully sanitized picture.

As Homefront puts it:

"To make a tourist attraction of war requires some heavy lifting and thick screening. . . .The history inside is clean and beautiful and, even fun. . . .They are wars of sacrifice without killing . . . ." There are no casualty figures listed with the displays, and especially no mention of civilian deaths.

But dig below the surface, as Lutz did carefully, and the picture of the military’s impact on this host community is very different: a mix of thriving retail businesses and a large middle class, cheek-by- jowl with widespread poverty, often poor schools, a persistently high crime rate, and an urban landscape in which the seedy side of military culture can be pushed to the margins, but not concealed.

This legacy should not really be surprising: the military, after all, is not a productive enterprise; its business is breaking things and killing people.

Moreover, as Homefront points out, Ft. Bragg is home to the Special Forces. The John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School here is a far more important cog in the American military machinery than the notorious (and now renamed) School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

The list of wars, large and small, overt and, more often, covert that its troops have been sent to is long, in the dozens. In a passage that seems surreal now, Lutz reports that in 1963, the Special forces here put on a special war games show for – the king of Afghanistan.

Paying Dues, Keeping Going

Since the new war began after this past September, Lutz has been active on the UNC campus, speaking at teach-ins, and aiding the nascent peace groups there and across the state. She recently met with our small peace group here in Fayetteville.

This activist role has its downside, however: her name was on a list of dissenting academics recently published by a group calling itself the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). The group’s report charged that those, like Lutz, who spoke against the war were, "Failing America," in its work of " Defending Civilization."

Inclusion on the list earned Lutz a spate of hate mail; but the outcry against the list’s authors was so swift and loud that they revise the report and deleted all the offenders’ names. when I asked her about it, Lutz shrugged off the criticism; it’s clear it has not deterred her.

Lutz features Quaker House in Homefront, particularly in a gripping chapter about the intense struggle over the Vietnam war which raged here during those years, involving GIs and activists from near and far.

But her links to Quaker activism are older than the book. In the early 1990s, she helped prepare an analysis of Junior ROTC programs for the American Friends Service committee. The results of this analysis were devastating, showing that the JROTC, curriculum taught a version of U.S. history which was highly inaccurate and riddled with racist stereotypes. Her research also showed that while JROTC was sold to local school boards as a financial boon, in reality is was a drain on their budgets.

Despite the hate mail, the ACTA witchhunt and the angry Op-ed pieces against Homefront, Catherine Lutz is optimistic about the prospects for a peace movement. "People are still living with a fantasy of war," she told me. "The only way you can sell a war to the American people is to conceal its reality from them. I think when that changes, the support you now see in the polls will start to evaporate."

Let’s hope she’s right.