Wars created comforts were common in Vietnam, too

Built 20 miles north of Saigon, Long Binh Post was the largest U.S. base in Vietnam. Among its features was the Nature of the War Museum, a replica of a Viet Cong-controlled village complete with tunnels, booby traps, and weapons. It served "as a reminder to personnel that there was indeed a war going on somewhere nearby," writes Meredith H. Lair.

That was not always easy to remember, she suggests, in Long Binh, a Cleveland-size enclave of American opulence that rarely saw any danger. The joke was that if the Viet Cong ever really attacked the base, with its 180 miles of roads, they would have to use the scheduled bus system for the incursion.

The huge base is emblematic of Lair's fluid and engrossing new book, Armed With Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (University of North Carolina Press).

The typical experience of the American soldier in Vietnam was not "the infantryman humping the boonies on ambush patrol that Platoon and other popular treatments have enshrined in public memory," says the author, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University. While 2.5 million Americans served in Vietnam, a much smaller portion saw combat....