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"This book is about military family separations during the Global War on Terror, told through the voices of spouses married to US Army soldiers reflecting on stages of the deployment cycle, including experiences of children and experiences with social supports, social, and mass media"--

"American Soldiers in Iraq offers a unique sociological snapshot of American soldiers in Iraq, analyzing their collective narratives in relation to the military sociology tradition."

Thousands of films coverwar and the military, but fewhighlight military family life. This study reports a systematic content analysis of forty-six films between 1935 and 2002 that spotlight children, adolescents, teenagers, and adults from military-service-related families. The results show a diverse range of portrayals across military branches, wars, genders, races, ages, military ranks, roles, and familial relationships. Furthermore, cinematic demands of military family life are portrayed inconsistently with real life experiences reinforcing a modest civil-military gap. Finally, six patterned characteristics emerge from the content analysis including intergenerational military occupational linkages, social deviance, precociousness, social mobility, youth romance, and parent-child conflicts. The present study partially confirms studies of civilian youth in film suggesting a diverse cinematic experience at the teenage stage of the life course. The results highlight a struggle in the negotiation between self-conceptions and self-images of children from military families where a reinforced stereotype of "military brat" is constructed in American cinema.

Armed Forces & Society (AF&S), is a major scholarly outlet for social scientists interested in military subjects, and in 1999 completed 25 volumes of continuous publication. This article presents data on authorship and affiliations for volumes 1-25 of AF&S and compares the findings to studies of other scholarly journals. Topical areas of analysis include (co)authorship, sex configurations of (co)authors, and academic, regional, and institutional affiliations of authors. Results show the journal to be fairly international and highly interdisciplinary. Overall, AF&S is both similar and dissimilar along a number of sociodemographic dimensions compared with other sociology and specialty area journals.

This article is based on a secondary analysis of post combat debriefing interviews conducted by the Department of Military Psychiatry, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, with 811 active duty U.S. Army service men and women who participated in Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama, in December 1989. The data offer a unique and unprecedented perspective on the use of telecommunications, and this study sought to illustrate the use of telephones and television by the soldiers involved in the invasion and its aftermath. As was found in previous research, the telephone in combat proved to be primarily positive at the level of the soldier, although it did introduce new challenges for leaders. Television technology was both useful and a distraction for soldiers. Overall, one-way and real-time, two-way telecommunication devices have come to have an important impact on the experience of soldiers and their family members during war.

This article examines a forward-deployed US Army unit in Eastern Europe. Drawing from military sociology, the theoretical framework used to study this unit focused primarily on factors of boredom and the fragmentation model of organizational culture. The methodological approach was mixed, including interviews and participant and non-participant observations of the deployed soldiers and military civilians. The research explored unit members' perceptions about unit leadership, quality of life, communication with loved ones, the mission, work roles, interactions with the local foreign military and civilians, and unit diversity. The findings contribute to a nuanced understanding of the relationship between military boredom and fragmentation. Overall, we found some ambiguity regarding some parts of soldiers' lives—including an unclear understanding regarding the nature of the mission. The study also found low to moderate levels of boredom across five domains: underutilization, cultural deprivation, lack of privacy, isolation, and time and space reorientation. Although in most cases the level of boredom related to perceived ambiguity (less boredom usually meant less perceived ambiguity), in some cases an inverse relationship was identified. We conclude that future studies should determine whether our findings apply to newer forward-deployed contexts in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.