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While the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may technically be over, the US military presence overseas persists undiminished. Although this number dates from prior the end of the War in Afghanistan, as of February 2021 the Department of Defense reported that approximately 220,000 United States military and civilian personnel are currently stationed on over 800 overseas military bases in 150 countries—a number that does not include the family members stationed with them.1 The bases where these personnel live span war zones and allied nations, are welcomed by their hosts, adamantly opposed, or both. They contain runways, weapons depots, training grounds, shooting ranges, and aircraft hangars. But they also accommodate schools, shopping malls, and American chain restaurants, as well as single-family houses, two-car garages, golf courses, baseball fields, movie theaters, and bowling alleys. In other words, “Wherever they go, America’s soldiers are bound to arrive at the same familiar vision of ‘home.’”2 This image of “home” has its own strategic value for the military; it can give soldiers a sense of comfort, familiarity, and belonging, certainly, but it can also be useful in recruitment, for improving soldiers physical and cognitive capacities, for retain existing soldiers, and also serves as a persistent reminder of what, exactly, they are so resolutely defending.
But of course, not all soldiers, and not all family members of soldiers, will relate in the same way to this idea of America-as-home(land) propagated by the US military. The significant diversity of people within the US military—as well as the significant diversity of visions of America—mean that some people will find a sense of home in the overseas US military, and some will not. We must then ask not only how does the US military work to make soldiers feel at home when stationed abroad, but also: how is the idea of “America” implicated in that feeling of home? How do soldiers benefit from and resist these efforts in creating a home for themselves? And, lastly, how do these projects of homemaking influence the United States’ standing in the world? Bringing together home studies and critical military studies, and assembling interviews, existing academic research, social media, periodicals, ethnography, site visits, and official documents, my work is an attempt to better understand how the US military attempts to cultivate a feeling of home—and especially, a feel of America-as-home—to achieve their own strategic ends.