An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

Conclusion: The Future of the United States 221

Whereas the average American at the dawn of the new mil­

lennium found patriotic inspiration in the legacies of the Civil

War and World War II, when the evils of slavery and fascism

were confronted and vanquished, for many commissioned and

noncommissioned officers the U.S. Army's defining moment

was fighting the "Indians."

The legacy of the Indian wars was palpable in the numer­

ous military bases spread across the South, the Middle West,

and particularly the Great Plains: that vast desert and steppe

comprising the Army's historical "heartland," punctuated by

such storied outposts as Forts Hays, Kearney, Leavenworth,

Riley, and Sill. Leavenworth, where the Oregon and Santa Fe

trails separated, was now the home of the Army's Command

and General Staff College; Riley, the base of George Arm­

strong Custer's 7th Cavalry, now that of the lSt Infantry Divi­

sion; and Sill, where Geronimo lived out the last years of his

life, the headquarters of the U.S. Artillery ....

While microscopic in size, it was the fast and irregular

military actions against the Indians, memorialized in bronze

and oil by Remington, that shaped the nature of American

nationalism. 6

Although Kaplan relies principally on the late-nineteenth-century
source of US counterinsurgency, in a footnote he reports what he
learned at the Airborne Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville,
North Carolina: "It is a small but interesting fact that members
of the 101st Airborne Division, in preparation for their parachute
drop on D-Day, shaved themselves in Mohawk style and applied war
paint on their faces."7 This takes us back to the pre-independence
colonial wars and then through US independence and the myth pop­
ularized by The Last of the' Mahicans.
Kaplan debunks the argument that the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon on September n, 2001, brought the
United States into a new era of warfare and prompted it to estab­
lish military bases around the world. Prior to 2001, Kaplan rightly
observes, the US Army's Special Operations Command had been