196 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
Meditating on the five major US wars since World War II-in
Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (1991), Afghanistan, and Iraq (2003)-with
flashes of historical memory of Jamestown, the Ohio Valley, and
Wounded Knee, brings us to the essence of US history. A red thread
of blood connects the first white settlement in North America with
today and the future. As military historian John Grenier puts it:U.S. people are taught that their military culture does not
approve of or encourage targeting and killing civilians and
know little or nothing about the nearly three centuries of war
fare-before and after the founding of the U.S .-that reduced
the Indigenous peoples of the continent to a few reservations
by burning their towns and fields and killing civilians, driv
ing the refugees out-step by step-across the continent ....
[V]iolence directed systematically against noncombatants
through irregular means, from the start, has been a central
part of Americans' way of war. 25