Base amenities let personnel forget they are living amid war and bloodshed

Evidence

Throughout my visits to various bases, I repeatedly had to remind myself about the role they play in waging war—such is the distance one can feel from conflict in these manicured Little Americas, with all their comforts and conveniences. And while military personnel and their families surely have a harder time forgetting the connection between bases and bloodshed, many of them mention a similar distance. At Gitmo, people describe forgetting about the prison on the other side of the base, let alone the wars raging thousands of miles away. Even within war zones, military personnel testify that Internet access, Skype, and other amenities make it possible to forget you’re in the middle of a war. They make it possible to regard the “bloody snarl of combat,” as the former Army public affairs officer and novelist David Abrams put it, as if “through a telescope … at a safe, sanitized distance.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 467

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relates to the essay on trees as infrastructure only loosely; but the sanitized-distance idea of the ‘Little America’ could connect to the base-harm argument throughout the book.
• XREF: Connects to broader critique of how material comfort masks moral costs of violence (cf. drone operator distance and ‘bloodless’ remote war literature). — connects to: Soldiers can experience wartime as sheltered idyll rather than danger — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 47; Base comforts and amenities distance personnel psychologically from the wars they support; US bases offered troops deployed to Iraq civilian comforts like gyms and internet — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 258 (+3 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Soldiers can experience wartime as sheltered idyll rather than danger — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 47; Base comforts and amenities distance personnel psychologically from the wars they support; US bases offered troops deployed to Iraq civilian comforts like gyms and internet — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 258 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Soldiers can experience wartime as sheltered idyll rather than danger #corroborates (0.93) — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 47
• Base comforts and amenities distance personnel psychologically from the wars they support #expands (0.92)
• Combat units build false comfort until a close casualty forces reality #complicates (0.78) — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 274