Homefront: A military City and the American Twentieth Century. By Catherine Lutz. Beacon Press, 288 pages, 20 black-and-white photographs, $28.50.

Fayetteville is a city of 121,000 in North Carolina’s sandhills. It boasts an art-house movie theater, the state’s oldest historically black college, and lots of shopping malls. It also has the country’s largest army base and a nickname that its residents abhor—”Fayettenam.”

Fayetteville is legendary among North Carolinians, even those who have never set foot there. When Catherine Lutz, professor of anthropology, began studying this city, she was repeatedly told that it’s a place where bars are plentiful and crime is high. But Lutz set out to see all sides of Fayetteville and study it as a case in point of how America’s military has affected life in this country. Visiting Fayetteville on and off for six years, she found that the city is much more than its reputation suggests.

Lutz is good at talking to strangers. She met people at malls or street festivals, approaching them by “being slightly inappropriately friendly,” she laughs. Some conversations lasted 15 minutes, while others resulted in hours-long interviews. Lutz formally interviewed 80 people and consulted newspapers and historical archives.

Lutz writes that she found Fayetteville to be a “corner of the American house where the wounds of war have pierced most deeply and are most visible.” But she also found Fayetteville residents—including soldiers—from all parts of the world who continually contradicted her expectations. While Lutz describes Fayetteville’s problems, she also shows an affection for the city, where many of the people she met are working to improve a life that, as Lutz says, has not been entirely of their own making.

Few outsiders know about the more cosmopolitan elements of Fayetteville. Because the military base brings people from all over, the city is less provincial than many places in North Carolina, Lutz says. The annual International Folk Festival includes the city’s many residents from Okinawa, Korea, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, and Germany. And residents readily accept new people. “They’re so used to people coming and going, and not just other North Carolinians, but people from all over the country, people who are different, racially and socially,” Lutz says. “These people have seen a much wider world. Intellectually it’s a very stimulating place.”

So why the bad rep? “Some of the bad reputation has to do with the bias against soldiers themselves, which sometimes is a class bias,” Lutz says. The military’s college-tuition assistance program often attracts young people from low-income backgrounds. “People assume that soldiers are dim-witted people who can’t get any other kind of job, so they go into the military. And the assumption is that they contribute to the city’s crime rate.”

In fact, Lutz says, “Crime tends to be committed by unemployed people, by people who are socially isolated.” By contrast, soldiers have jobs complete with benefits and are under more surveillance than civilians. And while Fayetteville does have a high crime rate, often the crime rate has been higher in Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city. “But nobody says ‘oh, Charlotte—dangerous place to live,’” Lutz says.

Some of Fayetteville’s reputation also has roots in downtown’s Hay street, which was notorious during the Vietnam war for its “wildwest” atmosphere of open drug use, prostitution, and fights. As residents tell it, many of the young soldiers, about to leave for an uncertain future in Vietnam, were grabbing pleasure while they could. In the 1990s, the city launched a revitalization of Hay street—razing strip bars and other buildings, taking a tougher stance on crime, and building a military museum.

But not all of the strip bars and prostitutes left—some just moved. Bragg Boulevard, a main thoroughfare, features bars and pawnshops and their large, bold signs.

Other businesses eager to serve soldiers are retail stores and restaurants—Fayetteville’s largest nonmilitary employers. These jobs pay low wages in any town, but especially in Fayetteville. According to the North Carolina Department of Commerce, the average weekly earnings for retail workers statewide was $328.87 in 2000. In Fayetteville’s home county, Cumberland, the average weekly retail wage was $308.63.

One reason for low wages is the surplus of jobhunters, such as soldiers who have retired and stayed in town (some as young as 39) and families of current soldiers. As Lutz writes, “The woman who sells towels at one Fayetteville department store was formerly an assistant city planner in a major city, while the person behind the cosmetics counter there has an M.B.A.”

The military base also employs many civilians, and Fort Bragg estimated its economic impact on Fayetteville (soldier spending, civilian jobs, and other forms of money flowing into the city) to be $4.1 billion dollars in 1999.

But Lutz wonders what Fayetteville might be like without the base. She writes “An important question to ask, though, is four billion dollars compared to what? To the value to the city of hightech corporations of the same total size as the post, paying taxes and employing local people at high wages? To the per capita impact of smaller businesses in the smaller city Fayetteville might have been if neither an installation nor substantial new industry had come to the area?”

The presence of Fort Bragg, which occupies 160,000 acres of land, also decreases Fayetteville’s tax base, since the government is exempt from property taxes. The U.S. government does award “federal-impact funds” to pay for soldiers’ use of public resources such as schools. But Lutz contends that the compensation is irregular—sometimes adequate and sometimes not.

The contrast between the base and the town is remarkable, Lutz says. “The base is the most socialized community in the country,” Lutz says. “Everybody has free health care, free or subsidized housing. There’s a tremendous social safety net.” As you drive past Fort Bragg, “You can find soldiers on litter patrol around the edge of the streets of the base every day,” she says. But when you get to Fayetteville proper, “These people can’t afford to put new asphalt down, and they don’t have an army of people to send out to pick up the litter.”

Although Lutz points out some of Fayetteville’s problems, she also wants to dispel prejudice toward Fayetteville and debunk the generalization that all the city’s residents are “camp followers.” There’s a perception, she says, that the military is “this one monolithic, single-minded entity.”

In truth, even the soldiers Lutz interviewed had diverse ideas about war and the military. One Vietnam veteran who had trained Special Forces soldiers struggled to reconcile the Ten Commandments with what he called the “military mind.” Lutz says, “Although he felt his army work had been in service to the best principles, he had this complex and critical view of what went on.”

Of course, Fayetteville is not the only community whose citizens sacrifice for the sake of the nation’s military might. Anyone who pays taxes or has a relative in the military knows about the costs of readiness for war. Lutz suggests that the people of Fayetteville may have paid more than their share.