In his exhaustive book entitled "The Spitting Image," Vietnam vet and Holy Cross Prof.
As the president who escalated the Vietnamesque war in Afghanistan, he was making a larger argument.ĭeliberately parroting Rambo's claim about "a quiet war against all the soldiers returning," he was asserting that America as a whole spat on soldiers when they came home - even though there's no proof that this happened on any mass scale. However, that lamentable failure was not what Obama was referring to. It's undeniable that chronic underfunding of the Veterans Administration unduly harmed Vietnam-era soldiers. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened." "You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. "You were often blamed for a war you didn't start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor," he told veterans.
Incessantly echoed by Hollywood and Washington since the concurrent successes of the "Rambo" and Reagan franchises, this legend was the central theme of President Obama's Memorial Day speech kicking off the government's commemoration of the Vietnam conflict. Desperate to cobble a prowar cautionary tale out of a blood-soaked tragedy, we keep reimagining the loss in Southeast Asia not as a policy failure but as the product of an America that dishonored returning troops. Out of all the status-quo-sustaining fables we create out of military history, none are as enduring as Vietnam War myths.
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