In a Monday post, Esquire blogger Charles Pierce warned that the Pentagon’s ongoing commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Vietnam War might “induce…amnesia” about “the horror we visited upon the people of Southeast Asia.”
Pierce also opined that a steady drip of Pentagon propaganda over the past few decades “has transformed the country from a skeptical republic to a sentimental beer commercial -- a Hallmark card delivered by an Abrams Fighting Vehicle.” He blasted the alleged shallowness of the American public’s support for the military, lamenting that we live “in a country that ooh's and aah's every time an F-15 flies over a stadium, or cheers a man in a uniform during the seventh-inning stretch” but doesn’t like spending public funds to help veterans.
From Pierce’s post (emphasis added):
Every militarized halftime show, every Concert for Valor, every local television anchor wearing a flag pin or a yellow ribbon, is testimony to how the Pentagon has transformed the country from a skeptical republic to a sentimental beer commercial -- a Hallmark card delivered by an Abrams Fighting Vehicle. Support The Troops has become our national ritual of absolution and, having applied it to one illegal war based on lies and political sleight-of-hand, the Pentagon is now preparing to apply it to the mother of all wars based on lies and sleight of hand. We will now have a Lost Cause myth foisted upon us that both North and South can embrace. This is where all those flyovers at all those NFL games eventually end. This is where the show planes come to land…
…The country never fully came to grips with the truth regarding the horror we visited upon the people of Southeast Asia. We turned the page in 1972, just in time to re-elect the treasonous thief who'd sabotaged a chance for peace to get elected in the first place in 1968. We ignored the veterans who came home, and then created imaginary spitting hippie strawmen to stand in for our own national neglect.
In truth, it was the shattered remnants of the antiwar movement in which many returning veterans found comfort and support, and not in the traditional veterans organizations run by the aging members of what the Vietnam vets disdainfully referred to as the "Class of '45." It was the alternative press, born out of the political tumult of the 1960's that owed its existence to the Vietnam war, who kept writing about the horrible effects of Agent Orange and the manifestations of what we now have come to know as PTSD. It was Ronald Reagan, who called their war a "noble cause," who closed down all the Veterans Administration's psychological outreach centers. If you want to see an honest modern re-enactment of what those days really were like, look at how the Republicans in the Senate filibustered to death Bernie Sanders's carefully crafted, bipartisan bill to provide help to veterans of our most recent wars, and look how that had almost no impact nationally in a country that ooh's and aah's every time an F-15 flies over a stadium, or cheers a man in a uniform during the seventh-inning stretch.
