< Vietnam War Apocrypha

~theoddballphilosopher

I once read about the Vietnam war from a novel called "The Things They Carried", which is an overall tone of the burdens our soldiers went through. Not only that, but how the war affected them in ways that our own government neglected to ever bring to light.

Tim O'Brien, the author once said, "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."

No one in our home received a hero's welcome. The very thought of losing to the American Military was considered hogwash. They paid a price our rulers weren't willing to pay.

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~contrarian wrote:

I read the The Things They Carried for freshman English. I don't remember anything I found objectionable from it. A lot of the 80s anti-government/militia/white nationalist types are a result of how white veterans realized they'd been shafted by the government.

One of my favorite war movies is The Thin Red Line which is a Malick flick. F*ck Jane Fonda. Vietnam was when our ruling class started having less skin in the game by not sending their own sons over. The American Military arguably hasn't won a real war since WWII.