{"id":18735,"date":"2020-04-30T08:00:43","date_gmt":"2020-04-30T08:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/uncategorized\/2020\/04\/30\/vietnam-and-modern-memory\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T05:47:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T05:47:44","slug":"vietnam-and-modern-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/opinion\/commentary\/2020\/04\/30\/vietnam-and-modern-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Vietnam and modern memory"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back in the mid-80s, an Army officer of my acquaintance succinctly summed up the mood of the post-Vietnam military: \u201cIt\u2019s OK to be a Vietnam veteran in today\u2019s military,\u201d he observed, \u201cso long as you don\u2019t dwell on it or refer back to it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was right. He had intuited the largely unspoken, but widely understood, politically correct attitude toward our humiliating defeat. Vietnam had been an aberration, the kind of war we would never fight again. And the less said about it, the better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, this same spirit of denial and revision has spread to American society in general in recent years. It\u2019s OK to be a Vietnam veteran in today\u2019s America, so long as you remember that war the way President Reagan portrayed it, as a \u201cnoble crusade,\u201d and so long as you profess utter admiration for our armed forces and unwavering support for our current crusades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thursday, April 30, marked the 45th anniversary of the fall of Saigon \u2014 and the end of our Vietnam misadventure. The Vietnam War I remember, and later studied, was anything but a \u201cnoble crusade.\u201d It was a profoundly existential experience. Survival was the only moral touchstone, and getting through to our rotation tour dates the only goal we cared about. All the Marines I knew \u201cin country\u201d were profoundly skeptical of the official rationales for why we were there and increasingly embittered by the reluctance of the South Vietnamese to fight their own war.<\/p>\n\n\n\t