sholio | Obviously this is specific to the U.S., but ...

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Obviously this is specific to the U.S., but ...

Something kind of random I was thinking about today is how the Vietnam War has almost completely disappeared from pop culture/awareness. I started thinking about it when I was flipping through a table of books at B&N, and picked up a book of war stories I was fully expecting to be WWII (because everything is right now), and opened it up and was briefly thrown to discover it was Vietnam.

And that's relatively rare now! When I was a kid in the late 70s/80s, it was ubiquitous, unavoidable. Most of the war movies were Vietnam. Just about every action-hero character in movies and TV and books had a Vietnam-veteran background to explain how they got their commando skills or acquired a bunch of exotic enemies or ended up living in an out-of-the-way place avoiding the world or whatever.

Which is not at all surprising, because of how thoroughly everyone in my parents' generation (the Baby Boomers) was shaped by the war. This is what makes it so weird and fascinating to me that we never talk about it anymore, because EVERY American male who was a young adult in the 1960s either served in the war or has a unique-to-him story about how he avoided it. There wasn't a single person in the adult generation that I knew growing up who hadn't had their life turned in a particular direction by the war, either through serving in it or avoiding it, through losing the boy they meant to marry or being forced to move to a different place or just having their worldview altered. It drove a whole generation; it's why I grew up in Alaska, and why my parents met in the first place. And 10-15 years after the war, there was a constant awareness of it; I grew up with the background awareness of Vietnam as a THING. And now that's simply not there.

Meanwhile WWII has experienced a resurgence. In the last 5-10 years it's EVERYWHERE, in a way I never remember when I was a kid -- not coincidentally, I imagine, as the generation who actually fought in the war dies off, leaving us to see it through a convenient pair of rose-colored glasses rather than remembering the horror firsthand.

And of course the war that's now used as a convenient backstory for characters in half the books and movies out there is Afghanistan.

I don't really see Vietnam coming back in the same way WWII did, just like WWI didn't. If the pattern held true, then WWI should've been the "nostalgia" war in the media a generation ago, and it wasn't -- probably for the same reason that Vietnam started to fade away, or be erased, once it was no longer close enough in time to overshadow everything. We don't like things that are messy and awful, that can't be reduced to a good-guy/bad-guy narrative (and especially in Vietnam's case, there's also the creeping suspicion that we might actually have been the bad guys). I don't really think the way we view WWII is any more accurate, but it's a whole lot easier to wrap up in a "just war" narrative and package it conveniently for entertainment.

And that narrative vacuum where Vietnam used to be is really interesting to me.

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This is an interesting observation.

It just fascinates me how it's completely dropped out of the cultural zeitgeist, when it was so huge relatively recently. Especially since WWII is now the "nostalgia war" in the U.S. and Afghanistan is the current war, and in between, there are a couple of wars NO one talks about. (The Korean War had already dropped off the landscape even by the '80s; one of my grandpas was a veteran of that one.)

WWI was definitely big here - in the 90s and again with the 100th anniversaries from 2014-2018. But it's also the first war Australia fought in as a nation rather than as a colony, so it's always been a much bigger thing here than in the US. That said, everything else is exactly the same as in your post. Vietnam didn't take such a huge chunk of the male population here, but it was still a big deal with the draft - when I was in high school we all had to interview our dads about it as part of a history class, and my dad (who was a British citizen and not draft-eligible) was appalled to be in "history".

I actually think the U.S. may be somewhat rare among WWI participant nations in that the war doesn't seem to have made that much of a lasting impact. We don't do poppies here, and I hadn't even actually realized that we'd reached the centennial until reading some of the comments; I've seen absolutely NOTHING about it in the media here. (Granted, we've been distracted lately with other stuff ...) Not that history books don't talk about it and so forth, but at this point, and even back when I was a kid, it's been very firmly relegated to history rather than still having an impact that's felt in the present day.

... but whoa, speaking of impact, I'm genuinely shocked that I actually did NOT know that about Australia and the Vietnam draft! I knew there was a coalition of Pacific-area nations involved, but I had always thought that having a draft for it was a U.S.-specific thing. Wow. I just learned something new.

I have seen it in the media - but all focusing on events in other countries. And I'm a pretty obsessive reader of news.

OMG, I get nostalgic about this *all* the time. Having my formative years in the eighties, the lingering impact of Vietnam were such a strong undercurrent in pop culture - some of my favorite episodes of shows like Magnum PI or Simon & Simon were tied to it. It makes me feel really sad (in a nostalgic sense) that younger folks today don't have that sort of touchstone. Wars like Vietnam or WWII are tied so much to the overall culture of the country at the time. I feel like Iraq/Afghanistan were (and continue to be) much more... "over there", where it impacts those who have direct involvement, but there's not the sort of societal impact on how we live our lives at home, so the pop cultural impact feels less, as well.

My nieces barely are aware that we are in a war, and have been their entire lives. I mean, they know this because I've told them, and they see it on CNN Student News... but...

You know, I barely remember the first Gulf War, but I do remember it. And that was a blip, practically!

Honestly, I forget sometimes too, and my brother and stepsister served in it! It's amazing how quickly it fades into the background and you stop thinking about it.

I remember what a big deal the first Gulf War was. To my mother's everlasting horror when she found out (because the last thing she wanted was her 15-year-old daughter having unsupervised correspondence with eligible young men who had not been parentally vetted), I ended up writing to an ad in a magazine that gave you the names and addresses of soldiers to write to, because I wanted to help out. They were all very nice; I remember one person I ended up exchanging letters with was a young military wife in Germany.

I had forgotten. Ana was ten - this would be about four years ago now - when all of a sudden I looked at her and said "Oh. My. God. We've been at war longer than you've been alive, and you don't even know."

And she didn't know. That was the very first she ever heard of it.

I remember what a big deal the first Gulf War was. To my mother's everlasting horror when she found out (because the last thing she wanted was her 15-year-old daughter having unsupervised correspondence with eligible young men who had not been parentally vetted), I ended up writing to an ad in a magazine that gave you the names and addresses of soldiers to write to, because I wanted to help out. They were all very nice; I remember one person I ended up exchanging letters with was a young military wife in Germany.

Aw!

I was six. We had an assembly at school and everything. It was huge - but then it was over.

It's just so much a part of their world. It's terrifying.

A couple of years ago I was hanging out with my nephew, who was born in 2004, and I was reading an action novel with a jet on the cover. He asked me what it was about and I told him it was about bad guys hijacking an airplane. He asked if I had heard of the Twin Towers and the airplanes that were hijacked then.

I told him I remembered it; I had been at work when it happened.

He gave me a look of round-eyed shock.

"You were ALIVE THEN?"

Oh God. It's like the Kennedy assassination was for me. It's been that way for their entire lives.

He gave me a look of round-eyed shock.

"You were ALIVE THEN?"

Ouch. I'm going to tell this to my mother. She's been grumbling for a week that one of the girls, fumbling for her birthday, pulled a much-too-early year out of their mental hat. (Somehow, even though she doesn't say so, this is because we're homeschooling through middle school. If they were in school, they wouldn't say these silly things!) I think she forgets how weird time is to kids.

YES, it was just such a huge thing in the pop culture of the '80s. I guess there was really no way around it, since all the male characters on just about every movie and TV show would've had to have a Vietnam background because of their age, so the shows went ahead and engaged with it directly.

And yeah, I think because the Iraq/Afghanistan wars are being fought by an all-volunteer military, they don't have that kind of direct impact. You can choose to sign up (my brother did), but there's not the same all-encompassing impact, where every male of a certain age is affected by it. Certain kinds of people choose to go to war, for many reasons, but it would have created a very different cultural gestalt if it had been applied to everyone from all walks of life. In pop culture, it's applied for convenient backstory if a writer wants a military character or a mercenary, but it's not applied to literally everyone.

And yeah, I think because the Iraq/Afghanistan wars are being fought by an all-volunteer military, they don't have that kind of direct impact. You can choose to sign up (my brother did), but there's not the same all-encompassing impact, where every male of a certain age is affected by it. Certain kinds of people choose to go to war, for many reasons, but it would have created a very different cultural gestalt if it had been applied to everyone from all walks of life. In pop culture, it's applied for convenient backstory if a writer wants a military character or a mercenary, but it's not applied to literally everyone.

This also affects the culture of the military, and our perception of it in the rest of society.

When everybody is drafted, any one soldier (sailor/marine/whatever) is just as likely to be democrat as republican, from a military family or not, educated or not, former delinquent or not, religious or not, and so on. The super rich might wiggle out, but even then, you're more likely to have a variety of income levels as well.

But when it's all volunteer, more and more it's going to shift to be some people, and as we all think "it's for those people" other people are less likely to be interested. And we do see that the military increasingly leans conservative after Vietnam.

Very good points. You observed something I've also been semi aware of, but never articulated; thank you for that.

It took me a long time to articulate it to myself too; I'm glad it helped!

I don't think it's just that WWI was messy, but that WWI just got sucked into being a sort of staging episode for the calamity of WWII in the narratives? I mean it only had a little time to permeate culture before it got overshadowed even though some iconic works were created.

Obviously here it works differently in that WWII pretty much has stayed the relevant touchstone war ever since it ended, not least because the impact remains from the political setup to the practical fact that the annoying unexploded bombs still disrupt life on a regular bases with tons needing disposal every year still.

Just the treatment it gets changes with the generational distance to the trauma. Like first the people who lived it, then the people who were raised by people who were messed up from having to live through it, and I've read some articles about psychological studies that apparently it continues to have an impact even in the grandchildren's generation... Anyway whenever someone here just says "The War" without any qualifier they mean WWII.

When I was a kid and the breakup and civil wars in Yugoslavia happened it got explained to us in school partly as fallout from WWI too, basically for conflicts anywhere the Ottoman Empire used to be before. And later spent a whole semester of AP history just on WWI in school, so it wasn't forgotten or anything, just not constantly present.

They were described to me as fallout from WWII!

Huh? That seems a bad choice to illuminate anything. I mean, obviously with resentments in Europe you can always go back further and drag out the mutual grudges for centuries upon bloody centuries as you please, so I guess picking anything whether earlier or later is kind of arbitrary. And how things in the Balkans went in WWII probably didn't make the constituent parts more fond of each other. But WWI seems the best somewhat recent breaking point to start considering both the Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were its casualties, and Yugoslavia only got created as a direct result of it, and had internal tensions and separatist movements right away.

Now that I'm grown, I agree with you. Back then, I was ten. I think my mother might have also said "And by the way, WWII did exacerbate earlier tensions" (probably using just those words, too, that's how my family is), but she focused on the more recent war.

It guess it also makes a difference how much depth you need. We covered it a lot in school because our teachers had to deal with students who were directly affected.

Like, the students from formerly simply Yugoslavian immigrant families suddenly "split" along ethnic lines, and they all still had families there, and sent money back, and even visited during the conflicts, plus several hundred thousand refugees came here.

And depending on who they were their interpretation of events were radically different, and teachers had to mediate that whenever current events came up. But at the same time the German students without roots there didn't know much of anything about that region, beyond that it was the cheaper Mediterranean holiday option.

Yeah, I agree about WWI being overwhelmed by WWII - narratively, it functions as a sort of prologue. Of course this isn't accurate, any more than the way WWII is handled in pop culture is accurate, but it gets stuffed into a convenient box as "the causes of WWII" and that's pretty much it for nuanced development.

I remember reading a thread somewhere online awhile back (Reddit?) in which people were polled about what "the War" meant to them, and, as you might expect, it was very different between nations and different generations within each nation. Everyone's "War" is the one that's affecting them the most right now, whichever one that is.

And yeah, that thing about generational trauma ... it doesn't go away, it just keeps working its way through future generations in various ways.

I think a big part of it is the war that you managed to avoid mentioning at all in this post--Iraq--for a couple of reasons.

I'm a little younger than you (born 1981) so my memory of the pop culture role of Vietnam is inevitably a bit different, but I think a big part of it by the late 80s and especially the 90s was the sense that there would never be another war like that--the USSR was faltering or fallen, no one was taking China seriously yet, and it seemed self-evident that any war the US ever got into would be another Grenada/Kuwait/Bosnia/Somalia--some bombing, a few days of ground operations maybe, a nebulous peacekeeping role as part of an international coalition, but nothing that would ever dominate the cultural consciousness, nothing that could ever require another draft. Bases were closing, the military was downsizing, the war of the future would be remote and technological and the furthest thing from guys in the jungle with machine guns. Even the pre-Iraq year and a half of war in Afghanistan didn't seem to really puncture that impression as much as the Iraq war did--and then Iraq happened, and suddenly long, protracted resource-devouring war was a reality, one no one wanted to talk about.

And I think the other part of it is, of course, that it rapidly became impossible to talk about Vietnam without talking about Iraq, and no one wanted (wants) to talk about Iraq. Can't talk about the draft without bringing up stop-losses, can't talk about PTSD and traumatic injuries without talking about... PTSD and traumatic injuries, can't talk about war protesters without talking about Cindy Sheehan, can't talk about wartime atrocities without talking about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and waterboarding. Afghanistan, can't talk about "what were we even doing there anyway" without talking about WMDs. As the relatively non-disastrous, relatively justified war is the one that gets assigned to action heroes' backgrounds, but Iraq just... disappears, and Vietnam goes with it.

And, on the other hand--I think WWII has gotten hauled out for the same reason, because people want 9/11 to be Pearl Harbor and to pretend that the subsequent wars of "liberation" (Operation Iraqi Freedom!) were as justified as WWII was. Or, failing that, let's just be nostalgic for a time when wars were good, yeah.

... ha. You know, I never even realized I had been talking around Iraq in this post instead of talking about it, until you pointed it out. But you're right. Just the fact that I didn't realize I was doing it speaks volumes. If it's possible to give a character an Afghanistan background or an Iraq background, people go for the former in 9 of 10 cases (or more). In a way, we've erased that one even faster than we erased Vietnam. Or maybe it's more that we've done what other commenters have talked about doing with WWI, where WWI gets rolled into WWII. (And the Korean war gets eclipsed by Vietnam -- I remember that when I was a kid in the '80s, I had some trouble remembering that they were different conflicts.) So Iraq, the war we really don't want to talk about, gets rolled into Afghanistan, the one that has an almost morally justifiable basis and therefore we don't have to examine our reasons for being there in quite such a self-critical way.

I think we are, in general, a nostalgic era right now. Old people are nostalgic for their youth, all the more so when in a time of rapid cultural change, and WWII is far enough back that it's easy to trowel on the nostalgia without having to deal with the uncomfortable parts. And it seems like there's an increasing cultural trend among younger people towards absolutism and evangelism and clearly defined good guys/bad guys -- a search for truth, basically, and WWII has precisely the right sort of good guy/bad guy narrative to be appealing.

And you may be right, too, that we're looking for meaning in the current war by searching past ones.

HUH.

Yeah, that's... a good point, and I think one that holds true for what I've observed too, now that you mention it. Hmm.

Yeah, it just kind of ... stopped being a thing while I wasn't looking. It's so odd to think about it now.

Wow, that's interesting. Yeah, it was everywhere when I was growing up -- TV, movies, history books, novels -- and while there are pockets of it here and there, like Things They Carried being a college staple, it's really not omnipresent the way it was. And I hadn't even really noticed.

It just sort of slipped out the back door when no one was looking! It took me a really long time to notice too. I'm not sure if I would ever have noticed if WWII hadn't been making such a resurgence.

I absolutely agree with you that WWII is popular because it can be made to fit into that archetypal good guys vs bad guys narrative in a way most other wars can't.

I also think that as time goes on, movies and other entertainment need to provide people with a basic backstory of 'this is what the war was about', since people don't necessarily remember it from their own life experience. And WWII's outline of 'this side was Nazis, let's fight them!' is hella simpler to get across in a two hour blockbuster than WWI or Vietnam or any of the others.

But it's unfortunate, because it leaves out so many important stories.

Yeah; I think we always want a clear-cut narrative in our history (which history has a bad habit of not providing), and different eras look for different sorts of touchstones. WWII is working very well for us right now, as a nation, because it suits everything both ends of the political spectrum want from a war: warm fuzzy nostalgia, harking back to a simpler time, clear-cut "good guys" and "bad guys" (obviously none of it is actually that simple, but it's easier to make it fit that narrative), long enough ago that most people no longer have direct experience with it, and it also features the right kind of baddies to suit a modern narrative. Even the truly bad stuff that we did, such as the Japanese internment camps and racially segregated units, is long enough ago that it can be spun as "products of its era" and made part of a rising above it/ moving forward sort of narrative, whereas it's not so easy to do that, in the present time, with racism of the Vietnam era because that was stuff that our parents did.

*ponders* As I read this I thought A-Team! with a soupsong of M*A*S*H. But from my British perspective WWII never went away, aspects of it impinge often. We have had a lot of anniversaries recently.

In terms of Vietnam now, i don't forget about it -- but my father was an amateur War Historian. I know fair amount about both the American Civil War and English Civil War!

Popularity of WWII? good-guy/bad-guy narrative. I think cinema has a lot to do with that and jingoism. It's simplifying something very complex. But if it means that Nazi/facists are the bad guys, and deserved to be stopped, I'm okay with that.

Though WWII pop culture movies can also work if you don't do the simple bad guy thing, I mean like "Das Boot" was successful across the board, not just in Germany, despite the protagonists being soldiers on a submarine for Nazi Germany.

This is a really good point--I grew up obsessed with Vietnam, because every night at dinner on the six o'clock news we heard the roll call of the soldiers who'd died that day, and I had a POW bracelet, etc. I was glued to the TV in the last days of our presence in Saigon. Now when my military history buff friend asks me what recent Vietnam books I've read, I have to tell him none, because few of them are making it out on the popular shelves.

I've been thinking about it a lot because Sebastian Stan is starring in a movie adaptation of one of my favorites, The Last Full Measure, and just started filiming a couple weeks ago, and there were some pics with him and a couple of the vets Ptsenbarger saved. And they are old men now, you know, we've all aged yet we still have this image of the young vet coming home, scarred and traumatized, to a nation that didn't want to acknowledge what was happening over there, the growing divide between the anti-commie, pro-war right and the "make love not war" left, and the fact that, really, we were losing, and did eventually "lose." And that's a big thing about it, and about the recent Iraq war, as dira mentioned above--we lost, or at least didn't make any difference despite the huge casualties and destruction. It's such a huge part of our national consciousness that we are right and we don't lose, and like you mentioned, everyone who grew up then was touched by the war in some way, but we lost, and that's our national shame or something. It's very weird and tragic.

Yeah, I think we as a nation want to bury our losses, and celebrate our victories as absolute victories despite the often dark side. I guess that's not a hugely unusual thing -- people in general want to do that -- but America seems to enshrine it in our national mentality, which means we *really* don't deal well with situations in which we lost. See also, the South's obsession with being the underdog (THE WAR WAS 150 YEARS AGO, GET OVER IT).

An LJ commenter mentioned this movie as well. Color me intrigued! God, there were so many Vietnam movies in the '80s, though. SO MANY. And not just serious war movies, but comedies too (even if they were often tragicomic), like Air America or Good Morning Vietnam. In the modern world, the idea of a war movie comedy seems absurd. When was the last time we had one of those? But when your entire generation has just gone through a devastating and bloody war, the idea of laughing about it must be easier to handle. The WWII generation did it too, with things like Hogan's Heroes. The idea of a WWII comedy now is just bizarre. You can't laugh about that! It's somber and tragic! But there's plenty of absurd humor in it too, and a blackly comic willingness to laugh at ourselves, and that's something that is lost, too, as the years go by and the past is drained down to sepia photos.

So interesting that the commenters have drawn the parallel between Iraq and Vietnam... No one in the pop culture scene likes to discuss that we lost Iraq. The way you point out that that whole cultural vacuum has sucked the story of Vietnam down with it is fascinating.

I'm reminded of a hat I saw a Vietnam veteran wear, which was poignant in its denial: "We were winning when I left."

Much food for thought here; thank you.

Maybe when some of the Vietnam anniversaries start coming around the pop culture will have to grapple with it again.

I wonder if the Vietnam anniversaries aren't going to get much attention (and other touchstones of the 50s/60s/70s) because Boomers, as a generation, might be the first generation who really don't want to think about getting old. Next year is going to be the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. I'm curious if it's going to get much play. 15th and 20th and 25th anniversaries are pretty neat. 50th anniversaries start to make you think about your own mortality. Any farther out from there, and it's mainly your kids who are the ones left to commemorate it ...

Yeah.

I grew up identifying with my parents because I was socially kinda isolated. And they were impressionable teens during the 60s/70s, identified with older hippie types. So for me the recent past just kinda ... dropped out? So Woodstock's 50th is weirdly a big deal to me even though I can't remember any of the hippie era that feels like a heart-home to part of me.

EXACTLY the same here. :D I have realized as an adult that I actually do have much more in common with my own generational cohort (Gen X) and with older millennials than with people my parents' age, but as a kid I didn't have a whole lot of contact with people outside the family, and I still tend to feel a lot of nostalgia for the music and clothing and trappings of an era that I was just about 10 or 15 years too young to have experienced.

It's possible that those anniversaries always mean more to people a generation or so younger than the people who were originally part of it, anyway. I wonder now if all the WWII 50th anniversary stuff that I remember from twenty years ago was meaningful to people who participated, or if it was mainly for the younger set.

Edited 2017-04-16 19:52 (UTC)

>> I still tend to feel a lot of nostalgia for the music and clothing and trappings of an era that I was just about 10 or 15 years too young to have experienced. <<

This. Except with slight fudging on the dates since technically I think I'm lumped in with millennials.

I've been thinking about this a lot too, actually. I think it's one reason Winter Soldier affected me the way it did, and probably why Civil War continues to anger me the way it does, because of the connections between the term "winter soldier" and Vietnam, and because of the treatment of vets when they came home and the media condemnation of Bucky without even a, "Wait, this international hitman/terrorist is allegedly Bucky Barnes? How is that possible?," but also the reasons those kids on the ground were given when they were sent in to fight, the ways they were used by old men in Washington, and those boys are my uncles and I have been watching them die of that my whole life, you know? But there is such a strong military tradition in my family, and of course nobody was going to talk about it in front of the kids, so I didn't really understand what I was seeing until I was in my teens and became obsessed with the Vietnam War for a while, trying to understand, and slowly growing to realize what a mess it was, how maybe we were the bad guys, or everybody was except the non-combatants just trying to survive. And it does feel like as the reality of the complexity and moral quagmires of war keeps rising up, pop culture keeps retreating harder and harder into the "last good war" nobody's really going to argue about, because who's going to say we shouldn't have fought the Nazis? And let's all just ignore the internment camps and the segregation and anti-semitism and atom bombs. No blood on these stars and stripes.

Sorry, that wandered far afield. Point is, Vietnam shaped my family culture before I was born. Hell, if my dad hadn't gotten a medical discharge due to severe sinus migraines that I inherited, there's a good chance my mom would have been a widow raising me alone. I wouldn't say I'm exactly nostalgic for the Vietnam War in pop culture, I think it contributed to some ugly trends, but its absence has not exactly caused those trends to abate, and I certainly feel like we could use it as an historical counterbalance to the specific nostalgic take on WWII currently permeating our media.

... holy shit, the comparison between Bucky and returning Vietnam vets is the real-world Bucky analogue I was never able to figure out when I was writing in the fandom. Back when I was thinking a lot about Winter Soldier-related issues (as one does) I'd always had a knee-jerk reaction against the prevailing fandom idea that people would obviously recognize that Bucky was an innocent victim and wasn't responsible for his actions, but I could never come up with a good real-world analogue, but holy shit Vietnam veterans, because it is INCREDIBLY analogous -- or at least about as close as a real-world situation could possibly be. How much choice did any of those kids have, when they were being in essence given orders at the point of a gun? But a lot of people treated them as if all the choices were theirs.

And yet ... it's so complicated.

My dad's tour of duty was in 1968, during the time the My Lai massacre happened. And I think I had gotten the impression, before talking to him about it, that it was one of those cases where the true story came out years later, and no one at the time knew exactly what had happened. But he said fuck no, everyone knew EXACTLY what had happened, the enlisted men in his unit were absolutely sickened and horrified*, while those directly in charge of them were doubling down on the "we did what was right! we didn't have a choice!" narrative (possibly to keep everyone from just outright going AWOL; apparently it was a morale nightmare and they were all draftees ANYWAY, so it wasn't like they were delighted to be there in the first place). He told me he almost got into a fistfight with one officer after the guy started basically gloating about what the troops in My Lai had done, and spent the rest of his time in service doing everything he could to avoid that guy because the officer really had it in for him after that. (For the record, my dad has a longstanding habit of pissing off people in authority, so the surprising thing is not that his COs hated him, but that he'd actually managed to get in that situation by taking a moral stand ...)

*This is something that I keep running into in war narratives, incidentally: people who were there being vehemently outspoken against some of the things they saw their own side doing. From WWII veterans who remember bursting into tears when they first learned about Hiroshima, to German soldiers weeping when they learned of the death camps, to war correspondents in the Pacific interviewing soldiers who were violently opposed to their fellow troops' disrespectful treatment of the Japanese war dead, to my dad's story about My Lai ... even in the worst of the worst situations, even as easy as it is for humans to get caught up in mob mentality and swept into hideously immoral acts because people around us are doing it, a lot of people even in that situation are able to hold onto a fundamental understanding of right and wrong, and to see the people on the other side as people, even in the middle of it all.

Aargh. Complicated.

And yeah, nearly everyone with Baby Boomer parents has a "what if" narrative that could've led to a very different outcome. My dad was assigned to a base in Alaska instead of shipping out to Vietnam; my husband's dad, despite actually wanting to sign up, was refused due to a football injury. Change either of these things, and we might be very different people, or not here at all.

I have seen less of a view that people in-universe would automatically assume Bucky is innocent, though I have seen--and been part of--hard side-eyeing of the writers and their bullshit "Bucky is 100% guilty" flippant comments while at the same time exonerating Wanda of any responsibility whatsoever for her un-brainwashed actions. What I have seen is a lot of agreement that there would be questions, and misinformation, and people who blamed Bucky and people who didn't, and coverups and attempts at coverup, and then of course Civil War just had that soundbyte with a reporter tossing off "Winter Soldier aka Bucky Barnes, known terrorist blah blah blah," which is so rage-making all on its own but also kind of perfectly encapsulates the clusterfuck of that movie due to overstuffing it with "hail hail the gang's all here" and changing it from an actual movie in its own right to a prologue to the next team-up. Anyway, if it had been handled competently in the movies, I feel like the ambiguous reactions to the Vietnam vets would have been just about right, although all of this is complicated by the fact that the MCU can't make up its damn mind about how much it wants to be comic book land and how much it actually wants to have real world science apply, so we as fans have a harder time trying to gauge how the characters are expected to react to things happening that can't happen in the real world. I mean, I feel like even as fans, so many of our debates are per force reduced to trying to determine where the goalposts should be, because we had a fairly consistent foundation on which to base extrapolation of what had been done to Bucky, what could be done, and where the writers were going with the storyline. Except now it's clear that the writers had no clue what message they were sending, and/or they're backtracking on things they established in WS, and...I have wandered totally off-topic. Lemme drag myself back.

It did kind of feel like Bucky himself was reacting like I remember wounded vets reacting, who got back and completely distanced themselves from the military, didn't even want the help with rehab or anything, just wanted to build separate lives. I mean, some joined the peace movement and were very loud about the horrors, and some were defensive and either "we were just following orders" or "we were totally justified," but there are still guys who will only say about it, if they say anything, "We didn't give the orders, but we carried them out." But I still did it.*

Though my father was honorably discharged from the air program, he did later go back in, and served up until his retirement just a few years ago. I would say he was very by the book, for the most part, but there were aspects of the job on which he was notably silent. I used to think it was because he wanted to "protect" his children, or maybe he thought we couldn't handle it because we were girls. With a better understanding of how we both react to certain situations where we see no good alternatives, though, I think maybe those were just things he really could not articulate, except to a therapist (if he believed in them, which is a whole 'nother set of family issues for another time).

I think you're right, though. I mean, objectively speaking, I believe I remember recently looking at some numbers regarding Vietnam combatants and draftees and it actually wasn't as big a segment of the population as it feels like it was (I'm using so many qualifiers because I am seriously sick and so anything I didn't do like, yesterday, is very hazy, and even then), but--and I am a career military dependent, so my sampling is skewed--I have very few American friends, whose dads are my dad's age, who do not have a "if not for" story.

*I do feel like it's only right to clarify, even though this was not the original topic, that I personally feel Bucky is blameless, for comic book universe-related reasons that could not possibly apply to the real world, because science and brains, reasons which I feel still stand despite whatever dumbass stuff comes out of the writers' mouths after the fact. That is why I fell even more crazy in love with the character when he took responsibility anyway, if only for being the weapon in other people's hands, and while I still think putting him back on ice was an idiotic wrap-up from an extra-narrative viewpoint, within the arc as written, Bucky choosing to remove himself from the field of battle and store himself in the hands of the one man who had shown himself willing and able to stand down when complete vengeance was his for the taking, is such a brave and selfless and honorable and smart move, and I kind of hope he sleeps through the utter stupidity we all know Infinity War is going to be and maybe doesn't come back until Kevin Feige is fired from the studio in disgrace for stealing paper clips or something.

while I still think putting him back on ice was an idiotic wrap-up from an extra-narrative viewpoint, within the arc as written, Bucky choosing to remove himself from the field of battle and store himself in the hands of the one man who had shown himself willing and able to stand down when complete vengeance was his for the taking, is such a brave and selfless and honorable and smart move, and I kind of hope he sleeps through the utter stupidity we all know Infinity War is going to be and maybe doesn't come back until Kevin Feige is fired from the studio in disgrace for stealing paper clips or something.

OMG. <333 (and Nat and Steve and Sam can each wake him up with a kiss)

Did you ever see the Tumblr post that compared Steve, Bucky and Sam to the various vets -- WWII, Vietnam and Afghanistan? http://manwithoutborders.tumblr.com/post/148275742195/aleatoryw-kaasknot-havoke-do-you-ever Then someone brought in Nat at the end, which I really liked.

I've never quite understood how WWII got press as "the good war" given the bombings that ended it, but that just usually starts really unpleasant arguments.

Oh my god. Yeah, you and I had the whole conversation about the links between "winter soldier" and Vietnam as well as the Revolutionary War (I can't remember which of us linked the other to a whole bunch of stuff on that, we might have been swapping links, I can't remember, Moi, which of us was holding the brain then), and you linked me to the tumblr when it was just Steve, Bucky, and Sam. I never saw the addition of Nat, but shit, yes. And even more significantly, consider all the ways she's Othered, she's the spy, not the soldier, she's the woman, not the man, she's the Russian, not the American, she is the Red Scare, even more than Bucky with that red star on his shoulder ever was or could be. And yet she came in on her own, came to S.H.I.E.L.D., immigrated, hell, recruited other Avengers, the great American team (and no matter all the nods to the U.N. in the comics, or the far fewer nods in the movies, never mistake this team is American, it's led by the American, whoever wears the uniform). But the idea that she represents the Cold War also really puts an interesting spin on her message to the government at the end of Winter Soldier, both in terms of the MCU and in the analogue with the real world, because the MCU obviously needs its antagonists and its conflict and its underlying intrigues and conspiracies, all those puzzles fans love figuring out even as we know the writers have no idea in hell what they're doing and will never be able to stick the landing. And in the real world, global governments seem to grow more and more entrenched in their factionalizing and their backroom dealings, because that's how shortsighted people keep their shortsighted power and fuck the whole world over oh wait sorry, is my bitter showing. Anyway, the movie framed it as Nat saying the Avengers were needed, superheroes were needed, but it's Nat, so I think she was also speaking double meanings about whistleblowers in the ranks being needed, even as the government rebuilt S.H.I.E.L.D. or something like it, because the government abhors an acronym vacuum and from the pissing contests the other agencies would have over who got S.H.I.E.L.D.'s leftover stuff, you know a joint team with special oversight would arise, and it would soon become apparent that it would just be easier to make the team permanent and the foundation of its own thing than to try to re-allocate the resources, and Nat would know all of that, and was talking about that too, and that business as usual clearly wasn't going to stop being business as usual just because another big news story happened in Washington, look at how standard-issue the whole media circus was, and here they were interrogating her, the woman, the spy, the foreigner, and where was their golden boy who gave the speech to tear the place down? You boys play nice now, bye bye.

And I am the only one who wants Nat to have a turn with that shield in her hand now? I mean, realistically, in the main storyline, I don't think there's any way in hell she'd want it, but as an AR, it could be a beautiful thing.

WWII is all about the Nazis, donchaknow. Even in Utah, where the internment camps were set up in the backyard, or in California, or Oregon. If the Pacific side comes up at all, it's Pearl Harbor, as though that in any way justifies anything, especially the bombs. And nobody talks about the ships full of European Jewish refugees turned away from U.S. ports prior to U.S. entry into the war, ships forced back to their points of origin, where the refugees were gathered up and sent to concentration camps. That's on us too.

BELLA (late but I am replying!)

(I can't remember which of us linked the other to a whole bunch of stuff on that, we might have been swapping links, I can't remember, Moi, which of us was holding the brain then)

SUCH A GOOD QUESTION

And even more significantly, consider all the ways she's Othered, she's the spy, not the soldier, she's the woman, not the man, she's the Russian, not the American, she is the Red Scare, even more than Bucky with that red star on his shoulder ever was or could be.

YES, YES YES. SO MUCH. And she's the one who's constantly put down and misjudged, too, and she uses that as a weapon, not other peoples' weaknesses per se but what they think her weaknesses are.

And yet she came in on her own, came to S.H.I.E.L.D., immigrated, hell, recruited other Avengers, the great American team (and no matter all the nods to the U.N. in the comics, or the far fewer nods in the movies, never mistake this team is American, it's led by the American, whoever wears the uniform).

YES! she really chooses her own destiny, after having been so shaped and mangled, in a way I don't think a whole lot of the other characters really do. And she does it over and over again.

the MCU obviously needs its antagonists and its conflict and its underlying intrigues and conspiracies, all those puzzles fans love figuring out even as we know the writers have no idea in hell what they're doing and will never be able to stick the landing.

....//cries

Man, I think like 10% of fandom has probably spent way more time and effort and investment in trying to work out the MCU in both fiction and meta than the white dudes who get paid to fuck it up. ARGH.

the movie framed it as Nat saying the Avengers were needed, superheroes were needed, but it's Nat, so I think she was also speaking double meanings about whistleblowers in the ranks being needed, even as the government rebuilt S.H.I.E.L.D. or something like it

That's BRILLIANT, I love it. I was really sad most people saw Nat as some kind of snitch or even recklessly putting peoples' lives in danger (like she probably wouldn't have censored really sensitive info, she's presented as a brilliant hacker, but anyway) because OMG, it's so clearly an analogue to ED SNOWDEN. And yet I saw very little of that in fandom or reviews -- it was like "obviously this is a reference to Snowden" &c &c but not really any thought about why that character did it, and what it might have meant for her. (Which is another reason why AoU and that "I dreamed I was something more than they made me" crap just does not work for me, but ANYWAY.) Nat, who is like the embodiment of espionage and compartmentalization and Fury's methods, saying no, this doesn't work, not anymore, this was built on lies and this is where it takes you.

because the government abhors an acronym vacuum and from the pissing contests the other agencies would have over who got S.H.I.E.L.D.'s leftover stuff, you know a joint team with special oversight would arise, and it would soon become apparent that it would just be easier to make the team permanent and the foundation of its own thing than to try to re-allocate the resources, and Nat would know all of that, and was talking about that too, and that business as usual clearly wasn't going to stop being business as usual just because another big news story happened in Washington, look at how standard-issue the whole media circus was, and here they were interrogating her, the woman, the spy, the foreigner, and where was their golden boy who gave the speech to tear the place down? You boys play nice now, bye bye.

THAT'S JUST FANTASTIC
YES

(And I've been muttering in comments recently about a canon divergent AU idea where Nat and Maria and some AoS characters take down the remnants of SHIELD and try to build something new, not based on the old, but it would take a lot of research and worldbuilding I probably couldn't do, and I'm not sure if it'd be the best thing for those characters anyway.)

And I am the only one who wants Nat to have a turn with that shield in her hand now?

NO

She already got to kind of hold/fight with it a few times in AoU and I think even in Avengers, but yes! Captain Widow! or whatever it would be, LOL. There's that tiny little comics AU where she picks up Thor's hammer, and I thought maybe they were alluding to that in a sly way in that party scene.

Even in Utah, where the internment camps were set up in the backyard, or in California, or Oregon. If the Pacific side comes up at all, it's Pearl Harbor, as though that in any way justifies anything, especially the bombs.

Yeah, and the Pacific War barely comes up at all -- although it was used in a really interesting way for a character in Agent Carter, I don't know if you saw that ep.

And nobody talks about the ships full of European Jewish refugees turned away from U.S. ports prior to U.S. entry into the war, ships forced back to their points of origin, where the refugees were gathered up and sent to concentration camps. That's on us too.

Did you see that Twitter account that sent out the details about the refugees who were on the St Louis when it was refused entry and sent back? It was absolutely devastating. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/haunting-twitter-account-shares-the-fates-of-the-refugees-of-st-louis-180961955/

Though Vietnam was incredibly important to the US and a lot of the service people came from the Untited States, not all did. I'm Australian, and my uncle was a Vietnam veteran. The fight for Vietnam veterans to get recognition of their service took decades, and there are still bodies of service people to be identified and repatriated to my country. I wasn't alive during the conflict, but it certainly made an impact on the decades I did grow up in, if only because I had someone in my family who had been a part of it.

Thank you for bringing this up - a commenter above mentioned the Vietnam draft in Australia, and that was actually the first I'd heard of it. I knew that other Pacific nations were part of a coalition with U.S. forces, but you only ever seem to hear about U.S. veterans here, and I didn't know about a lot of this. History. Damn.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Obviously this is specific to the U.S., but ...

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