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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.
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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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.
no subject
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.