Vietnam was a bad war.

That, at least, is our culture's consensus about the war.  Vietnam was the war where draftee soldiers killed babies and smoked pot.  It was the war where the U.S. soldier had a muddled mission, the war that we had no business fighting.  It was the war where the veterans came back and became alcoholic homeless burnouts.  

Vietnam was not like the second World War.  The second World War was filled with honest-to-god patriots saving the world from the evils of Nazi tyranny.


 It was a war fought by the Greatest Generation that came home to build the country and carry it through the 20th century on their shoulders.

This, at least, is what we have told ourselves as a society.  Where did this narrative of Vietnam as the bad war start?  It's been told to us, and repeated, by the media, by television, and by the movies.  And, after awhile, it's sort of accepted as factual.  In my review of 20th century war films, the demarcation line between the heroic patriotic films of the second World War, and the angst-filled suffering soldiers of the Vietnam era is stark.  Even the best of the Vietnam films - movies like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, and Apocalypse Now - are firmly focused on the horrors of war.  Pro-Vietnam war films like John Wayne's The Green Berets are considered laughably naive.

B.G. Burkett takes issue with this view of Vietnam, arguing that his generation of veterans, were victims of a cultural form of stolen valor, wrongly derided as screw-ups, when instead, they were actually some of the best soldiers produced by the U.S.

military.  It's an assertion that seems to fly in the face of so much cultural inertia that it seems difficult to believe.  But Burkett has facts.

Vietnam was the war of draftees, right?  But only a quarter of Vietnam soldiers were draftees.  Most volunteered.  Compare this with World War II where contrary to the popular perception of everyone enlisting to do their duty, 66% of the second World War force was draftees.

The idea of the burnt out Vietnam vet?  In actuality, the great majority of Vietnam vets went on to become highly successful individuals, with 85% successfully making the transition to civilian life.  What's more, 97% were honorably discharged, and 75% of those that saw combat, would do it again, even knowing the outcome.  Less than 1/2 of 1% of Vietnam vets have ever been jailed for a crime.

The idea of war crimes and of "baby-killing" soldiers?  Sure, Vietnam had atrocities, just as any war does.  My Lai comes easily to mind.  But Vietnam pales in the number of civilian deaths compared to the second World War.  Not only does one have to ignore the Dresden fire bombings, which killed tens of thousands of civilians, or the atomic bombs, but U.S. troops in the second World War were involved in significant numbers of rapes, murders, and assaults.

B.G. Burkett informed me of all of this during a phone interview with him in early January.  It was enough to make me re-think a lot of my old assumptions about the Vietnam war and the movies about the war.

Yet, even despite all this Vietnam revisionist history, I still can't imagine an earnest patriotic war film extolling the virtues of combat in Vietnam.