That’s too bad. Perhaps with your patient counsel, they will see the error of that view.
Are you talking about John Kerry?
I will tell them it was all in their head, that all of the people saying nasty things to them is a false memory and not real.
No doubt that will help immensely.
Well, I wouldn’t know, all of my people were Volvo driving Unitarians.
Returning to the OP for a moment, I have memories from many years ago of reading that a common practice in the military may have contributed to the persistence of MIA rumors. Unfortunately I don’t remember where I read it, so I am reduced to repeating hearsay, but it sounds plausible.
Allegedly, being listed as MIA instead of KIA carried advantages in terms of government benefits. Memory is hazy, but perhaps spousal benefits and/or salary were paid to spouses of MIA servicemen that were cut off when death was confirmed? Anyway, what I recall reading is that many times sympathetic officers would list a man as MIA even if they’d seen him blown sky-high, in order for his family to receive the more favorable benefits for as long as possible.
If that’s true, could a “culture” of doing that have sprung up in the military in Vietnam, for humane, even noble reasons? And thus created a false impression that there were lots more people missing-in-action than would otherwise have been the case, and discouraged timely resolution of the cases?
While it’s possible casualties were misreported, it still doesn’t really say anything about the discrepancy between the MIA legends around Vietnam and the lack of such legends (for the most part) about other wars because, again, MIA reports are exceedingly common. There are still more American servicemen listed as MIA from World War II *than the total number of dead iand missing n Vietnam. * The total MIAs from Vietnam are actually a smaller percentage of overall casualties than from World War II.
And yet WWII didn’t spawn an entire mythology around MIAs with movies and books and its own flag. I think, to be honest, that this boils down to the fact that the USA was on the winners’ podium in WWII and wasn’t in Vietnam.
I believe I’ve said it before, but an argument against widespread spitting is the number of spitters very publicly dead. Think about it: There’s a guy who was in country two days ago and is PTSDed to the hilt. Would you reasonably believe you could spit on him without him killing you?
I don’t think you’re an expert in the nature of PTSD.
Or at least sending them to the moon. Police reports of the altercations would go a long way to establish the credibility of spitting (or police reports of spitting, for that matter: isn’t it assault?)
Whoever makes those MIA/Prisoner flags must be a millionaire=every fire and police station seems to have them.
Yeah, the gist of the argument as I understood it might be restated as “during the 1960/1970s, the changing military culture resulted in an over-reporting of MIAs and a concomitant inability or unwillingness to later re-list them as KIAs, resulting in an awkward situation where military leaders more or less couldn’t downplay the MIA problem without admitting what they’d been doing, and without their guidance, true believers were able to inflate the perceived problem significantly.”
Whereas WWII vets were grimly realistic about the inability to meticulously account for every casualty in a vast worldwide conflagration.