Has he been declared dead by the government? Were any automatic promotions after 1968 been rescinded and has the government asked her to return the X number of years of paychecks, less widow’s benefits? Is there a financial advantage she sees to refusing to accept the obvious?
She may not be as nutty as some think.
ETA: For the record for those who don’t know, my father was a POW in WWII and he thought many of those in the POW/MIA community were either nutbars or had some financial or political stake in maintaining the illusion that any of those guys were still alive.
You have a point - there could be method to the madness.
My sister was a VA nurse, and one of the saddest things she said about that type of nursing was that the spouses couldn’t afford to let their husbands die. Their benefits would be cut too severely. So they were keeping people alive - at incredible cost to the taxpayer - not out of hope of recovery, or because the individual was still enjoying a worthy quality of life - but because on life support his wife got the full benefit check.
I’m not a flag-waver. Never have been. However, my husband is a Vietnam combat vet and I recognize that he may have a more personal sentiment about that than I do. My BIL’s cousin’s remains were just returned to the US about 5 years ago, so I’m sure he has an even more personal take on it than my husband.
I feel as bad for the missing GIs and their families as the next guy, but I’m not interested in expressing those feelings to the world with a flag. It makes me no more or no less aware, sympathetic, crushed, appalled, or otherwise emotionally touched than someone who does.
But of course, though it looks that way, you are not really claiming that there’s nobody who actually DOES honestly think tha, and if they say so they’re lying. You’re just trying to give back as bad as they did to what you saw as condescending and dismissive attitudes from earlier posters.
…Right?
I work every day in an office that displays the MIA flag. It’s an honorable display of remembrance and of the need for an accounting, and over the last six years it has specially regained significance (though yes, I would support an amendment to the Act so that the flag represents ALL those missing or captured, past, present and future). OTOH if somebody walks in that office with a petition asking Puerto Rico to pull out of the Miss Universe Pageant (held in Vietnam this year) because “there are still Puerto Rican American troops captive in jungle camps”, he’ll be listened to politely but will not get past a 4th-level assistant.
There ARE fools and people in denial and condescending people on every side of every issue, even this one - but are we going to let THEM be the ones who define how we discuss it?
So if in some future thread about some random topic, if I (an anti-war liberal) put on an earnest face (I’m generally earnest when discussing important topics) and say “Oh, I support the troops, they’re just doing their duty, it’s the war I’m against” (which is within shouting distance of something I might say), your response will be “oh yeah? Well, look at what Sampiro and RTFirefly said in that thread about POW MIA!”?
Seems to me that that would be a bit of a non-sequitur.
No, probably not, although I might respond to Sampiro or RTF that way if they had the brass to make such a statement. No, in your case, I’d probably hope that you are sincere and perhaps mention that not all of your brethren who claim to believe the same way actually do.
[One and only response and hijack]
Yeah, it’s called a joke. Keep reading and you come to an actual real response about the families of MIAs still passionate about Americans being tortured . Nice that you still managed to work in an implied impugn on my patriotism and a reference to southerners as inbread [sic] hillbillies though. (What is the root of your obsessive grudge with the south?) :dubious:
A bit more OP but I’ll still keep it within hijack brackets: There is nobody on earth I hate enough to wish upon them what men like McCain and Jeremiah Denton and thousands of others whose names are forgotten went through in those jungle hellholes, and if some eccentric mad billionaire were to offer me $100 million to spend one year in a place like the Hanoi Hilton I’d absolutely refuse. I do not minimize their physical suffering then or their ongoing emotional suffering or that of their loved ones.
That said, I probably find more offensive than you found the above the notion that surviving torture automatically makes one a brave and noble person deserving of praise. It does not. It makes them veterans and torture survivors.
They survived what for most is and hopefully will always be an inconceivably horrible ordeal. These men weren’t tortured for their beliefs and they weren’t martyrs- they were military prisoners who were, as mentioned above, captured by despicable and cruel enemy soldiers (many of whom it should be remembered had seen their families and friends and fellow countrymen literally burned to death).
These men who were tortured had often undertaken missions that, had they ordered by any other army, you would not hesitate to call them evil and demand revenge. They killed civilians- many of them children- and destroyed huge regions of two nations that were already among the poorest on the Earth and that did so without discretion or seeming regard for the consequences of their actions and not even due to personal malice or an attack upon Americans but due to political ideology of the leaders of a nation of starving peasants who had helped us in World War I. They set up the horrors that would lead to Pol Pot every bit as much as the VC did. I get sick and tired of hearing about “our brave men and their sacrifices”- let’s NOT forget that they were in a war zone killing people, they didn’t get kidnapped while delivering Christmas gifts (unless you count Linebacker II perhaps).
Again and again, what they endured I’d wish on nobody, but suffering alone does not make a deed heroic or a cause noble anymore than, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the fact somebody is willing to die for a belief makes that belief true. Calling them all brave and comparing them to self sacrificing martyrs just because they went through hell is a simplification that is… well, I won’t say unAmerican, but certainly sickeningly jingoistic with a serious nod towards racism.
[/One and only response and hijack]
Ahh, I see. It was just a joke. No harm intended, no denigration of the sacrifices of the troops in Vietnam, no crass insult to those who keep the memories of what these people died for alive then? Silly me. No harm no foul I guess. So sorry.
BTW, just to clarify, in the same vein( because they’re just jokes after all, they don’t mean anything), I trust all jokes about faggots and dead mothers are now just peachy, hmmm? After all, they’re just jokes, no offense was intended, lighten up man, sheeesh!
Your particular beliefs about the righteousness of the Vietnam War are irrelevant. When serial killers are executed, do members of their family cry? Yes, because they’re family members. The flag espouses no viewpoint on whether or not the war was just, it simply asserts “You Are Not Forgotten”, a noble sentiment under any circumstances, and one that you would be quick to express about any of your family members. These people are looking for a closure they’ll likely never get. What the hell is so objectionable about that that we need an off-key dissertation about the Vietnam War and its ethics in addition to a general maligning of these people as “wingnuts”, at minimum by association?
The answer, of course, is nothing. But God knows that you guys just had to work those in, so congratulations.
Hey, I suggest if you don’t like the POW-MIA flag or bumper sticker, you should make your feelings known to the bearer. I’m sure he’ll take it down, because he would never want to be, you know…racist.
I wasn’t referring to the families- of course they still remember and don’t want their nephews forgotten, and I never referred to anybody as wingnuts (I don’t believe I’ve ever used the term). I’m referring to WeirdDave’s “Sampiro’s mocking our poor brave sacrificing heroes” comment.
I’m not referring to those waving POW-MIA flags or bumper stickers. I’m referring to the jingoism in this thread. That said, how is it not racist to dismiss the killings of innocent Vietnamese and Cambodians by automatically hailing as heroes men who dropped the bombs because they were captured and on our side?
On my holiest oath of honor I have a friend at work (who I have mentioned him before on these boards) who is himself a former PoW in Vietnam. He himself has said that he cringes when people refer to his “sacrifice”, for to quote him, “A sacrifice is given willingly- I’d never have willingly done that.” He also says he doesn’t think of himself as a hero and will no longer speak in public about his experiences because he detests the “people who say wars are bad are un-Americans and mocking this man’s horrors” spin that’s so often put on it. (I know he doesn’t like McCain but I’m not sure what his politics are otherwise- I don’t think he’s pro Obama either.)
It’s been almost 15 years now since Clinton, working from groundwork laid by Bush the Elder, moved to re-establish diplomatic ties with Vietnam. At the time, the move was opposed on the grounds that Vietnam hadn’t accounted for some MIAs and might still be holding them as prisoners.
That belief seems to have diminished now, and never made any sense. As someone, possibly Pete Peterson, the first post-war U.S. ambassador to VN, said, you can’t tell a grieving family member when it’s time to give up hope, but you also can’t base your foreign policies on delusions. The whole thing is more a cause for sadness than anger.
You know, the proper response when someone points out that you’ve said something offensive is to say “I’m sorry”, not to attack the person for not getting the poor joke you were trying to make.
And where in this thread have I mentioned the “poor sacrificing heroes”? Nowhere, that’s where. I have merely maintained that men who served in Vietnam, particularly men who were held a POWs, some of whom never came back, “sacrificed” for their country. Do you want to contest that?
Such as equating southerners as inbred hillbillies? As this is not the Pit I will be concise and say I do not apologize for your inability to comprehend the obvious.
Not those words, but you do go for appeals to emotion “with the grace of a freshman fumbling with a bra strap”, accusing me of denigrating memories and the like and such quotes as
This was… a subject of debate was it? (Incidentally most deaths in Vietnam were not of PoWs.)
The word sacrificed I’ll contest all day, but it would be an exercise in semantics.
Charming. Did you really need to make this that personal or to allude to your participations in other boards in GD of all places? I did not call you a name, and you’re currently in the pit thumping your chest at having heard hate speech when you hurl it at me in Great Debates and bring up my dead mom to boot (yep, still dead she is, probably decomposed by now, not sure how much really- we’re just not as close as we used to be). Your ilk haven’t gotten a rise out of me in a very very long time because I honestly don’t care, though I will say that OG but you people are truly pathetic.
That is an excellent, if obvious, point. If those guys want to honor their fallen comrades they should find a less specific symbol. The POW/MIA patch, even if its use is expanded to remembering POWs and MIAs of all wars, says nothing about the people whose fates are known, who are the majority. As it stands, though, like the particularly-overused and most famous Confederate flag, it has a meaning that has changed for some people but not for others, and is associated in the minds of the majority with people who cannot accept what is obvious to most people, be it a lost cause or a lost husband. Like I said, there should be a more general symbol of remembrance of all fallen comrades.
OTOH, I thought the American flag served as that reminder.
Those are your words, not mine. You invoked that image when you said that people only had the MIA/POW flag because “the confederate flag was too controversial”. I don’t know where you get this idea that I’m hostile to the south, I’m a southerner from a long, long line of southerners
Those were RTFirefly’s words. Do you want to take ownership of them?
Thank you for that fascinating historical tidbit. I had no idea! I though Vietnam was a place where American soldiers were flown to in order for them to be imprisoned and tortured. Off the plane, into the gulag, that’s Vietnam. Now that we’ve dispensed with that particular straw man, are you contesting the fact that some POWs died and never came home? Because that’s all I said.
Yup, it would be, and you’ve chosen a particularly idiotic side to argue. Americans went to fight in Vietnam. Some died. they SACRIFICED their lives. Some were held prisoner. They SACRIFICED their freedom. Some came home traumatized and were never well again. They SACRIFICED their mental health. Do you deny any of these things?
NOW maybe you’re finally getting it. Finally. It’s PERSONAL. The subject of POWs/MIAs is extremely PERSONAL to a great many people in this country who lost loved ones in the service of a country that didn’t even care for a long time. You want to insult and belittle people who fly the MIA/POW flag in remembrance ? Fine, go ahead, it’s a free country. Those people you dismiss so lightly fought and died so that you’d have the right to do so. However, when you do so, never forget, NEVER FUCKING FORGET that you are PERSONALLY insulting a great many people.