Last night, Justin and I decided to finally watch "First Blood". I recently obtained the Ultimate Edition, with Survival Mode, which I found in the $5 bin. It was great. I had seen it before, in second grade, but I didn't remember a whole lot. It was the first R-rated movie I ever saw. Watched it over at a friend's house. I think I enjoyed it more this time around. Mindless destruction of people and property, followed by a somewhat poignant ending. The whole movie can be taken in a couple of ways. You can enjoy it for the exploding buildings and guerrilla warfare tactics, and you can also look at the subtlety behind the scenes.
I find it very interesting when I hear about how Vietnam vets were treated when they came home from war. I guess I just assumed that people hated the administration and not the soldiers themselves. These days, I don't know anyone personally who doesn't at least pay lip service to supporting our troops. I see bumper stickers all the time that say "Support the troops, not the war" and things of that nature. Maybe it just has to do with how many more casualties there were in Vietnam as compared to the Iraq War.
Brushing all that aside, we both really enjoyed it from both points of view, and decided we had to go find "Rambo: First Blood Part II". To the Wal-Mart Bargain Bin! We found it within five minutes. Came back and watched it. I think I might've liked it a little better than the first one. There were more politics involved, and it really showcased some of the bureaucrat scum we had running things (so much unlike today). So we gotta find "Rambo III". We got two weeks until we see "Rambo" (AKA "Rambo IV").
The original title of Radiohead's 2007 album was "In Rambos".
I find it very interesting when I hear about how Vietnam vets were treated when they came home from war. I guess I just assumed that people hated the administration and not the soldiers themselves. These days, I don't know anyone personally who doesn't at least pay lip service to supporting our troops. I see bumper stickers all the time that say "Support the troops, not the war" and things of that nature. Maybe it just has to do with how many more casualties there were in Vietnam as compared to the Iraq War.
Brushing all that aside, we both really enjoyed it from both points of view, and decided we had to go find "Rambo: First Blood Part II". To the Wal-Mart Bargain Bin! We found it within five minutes. Came back and watched it. I think I might've liked it a little better than the first one. There were more politics involved, and it really showcased some of the bureaucrat scum we had running things (so much unlike today). So we gotta find "Rambo III". We got two weeks until we see "Rambo" (AKA "Rambo IV").
The original title of Radiohead's 2007 album was "In Rambos".
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Comments
I need to see this one while it's still on the big screen. Maybe this weekend?
Speaking of Vietnam vets, my dad was in uniform on a college campus during the Vietnam era and has told me about how badly he was treated. The public's attitude towards the military was much less than favorable. I've also read that one of the "lessons learned" after Vietnam was that protestors should direct their animosity towards the administration rather than the troops. Those slogans you see (Support the troops, not the war) are practically a direct result of what our country endured during that time.
I need to ask my uncle about Vietnam sometime. He doesn't talk about it much, but I'd like to see what his experience was.
My father's friend died next to him on the beach. I wish he had talked about that. It was one of the most important moments of his life but we never knew much about it.
Whether your uncle was walking point in the jungle or was a cook in Saigon, get his story. Not just the combat, get the heat and the bugs and the bar girls and the food and the music and the drugs (if he wasn't partaking, his friends were). Write it down. It's the real history.
Groups of veterans were among the strongest anti-war groups.
The My Lai massacre left a bad taste in peoples' mouths (although there were some real heroes that day, too, like the pilot who set his chopper down in front of the troops and dared them to fire on him, or the guy who waded into a ditch of bloody bodies to retrieve a crying baby). Free-fire zones meant you could shoot anything that moved. Hostile villages were torched and crops napalmed. Every day. The troops didn't (usually) make those situations but they often got blamed. Guys came back traumatized and burned out and did terrible things.
If this all sounds familiar, it's because we're starting to see it happen again, as history comes full circle and we pay the same price for making the same mistakes.