There was a brief tabloid media kerfluffle in NYC last week about a relic of the Vietnam War -- the POW/MIA flag.
It seems the flag had not been flown in front of City Hall for almost a year, until someone noticed and dropped a dime to the Daily News.
The non-Murdoch tabloid put this "exclusive story" on about 80 percent of the front page, with the major wood screaming "GET IT BACK UP!", and another headline getting after Mayor DeBlasio (emphases in the original) -- "MEMO TO OUR GADABOUT MAYOR: As America observes Memorial Day, why isn't the POW flag flying at City Hall?"
The flag was run up the next day, because DeBlasio obviously prefers not to piss off veterans who are fervently attached to this weird flag, based essentially on the conspiracy theory that the dastardly Vietnamese Communists are still holding American prisoners.
And he certainly does not want to see any more tabloid front pages about it.
More, below.
I can understand DeBlasio's reluctance to make an issue of this weird flag. Veterans and tabloid newspapers love it, and any attempt to explain why it is a selective anachronism, more than 40 years after the Vietnamese returned every POW they had, would fall on deaf ears.
Like those of Paul Rieckhoff, an "Iraq War veteran and 9/11 first responder who runs Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America":
“I am not at all surprised,” Rieckhoff told The News Tuesday. “The mayor has proven to be extremely disconnected from the veterans community, and this is the kind of thing that happens when you don’t understand or appreciate our traditions and priorities.”
Flying the flag at City Hall is required by a 1990 city ordinance "until every servicemember is accounted for."
Which is essentially forever, since "more than 83,000 people who served in the United States armed forces are still unaccounted for since World War II" (a mere 1,600 of those in Vietnam), and accounting for every one of them cannot possibly happen.
Everyone knows that every one of those servicemembers is dead. In Vietnam, most of them were pilots whose planes were shot down or crashed; they either died on impact, or were killed by the people they were bombing soon after capture.
For example, from the wiki, Evelyn Grubb, one of the founders of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, which came up with the flag, found out after the war that her pilot husband died "shortly after being shot down."
Nevertheless, Grubb became "a driving force in gaining the flag's adoption by the military, the U.S. Postal Service and other federal service agencies. Eventually the flag became widely popular and adoption of its use began to spread on its own, as the flag became a national symbol of Vietnam War remembrance."
That's the part about the weird flag I don't get -- the Vietnam War was a FUBAR disaster in every way, especially for the families of those killed or maimed there.
We should remember all of them, not just on Memorial Day, and certainly not just the relative few who were prisoners or MIA/presumed KIA.
The weird flag grants a special status to POW/MIAs -- they will not be forgotten, while the sacrifice of tens of thousands of Army and Marine soldiers who are not represented on the weird flag is implicitly forgotten in this "national symbol of Vietnam War remembrance."
I believe there's a bit of class bias here; most POW/MIAs were officers, like Grubb's husband, Sen. John McCain, former Sen. James Stockdale, etc. Their wives and families gave us the weird flag.
Most dead servicemembers, in Vietnam as in every war, were not officers; the weird flag essentially ignores them.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, aka The Wall, opposed by conservative veteran types who love the weird flag, thankfully recognizes everyone.
Perhaps the weird flag made sense in the early 1970s, when there were actual POWs and the Vietnamese were not cooperating about MIAs. Those days are long gone.
But the weird flag only became institutionalized in the 1980s and 1990s, long after there was any hope of a POW/MIA returning home alive.
Now the flag represents Rambo conspiracy theories at worst, and a selective memorialization of some bomber and other pilots at best.
I prefer inclusive memorials like The Wall for our Vietnam dead, and replacing the weird flag with a Memorial Day flag that honors all US servicemembers who died in every war.
But that flag does not exist, and the weird one does. The fervent support of the weird flag among some veterans will keep it flying, as the NYC ordinance requires, essentially forever.
Opposition to the weird flag is rare, an academic here or there, and therefore no politicians, even a relatively progressive mayor like DeBlasio, will call for its retirement, now or in the near future.
I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam War, so I knew some of what the weird flag is about, and have learned more since.
Young people today, and in future generations, are and will be mystified by the weird black flag flying over post offices, town halls, state government buildings, the White House, etc., and some will wonder, justifiably, what is that and what does it mean.
Hopefully then the weird flag will be consigned to the dustbin of history.