When Bush asserted that the aftermath of the US Vietnam experience was a useful example of the dangers of withdrawing from Iraq, I could not stop myself from trying to imagine what the Neocons were trying to achieve by putting those words into Bush's mouth. My ruminations led to a question about, for lack of a better term, "generational memory". I was born a few years after the end of WWII. Both of my parents served in that war, but their experiences were not a significant part of family lore. I was alive during the Korean War, but had no conscious experience of it.
Consequently, for me, both wars were as much historical events as WWI, in which the Grandfather I knew well fought. By this, I mean what I know about these wars is not the result of personal experience, even second-hand through personally delivered accounts of participants. My knowledge derives only from written and spoken accounts of news people, scholars or others whom I do not know, who probably have no direct experience of the events they are describing and interpreting, and who may have ideological or other biases.
Moreover, my education did not spend much, if any, time on the Korean War.
In contrast, the Vietnam War and its aftermath dominated my political consciousness throughout high school, college and part of graduate school. The War, the Civil Rights movement, the feminist revolution and the related issues of poverty and other forms of social injustice were the issues around which my own lasting political views were formed.
I then realized that I am (gasp) old. Anyone who was 10-15 years old in 1975 (to be conservative), when the War finally ended, probably has little more knowledge of Vietnam than I did of WWII or the Korean War. If true, that means that anyone younger than 42-47 has no direct, personal knowledge of Vietnam. Their knowledge, like mine of earlier conflicts, is primarily derived from secondary sources. Moreover, accounts of Vietnam are ideologically driven to an extent accounts of those earlier wars never were. The US lost; thus this nation's right-wing needs to justify their support for it and blame someone else for the loss.
So I hope to get some discussion of a very tentative hypothesis: Are perceptions of Vietnam peculiarly susceptible to manipulation by the Neocons? How, if at all, was Vietnam presented in the educations of people under the age of (say) 45? What other kinds of information do Kossacks of that age know about that war? What about the knowledge of those who are less politically involved or interested?
In sum, is Vietnam a topic about which opinions of younger generations are sufficiently malleable that opinions can be changed by enough propaganda? Has such propaganda, which has been disseminated at least since Reagan, already begun to change the previous perception that Vietnam was a quagmire that the US should never have entered, that it was never winnable and that the US should have gotten out earlier? Are discussions of Vietnam even persuasive anymore, or is that an issue that has simply receded into the past?