The thing is, wanting to end a war and supporting an enemy are not reliably the same thing. It's also not the same thing as not supporting our soldiers. There may well be overlap, but there isn't always. There are some people you can't convince of that--but there are always people who make it harder to try. This is, of course, true of both sides. On the one hand, you got the people who called Vietnam veterans baby-killers. The people who openly consorted with the North Vietnamese government and claimed that all stories of atrocities committed by the Viet Cong were exaggerations at best and probably flat-out lies. Those people polarized the debate. However, so did the people on the other side, the ones who declared that anyone opposed to the war was a traitor, the ones who claimed that all stories of atrocities committed by US soldiers were exaggerations and best and probably flat-out lies. There were, of course, nice, sane people on both sides of the debate, but, as in any contentious situation, it's the lunatic fringe that gets noticed.

Hearts and Minds seems sane and rational, though I'm told the filmmaker, Peter Davis, read a message from the North Vietnamese government as part of his acceptance speech. So there's that. And it's certainly a biased film--the contrast of General Westmoreland explaining that "Orientals" don't place the same value on human life as Americans being intercut with a Vietnamese funeral and the grief connected to it kind of shows that, I think. Most of the film is intended to show the problems of our occupation of Vietnam. Many of those interviewed are veterans, but mostly the kind of veterans who were protesting the war. The few others are primarily used as contrast.

Now, Westmoreland claimed to have been quoted out of context, and there are those who say that Davis trapped him into making the statement. However, I have to say that I can't think of any context that would have made that statement less reprehensible. I also can't see how anything Davis said would have forced Westmoreland to make that kind of statement. Likewise George Coker, a former American POW, declares that Vietnam would be a very pretty country were it not for the people. Now, I can understand Coker's not being the most happy with the Vietnamese people, especially of course the North Vietnamese. On the other hand, he is committing the falacy of tarring the entire population of the country with the same brush.

It is also true, of course, that the film shows only the American atrocities. We see Phan Thị Kim Phúc, the famous girl photographed running naked down the street, horribly burned by napalm. (Richard Nixon, apparently, believed the photo, and presumably the film of the same event, to be faked.) We see that funeral. We hear veterans talk about the horrible things they saw. But we never actually hear Coker talk about what happened to him. We don't get told how either side treated their prisoners, really. We hear a lot about napalm, but nothing about the Hanoi Hilton. It is a biased film, though I'm kind of curious as to how much of popular culture at the time was biased the other way.

I will admit that I do not much approve of the Vietnam War in retrospect. To be fair, I wasn't there for it. The war is considered to have ended in 1975, more than a year before I was born. I'm not best thrilled with the current war, either, though I'm sure none of you are surprised by that. I like to think that we've gotten better at presenting an unbiased view of things, but I know that we haven't. Then again, hardly anyone in history ever has. We consider our current reporting of World War II to be unbiased, but how often do we consider the perspective of anyone but ourselves and Hitler?