Ted Morgan wrote:
> The other piece is the popular culture which, in the US mainstream, has left
> the Vietnamese people/victims of this oppression completely invisible
> (unless, as in Platoon, they are victims of individual "bad apples") and, in
> fact, have been transformed into the perpetrators, with the US (soldiers) as
> victims (e.g. Deer Hunter, Forrest Gump most recently). In other words, the
> popular culture reinforces the official propaganda of the war as something
> THEY did TO US.
See my recently published book, "The Viet Nam War/The American War: Images
and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives" for a
lengthy discussion of exactly this issue, including a discussion of the
racism of Platoon.
Renny Christopher
rchristo@toto.csustan.edu