THE VIETNAM WAR'S REMEMBRANCE: THE CELEBRATED VETERAN AND THE ABSENCE OF POLITICAL INQUIRY

When Barack Obama visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Memorial Day 2012, he told the assembled crowd that the war had been “painful” primarily because the nation had not expressed sufficient gratitude to the men and women who had fought it. “You came home and sometimes were denigrated when you should have been celebrated,” Obama explained, calling this failure a “national shame, [and] a disgrace” and “resolv[ing] that it will not happen again.”Footnote ⁶ These remarks evoke the persistent remembrance of Vietnam veterans having been unfairly maligned and rejected by the nation, one that, while not entirely unsubstantiated, has come to dominate American remembrances of the war, blotting out attention to any other aspect of the war: the disingenuous policies that led to US intervention and escalation, and the hundreds of atrocities committed during it, the deaths of millions of Vietnamese and the environmental destruction of Vietnam among them.Footnote ⁷ As scholars like Patrick Hagopian and Christian Appy have shown, beginning in the 1980s, the national debate over the Vietnam War transformed into a focus on “national healing,” an effort to belatedly honor Vietnam veterans as, in Appy's words, “mainstream culture and politics promoted the idea that the deepest shame related to the Vietnam War was not the war itself, but America's failure to embrace its military veterans.”Footnote ⁸

A key moment in this effort came in 1981, when Ronald Reagan – one of the foremost proponents of this discourse of healing – awarded the Medal of Honor to Vietnam veteran Roy Benavidez in order to assert, as Andrew Bacevich put it, that “nameless others had wronged America's fighting men … [and he] would not repeat these errors; he would champion soldiers, correcting the injustices done to them in the 1960s by providing the soldiers of the 1980s everything they needed and more.”Footnote ⁹ Reagan's was hardly the first use of the Medal of Honor to establish the war's nobility, but doing so in 1982 was a key means of furthering a healing discourse around the war that facilitated his renewed investments in American militarism and his more aggressive foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁰

The notion that Vietnam veterans' mistreatment must be both atoned for and never repeated likewise facilitated subsequent US interventions. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Jerry Lembcke argues, “the U.S. soldiers in the Gulf had become the primary reason for the war” and the remembrance of mistreated veterans had “galvanized the sentiments of the American people sufficiently to discredit peace activists and give George Bush his war.”Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, Gulf War victory celebrations featured Vietnam veterans and became another public forum for healing from that war.Footnote ¹² By the late twentieth century, as Kristin Hass has shown, Americans increasingly celebrated veterans for their service “regardless of the terms of that service or what that military service does in the world.”Footnote ¹³ The consequences of this remembrance are profound. As Appy explains, these remembrances “celebrat[e] uncritical obedience to authority” and assert that “Citizens have no obligation to understand the purpose of [service members'] mission.”Footnote ¹⁴ This trend has continued into the current wars to the point where, as Mary Dudziak explains, in Iraq “the mission had devolved to supporting the troops, while the troops themselves gave the mission meaning.”Footnote ¹⁵ Americans' remembrance of mistreated veterans as the most significant aspect of the Vietnam War's legacy, that is, has encouraged Americans to honor servicemen while not questioning resurgent American miltiarism.

Barack Obama and his advisers have claimed that his views of US foreign policy have not been informed by the war and have frequently sought to distance the conflicts that he has managed from comparisons with it.Footnote ¹⁶ Most famously, when he appeared onstage at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York on 1 December 2009 to announce his deployment of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, Barack Obama declared that “those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam” were relying upon “a false reading of history.”Footnote ¹⁷ Also, he and his advisers trumpeted their reading of Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam as evidence that they were not repeating the mistakes of an earlier generation.Footnote ¹⁸ Nonetheless, he has consistently acted according to a remembrance of the Vietnam War that emphasizes the failure to respect US veterans. Indeed, although his conservative critics disdain him and valorize Ronald Reagan, Bacevich's analysis that in awarding the Medal of Honor to Benavidez Reagan sought to legitimate expanding militarism and cultivate acquiescent patriotism aptly describes Obama's approach to the war in Vietnam in the twenty-first century.Footnote ¹⁹ That is, in a moment when critiques of his foreign policies often invoked the Vietnam War, Obama's use of military awards has repeatedly positioned him, and been positioned in US newspapers, as both righting Vietnam's most serious wrongs and avoiding their repetition. Also, he has used Vietnam veterans' stories to insist that Americans celebrate individual soldiers' actions while remaining uncritical of and unconcerned by the policies that they pursue. In both implicitly and explicitly yoking the Vietnam War's legacy to the Afghanistan war, this rhetoric facilitates an uncritical acceptance of a US foreign policy that remains aggressively militaristic.

OBAMA'S VIETNAM

Obama presented awards to and otherwise publicly championed previously forgotten or maligned Vietnam veterans in a moment when the Afghanistan war was increasingly unfavorably compared to the war in Vietnam. Just four days after his inauguration, the Washington Times punctured the optimism that surrounded Obama's election, reminding those who compared Obama to John F. Kennedy that “it was Kennedy who gave us Vietnam, a military disaster from which America has never truly recovered” and that “Afghanistan will be [Obama's] Vietnam.”Footnote ²⁰ Despite Obama's December 2009 efforts to distance the two wars while announcing his troop surge in Afghanistan, for many critics Afghanistan seemed headed towards a conclusion as unsatisfying as that in Vietnam – one in which the US left an unstable ally to continue the fight, knowing that it was likely to fail. Newspapers quickly declared that “LBJ fought Vietnam as the conflicted war president he was” and “[o]ne senses Obama is escalating for the same reason”; that “it sounds like Afghanistanization, which sounds like Vietnamization”; and that it was “a plan to exit, Southeast Asia-style, not achieve victory.”Footnote ²¹ Journalist David Sanger explains that these critiques were not necessarily misguided; Obama's advisers had termed their plan “Afghanistan Good Enough,” in which “good enough” meant sufficiently stable for the United States to leave – a term that recalls Nixon's rightfully maligned “Decent Interval” – and Sanger notes that this plan seemed destined to leave US troops feeling frustrated and abandoned: “Had its existence been known beyond the White House, it likely would have outraged many who served, and who feared that a ‘good-enough’ mentality would abandon their hard-won gains.”Footnote ²²

These criticisms came as Obama expanded the reach of US military power in ways that raised ethical and legal questions. Chief among these was the expansion of antiterrorism efforts into ostensibly neutral countries including Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia through an increasing reliance on drones and special-forces deployments. Obama has defined these policies as both necessary and legal. At West Point in 2009, he made clear that the United States would be increasing its military aid to and activity in Pakistan because “this same cancer [of Islamic extremism] has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan” and “we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border.”Footnote ²³ Four years later, at the National Defense University, he justified his administration's increasing use of drones by arguing that both US and global security interests necessitated projecting power into other countries: “To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and our facilities abroad, but also in the very places like Sana'a and Kabul and Mogadishu where terrorists seek a foothold.”Footnote ²⁴ He further explained that drone use would prevent the levels of civilian casualties that marked the war in Vietnam.Footnote ²⁵

Long before these speeches, however, these policies had earned sharp comparisons with the war in Vietnam. If proponents of extending the war into Pakistan referenced Vietnam-era efforts to dismantle the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia, critics increasingly compared increasing drone use in ostensibly neutral countries to Nixon's incursions into Laos and Cambodia.Footnote ²⁶ The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted, “Our military incursion into Cambodia simply expanded the war in the region, severely damaged Cambodia itself and widened our theater of battle without improving our situation in Vietnam” before explaining, “The parallel with Vietnam and Cambodia is Afghanistan and our new focus on Pakistan.”Footnote ²⁷

Overseas, London's Morning Star noted that Obama “must recognize the growing parallel with Vietnam,” in which “US forces first expanded the war into North Vietnam and later wholly illegally into Cambodia.”Footnote ²⁸ The Guardian wrote that “the extension of a conflict onto the territory of a friendly, and highly fractious, allied country has a very bad resonance from the recent past. The expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia and Laos, for example, made things much worse.”Footnote ²⁹ In Canada, the Globe and Mail inveighed about Obama's drone program: “Not since Richard Nixon ordered secret but massive air strikes on Cambodia during the Vietnam war has such a clandestine, ‘deniable’ and ‘out of area’ bombing campaign played such a central and controversial role in war.”Footnote ³⁰ A year later, London's Evening Standard unfavorably compared Obama's foreign policy with Nixon's: “When Richard Nixon bombed Cambodia 40-odd years ago, he tried pretty hard to keep it secret. Now we have a US President for whom drone attacks against targets in Yemen and Pakistan are part of the day-to-day conduct of international affairs.”Footnote ³¹ Similar sentiments appeared in newspapers in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.Footnote ³² Domestically and abroad, troubling but frequently forgotten aspects of the Vietnam War had become the defining points of comparison in critiques of Obama's foreign policy.

“A MISTAKE THAT MUST NEVER BE REPEATED”: RECOGNIZING VIETNAM VETERANS IN A MOMENT OF EXPANDED WAR

In this moment, the Obama administration repeatedly recognized Vietnam veterans in a manner that relied upon a familiar narrative that celebrated soldiers without considering the war's larger political questions. Significantly, each man Obama honored had been involved in the illegal, or at least highly questionable, escalations with which Obama's own war plans were in that moment being unfavorably compared. His honoring of their service while not questioning the appropriateness of invading Laos or Cambodia or bombing North Vietnam implicitly responded to these condemnations. Focussing attention solely on the soldier and either ignoring the political significance of what they had been doing or insisting that service in those endeavors had been both proper and necessary helped establish the celebration of the soldier without questioning the expansion of US war-making as an acceptable response to the current wars.

Each of the three cases in which Obama has posthumously recognized a Vietnam veteran reveals how his embrace of the Vietnam War's legacy contributes to this defense of his foreign policies. Richard Etchberger's case has been remembered firmly within the larger narrative of the maligned Vietnam veteran, with the failure to award him the Medal of Honor representative of the United States' willingness to disregard American sacrifices in order to maintain its reputation. Yet while Etchberger's heroism in battle is unquestionable, the effort to recognize him has marginalized the reality that he was killed on a mission that placed US troops in neutral Laos. As Timothy N. Castle describes it, Heavy Green was “a covert operation conducted within the framework of a duplicitous and unparalleled American foreign policy,” and “When disaster struck … U.S. representatives embarked on an immediate and decades long cover-up.”Footnote ³³ Castle acknowledges that Heavy Green was illegal, but the primary problem with that is that Etchberger's “extraordinary bravery has never been publicly acknowledged.”Footnote ³⁴ That is, the individual soldier's actions, rather than the circumstances in which they occur, are worthy of public consideration.

Other advocates have likewise understood the failure to award the Medal of Honor as the result of a duplicitous, ungrateful government seeking to protect itself at the expense of the troops. In a June 2006 letter requesting that Etchberger's case be reviewed, Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D–ND) noted a former air force official's explanation that “the determining factor … was that the Medal of Honor could not be [awarded] without national publicity, a situation that was to be avoided due to the site of the action and the details surrounding it.”Footnote ³⁵ The air force chief of staff told Etchberger's commanding officer that “due to the sensitive political situation in Southeast Asia the Medal of Honor would not be awarded.”Footnote ³⁶ Each writer's implicit assumption – that Etchberger deserves the medal despite having participated in an illegal operation – intersects with the prevailing discourse that asks Americans to celebrate Vietnam veterans without debating the war.

Media coverage leading up to the posthumous award likewise evoked a remembrance of the Vietnam War which demands that Americans celebrate military service absent any consideration of the political or historical context in which it occurs and construed Obama as resolving this mistreatment. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that “Lyndon B. Johnson declined to award the medal” but that “Obama then told Cory Etchberger that his father would finally receive” it.Footnote ³⁷ The New York Daily News wrote that the recognition “was personally denied by Lyndon B. Johnson” but that “President Obama will take down the last veil surrounding the Vietnam War-era case.”Footnote ³⁸ The Washington Times, in an article that opened by declaring that “Etchberger died for Lyndon Johnson's sins; on Tuesday, President Obama paid tribute to Etchberger,” complained about the “political grandstanding” that created the conditions under which “it has taken four decades for the country publicly to recognize Etchberger's sacrifice and heroism,” but lauded Obama for correcting this error.Footnote ³⁹

Obama followed suit in the award ceremony, invoking the remembrance of marginalized veterans and presenting himself as resolving the Vietnam War's enduring pain and thus not repeating its errors. Three times in thirteen minutes, he asserted the imperative to confer upon Vietnam veterans honors that they had been denied and described himself as the vehicle through which that recognition would occur. “Today marks another chapter in a longer story of our Nation finally honoring that generation of Vietnam veterans who served with dedication and courage, but all too often were shunned when they came home, which was a disgrace that must never happen again,” he told the crowd, before telling Etchberger's sons that “today your nation finally acknowledges and fully honors your father's bravery. Because even though it has been 42 years, it's never too late to do the right thing. And it's never too late to pay tribute to our Vietnam veterans – and their families.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The President went on to connect the war in Vietnam and the current wars by positing that our nation endures “because there are patriots like Chief Master Sergeant Richard Etchberger – and our troops who are serving as we speak – who love this nation and defend it … [W]e remain worthy of their example only so long as we honor it.”Footnote ⁴¹

Through these remarks, Obama subverted comparisons of the Afghanistan and Vietnam wars, arguing instead that American servicemen were united across generations by shared bravery, and that contemporary veterans would not be maligned as Etchberger and his comrades had been. At the same time, in focussing on Etchberger's dedication and courage and saying of his mission only that “Dick and his crew believed they could help turn the tide of the war, perhaps even end it,” Obama remained nearly silent about the reality that Etchberger was participating in an illegal operation in a neutral country.Footnote ⁴²

Here, Obama models what Jay Winter has termed “political silence,” the sort “chosen in order to suspend or truncate open conflict over the meaning and/or justification of violence” and, more specifically, of what Ketil Knutsen calls an “adversarial silence,” which involves “removing histories which do not speak favourably about one's own cause or ideology.”Footnote ⁴³ Focussing on Etchberger's actions outside the context in which they occur, Obama furthers a discourse of healing in which political questions about the war, and about the explicitly illegal activities that were endemic to it, simply do not matter and in which the only issue worthy of discussion is the individual service member's heroism. These remarks also establish that doing what one believes will “turn the tide” of the war (a phrase that is also particularly significant because of how frequently it had been used to describe Obama's expanded Afghanistan war), even if that includes an illegal projection of military power into a neutral country, is worthy of support and celebration.Footnote ⁴⁴ By establishing that Americans should celebrate American heroism without acknowledging or criticizing the secretive occupation of Laos, this rhetoric discursively encourages the acceptance of the analogously secretive and controversial drone strikes and special-forces operations through which Obama has projected US military power in places like Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

The other instances in which Obama has posthumously recognized Vietnam veterans involved in similarly questionable aspects of the war have likewise contributed to this discourse. In these cases as well, the President has either presented himself or been constructed in the media as both righting a past wrong and encouraging a focus on the soldier's dedication rather than on the actions in which he participated. In 2009 the Obama administration supported a petition filed by the family of John Lavelle to have his rank restored to four-star general. In 1972, Lavelle, an air force general, had retired in disgrace. The highest-ranking air force officer in Vietnam, he had in 1972 been called to account for falsifying reports and illegally bombing radar sites in North Vietnam, a violation of Johnson-era policies that prohibited US planes from striking targets that did not immediately threaten them. Whether Lavelle had engaged in these activities is beyond question; as Jeffrey Kimball explains, Lavelle “decided to make liberal interpretations” of the rules of engagement and “authorized at least twenty-eight missions in which air crews were ordered to attack targets that were potentially threatening … as well as targets that were only ‘associated’ with sites that had fired on American planes, such as airfields, radar installations, and SAM transport trucks.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Lavelle's case became controversial, however, because Richard Nixon refused to acknowledge that his administration had given Lavelle orders to conduct “protective reaction strikes” and “liberally interpret the rules.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Kimball is clear that Lavelle was a scapegoat and that “Nixon was unwilling to take public responsibility for his won belligerent policies.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Twenty-first-century remembrances of Lavelle have focussed on Nixon's willingness to scapegoat Lavelle, not on the expansion of the war that he ordered. In a 2008 deposition, Lavelle's daughter recalled, “Nearly every day from May 1972 into 1973 there was an article in every major newspaper pillorying my father. Every facet of his character was attacked publicly. It was asserted that he was a lawbreaker, untruthful, and unpatriotic to our democratic principles”; a 2006 Air Force Magazine article describes contentious Congressional hearings and notes that at least one senator “called for courts martial.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet that article also revealed that the Nixon administration had in fact provided Lavelle “authorization from the highest level” and that “the White House and the Joint Chiefs work[ed] in sync to conceal Nixon's directive from the public.”Footnote ⁴⁹ A subsequent investigation by the Secretary of the Air Force confirmed these findings, and former CIA director James Woolsey and former congressman Otis Pike wrote letters in support of Lavelle, with the latter declaring “they sacrificed him to cover the lie.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Here, then, was another example that aligned with remembrances of the war in Vietnam having been defined by political manipulation and self-preservation at the expense of noble service members.

Efforts by Lavelle's family and fellow veterans found a sympathetic ear in the Obama administration. On 12 July 2010, Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent the President a memorandum concluding that “the bombing missions were authorized” and that the accusations against Lavelle “stemmed from directions from his superiors not to disclose these missions publicly” and that the evidence presented “clearly corrects the historical record and warrants a reassessment of his retired grade.”Footnote ⁵¹ That Lavelle had, in fact, followed illegal orders was apparently inconsequential; that he had dutifully served his nation, regardless of the mission he had been given, and then been maligned was the only important consideration.

White House support of the effort to salvage Lavelle's reputation provided another means of establishing Obama's credibility as commander in chief and of validating his war strategy. Although the President never publicly commented on Lavelle, and there is no evidence that anyone in the White House conspired directly to link the two events, media coverage directly and indirectly linked the Lavelle case to the war in Afghanistan and, particularly, to the controversy that had flared earlier that summer surrounding the firing of General Stanley McChrystal. These reports cast Obama as repairing the Vietnam War's failures and as constitutionally different from the men responsible for them.

As we have seen, opposition to the war, predictably voiced through comparisons to the war in Vietnam, was steadily increasing even before the infamous Rolling Stone interview that led to McChrystal's ouster. The McChrystal debacle did not assuage these fears. Critics read McChrystal's interview as evidence that “U.S. troops have good reason to feel as if their Commander in Chief isn't fully behind them” and sympathized with “McChrystal's understandable frustration with the administration's inability to construct coherent political and diplomatic strategies for winning the war.”Footnote ⁵² Still others accused the President of personal pettiness, with McChrystal becoming “the victim of a needless crisis in which President Obama seems more defensive than decisive.”Footnote ⁵³ The controversy thus focussed attention on Obama's personality traits and leadership style during an already controversial war, with some critics viewing him as sharing, to some extent, Nixon's defensive venality.

The effort to support Lavelle's restoration – which, incidentally, failed – subverted claims that Obama was replicating Nixon's imperiousness and duplicity while affirming the need to honor American servicemen regardless of their actual actions or the context in which they performed them. As they had in regard to Etchberger, newspapers constructed Obama as seeking to rectify a Vietnam-era injustice. The New York Daily News complained that “Nixon hung [Lavelle] out to dry” but that “on Obama's recommendation, the Senate … began proceedings to restore his two stars”; the Washington Post remembered that “Nixon was unwilling to stand up publicly for the General,” but that “Obama gave his support” and that “the decision officially sets the record straight about who really lied during the controversial chapter in the Vietnam War … and who was left holding the bag.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer wrote of “an American military man so terribly wronged by high-level cowardice and deceit, and by media presumption,” but noted that “President Obama has asked the Senate to officially restore him to his full rank.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Entirely absent was any criticism that Lavelle had, in fact, violated existing protocols or any discussion of whether claims to have simply been “following orders” absolved him from the responsibility for the war's escalation and violence.Footnote ⁵⁶ Here again, the Vietnam veteran became solely a victim of nefarious policymakers who penalized him for doing his job when their own duplicity came to light.

Minimizing the reality that the President's request was a matter of protocol, newspapers portrayed Obama as the primary actor in Lavelle's restoration, one who “sets the record straight” and thus a counterpoint to Nixonian dishonesty. Indeed, even the Wall Street Journal gave Obama the benefit of the doubt regarding Afghanistan based on his handling of the Lavelle case. “The reinstatement of Lavelle's good name is all the more worthy for the fact that it comes as Mr. Obama is escalating a new war … in which he has already tasted controversy surrounding his own generals,” Seth Lipsky wrote; “We will learn how he stands by his own generals as they use their judgment.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Another newspaper distinguished McChrystal from Lavelle, noting that the former, whom the author emphasized was “recently relieved of command,” had avoided sanction in the Pat Tillman cover-up for the same crime for which Lavelle was demoted and thus warranted sanction.Footnote ⁵⁸ The rhetoric that surrounded the Lavelle case thus countered assertions that Obama had ousted McChrystal for personal reasons or that he was insufficiently supportive of the military.Footnote ⁵⁹ Mobilizing a discourse in which Vietnam veterans were the war's primary victims, political leaders were the primary villains, and the primary imperative was apolitically celebrating veterans' sacrifices while not interrogating the actual violence in which they engaged, attention to Lavelle's story thus contributed to a discourse that asserted that Vietnam-era mistakes were being rectified and not repeated.

At the same time, not acknowledging, much less condemning, Lavelle's participation in the illegal, preemptive bombing of North Vietnam represented another critical silence, in which there was no consideration of whether Obama's increased use of drones, and particularly of cross-border signature strikes, in which drone operators eliminate subjects based on patterns of behavior that merely suggest potential terrorist activity, replicate the violence of the Nixon administration's “protective reaction strikes.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Rather, the silence that surrounded Lavelle's complicity in the bombings legitimated the notion that celebrating veterans without questioning their actions or the policies on behalf of which they perpetrate them is an appropriate political position. That he could be celebrated as a good soldier – or, actually, airman – despite the activities in which he was complicit helped constitute analogous activities in the present moment as undeserving of interrogation and critique.

Obama's 2012 award of the Medal of Honor to Leslie Sabo likewise followed this pattern. Sabo had died in Cambodia in May 1970 when he used a hand grenade to kill North Vietnamese troops who had ambushed his platoon.Footnote ⁶¹ If Sabo's self-sacrifice is unquestionable, it nonetheless occurred in the context of one of the Vietnam War's most controversial moments – the Cambodian incursion, which inspired, among other protests, those at Kent State University.Footnote ⁶² Given Obama's embrace of a remembrance of the Vietnam War that focusses on soldiers' sacrifices rather than the war's broader political and social history, though, that the Cambodia incursion was a wildly unpopular escalation receives no mention and functions as another critical silence. The President noted only that “when American forces were sent into Cambodia, Bravo Company helped lead the way” and focussed only on the discomfort that US troops endured – “heavy packs,” “incredible heat and humidity,” and “monsoon rains.”Footnote ⁶³

Indeed, Obama's brief remarks were dedicated as much to recuperating the legacy of all Vietnam veterans as they were to finally recognizing Sabo, who himself appeared as the victim of bureaucratic indifference and “paperwork that seemed to get lost in the shuffle.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The President began by recalling the war as “a time when, to our shame, our veterans did not always receive the respect and the thanks they deserved – a mistake that must never be repeated,” and closed the speech by noting that “instead of being celebrated, our Vietnam veterans were often shunned. They were called many things, when there was only one thing that they deserved to be called – and that was American patriots.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In closing, Obama entreated the nation to “say to our Vietnam veterans what should have been said when [they] first came home: You did your job. You served with honor. You made us proud.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In asking Americans to offer these thanks while simultaneously remaining silent about the controversial policy that he helped carry out, Obama again furthered a long-standing narrative in which gratitude for the soldier's sacrifice displaces attention to the violence that he or she perpetrates or the political motivations for it, whether that violence occurs in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen.

And, as he had during Etchberger's ceremony, he connected the service of Vietnam veterans to the actions of those who had fought in the United States' twenty-first-century wars. Yet while he had only mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in the earlier ceremony, this time he pointed out that “we're joined by those who have carried on Les's legacy in our time, in Iraq and Afghanistan – members of the 101st Airborne Division, the legendary ‘Screaming Eagles.’”Footnote ⁶⁷ Here again, Obama invoked the Vietnam War in a manner that subverted the frequent use of that war to critique his foreign policies. The most significant connection between the two wars was that contemporary soldiers were exhibiting similar bravery, and in recognizing them Obama again suggests that as he heals the wounds of the war in Vietnam he will prevent similar ones from being opened in the current wars' aftermath.

It is perhaps unsurprising, given Obama's embrace of the narrative of the forgotten Vietnam veteran, that he has endeavored to recognize contemporary veterans using much the same language. Doing so, I argue, contributes to the discursive production of Afghanistan as not-Vietnam, a war unmarked by the failure to recognize American sacrifice and heroism. That such an argument needed to be made in 2010 was, as I have shown, the product of numerous comparisons of the two wars. And indeed, Giunta's mission in particular was discussed in those terms. In the Washington Post, two retired generals noted that “the circumstances under which Giunta won his medal felt frighteningly familiar”; in the New York Times, Elizabeth Rubin wrote, “no one knew that … Honcho Hill would be Afghanistan's Hamburger Hill.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Also, that no living Iraq and Afghanistan veteran had yet been awarded the Medal of Honor augured for some that the current wars were replicating post-Vietnam failures to honor American troops. That George W. Bush had awarded the Medal of Honor to one Afghanistan veteran and four Iraq veterans, as well as three Vietnam veterans – one each in 2001 and 2002 and one in 2007 – was insufficient for many Americans.Footnote ⁶⁹ Newspapers noted how few times the medal had been awarded, with the Washington Post noting that veterans' groups understood “the relative lack of medals for service in Iraq and Afghanistan” as having “contributed to a lack of public appreciation for the sacrifices made by U.S. troops” and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggesting that those who had served in Afghanistan were receiving even less recognition than those who had served in Vietnam.Footnote ⁷⁰ These remarks followed lawmakers' remarks from as early as 2006.Footnote ⁷¹ In 2009, for example, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R–CA), one of the first Iraq veterans elected to Congress, implied that the nation was repeating the war's failures by privileging civilian micromanagement over military commanders' judgment.Footnote ⁷² That September, the Christian Science Monitor explained the paucity of medals by noting that “senior military and civilian officials today mostly postdate the Vietnam era, when dozens of people received the award,” suggesting that the post-Vietnam generation had forgotten the war's primary lessons – that the men and women who fought it should be recognized regardless of the war's popularity.Footnote ⁷³

Surely it is the case, as Giunta's battalion commander scrawled across the bottom of the nomination form, that “SPC. Giunta acted with conspicuous gallantry.”Footnote ⁷⁴ At the same time, in honoring Giunta with the Medal of Honor, Obama addressed these concerns, noting that it was “the first time in nearly 40 years that the recipient of the Medal of Honor for an ongoing conflict has been able to … accept this recognition in person.”Footnote ⁷⁵

More importantly, Obama's use of language that echoed his presentation to Etchberger in his presentation of the medal to Giunta establishes that the nation will not repeat the errors of the war in Vietnam, and that the twenty-first century will not endure the turmoil and malaise attributed to that war's aftermath. Indeed, the parallels are striking. Etchberger “served at the summit of one the tallest mountains in Laos,” while Giunta fought “in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Whereas “Etchberger lived by the Airman's creed to never leave an airman behind,” Giunta “embod[ied] the warrior ethos that says ‘I will never leave a fallen comrade.’”Footnote ⁷⁷ While Etchberger “and his crew believed in their work. So they stayed; they continued their mission,” Obama noted that “with the battle over, First platoon picked up their gear and resumed their march through the valley. They continued their mission.”Footnote ⁷⁸

This narrative contributes to the cultural construction of Obama as a clear-headed, moral, and realistic leader for whom the continuation of an unpopular war is a matter of unpleasant necessity rather than political mendacity or error and who is fully cognizant and appropriately appreciative of the sacrifices that he requires of the men whom he has sent to fight. That is, while basic similarities between the speeches might be expected, these parallels represent more than boilerplate language or unimaginative speechwriters. Giunta's actions emerge as fundamentally like Etchberger's in ways that define the Afghanistan and Vietnam wars as identically marked by shared sacrifice, dedication, and heroism rather than shared futility.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, the crucial difference is that while Etchberger's heroism was first hidden and then forgotten, Giunta's is being recognized in a timely, public manner. Indeed, Obama twice used the occasion to thank service members, remarking that the Medal of Honor “reflects the gratitude of an entire nation” and that “his medal today is a testament to his uncommon valor, but also to … all the men and women who served by his side. All of them deserve our enduring thanks.” This linkage to the Vietnam War and the language of gratitude contributes to a discourse that constructs Obama as a leader understanding of the failures of the war in Vietnam and capable of both salving them and preventing their repetition in Afghanistan regardless of how unpopular the war, and how elusive victory, remained.

Moreover, and as in other remembrances of the Vietnam War, it is the soldier's heroism and his commitment to his mission that are most important.Footnote ⁸⁰ Nowhere in Obama's remarks is there any consideration of the larger contours of the Afghanistan war or the strategy that Obama had embraced. That Giunta's mission was ultimately futile and calls into question the efficacy of counterinsurgency – US troops eventually abandoned the Korengal Valley to Taliban Control – is immaterial, and Giunta is celebrated for “try[ing] to do everything you can when it's your time to do it.”Footnote ⁸¹ Americans are here again encouraged to focus on individual soldiers' actions, rather than larger questions of strategy and policy. This rhetoric, as in Obama's celebration of Vietnam veterans, enables the war to continue without substantial critique while distancing it from Vietnam's problematic legacy.

Obama's recognition of Vietnam veterans and men who have fought in Afghanistan reveals how deeply the Vietnam War's legacy continues to inform contemporary US cultural politics. In a moment when his foreign-policy agenda was frequently compared to that earlier war, Barack Obama has insistently mobilized a dominant remembrance of the Vietnam War in ways that subvert those critiques and encourage uncritical acquiescence to his expansion of the Afghanistan war and the increasing targeting of terrorist suspects in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Obama's repeated recognition of previously forgotten or maligned Vietnam veterans has recalled a remembrance of the Vietnam War that posits its largest failure as having occurred when an ungrateful country shamefully failed to recognize its heroes. In doing so, he has established himself as an agent of healing and connected the two wars in ways that assure Americans that the current wars will not result in a similar legacy. At the same time, by remaining silent or not critiquing the controversial circumstances of these veterans' service, he has contributed to a discourse that establishes as appropriate the uncritical celebration of military service even when that service is of questionable legality or projects military force into neutral countries. Obama's use of military awards, then, reveals how powerful the war remains in American cultural politics, and his efforts to recognize Vietnam-era heroism illustrate one way in which the dominant remembrance of the Vietnam War's aftermath continues to enable the perseverance of American militarism.