What ‘Ramboism’ and Vietnam Is All About
So we have more “experts” (Letters, July 8) telling us what Rambo stands for. I’ll tell you what Rambo is all about: Vietnam veterans getting screwed all over again.
The war started when we tried to help France get their Vietnam colony back so they’d support NATO in Europe. Tell Daniel C. Palm it was the “intellectualoids” like McGeorge Bundy and Walter Rostow that got our boys sent there because they thought they could manage a war like they managed a university. To bureaucrats like the one in the movie, the kind who love telling us that “the world is a jungle” and who do all they can to keep it that way, the soldier is always expendable.
The real question is why young men let loyalty to their country make them work for idiots like that who screw them time and time again.
A war ain’t a football game but “Coach” Lee Nickerson has his 10 Steps to Win With Rambo pinned up in the locker room. Hey, if you got into a war on idiotic advice, and you already dropped three times the bomb tonnage of World War II on the Vietnamese, and you’re only staying in to save Lindon B. Johnson’s ego and some others, you don’t keep fighting just to “win.” That’s asinine. You get out, like Richard Nixon did. Massacring another 59,000 or 159,000 American boys would not have helped the national honor or made a victory we’d be proud of today.
Tell me where were all these “patriots” who love our vets so much when these guys just got back and needed help badly? Or do they just suddenly remember them 15 years later when they need heroes to lead the parade to the next war? That’s exactly what Hitler did.
You want to stand for something, help the real vets who are all around us. The ones who need jobs, or suicide-prevention counseling, or government help with deformities in their kids from Agent Orange. That’s what Sylvester Stallone said that made sense, “We want our country to love us as much as we love it.” Not “We want it to go around bullying little countries the size of Chicago so we can prove we didn’t lose ‘Nam.”
Come off it.
JOEL TAUNTON
Los Angeles