Archives » Friday, February 01, 2008
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David Botti
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Feb 1, 2008 04:18 PM
The current series in the New York Times
on veterans who've committed murder has spurred tremendous debate over
the way vets are portrayed by the media. To understand origins of the
prevailing portrayals of our current veterans, it's a good idea to take
a step back and view the issue in a historical perspective.
Jerry
Lembcke is a Vietnam veteran and professor of sociology at Holly Cross
college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Lembcke's book "The Spitting
Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam," looked in part at how
the news media and pop-culture cultivated narrow portrayals of Vietnam
vets. He has also written op-eds for the Boston Globe, Newsday, and the
San Francisco Chronicle among others. In 1968 Lembcke was drafted into
the Army, serving as chaplain's assistant before returning home and
joining the anti-war movement.
I talked to Lembcke about how
the Vietnam-era vets experience impacts that of those men and women
coming home from war today -- and how he thinks the media is handling
its coverage of veterans and issues associated with them.
SOLDIER'S
HOME: You've written that a veteran's behavior can be influenced more
from how past vets were portrayed in pop-culture, as opposed to
personal experiences he/she might have had. How does this
happen?
LEMBCKE: The post-Vietnam popular culture
representations of veterans was so powerful and so long lasting, and it
so overwhelmed the war itself in popular culture, that as people began
to come home during the Gulf War in the 1990’s, and present these same
symptoms as Vietnam veterans coming back, I thought there’s a
connection here. I think I used the phrase “learned experience,” and it
occurred to me that this was a generation of veterans who’d grown up
immersed in this popular culture of what it looks like to be a war
veteran coming home.
This was very different than the culture
Vietnam vets grew up in. Looking at representations of WWII veterans
for example, which was not nearly as powerful in film for example. We
got more war films about WWII, but not so many films about veterans
coming home.
What is being portrayed in these kinds of movies that can influence veterans?
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