Hovig:

Have to disagree here. The Left has been rewriting its view of Vietnam (only the relevant portions) for the longest time.

If I were a foreigner with no knowledge of American history, and relied on their version, I would conclude that the United States invaded the poor nation of Vietnam under Richard Nixon, committing massive atrocities, slaughtering millions through brutal massacres such as My Lai, which occurred on a regular basis. Nixon (and some guy named Johnson, apparently) went further, and invaded the nations of Cambodia and Laos illegally, and culminated his war criminal period by the brutal bombing of North Vietnam.

Only the poor served there, while the rich stayed away. (Evidently with the exception of John Kerry.) When they came home, however, they were embraced by their countrymen, especially the protestors, who only wanted them back safe and sound (and any claims of spitting on veterans is entirely urban legend, as I recently read).

Fortunately, the US lost the Tet Offensive, and then the war ended and POOF that was it.

Little about the Ho Chi Minh trail and where that was located (hint: it might have something to do w/ Nixon’s invading Cambodia); nothing about whether it was mostly whites, blacks, poor, middle class, educated or uneducated who served; nothing about LBJ directing the war from the WHite House, or Westmoreland’s focus on search-and-destroy operations.

Tet? Creighton Abrams? The conventional North Vietnamese offensive that actually toppled the South? The revisionism about spitting on troops, I’ll leave to those who have served.

And the aftermath? I find it interesting how few Southeast Asian states, from Thailand to Singapore, felt it was the wrong war at the wrong time, that it was an imperialist war, that it was unnecessary.

So, I fully expect the Left to have no embarrassment, because they’ve been busily rewriting so that they were right all the time.