[Mr 5 0]

Merc:

Thanks for the clarification regarding your negative reaction to the movie audience cheering the Americans in the Viet Nam war movie, 'When We Were Soldiers'.

Let me attempt another approach here.

In war - battle - combat - a soldier must, must dehumanize the other side...the enemy. He becomes 'A Stinkin' Nazi', a 'Dirty Communist' or a 'Yellow Running Dog American' (to a Chinese Communist).

He has no name, no face, only a uniform or a nationality identification ;'Kraut', 'Gook', 'Towel-Head', etc.

Why do you suppose that is?
Yeah, you probably have it. It's hard to shoot and kill 'Hans Bauer', or 'Lan Won We' or even 'Mohammed'; husband, father, brother, son. So we don't attempt to humanize the enemy, we do the opposite; we de-humanize him and he becomes - not human - just a symbol ('Remember Pearl Harbor!') - and a target.

It's the only way to fight a war. This is why so many came home mentally screwed up by Viet Nam combat action compared to the returning WWII vets who mostly, did well and readjusted to civilian life quickly.

The WWII vets knew they were fighting tyranny and the death of their country if they failed. Hitler was real, as was the whole Axis army. It wasn't very difficult to dismiss a German or Japanese soldier as a 'thing' to be destroyed, as quickly as possible. The folks at home cheered every victory and welcomed the WWII vets with parades and open arms for 'making the world free'. They deserved the applause and still do. Viet Nam was quite different. A mostly political 'war', mishandled from the start by an inept President (Johnson). No parades, no cheers for the returning vets - then. A certain amount of national ambiguity about the war had to project a like feeling on the part of some of the U.S. troops in Viet Nam, making their job (killing the enemy) harder and leaving mental and emotional scars for a lifetime.

Now, we see that Viet Nam devolved into the hellhole we knew it would become, and we cheer the guys (even in a movie) who did the job back in the sixties in that jungle hell called Viet Nam. Better late than never and even if it's in a movie theatre.

Point being that when one feels threatened (as America has after September 11th, collectively, as a nation) it's not difficult to dehumanize the 'enemy' and cheer his death and destruction.

When the Muslim fanatics flew those planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade center towers, they felt the same, Merc. They didn't care or even consider the thousands of fathers, mothers and just plain human beings they were killing that day. Those dead Americans were nameless and faceless to Mohammad Atta and the others, and when they died and the towers fell, there was cheering on the streets of Baghdad, Iraq and other Moslem countries, as you know.

How can they do that? Easy. Hatred, on the Arabs part. Fear and anger on our part.
The cheering in Baghdad was for the 'infidel' Americans now dead and rightly so, by Arab reckoning. The cheering you hear in a theatre is the cheering of folks being rather mindlessly but emotionally patriotic. I understand it.

Most of us are looking at that war movie and thinking it's like a sports contest. Hooray for our 'team'! That's naive but somewhat understandable. It's been eleven years since Desert Storm, over thirty years since Viet Nam and a half century since Korea. 60 years since the last 'good' war, World War II. What do we really know or understand of war today?
Us vs Them. Good Guys vs Bad Guys. It's easy to cheer 'your' side and again, I believe your revulsion at the cheering of killing is understandable but a bit misplaced. As I said in my earlier message to you; as you know, real war vets don't cheer, they just remember and grieve for those they lost in combat.

Most of us won't serve in combat, and we can't all be NYC firemen so we identify with those who serve by cheering them on, from the sidelines, as it were. That's what you heard in that theatre, Merc. Identification with the (admittedly) make-believe soldiers and with the country they represented on the screen as they 'fought' the enemy, the North Viet Nam soldiers. We call it 'patriotism' and it's sincere and justified, in my opinion.

We could have used a bit more of it during the actual Viet Nam war, at least where the U.S. soldiers were concerned. They were treated like dirt by many (not all) on returning home and were really victims of the Washington politicians who couldn't decide whether they wanted to win or just leave Viet nam, so we lost 55,000 men and finally - finally - just left. No praise for politicians but the men who fought there deserve the cheers they got in the theatre, late as it is.

I do differ with you on one important point. I don't accept the rationale of 'moral equivalency' often offered on this subject. The acts of September 11th were overt acts of war with the intention of murdering Americans. It succeeded. The U.S. response is justified, in my opinion - as was our response in WWII.

Yes, the fanatic Arabs are 'bad guys' and Americans are 'good guys' as the Axis powers were 'bad guys' in WWII and the Allied powers the good guys, to put it simply. I don't buy the rationale that 'it's not that simple'. It is.

There is evil in the world. Fighting that evil is a good and necessary endeavor. The fact that a man or woman chooses evil and has a family does not absolve him or her of the consequences of evil acts. We can differ about what is 'evil' but I think September 11th makes the point, as did the mass murdering of the communist thugs who eventually took over Viet Nam after the U.S. abandoned it, or the concentration camps of Hitler's Germany, and so on.

The United States is not evil. People like bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are and they command tens of thousands of followers who are eager to do their will and kill Americans.
The fact that the followers of these men are fellow human beings with family does not change their responsibility for what they choose to do and the possible death from American bullets and bombs their actions may bring to them. Reaping and sowing.

Osama bin Laden has many wives and many sons and daughters. So what? Hitler had a cute dog. So what?
Evil, violent actions against an entire people will be met with counter-violence by those people in order to stop it. It's usually called 'war' and each 'side' usually wants to win the war and survive. That's not sick or demented, it's simply human nature.