A Phantom War: Hollywood as a Mythmaker in the Post–Vietnam War Era

The Celluloid Jungle

The Vietnam War occupies a strange place within the collective American consciousness. It is at once a symbol of pride and futility. To some, it is an icon of our shortcomings as a force for global intervention. To others, it is a battle against evil itself. The conflict was a proxy war between the East and the West, a duel at the height of Cold War tensions—pitting communist pride and unity against capitalist technology and market power. It was also the first time that the U.S. government would fight against a modern insurgency on a large scale. As the war dragged on, it became symptomatic of America’s growing pains as a postwar superpower, and with that came a scar across the mental fabric of two nations separated by an ocean, one which would be offered a panacea courtesy Hollywood. With time, that conflict in Southeast Asia that cost the lives of real men, women, and children became what Sturken (1991) referred to as a metaphorical screen on which to project and make sense of the changing attitudes of a nation.

This collective desire on the part of the American people to understand and explain what happened in such a muddled war, and what purpose capitalist ideology serves in the modern era, is what accounts for the breadth of media based on the Vietnam conflict. Even before the war’s end, Hollywood began to produce films based on the foray. As the war came to its close and entered into the lens of memory, these artworks became more nuanced, exploring and analyzing themes of American exceptionalism, colonialism, and the role of traditional American masculinity. This media provided catharsis to a rattled public still trying to make sense of what they had seen and heard from Vietnam.

As a result, a gestalt has been created—one that simultaneously remembers the war as a chaotic meat grinder wherein innocent and young American men were exploited by a knowing and corrupt government to fight in a sabre-rattling contest and still miraculously frames these men as unquestionably righteous one-man armies decemating fully depersonalized orientalist caricatures. Yet it still tenderly depicts the confusion and horror of asymmetrical insurgent warfare, showing the surrealness of combat and brutality through the lens of myth. In time, all depictions would blend together into what the average American saw as truth, and the war’s legacy would provide ample ammunition for the culture wars to come.

Hollywood’s Vietnam is a strange place—it is a war and not a nation. Through its depictions, the Việt Cộng and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) rarely have clear motivations or historical contextualization. The audience does not understand why communism is appealing to the North; rather, it appears as an aesthetic affectation—Cold War era shorthand for “evil.” The Southern Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) is either absent or shown to be ineffective, despite the fact that they had been fighting the war before America intervened. Hollywood depicts most Vietnamese men as complicit in communist plots, and Vietnamese women are reduced to erotic set dressings or spys, often both. Within the American armed forces, the commanding ranks and rear echelon are incompetently reckless in their strategy and laissez-faire if not outright vindictive toward the boots on the ground, and the US combat veterans themselves are all dangerous timebombs and messianic martyrs. In actuality, the war fought in Vietnam and the war fought on film sets in Philippine jungles 20 years later are two different but nonetheless impactfully “real” conflicts. The projected image of Vietnam has become its collective memory, and this imagined battlefield has found global acceptance—even in Southeast Asia . . .

. . . The Doors are playing through the tinny, metallic sounds of a transistor radio. The blades of a Bell UH-1 helicopter are chopping through dense sticky air, and somewhere a reporter scribbles a few hurried notes for Esquire. This article is not about military history; it is about memory. It is about the ways in which Hollywood’s narrative of the Vietnam War and its veterans parallel the development of the contemporary American psyche.

“We Didn’t Even Have to Act. We Were There.”

Before the 1960s, it is unlikely that most Americans would have been able to identify Vietnam on a map. Then known in the West as part of Indochina, Vietnam was one of several French colonies. If the region were to appear in film, it was most likely as little more than an exotic backdrop for a romance or adventure movie. Rarely were these films interested in any semblance of accuracy; instead, Southern California was substituted for a Southeast Asian jungle and wicker furniture was abundant shorthand for “we’re in the colonies” (Lanning, 1994). All of this changed following the defeat of the French colonial powers in the region and the rise of communism in the North. By the end of the 1950s, Vietnam was a household name, and the civil war that had engulfed the Southeast Asian peninsula had become emblematic for the looming specter of communism.

Hollywood filmmaking has become the de facto authority on the Vietnam War experience, surpassing documentaries, newsreels, and self-directed media about the war produced by Vietnam within the cultural pantheon when it comes to offering a glimpse of the “real war,” particularly for those born after the conflict. Films weave into the memories of those directly affected and those who watched the war on TV alike, intertwining with documented realities and constructing a hybrid of fact and fiction. Hollywood has formed a coalescent narrative about an explicitly American direct-action experience, combining the brutal victimization of troops with jingoistic power fantasies that paradoxically recapitulate America’s righteousness. The cinematic Vietnam veteran is an individual wrapped in primal wisdom. Their experience is regarded as incommunicable—nigh spiritual, their war unrepresentable, a theme borrowed from earlier postwar discussions of the Holocaust (Sturken, 1997). By embracing this sympathetic viewpoint, the myths of the Vietnam War and its American veterans have become draped in enough allegory and poeticism to become metaphors for the American identity as a whole.

Michael Herr can perhaps be considered the most influential wartime correspondent during the conflict. Writing for Esquire, he reported using a dreamy and surreal style, fast talking and telling stories that were sharp witted, larger than life, and filled with literary images. He would compile his experiences into the journalistic report-cum-memoir Dispatches (Herr, 1977). The book inspired a generation of writers, as well as being influential in the screenplays for several films about the Vietnam War. Herr intentionally wrote in a cinematic fashion—in 1978, he said of it,

In any other war, they would have made movies about us too, Dateline: Hell!, Dispatch From Dong Ha. . . . But Vietnam is too awkward, everyone knows how awkward, and if people don’t even want to hear about it, you know they’re not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up. . . . So we have all been compelled to make our own movies, as many movies as there are correspondents, and this is mine. (Sturken, 1997, p. 87)

Herr’s work proved so resonating that he was contacted by Francis Ford Coppola to cowrite the screenplay for Apocalypse Now (1979; Sturken, 1997). While the film was not the first about the Vietnam War, it has proven to be one of the most codifying—it was the first of its kind to attempt a highly “realistic” treatment of the war, showcasing the psychological toll it took on its participants. It would set the stage for future epic, high-art treatments of the war such as Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick et al., 1987), which Herr also cowrote (Sturken, 1997), and Platoon (Stone, 1986).

Apocalypse Now synthesizes reality with fiction. Many of the vignettes featured in the film were adapted from the experiences of Michael Herr and cowriter John Milius’s veteran friends (Sturken, 1997)—for example, the scene in which our protagonist Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen, joins a group of besieged U.S. Marines on the banks of a river. Willard encounters a U.S. Marine with a chopped-down M-79 grenade launcher who draws the weapon and aims toward an NVA fortification from which shouting continuously radiates. Relying primarily on sound to identify his targets, he fires and obliterates the NVA position. This scene was one witnessed by Michael Herr (1977) during his wartime reporting. Given the surrealness of the actual war, it is easy to understand how its mythical fetishization would be almost inevitable.

This was embraced by many filmmakers who likened their experiences filming to those that soldiers and civilians had during the actual war. Coppola said of the delays, long time spent by the cast and crew in the Philippine jungles, and the adverse weather conditions they faced, “My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. . . . It was crazy . . . we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane” (Sturken, 1997, p. 98). In his comments, Coppola (1979) directly references critiques of wartime administration, the experiences of veterans, and themes from Apocalypse Now. Coppola even documented the filmmaking experience in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Bahr et al., 1991).

Platoon has been lauded as one of the most realistic depictions of the Vietnam War by many U.S. veterans who say that it accurately creates verisimilitude regarding combat experiences as well as the mundanity and boredom of war (Lanning, 1994). Director Oliver Stone, himself a veteran, presented the film as autobiographical, showing his wartime photos in its marketing run. Additionally, Stone had claimed that he had been “at war” with executives to produce the film and had hired former U.S. Marine, Captain Dale Dye, to put the actors through a training routine in the Philippine jungle where Platoon would be shot. They rucked through red clay and ate infamous military C-rations, emulating a distant semblance of the war as best they could.

Actor Tom Berenger said of the experience, “We didn’t even have to act. We were there” (Sturken, 1997, p. 97). Platoon was able to convince the public that it was the “real war”—accurate but dramatized, showcasing the murder, rape, and destruction of Vietnam by the 25th Infantry Division (Lanning, 1994). At its core, Platoon is a morality play between good and evil set against the backdrop of Vietnam. It is about a young man’s—and by extension a nation’s—loss of innocence and transition into adulthood (Sturken, 1997). Given the impactful nature of Platoon and Apocalypse Now, as well as their fantastic artistry, it is unsurprising that the public saw them as emblematic of wartime Vietnam.

“The West Is the Best . . .?”—The End by The Doors (Morrison, 1967)

The Vietnam War disrupted America’s understanding of its place in the world and its core identity. It was one of many final straws placed upon the back of the national consciousness alongside the civil rights movement, increasing remembrance for atrocities committed against indigenous peoples, and a growing distrust toward the U.S. federal government. No longer was the United States a universal force for good, rather to some it had been vilified. Hollywood’s history does not remember America’s role in the Vietnam War as a battle between absolute good and evil; instead, it was a nuanced invasion of a country that had already shaken off the heel of one colonial power and a purposeless pit for money and lives—a cyclical narrative applied to future wars as well. In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, the American people questioned to what degree their own actions and attitudes may have played in what was quickly being regarded as a tragedy, and the United States government was desperate for reconciliation.

On April 23rd, 1975—within a week of the fall of Sài Gòn—President Ford gave a speech at Tulane University during which he pled with the public to halt the national debate surrounding the Vietnam War, stating that Americans cannot regain their prewar sense of pride by “refighting a war that is finished” (McMahon, 2002, p. 164). To a degree, this appeal echoed a collective sense of national fatigue that demanded ideological healing and closure. Though the war in the celluloid jungle is fought and refought, its meanings and messages have changed with the times, reflecting a healing process toward eventual historical sanctification (Foote, 2003).

The first spate of films made about the Vietnam War tended to present it in an uncritical light, foregoing analysis for spectacular action, with Vietnam primarily serving as a topical backdrop for reassuring power fantasies. Most were patriotic reactions to antiwar backlash. In many ways, they followed the same structure as World War II films wherein valiant and steadfast action heroes strike out righteously against tyranny. They paint U.S. soldiers in a propagandistic light, “civilizing” what is seen as “savage,” and do next to nothing to address the psychological toll of war on military personnel or the destruction of Vietnam. These films show the Vietnamese as whiley foils to White liberators. They include the explicitly anticommunist action drama The Green Berets (Wayne, 1968) directed by and starring John Wayne as Colonel Mike Kirby, a gung-ho commando, who justifies the extra judicial torture of a captured North Vietnamese spy. This is presented as unironic in spite of the fact that he uses the same tactics as the Việt Cộng and the NVA. The overarching subplot of the film concerns the conversion of a skeptical journalist into a war supporter and features an army of North Vietnamese soldiers as cannon fodder and a Southern Army of the Republic of Vietnam colonel using his sister-in-law Lin (a Vietnamese supermodel) as a honeypot to capture an NVA general. Lin is temporarily alienated by her brother-in-law for carrying out her mission. The movie also features a somewhat surprising friendship between the main characters and Ham Chuck, a war-orphan played by Craig Jue who learned (to qoute the film) “pretty good” English from missionaries; it is surprising for a film this jingoistic to include depictions of collateral damage at all. Not only that, the character of Captain Nghiem is a former Việt Cộng defector. It is surprising that the film would present the Việt Cộng as redeemable to this degree, while still showing them as primarily anti-North stereotypes. Even these early explicitly pro-American intervention films had moments of nuance out of necessity brought on by the subject matter.

However, the late 1970s saw a selection of more critical, morally ambiguous Vietnam films such as the aforementioned Apocalypse Now as well as The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978) starring Robert De Niro as a new archetype for the era “The Hollywood ‘Nam Vet” broken by his wartime experiences (McMahon, 2002). The damaged veteran was one of the few avenues in media to be readmitted into American society without totally abandoning one’s past (Clark, 1986). He was a dangerous loner antihero or unstable villain. Instead of a black Stetson hat, the antagonist of the 1970s television wore a tattered fatigue jacket covered in peeling unit patches (Lanning, 1994). Despite his underlying and barely contained violence, he was not totally unsympathetic. The ‘Nam Vet’s rage was not something he would directly release on Americans as he was not “here” during a psychotic break (or even during a premeditated attack); he was still “in the shit.” Thus, the cinematic veteran becomes a victim even as a victimizer, psychologically broken by the government he trusted. This allowed America to cope with the collective primal anger and confusion of witnessing the first televised war—one which the nation could not even agree on the outcome of.

The tragic Vietnam veteran became a surrogate for the country’s collective trauma and guilt, partially due to its treatment of combat veterans. The fantasmagorical veteran was thus a ghost-haunting America as much as the mythical Special Forces operative haunted the jungles of Vietnam or a conspiratorial shadow war in Laos, or even Nicaragua, channeling his rage into righteousness. In Rolling Thunder (Flynn, 1977), a former American prisoner of war (POW) survives torture at the hands of criminals due to having faced similar treatment during Việt Cộng imprisonment (Clark, 1986). Travis Bickle (also played by De Niro) of Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976) is a partial deconstruction of this trope, but he no less fits the archetype. A loner, Bickle scours the streets of what he saw as a “scum-encrusted” New York City, reflecting racialized fears of a crime wave at the time sweeping America’s hollowing cities. He is sexually frustrated and angry, and he does not know how to assert his manhood without protective violence—in this, he is a play on the classical cowboy archetype. Bickle very nearly becomes a political assassin but is transformed into a vigilante through a combination of fear and pseudohebephilic longing. The film goes out of its way to demonize him and his actions. The people he kills, though criminals, are shown suffering immensely, and in the end he traumatizes Iris (played by a young Jodie Foster) instead of winning her heart. Bickle is no classic cowboy—he gets no sunset—rather he rides off into a bluesy night where there is no true catharsis, yet his actions are lauded by the press and public.

Television in the 1980s was kinder to the Vietnam veteran. The A-Team (Lupo & Cannell, 1983) and Magnum, P.I. (Bellisario et al., 1980) saw them as positively toughened and more skilled because of their wartime service (McMahon, 2002). These characters tended to rarely have overt mental health issues exacerbated by their past experiences, though the Vietnam War still figured in their backstories. There was also a minor trend in family programs and sitcoms wherein characters would just happen to be veterans, but this never factored into their personality or storyline, with perhaps the exception of a very-special-episode moment. Their past remained alien and separate from their present, perpetuating the mythical qualities of the Vietnam conflict (McMahon, 2002).

It is no coincidence that these works coincided with the Reagan administration, a booming market of rapid growth and excess, the war on drugs, and a new kind of economic war against Asia. America had little time for introspection and analyzing the past. Instead, it once again needed reassurance and vindication. At the dawn of Generation X, children abandoned their military-themed GI Joes, focusing on fantasy-themed toys like He-Man, forcing Hasbro to release a line of more militarily ambiguous adventure-themed toys. In the 1980s, the general American public wanted escapism (McMahon, 2002).

The Rambo series deserves special mention. Though the protagonist is a psychologically damaged veteran, he is treated sympathetically; not only that, he shows pride in his service but objects to his treatment at home and government’s treatment of him. John Rambo represents a surprisingly complex character who seems prophetic in light of the antigovernment militia and “boogaloo” movements. The series itself perpetuates the long-standing concept of large numbers of American POWs who were never repatriated and “left behind” by the mainstream U.S. government and society. In Rambo: First Blood Part II (Cosmatos, 1985), the titular character refuses a medal after rescuing American POWs on behalf of a shadowy branch of the U.S. government, claiming that he just wants the country to “love them as much as they loved it” (Clark, 1986, p. 75). Despite Rambo’s adolescent machismo, he simply wants to be loved by a public that he sees as turning its back on people like him. While this can easily be read as nationalistic pandering, it does communicate the fragility of American patriotism in the post-Vietnam era and a desire to reunite and grieve. These were after all major Hollywood productions. Betrayed and coming-of-age in the Vietnam era, both Rambo and the American public were traumatized, realizing through the zeitgeist that the United States could perhaps do wrong to those it claimed to protect, or that an American war could be seen as unrighteous. While this was well understood by indigenous groups and people of color since the nation’s inception, this was the first time that the American mainstream had become so self-aware, and it was terrified to know that heroes can die, Americans can lose, and that it can all be so meaningless. Beneath the bravado and anger, there was a desire for acceptance, for unconditional patriotic love, a return to innocence, and the realization that it would never come.

“The Same Familiar Violence”

Veterans came home from World War II to massive celebrations on VE (Victory in Europe) and VJ (Victory in Japan) day; Vietnam veterans came home one by one to underfunded Veterans Affairs hospitals, ambivalent media, and at times harboring antiwar sentiments themselves. Labeled as social outcasts by Hollywood even when positively represented, they expected the praise of their fathers’ wars but were met with derision and doubt instead (Sturken, 1991). The sharp contrast between films taking place during World War II and the Vietnam War is striking and reflects a shift in the collective memory regarding the two conflicts.

World War II films generally relied on notions of American heroism. Germany and Japan are depicted to their very cores as irredeemably savage. We learn that the axis was full of spies while the allies fought bravely face to face. The allies were paragons of justice and never caused collateral damage. Americans universally respected each other in spite of historically factual racial tensions, fascism having a foothold in America, and isolationist rhetoric being common in the lead up to American involvement (of course these things are never spoken of in traditional World War II media). Even American and British civilians eagerly aided in the war effort from the homefront (Lanning, 1994). German and Japanese civilians are glossed over. In spite of this historical mythos, it is worth noting that according to the Selective Service System only 25% of Vietnam veterans were draftees, whereas in World War II 66% were (Lanning, 1994). Granted, 16 million Americans served in World War II, whereas 8.7 million served during the Vietnam conflict, with 3.4 million deployed in Southeast Asia (US Department of Veterans Affairs, 2019). Nonetheless, war films, at least those made in the period between World War II and the Vietnam War, statistically raised a generation of loyal patriots.

American soldiers went to Vietnam with images from the World War II movies playing in their heads. Michael Herr said of it,

I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by the seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of these grunts would run around during a fight when they knew a camera crew was nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads . . . the first few times I got fired at or saw combat deaths nothing really happened. . . . It was the same familiar violence, only moved over to another medium. (Sturken, 1997, p. 95)

Many of the men fighting in the Vietnam War were still in their teens, and the level of violence that surrounded them, as well its traumatic toll, awakened nostalgic images of an imagined World War II. The philosophy of committed journalists like Herr to leave everything as raw as possible was in direct response to the sterility of the World War II narrative. It is ironic that that realism would itself be used to construct what is, in many ways, just as fictitious a tale.

“Vietnam Was a War, Not a Movie!”

To quote a GI,

I lost my footing and . . . went under the water and came up and out, screaming “This ain’t a war movie! This ain’t a John Wayne movie!” I started to laugh. . . . Vietnam wasn’t a war movie. [The WWII movies] could no longer deflect reality, black out the pain and anger and justify me as the good American who had come to rescue the Vietnamese by killing Vietnamese . . . they were really propaganda films. (Sturken, 1997, p. 95)

The late 1980s and 1990s saw a period of forgiveness toward the “Hollywood ‘Nam Vet” and desire for healing in cinema (Sturken, 1997). Born On the Fourth of July (Stone, 1989), based on the memoir of the same name, offers the experience of Ron Kovic. Starting the film as a prototypical suburban child from Long Island, he is raised to trust his country absolutely. However, during his deployment, he experiences the horror of a civilian massacre and later mistakenly kills a member of his own platoon. He suffers a grievous injury and after nearly dying is returned home to an abusive Veterans Affairs hospital. In the end, his experiences in Vietnam leave him physically and psychologically ravaged (Petersen, 1992). Kovic becomes cynically calloused, and by finally turning against his government and opposing the war, he has achieved his coming-of-age at the cost of innocent bliss. (Sturken, 1997). Kovic’s experience is symbolic of the Baby Boomer generation as a whole. Born under the grimacing specter of nuclear annihilation and coming-of-age during the social upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kovic faces the same loss of innocence as his generational cohort as he comes to question and finally renounce the forces that he so faithfully believed. The mythos surrounding the Vietnam War is a cautionary tale, but the myths do not tell the full story.

A 1980 Harris survey of U.S. Vietnam veterans revealed that 91% were “glad they served,” 74% said they “enjoyed their time in the service,” 80% disagreed with the statement “the United States took unfair advantage of me.” Additionally, more than 70% said they did not “often dream I’m back in Vietnam” (Lanning, 1994). Furthermore, in 1982, according to a report by the Department of Labor Statistics Vietnam veterans were no more likely to be unemployed than nonveterans, and in 1981 the Bureau of Justice concluded that veterans over the age of 25 were typically unlikely to be incarcerated relative to the general US population (Lanning, 1994). One must critically consider the sources for this information, though it stands in stark contrast to the common Hollywood portrayal of every Vietnam veteran as a hippie convert or a shallowly “shell-shocked” danger to himself and others.

In spite of their overall ability to socially reintegrate, approximately 20% of Vietnam veterans did experience emotional difficulties on returning home due to the war compounded by an environment with little cultural support for mental health (Lanning, 1994). It is tragic that so many veterans (as well as refugees) came home to the United States with psychological trauma and so little support. However, it bears remembering that those with mental health issues are more often than not at most a risk to themselves and that the vast majority of mental illness takes place invisibly as it compromises the individual’s quality of life. The Bickles and Rambos of the silver screen are fetish objects onto which the American public can project their anger, distrust, confusion, and betrayal. Films are memorials from personal memory to collective memory (Sturken, 1997). The stories told about war are often exceptional, and that is precisely why they are told. The Vietnam War was horrific, but to reduce the veteran to a permanent victim of circumstance without a future only further harms them, denying their agency and building a hegemonic narrative that becomes culturally normalized while erasing the experiences of Vietnamese civilians and refugees.

It is especially unfortunate for people with posttraumatic stress disorder that the fictional Vietnam veteran has become so fragmented and symbolically reconstructed, as it negatively tints the cultural representation of all posttraumatic stress disorder sufferers. This is not to deny the autobiographical works of veterans but rather to highlight the danger posed by stereotypes perpetuated in pop culture as a whole. In Hollywood, the veteran is a naive child, a war monger or hippie, a savior or atrocity organizer, a supersoldier or baby killer, or a victim of their government—but rarely a genuine person. Vietnam has been made into a projection screen—a nation transformed by Hollywood and mass media into an abstraction that has subsequently become a battleground for interpretations of truth itself. The mythical Vietnam is just that.

A popular veterans’ bumper sticker says, “Vietnam Was a War, Not a Movie” (Sturken, 1997, p. 96). As realistic as films like Platoon or Born on the Fourth of July strive to be, they do not express the universal experience of the Vietnam War. Rarely mentioned in Hollywood is the service of the South Vietnamese, the experiences of military personnel outside of direct combat positions, the involvement of women in the military, or the life of communist troops (Schwenkel, 2006). While these stories are perhaps not as immediately cathartic for the general American public as those about U.S. Marines in the jungle, they represent at least a fraction more of the conflict in its totality.

Oftentimes, films created by people of Southeast Asian descent set during the war focus primarily on the social upheaval of the average citizen and may forego any depiction of combat entirely. Vietnamese works such as The Little Girl of Hanoi (Em bé Hà Nội; Ninh, 1975) and The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone (Cánh đồng hoang; Nguyễn, 1979) depict the war with a pacifist lens, showing the oppressive terror of living as the citizen of a nation that has fallen apart around you. Also of note is Ham Tran’s Journey From the Fall (Vượt Sóng; Trần, 2006), which follows the divergent tales of a Vietnam family following the end of the war. The patriarch, Long, is sentenced to be imprisoned in a communist reeducation camp, while the matriarch, Lai, and the remaining family cope with life as refugees bound for California.

War Without Frontiers

The end of the Vietnam War caused America to question the very concepts it would have traditionally used to contextualize the conflict: Western dominance, technological exceptionalism, and American benevolence were no longer infallible forces (Sturken, 1991). American intervention in Southeast Asia is used as an example of futility, seen as imperialism and a waste by some and as a point of patriotic pride and tenacity by others. More than 40 years later the war still lacks closure; there is still debate over whether the United States simply withdrew or was decisively defeated, if all American POWs were returned, and if the United States conducted covert missions in the area after the fall of Sài Gòn.

Conspiracy theories about secret shadow wars and rogue former commandos proliferate, from the celluloid dreams of John Rambo to the silicon nightmares experienced by Captain Alex Mason in the Call of Duty: Black Ops series (Anthony et al., 2010). This discourse is given new life in the post–digital age. Vietnam War mythmaking has seamlessly jumped to the new media landscape, whether presented in detailed, independently produced historical documentaries on YouTube or as pseudoparanormal crowdsourced flash fiction found on 4chan’s /x/ (paranormal) and /k/ (weapons and militaria) imageboards. It is also essential to note the aesthetic works of social media era artists and creators in the form of memes and surreal video tributes that act as a sort of pure art using the Vietnam War as a metaphor for the human condition. In broader American mass culture, it is telling that the POW/MIA (missing in action) flag still holds such a vivid place in the collective memory.

This abstracted war of “truth” has been culturally significant in ways far different from the true history of the Vietnam conflict. The mythos of Vietnam has been a vital cultural-coping mechanism in the post–Cold War era. Hollywood’s Vietnam is an allegorical tale to understand the War on Terror and a flashpoint in the culture war, with the political left and right often having a fundamentally differing understanding of the conflict. It is also used as an analogous way of reasserting masculinity in the face of a mental health crisis. Culture is shaped not only by what objectively happened but also by what people think happened. In the postdigital age, societies seek out constructed narratives of “reality” as praxis to understand the ideological ambiguities brought on by the arrival of true globalization in the information age.

The Vietnam War on the silver screen is not the one that was fought in Southeast Asia but a simulacrum of it through which the passing of modernity into postmodernity can be explored. This “phantom war” is fought again and again, cast onto conflicts concurrently and retroactively; it is fought in the hills of Afghanistan, first under a Soviet banner and then again under a United States flag. It is fought in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands between narcos and federales. It is the archetype for the insurgent wars of the 21st century. It is the war for the American psyche.