Effect On Popular Culture
In the words of one analysis, "The notion that the United States may have left men behind was hard to fathom, and Americans chose to partly solve this complex problem through fictional characters."
This was especially true in American films. The first was Chuck Norris's 1978 Good Guys Wear Black, which postulated a cynical U.S. government writing off MIAs with a bogus mission. 1983's Uncommon Valor, starring Gene Hackman, followed suit, as did Norris again in 1984 with Missing in Action.
By far the most visible film in this theme was Sylvester Stallone's Rambo: First Blood Part II in 1985, which did the most to popularize the idea that American POWs had been left behind after the war and that the government had no real interest in their rescue. The Rambo character, who in this film may have been partly modeled after Bo Gritz, was a Vietnam veteran commando still haunted by the multiple failures of the war. The pivotal moment of the film occurs when Rambo, realizing he was betrayed by the U.S. government and under torture from the Vietnamese and their Soviet allies, is put into radio communication with the officer who ordered the mission and tells him, "Murdoch. I'm coming to get you!" Rambo and the Norris films were commercially successful in both the United States and in Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia, and did much to perpetuate the stock image of American prisoners held in bamboo cages.
Rambo was followed by Norris's 1985 prequel Missing in Action 2: The Beginning, as well as other films such as P.O.W. The Escape (1986) and Dog Tags (1990) that shared similar conceits. The Vietnam war POW/MIA issue was explored in some U.S. television series, such as the 1997 The X-Files episode "Unrequited".
Read more about this topic: Vietnam War POW/MIA Issue
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“The pleasure of one’s effect on other people still exists in age—what’s called making a hit. But the hit is much rarer and made of different stuff.”
—Enid Bagnold (1889–1981)
“To get time for civic work, for exercise, for neighborhood projects, reading or meditation, or just plain time to themselves, mothers need to hold out against the fairly recent but surprisingly entrenched myth that “good mothers” are constantly with their children. They will have to speak out at last about the demoralizing effect of spending day after day with small children, no matter how much they love them.”
—Wendy Coppedge Sanford. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, introduction (1978)
“What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)