"These men were wrongfully rejected, the veterans. The fighting man should never have been blamed for Vietnam"
About this Quote
Sheehan’s line lands like a corrective, and it’s meant to. Coming from the journalist who helped expose the machinery and mendacity behind the Vietnam War, this isn’t sentimental absolution; it’s a reallocation of moral responsibility. “Wrongfully rejected” frames returning veterans as casualties of a second front at home: not bullets, but social disgust. The phrasing is blunt to the point of prosecutorial. Someone is guilty, and it isn’t “the fighting man.”
The subtext is a rebuke to two easy American habits: turning complex wars into personal morality plays, and mistaking visible agents for decision-makers. Vietnam made that confusion tempting. The draft pulled in ordinary young men; the war’s television intimacy made uniforms into symbols; the antiwar movement, at times, needed a face for its rage. Sheehan separates the body that carried out orders from the institutions that authored them. “Should never have been blamed” reads as both ethical claim and political strategy: if you want an honest reckoning with Vietnam, you don’t start by scapegoating the people with the least power.
Context matters: by the late 1970s and 1980s, the “spit-on veteran” narrative was hardening into cultural shorthand, while policymakers and architects of the war often retained prestige. Sheehan’s intent is to pierce that imbalance. The sentence also carries a warning for future wars: when national shame arrives, it tends to trickle downhill. He’s insisting that accountability travel upward, to the planners, the liars, the leaders - the people who could choose, and did.
The subtext is a rebuke to two easy American habits: turning complex wars into personal morality plays, and mistaking visible agents for decision-makers. Vietnam made that confusion tempting. The draft pulled in ordinary young men; the war’s television intimacy made uniforms into symbols; the antiwar movement, at times, needed a face for its rage. Sheehan separates the body that carried out orders from the institutions that authored them. “Should never have been blamed” reads as both ethical claim and political strategy: if you want an honest reckoning with Vietnam, you don’t start by scapegoating the people with the least power.
Context matters: by the late 1970s and 1980s, the “spit-on veteran” narrative was hardening into cultural shorthand, while policymakers and architects of the war often retained prestige. Sheehan’s intent is to pierce that imbalance. The sentence also carries a warning for future wars: when national shame arrives, it tends to trickle downhill. He’s insisting that accountability travel upward, to the planners, the liars, the leaders - the people who could choose, and did.
Quote Details
| Topic | Military & Soldier |
|---|
More Quotes by Neil
Add to List
