The Funeral Scene

After watching this film, I was thoroughly impressed (for the lack of a better word) by the extensive use of rhetoric by the American leaders at this time. The returned veteran of the war changed his choice of words to fit the audience that he was talking to- first to a crowd (speaking about how America made him a good American), next to a group of school children in a cafeteria (speaking in simpler terms "they don't like us" and then to a group of middle aged house wives (appealing to their morals and American values of being raised "right").
I was focusing my attention to the rhetoric of our "leaders" (Nixon, Johnson, Westmoreland, etc.) used when speaking to the American people. They kept digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole in Vietnam, with no end in sight.
Suddenly as I was thinking about all of this- the media's impact on public opinion and how that worked and comparisons to the Iraqi War... the sobs of a young boy at his father's funeral rushed into my consciousness.

His raging sobs, his cries, his wimpering. It brought me back to the day I heard of my own father's death. He held his father's photograph as they loaded his casket onto a truck. He shook with terror as the Vietnamese flag was draped over the casket. His surviving mother joined in the sobbing and attempted to crawl into the hole with the casket.
"Life is plentiful and life is cheap in the orient"
"Life is not important"
-Westmoreland

Putting these two scenes together, really affected me. I am a human being who has felt the pains of a close member of my family dying. But, I am also an American, the same as this ignorant man talking about "oriental" people as a whole. This makes me, like the marine, lose my patriotism, my pride in the America. Life is not cheap, life comes at a very high price- including the Vietnamese.