For years after World War II, kids playing soldier games in playgrounds and backyards reenacted victory over and over, and a just victory, too. One of the great heroes of that war, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a solid, comforting presence in the White House. Perhaps I missed it, but over the past quarter-century, I haven't seen kids play Vietnam War games. They're more likely to reenact the exploits of Luke Skywalker battling the Empire or stage Pokemon battles. Children, no less than adults, prefer reliving triumphs to playing at defeat.
Kids pick up on that, and turn elsewhere.
The country as a whole is likely to do the same on April 30, the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. Reliving Vietnam means reliving an era when families and communities were torn apart and when a still-unhealed wound opened between those who served and those who did not. Remembering the unfair allotment of the burdens of that war is the first reason April 30 cannot go unnoticed. Vietnam was the first war in our history in which veterans were not treated as heroes, or even as good citizens who had done their duty. The hostility toward the first fully televised war was such that those who returned home from service were often treated like TV villains.