why was the vietnam war called the working class war

Additionally, Donald Trump’s aspersive quip on the hero-prisoner aura piques our interest in how that narrative was formed in the post-war years and what about it made Trump’s words so compelling. As the punctuating event on President Obama’s timeline for remembrances, the POW story warrants a look back at how it stood in 1973. The return of 591 POWs from Vietnam in February and March of 1973 was the symbolic end of the war for most Americans. Obama also used the Memorial Day setting to launch a twelve-year series of fiftieth anniversary events commemorating the years 1961-1973 of the war in Vietnam. A comparison with Barack Obama’s 2012 Memorial Day speech sets Trump’s indecency in relief: With Vietnam veteran and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at his side and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall behind him, Obama invoked the image of Vietnam veterans abused by war protesters and neglected by the public to pledge that that would not happen again-a message that Trump apparently did not get. Rendered through a near-half-century of literature, film and folklore, the hero stature of the POWs was all but sanctified. The indignation with candidate Trump’s slough-off of the POWs was not surprising. His barb “prompted disbelief-as well as a wave of public outrage,” wrote Felicia Sonmez in the Washington Post. Trump’s putdown of McCain was made at made an Iowa campaign stop on July 17 when Trump was in a battle for the Republican Party nomination for president. He came home to a hero’s welcome that he parlayed into a political career. McCain was held prisoner until the peace accords ending the war were signed in January 1973. Donald Trump’s 2015 dismissal of American military personnel captured and held prisoner in Hanoi during the war in Vietnam was aimed at Arizona Senator John McCain who had been shot down over North Vietnam in 1967.

Why was the vietnam war called the working class war