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The military has been determined to control the images of war since Vietnam. They're convinced that they lost the war because of loss of political support back home, because people saw what was going on.

This is all about a media war that continues to rage between the old and new media. Unfortunately for our soldiers, these brave Americans are caught in the crossfire.

The media lies to us all the time, and we always believe the media.

Today they have proven once again that the mainstream media can't print enough bad news about our troops.

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.

The Iraq war fueled distrust of the press from both sides.

You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy.

We have as a nation been duped by those who use our guilt about how we treated the innocent pawns in the Vietnam War game - the soldiers - into missing the point once again about the utter senselessness that is war.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

The conclusion that many uniformed military came away from Vietnam with was that political interference, dominance of strategy and even tactics were a very bad way to conduct a war, and that indeed, if that was going to be our practice, that we shouldn't wage conflict again.