journal of war & culture studies, Vol. 16 No.

3, August 2023, 312–331

Un-doing the Vietnam War Legacy:

Monumentalizing Second World War
Veterans to Legitimize Contemporary
US Military Interventions
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż
University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Arthur C. Danto’s distinction between monuments and memorials proposes

a differentiation between two ideologically-determined modes of commem-
oration, encompassing not just architectural symbols of the past but also
all other forms of cultural ‘remembering’, including documentary, literary,
and cinematic forms of representation. My discussion will focus on a photo-
graphic album significantly entitled The Last Good War and the transhistorical
depictions of the war veteran in the film Memorial Day. The purpose of this
paper is to underscore the ideological ambivalences at the heart of the Amer-
ican Second World War veteran ‘craze’, which not only paved the way for over-
riding the post-Vietnam War cultural legacy, but also served to ethically and
ideologically legitimize contemporary US military interventions in national
(collective) memory.

keywords The Vietnam War, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Second World
War, war veterans, Iraq, Afghanistan, collective memory,

Introduction: representing war(s) in contemporary American

collective memory
National (collective) memory should be understood as an institutionalized, ritua-
lized, and culturally-transmitted version of a nation’s past for the purpose of con-
structing a socially unifying image of a distinctive national identity in the present.
A nation as an ‘imagined political community’ (Anderson 1991 [1983]: 6) cannot
be said to possess a real memory for ‘all memory is individual, unreproducible –
it dies with each person’ (Sontag 2004 [2003]:76). National memory is but only
a different term for historical knowledge about events selected and propagated as

© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group DOI 10.1080/17526272.2021.2019373
 UN-DOING THE VIETNAM WAR LEGACY 313

nation-defining through the school curriculum, socially celebrated national holi-

days, commemorative rituals, as well as literature, film, and other art modes: ‘[it]
is not a remembering but a stipulating that this is important, and this is the story
about how it happened’ (Sontag 2004 [2003]: 76). If we accept that ‘a nation is a
grand solidarity constituted by the sentiment of sacrifices [because] common suffer-
ing is greater than happiness’ (Renan 1994 [1882]: 17), then it is obvious why mili-
tary conflicts tend to constitute the preferred historical events chosen for national
‘rememoration[s] [as] recycled, up-dated past[s], realized as the present through
such welding anchoring’ because ‘[t]he greater the origins, the more they magnif
[y] our greatness’ (Nora 1989: 16). Significantly, to redefine historical knowledge
as national memory is to assert an enduring emotional connection between the
past and the present, for to say that ‘we remember’ is to prove that ‘we care’.
The affective, epistemological, and ideological persuasiveness of national (collec-
tive) memory depends on the ‘living’ memory as encapsulated in the accounts of
the people who experienced a specific war as either a combatant or civilian.
Hence the appropriations of actual memories in post-memory documentary pro-
jects and (re)imaginings of such ‘rememberers’ in post-memory film and literature.
My interest resides in the documentary versus fictional depictions of American
veterans of the Second World War, my overall argument being that these veterans
were not the authors of their ‘monumental’ image in contemporary American
culture, and thus there is a need to scrutinize the ideological intent underlying
the specific timing of the diverse representational frames within which they appear.
The thematic focus of the article will be the photographic book The Last Good
War and the movie Memorial Day . I see here the point of convergence to reside in
their comparable ideological (mis)uses of Jan Assmann’s concept of ‘communicative
memory’, both emphasizing the urgent need to listen to the (hi)stories of – specifi-
cally – Second World War veterans, allegedly, because they will soon pass away, but
also as crucial epistemological stand-ins for the memory-void created by historical
distance. In the words of Pierre Nora, ‘[collective] memory is, above all, archival. It
relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the
visibility of the image. […] The less memory is experienced from the inside the
more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs […]. What
is being remembered? In a sense, it is memory itself’ (Nora 1989: 13,16). The
Last Good War: The Faces and Voices of World War II (2010), edited by
Katrina Fried and Gavin O’Connor, contains an introduction by historian
Hampton Sides, photo-portraits of Second World War veterans as ‘The Faces of
History’ taken by photographer Thomas Sanders, and the veterans’ recollections
as ‘The Voices of History’ gathered by oral historian Veronica Kavass. Ultimately,
124 Second World War veterans are included in the album. The war memories are
arranged chronologically, beginning with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and
concluding with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mem-
orial Day is a 2012 film directed by Sam Fischer. The opening scene takes place
during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the setting is the Anbar Province, the year is
314 MARZENA SOKOŁOWSKA-PARYŻ

2005. Sergeant Kyle Fogel is wounded by shrapnel when an IED hidden in a dead
animal by Iraqi insurgents explodes. He is taken to a military hospital where he is
approached by a female lieutenant doctor asking him about his nickname ‘The Col-
lector’, as he is known for retaining odd bits and pieces as war mementos. This
question triggers a flashback to 1993, the setting Le Centre, Minnesota, on Mem-
orial Day, when 13-year Kyle finds his grandfather’s footlocker containing keep-
sakes from the time of his service in the Second World War, which are said to be
doomed to remain incomprehensible without an accompanying personal
memory-as-testimony. The grandfather’s told (hi)stories create the grounds for a
trans-generational emotional bonding, the effect of which will be Kyle’s decision
to join the army.
Regardless of their different genres, The Last Good War and Memorial Day are an
intriguing case of twenty-first-century cultural projects which, though initiated and
completed independently of each other, ostentatiously purport a veteran-based
apotheosis of the American participation in the Second World War, and blatantly down-
play the Vietnam War within a politically-significant time frame of the aftermath of the
Gulf War and the US invasion of Afghanistan, and during/following the Iraq War. I
argue that the monumentalization of Second World War veterans in The Last Good
War and Memorial Day serves the purposes of counter-acting the memorialization of
the Vietnam War in order to legitimize contemporary US military interventions.
National (collective) memory is always discriminatory and ideologically-biased,
serving the predominant purpose of defining the national identity in the present by
creating a certain vision of the society as it supposedly was in the past, it ‘simplifies,
sees events from a single, committed perspective; it is impatient with ambiguities of
any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes’ (Novick 2000 [1994]: 4).
The socio-cultural imaginings of the nation in and for the present may be subject
to either processes of monumentalization or memorialization of selected historical
events put forth as nation-defining. My differentiation between these two diverse
commemorative trends derives from Arthur Danto’s definitions of the memorial
as ‘a special precinct, extruded from life, a segregated enclave where we honor
the dead’ versus the monument which ‘make[s] heroes and triumphs, victories
and conquests, perpetually present and part of life’ (Danto 1985: 152). Memoria-
lization serves to depict the past as a warning for the future, with war depicted
through the ideological lens of ‘cultural trauma’ within which ‘[t]raumatic status
is attributed to real or imagined phenomena, not because of their actual harmful-
ness or their objective abruptness, but because these phenomena are believed to
have abruptly, and have abruptly and harmfully, affected collective identity’ (Alex-
ander 2004: 9–10). In turn, monumentalization is a representational process that
does not deny that war is hell but it aims to depict the tragedy of a (national) col-
lectivity as a worthwhile sacrifice superior to the trauma of the individual: ‘tragic
struggle may entail moral agony, but it leaves the sense of identity and dignity
intact’ (Hoffman 2005 [2004]: 41).
 UN-DOING THE VIETNAM WAR LEGACY 315

A title such as The Last Good War may well lead one to wonder on what ethical
premises any military conflict can actually be labelled a ‘good’ one. This title does
not come as a surprise, however, when one takes into account the process of mon-
umentalization of the Second World War in American national (collective) memory
starting with Studs Terkel’s ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II
(1984) and Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation (1998), and culminating in
the immense box office success of Saving Private Ryan (dir. Steven Spielberg,
1998) and Band of Brothers (created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks,
2001). If the declared aim of The Last Good War was to encourage potential
readers to ‘seek our veterans close to you, talk to them, hear their stories [and]
[u]nderstand what they accomplished’ because ‘the most important responsibility
a society bears towards those who served the nation in war [is] to pay homage’
(Sides 2010: 7), then one may ask why Vietnam War veterans continue to receive
less attention than Second World War veterans? Concomitantly, Memorial Day
poses a similar problem of exclusion with ‘[its] conspicuous absence of any refer-
ence to military service by Kyle’s largely unseen father, who presumably would
have been of age to serve in Vietnam’, instead ‘display[ing] equal respect to both
WWII and Iraq War vets’ (Leydon 2012: n.p.; emphasis mine). The Last Good
War: The Faces and Voices of World War II did not gain critical acclaim and popu-
larity comparable to Studs Terkel’s ‘The Good War’ which won the Pulitzer Prize
for non-fiction. Memorial Day never became a box office hit, with only lukewarm
ratings of 6,1/10 (IMDb) or 63/100% (Rotten Tomatoes), and receiving mixed
critical reviews.
However, I consider both the documentary and the cinematic projects as compar-
able and noteworthy symptoms of the need to exorcise the never-ending hauntings
of the Vietnam War Syndrome by celebrating Second World War veterans in order
to ‘reaffirm [American] innate [and traditional] bravery and moral courage’ as well
as the ‘[American] dominance in the world’ (Bodnar 2010: 4) in a time when – once
again – difficult questions needed to be answered about the justness of the politics
and the ethics of the conduct of US-instigated military conflicts. The monumenta-
lization of the Second World War veterans in The Last Good War and Memorial
Day testifies to an emergent US need for a ‘therapeutic [form of] patriotism’
(Andén-Papadopoulos 2003: 95) that could (possibly) ‘cure’ the nation from the
guilt of the Vietnam War and provide an ethically-acceptable, albeit historically-
simplified, point of reference for the contemporary combatant as the ‘inheritor’
of the ideals allegedly residing at the core of the American national identity and pur-
ported to have been defended by Americans during the Second World War. It is not a
coincidence that the one of the most iconic images of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is
Thomas E. Franklin’s photograph of firefighters raising an American flag on the
ruins of the World Trade Centre, its ideological and emotional force deriving
from its ‘self-glorifying’ invocation of Joe Rosenthal’s ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo
Jima’, constructing an overt connection between the Second World War and
316 MARZENA SOKOŁOWSKA-PARYŻ

present-day ‘patriotic, peace-loving, good Christians still standing tall in the face of
fanatic […] evil’ (Andén-Papadopoulos 2003: 95, 97).

Contexts: from memorialization (The Vietnam War) to

monumentalization (The Second World War)
The memorialization of a past military conflict involves a purposeful focus on the
physical and psychological suffering of victims in order to convey a powerful
anti-war message, and it also aims to ensure that post-memory generations will
feel morally compelled to seek knowledge about historical events and acknowledge
history’s continuing significance in the present as a warning against repeating the
mistakes of the past. In the words of Arthur Danto, ‘we erect monuments that
we shall always remember, and build memorials that we shall never forget’
(Danto 1985: 152). It is telling that Danto’s distinction was inspired by the contro-
versies surrounding Maya Ying Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial which, at first,
comprised only the Memorial Wall including the names of the dead in the war.
The original design perfectly incorporated the memorial paradigm by refraining
from grandiose magnitude, traditional allegory, and ostentatious symbolism, offer-
ing instead an artistically subdued horizontal structure of a simple black granite
wall. This V-shaped Memorial Wall has been interpreted as representing ‘the
open, castrated wound of this country’s venture into an unsuccessful war, a war
that emasculated the role the United States would play in future conflicts’
(Sturken 1991: 123). However, the memorial ‘cannot connote a […] wound
without signifying the violence which created the wound’ (Sturken 1991: 124),
and this is precisely the aim of all the different cultural forms of memorialization
of war, namely, to instil an ethical obligation to acknowledge the extent of the
human suffering and loss that military conflicts inevitably involve.
From its outset, the Vietnam War evaded the possibility of being fitted into a
coherent master-narrative and an acceptable moral framework because the
reasons why the US should fight an alleged ‘Communist’ enemy in Vietnam were
never as politically persuasive as the need to fight the Nazis in Europe or the Japa-
nese in the Pacific: ‘[w]ith respect to the Vietnam War, neither government nor
media could successfully construct a triumphalist narrative as they had previously
done for World War II’ (Casaregola 2009: 186). The manner in which the war was
fought became ethically problematic also due to the horrifying images that came to
be inextricably connected to it, be it the ‘Eddie Adams’ photo of the execution of a
suspected Vietcong (VC) member at point blank range or the naked Vietnamese
child fleeing her burning village after a napalm attack’ (Russell 2002: 7). The
Vietnam War also became associated with the infamous kidnapping, rape, and
murder of a Vietnamese girl in 1966 (the so called ‘Incident on Hill 192’) described
by Daniel Lang in in The New Yorker in October 1969, or the notorious My Lai
Massacre of 1968, first reported by Seymour Hirsch in Plain Dealer in November
1969, and followed by his account of the coverup of this war crime in The
 UN-DOING THE VIETNAM WAR LEGACY 317

New Yorker in January 1972. Reports of such atrocities had an inevitable bearing
on the social ostracism of the veterans in the US. Basically, it was a war with no
grand finale as in the case of the Great War or the Second World War: ‘The
reason for the uniqueness of Vietnam, for the emergence of the multifaceted
"Vietnam Syndrome", is simple and straightforward: only in Vietnam did the
United States suffer a comprehensive military and political rout, an unprecedented
and unrepeated defeat and humiliation’ (Simons 1998: xvii). The Vietnam War Syn-
drome may be thus overall defined as ‘[t]he erosion of national confidence [in the
army], popular disaffection [with the government’s international politics ], [with]
Kissinger able to lament "the breakdown of our democratic political process"
(when further US interventions were blocked) – all this signalled the damage
being done to a hugely arrogant nation accustomed to perceiving itself not only
as the ultimate "can-do" country but also as the reservoir of all God-given
virtue. The wound was deep and it refused to heal’ (Simons 1998: 8).
Collective memory is not an ideologically unambiguous or inflexible determinant
of national identity. In the case of the Vietnam War, it is necessary to take into
account the political versus the cultural forms of narrating the conflict. In the after-
math of the declaration of the end of the war in 1975, ‘American leaders quickly
tried to consign the war to oblivion’ (Hagopian 2009: 32). However, by the end
of 1970s popular films became the decisive factor in shaping public opinion. The
immense public and critical success of Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (three
Academy Awards in 1979), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (five Academy
Awards in 1979, including Best Picture), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse
Now (two Academy Awards in 1980), effectively ‘alienate[d] mainstream
America from veterans’ by ‘consolidat[ing] the images of the troubled veteran
and veteran/activist animus’ and the ‘near-genocidal destruction of the Vietnam
War’ (Lembcke 1998: 146, 148). It is a paradox that the best American cinematic
productions which came to be regarded as unquestionable classics of the war film
genre are those which have done a great disservice to the actual Vietnam War veter-
ans by publicizing a morally enraging image of the American soldier either brutally
raping a woman (Brian de Palma’s Casualties of War, 1989), metaphorically raping
a foreign land (Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, 1987), addicted to drugs and
alcohol, even psychopathically violent (Oliver Stone’s Platoon, 1986), or disillu-
sioned and/or disabled (John Irvin’s Hamburger Hill, 1987; Oliver Stone’s Born
on the Fourth of July, 1989). The official diagnosis of PTSD by the American Psy-
chiatric Association in 1980 added the possibility of a new interpretative dimension
somewhat exonerating the veterans: ‘’As a case of psychologizing the political, the
construction of PTSD is a classic illustration of how "badness" can be reframed as
"madness’"’ (Lembcke 1998: 110). Nevertheless, the foregrounding of the trauma-
tized veteran only added to ideological framing of the war as a brutal and futile
conflict.
The 1980s must be viewed as a period of an unsurpassable divide between pol-
itical and cultural representations of the Vietnam War. However consistently
318 MARZENA SOKOŁOWSKA-PARYŻ

President Ronald Reagan argued for a necessary ‘shedding [of] guilt and shame and
remembering [the nation’s] efforts in Vietnam with pride and self-belief’ in order to
‘give veterans of the Vietnam War the recognition they deserved’ (cited in Hagopian
2009: 38), it would be the culturally propagated anti-war stance that would prevail
in the collective (national) memory. Even though Rambo: First Blood II (dir. George
P. Cosmatos) was an unquestionable box office hit in 1985, it ultimately failed to
supersede Hal Ashby’s, Michael Cimino’s, or Oliver Stone’s iconic-to-be cinematic
versions of the Vietnam War veteran as a social misfit, unable to reconnect to family
and former friends, haunted by memories, and representing the destructive impact
of combat on the male body and/or his psyche. The spectacular ‘action adventure’
generic conventions of Rambo: First Blood II only enhanced its ’Reaganite
interpretation of the [Vietnam] war when Rambo says "I did what I had to do to
win. But somebody wouldn’t let us win"’, with its overtly political ‘unequivocal
plea for the rehabilitation of the Vietnam veteran: "I want what […] every other
guy who came over here and spilt his guts and everything he had wants: for our
country to love us as much as we love it’’’ (cited in Chapman 2008: 184, 177).
And if Maya Lin’s original architectural design of the Vietnam War Veterans mem-
orial incited such immense controversy at the time it was because it resisted the pol-
itical pressures to re-narrate, i.e. monumentalize, the Vietnam War, and aimed
instead to underscore and perpetuate the ethical paradigms of memorialization
that framed this conflict and the veterans by ‘[its] refusal to engage with a historical
interpretation of the war, especially since it was majoritarian history in the first
instance that rendered the veteran invisible in American society’ (Parr 2008: 67).
The most distressful consequence of a society bitterly divided on the issue of the
justness of this military intervention was that ‘indifference, hostility, and denial
allowed no catharsis for the veteran’ (MacPherson 2001 [1984]: 46). During the
unveiling of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Statue in 1984, President Reagan
addressed the veterans present at the ceremony: ‘When you returned home […]
[s]ome of your countrymen were unable to distinguish between our native distaste
for war and the stainless patriotism of those who suffered its scars. But there’s been
a rethinking there, too. And now we can say to you, and say as a nation: Thank you
for your courage. Thank you for being patient with your countrymen. Thank you.
Thank you for continuing to stand with us together’ (Reagan 1984: n.p.). However,
neither the addition of Frederick Hart’s ‘Three Servicemen’ nor Reagan’s reading of
the statue as an apotheosis of ‘[t]hose who fought in Vietnam’ as ‘reflect[ing] the
best in us’ (Reagan 1984: n.p.) could change the overall effect of the Vietnam Veter-
ans Memorial which demands a meditative and critical perspective on the past,
invoking questions about the causes and consequences of this historical event,
and thus de-mythologizing American national identity in the past and for the
present: ‘It is not a stereotypical perception of warfare or the war hero […]. [Lin]
works with the social anxieties that the war produced […]’ (Parr 2008: 69). Due
to what happened to veterans when they came back home and how this war was
imagined in cultural (cinematic) representations, this particular military conflict
 UN-DOING THE VIETNAM WAR LEGACY 319

was – and remains – beyond the possibility of monumentalization which always

offers an affirmative version of historical events and comprises an apotheosis of
the nation by idealizing its soldiers.
Nonetheless, Ronald Reagan was right about one thing, namely that every nation
needs ‘patriots who lit the world with their fidelity and courage’ and ‘[who] sacri-
ficed their lives in the name of duty, honour, and country’ (Reagan 1984: n.p.). One
may well wonder whether ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II was
not intended as an answer to precisely such a national need in the 1980s. Terkel
writes: ’Quotation marks have been added, not as a matter of caprice or editorial
comment, but simply because the adjective "good" mated to the noun "war" is
so incongruous’ (Terkel 1984: n.p.). Despite this acknowledgement, the memories
of Second World War veterans collectively tell an uplifting (hi)story with ‘sweet
sounds of valour ultimately eclips[ing] the painful cries of war’ (Bodnar 2010: 9).
Even though Terkel had to admit that this was a period of overt racism, this was
still to be an account of an exceptional generation in an exceptional time: ‘The
memory of the rifleman is what this book is about; and of his sudden comrades,
thrown, hugger-mugger, together; and of those men, women, and children on the
home front who knew or did not know what the shouting was all about; and of
occasional actors from other worlds, accidentally encountered; and of lives lost
and bucks found’ (Terkel 1984: 1). Brokaw adopted a similar idealizing viewpoint
in The Greatest Generation. Though he includes a chapter entitled ‘Shame’ begin-
ning with the admission that ‘[a]ny celebration of America’s strengths and qualities
during those years of courage and sacrifice, however, will be tempered by the stains
of racism that were pervasive in practice and in policy’, in Brokaw’s opinion this
does not change the fact that the Second World War should be considered a ‘testi-
mony to America’s collective and individual resistance to tyranny, its awesome and
ingenious industrial machinery, and […] the common values of its richly varied
population when faced with a common threat’ (Brokaw 2004 [1998]: 183). One
must ask why Terkel and Brokaw chose to glorify Second World War veterans
rather than try to rehabilitate Vietnam War veterans in public memory – was it
because such veterans were seen as beyond social redemption?
As Steven Jay Rubin aptly notes, ‘[t]he Vietnam War soured mainstream America
on war films. And, in many ways, the genre has never recovered from that. […] the
country hasn’t really supported a U.S. military mission since the Second World War’
(Rubin 2011: 221). Steven Spielberg’s film tribute to his father (a Second World War
veteran), followed by the immensely successful HBO miniseries based on Stephen
E. Ambrose’s history of E Company of the 101st Airborne, effectively consolidated
the ‘monumental’ version of the US’s role during the Second World War as an
alternative to the ‘memorial’ representation of the Vietnam War. The timings of
the film and the TV series are significant. Saving Private Ryan appeared in
cinemas in the aftermath of the Gulf War, whereas the showing of Band of Brothers
coincided with Operation Enduring Freedom, which saw US troops invading
Afghanistan as a result of the launching of the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ following
320 MARZENA SOKOŁOWSKA-PARYŻ

the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This is not to say that that there were overt political
motivations underlying Spielberg’s war film projects. My argument is that, even
if unintentionally, Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, opened – due to
their enormous popular success – the space for subsequent ideological appropria-
tions of Second World War veterans in order to morally justify the US military
engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan was hailed as a ground-breaking master-
piece of the war film genre: ‘This film simply looks at war as if war had not been
looked at before’ (Maslin 1998: n.p.); ‘(the film) signalled a dramatic paradigm
shift in the way audiences experienced war films’ (Rubin 2011: 224). It is apparent
from the specific structural framing of the film that the character of the war veteran
was as important for Spielberg as the combat sequences. By creating an illusion that
the plot of the film is not imagined history but a living memory of the old man who
appears in the opening and concluding scenes of the film, Saving Private Ryan
restores the significance of the war veteran as the ‘holder’ of the truth of war
that has its relevance also for contemporary generations. The film begins with a
close up of a faded American flag, followed by a long scene focused on an old
man heading towards a war cemetery, with his family walking behind him in
silence. Amidst seemingly endless rows of white crosses, the old man kneels
down and cries before a grave. The final scene of the movie takes the viewer
back to the same war cemetery, the worn-out American flag, and the same old
man. John Biguenet asked in his review: ‘How can the sentimental tableau of a
weeping old man […] possibly serve as a fit conclusion to so savage and unsenti-
mental a film?’ He concludes, however, that ‘the prologue and epilogue, […] pose
what remains a fundamental question after the blood-drenched twentieth
century: What is our responsibility to those who have gone before us?’ (Biguenet
2014: n.p.). General Colin Powell’s speech at the Oscar Awards Ceremony in
1999, where both Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line were nominated
in the ‘Best Film’ category, emphasized the nation’s obligation to pay tribute to
American Second World War veterans: ‘Had these men and women failed that
test of their greatness, we would live very different lives today. To our and our chil-
dren’s good fortune, they did not fail. Instead, they triumphed’ (Powell 1999: n.p.).
Thus, the character of the fictional war veteran in Spielberg’s movie may be inter-
preted as a call for acknowledging the nation’s indebtedness to the men who
fought in its name, with the enclosing images of the tattered American flag signify-
ing the extent of the suffering underlying the soldiers’ sacrifice. However, Saving
Private Ryan involves only a simulacrum of actual memory.
The fictional veteran in Saving Private Ryan was to be replaced by actual Second
World War veterans appearing at the beginning of each of the ten episodes of Band
of Brothers. Their reminiscences are incorporated as prologues to each of the
enacted stages of Easy Company’s combat history beginning with the Normandy
invasion and ending in the conquered Third Reich. The faces of the Second
World War veterans from one particular company of the US army became
 UN-DOING THE VIETNAM WAR LEGACY 321

recognizable across the nation: ‘[they] became celebrities. They attended Holly-
wood galas, spoke at events, and received awards from a grateful nation’ (Hymel
2019). In 2002, Band of Brothers won the Emmy Award for the best miniseries,
with the poignant image of Tom Hanks helping the elderly Major Dick Winters
enter the scene to make his speech, and Steven Spielberg addressing his words to
the veterans watching the ceremony from the St Regis Hotel in Los Angeles: ‘The
men of Easy Company won this in 1944’ (’Band of Brothers: Emmy Awards Cer-
emony’). It is beyond doubt that the blatantly graphic depictions of the soldiers’
physical pain and psychological trauma serve the purpose of redefining courage
as endurance for a higher goal: ‘[the series is] a remarkable testament to that gen-
eration of citizen soldiers, who responded when called upon to save the world for
democracy and then quietly returned to build the nation that we now all enjoy, and
all too often take for granted’ (Clinton 2001: n.p.).
Monumentalization avoids engaging in all the political complexities and ethical
nuances of a given military conflict. Thus, Saving Private Ryan and Band of Broth-
ers omits any reference to the isolationist politics of the US in the 1930s. Would the
US engage in the Second World War if there had been no Pearl Harbor? The title of
the ninth episode in Band of Brothers falsely suggests that the overall purpose of the
US participation in the Second World War was the liberation of persecuted Jews, the
ethical paradox being that it was the Third Reich that first declared war on the US
and not the other way round. This title is an obvious borrowing from Major
Richard ‘Dick’ Winter’s recollection of the discovery of a concentration camp
included in Stephen Ambrose’s history of E Company: ‘the impact of seeing these
people behind that fence left me saying, only to myself, "Now I know why I am
here!’’’ (Ambrose 2001 [1992]: 263). The dedication of an entire episode to the lib-
eration of a concentration camp in order to testify to Nazi anti-Semitism as a foil to
American democratic ideals should not blur the fact that the US army in the time of
the Second World War was racially segregated. The purportedly ‘bad’ Vietnam War
involved a US military force that was by far more egalitarian, and in films about this
particular conflict it is no surprise to see Afro-Americans and members of other
ethnic minorities fighting in the same units as white Americans. Significantly, Fre-
derick Hart’s statue of the ‘Three Servicemen’, added to Lin’s original Memorial
Wall in 1984, depicts ‘the diversity of the US military by including a Caucasian,
African American, and Latino American’ (’Histories of the National Mall’).

The Last Good War and Memorial Day: a Second World War
perspective on contemporary US military interventions
The Last Good War demands that readers ‘see’ (i.e. notice and understand) all
Americans who served in uniform in the name of the their nation: ‘I hope […]
people […] become more appreciative of all those who served and fought our
wars. […] It shouldn’t matter if they were in Germany, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq.
They have all made sacrifices for our safety and our future’ (Sanders 2010: 9).
322 MARZENA SOKOŁOWSKA-PARYŻ

The repetition of the pronoun ‘our’ linking the words ‘wars’, ‘safety’, and ‘future’
creates an ethical paradigm eclipsing historically different military conflicts. Such a
discursive manipulation allows for the Vietnam War and present-day veterans to be
seen jointly as part and parcel of one distinctive group of Americans, i.e. those who
fought. And the fact that they fought is more important than when and why and
how they did so. In turn, the title of Sam Fischer’s film reminds the viewers of
the need to celebrate Memorial Day ‘which is observed on the last Monday of
May, [and] commemorates the men and women who died while in the military
service’ (‘Memorial Day’). Though seemingly purporting a demand for honouring
all US war veterans, the rendering of Kyle’s military service during the Iraq War as a
reflection of his grandfather’s Second World War experience allows to exclude any
reference to the Vietnam War – though this conflict would be a far more relevant
point of reference for the contemporary US soldier. The example of the memoir
Jarhead is telling here, for Anthony Swofford not only devotes an entire chapter
to his reminiscences of his father, a Vietnam War veteran (2003: 51–55), but he
also writes of what he and his comrades watched immediately after the news of
their deployment to Iraq (the Gulf War): ‘We concentrate on the Vietnam films
because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped
write our training manuals. We rewind and review famous scenes […] Apocalypse
Now […] Platoon […] Full Metal Jacket […]’ (Swofford 2003: 6). In Memorial
Day, the monumentalization of Second World War veteran Bud Vogel serves to
establish an idealizing perspective on the Iraq War which could not have been
achieved by invoking the Vietnam War. Let it suffice also to mention the film adap-
tation of Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers’s novel The Yellow Birds (dir. Alexandre
Moors, 2017), including a scene of soldiers trudging through a Vietnam-like jungle
landscape that must strike the viewers as conspicuously incongruous with the Iraqi
landscape. Yet, by means of the intended associations with the Vietnam War, this
scene effectively enhances its anti-Iraq War message.
There are military conflicts which evade simplified ideological framings of a
‘good’ or ‘bad’ war, and, in consequence, contribute to a representational crisis.
Though politically the Gulf War (1990–1991) was officially legitimized as the ‘Lib-
eration of Kuwait’, the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan took place as
‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, and the Iraq War of 2003–2011 was code-named
‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, the last two interventions allegedly necessitated by
the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’ in answer to the 9/11 2001 Al Qaeda terrorist
attacks, they remain culturally problematic wars in the sense that there does not yet
exist a dominant and ideologically homogeneous canon of documentary and/or
fictive representations that could be regarded as the major referent for understand-
ing their role in shaping the US national identity in the present. This is much due to
the fact that these were different military interventions across time and not one
single war. If we consider war films only, then we have conflict-specific filmic rep-
resentations, as suggested by such listings as ‘Top 10 Gulf War Movies’ (IMDb),
(2021) ‘Top 10 Iraq War Movies’ (IMDb), (2021) ‘The 9 Best War Movies
 UN-DOING THE VIETNAM WAR LEGACY 323

About Afghanistan’ (Military Gurus) (2021). Concomitantly, there are alternate

compilations, transgressing strict historical borderlines, such as ‘The 10 Best Post
9/11 War Movies’ (CinemaBlend) (2021) or ‘Movies about the Iraq, Afghanistan
wars’ (CNN Entertainment). The question is, however, how effective are such list-
ings aiming to propagate an all-encompassing ideological perspective of a total con-
flict between the assumed ‘civilized’ values of the US and the alleged ‘barbarism’ of
the Islamic ‘Other’. Can we speak about a canon of iconic cinematic representations
of contemporary US military interventions comparable to the ideologically standar-
dized group of films that effectively shaped the way Americans came to perceive the
legacy of the Vietnam War?
There is yet another issue which needs to be taken into account. The ideological
designations of particular wars may differ: ‘’If World War II was "the good war",
and the Korean War "the forgotten war", and Vietnam "the controversial war", the
conflict that began with the attacks of September 11, 2001, and has sent U.S. troops
to Afghanistan and Iraq for nearly a decade can be called "the 1 percent war". The
troops deployed to these combat zones and their immediate families make up less
than 1 percent of the population of the United States. The rest of us contribute
nothing’’ (Friedman and Mandelbuam 2011: 292). Paradoxically, what connects
the Second World War and the Vietnam War veterans is the fact that they either vol-
unteered or were conscripted, whereas contemporary US military interventions are
fought by an army made of people for whom this is a chosen profession; in the
words of Anthony Swofford: ‘Some of you will say to me: You signed the contract,
you crying bitch, and you fought in a war because of your signature, no one held a
gun to your head’ (Swofford 2003: 358). This poses a problem of how to represent
the contemporary war veteran, i.e. how to downplay the truth that participation in
a war today is a well-paid mission chosen by those for whom the army is essentially
a career move?
The contemporary US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were con-
sistently propagated by the presidential administrations as ‘just wars’ based on
the principle of jus ad bellum which allows ‘a state [to] resist aggression with
force so as to defend the local object of the aggression – i.e. the victim state and
its people’ (O’Driscoll 2008: 12) and ‘[to] employ force in defence of [the
nation’s] own particular interests [insofar as] [these] actions can be convincingly
construed as a defence of the international order and a securing of the international
common good’ (Coates 1997: 127). These were precisely the arguments used by
President George W. Bush in his 2003 address to the nation: ‘following deadly
attacks on our country, we began a systematic campaign against terrorism. […]
America and a broad coalition acted first in Afghanistan […]. This work continues
[in] Iraq, […] This undertaking is […] critical to our security’. One should note also
President Bush’s reference to the Second World War: ‘America has done this kind of
work before. Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan
and Germany, and stood with them as they built representative governments’
(Bush 2003: n.p.). And yet the Vietnam Syndrome was far from being bygone:
324 MARZENA SOKOŁOWSKA-PARYŻ

‘At the level of national understanding [and] in the realm of geopolitical policy,
success to the current campaign against terrorism, as in the Gulf War against
Iraq a decade ago has to this point been measured by how […] it had not turned
out to be another Vietnam’ (Beidler 2004: 2; original emphasis). What is more,
recent US military interventions have been marred by war crimes gaining a public
notoriety also by means of their filmic representations: the torture of Iraqi prisoners
in the Abu Ghraib prison in Rory Kennedy’s 2007 Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Errol
Morris’s 2008 Standard Operating Procedure, the gang rape and murder of an Iraqi
girl in Mahmudiyah in Brian de Palma’s 2007 Redacted, or the Maywand District
murders of Afghan civilians in Dan Krauss’s 2013 documentary and his 2019 fictio-
nalized war drama, both under the same title The Kill Team.
It was definitely not the aim of the authors of The Last Good War to undermine
the ‘justness’ of post-1945 conflicts. The military effort and sacrifices of the soldiers
in the contemporary US-waged wars are legitimized by the monumentalization of
Second World War veterans as representing ‘the Greatest Generation’ that is por-
trayed as a role model for what being an American should stand for: ‘the grace
and fortitude with which they plunged themselves into service. […] selfless, deter-
mined, humble, heroic’ (Sides 2010: 6), ‘They represent a time of unflinching patri-
otism’ (Kavass 2010: 10). These eulogies must sound familiar, as if one was reading
Brokaw all over again: ‘[they] faced great odds and a late start, but they did not
protest. At a time in their lives when their days and their nights should have been
filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they
were fighting, often hand to hand, in the most primitive conditions possible,
across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria’ (Brokaw 2004
[1998]: xxvii). There is no doubt among the authors of The Last Good War that
the veterans of contemporary wars deserve the same reverence as the men and
women who served during 1939–1945, the more so as they (allegedly) fight for
the same ideals underlying American national identity in times of grave political
and social crises: ‘We seem to uphold different values now. […] we are incredibly
divided on every major issue. […] Such behavior would be unheard of during the
Second World War’ (Kavass 2010: 10). Nevertheless, a title suggesting that the
Second World War was ‘the last good [American] war’ has – even if unintentionally
– a meaning that is in perfect accord with the ethical ambiguities problematizing the
social responses to - and the cultural representations of - US military interventions
from the 1990s till this day. In Memorial Day, the choice to tell Kyle’s Iraq War
story within the frames of his grandfather’s Second World War memories is, in
itself, evidence of the ethically problematic status of the contemporary wars in
American collective (national) memory. In other words, Kyle’s ethical identity as
a US soldier needs the moral validation of a veteran of the Second World War:
‘When you put on a uniform, you don’t get to choose the war. There is no right
or wrong, you do your best’.
The most noticeable point of convergence between The Last Good War and
Memorial Day resides in their comparable highlighting of memorabilia as physical
 UN-DOING THE VIETNAM WAR LEGACY 325

traces of the personal experiences of historical events: ‘[t]hings do not have a

memory of their own, but they may remind us, may trigger our memory, because
they carry memories which we have invested into them ’ (Assmann 2010: 111).
For post-memory generations, such objects need the telling of the (hi)stories that
underline the reasons for which they had become such treasured possessions: ‘Veter-
ans […] started pulling out WWII memorabilia out of tucked away places in their
rooms, they called me on the phone to share their recollections of the war’ (Sanders
2010: 9). Likewise, in his letter-as-testament, the fictional Lieutenant Bud Vogel in
Memorial Day expresses his appreciation for his grandson’s persistence in persuad-
ing him to share his memories linked to the three things chosen from the trunk:
‘What’s left is what matters. […] It is the stories behind them. Stories live forever
if only you tell them. Thank you, […] for teaching me that’. The long silence of
Second World War veterans signifies the missing stage of ‘communicative
memory’ which is essential to create epistemological and ethical bonds between
generations. In Jan Assmann’s definition, ‘communicative memory […] is not for-
malized and stabilized by any forms of material symbolization’, and, therefore,
relies on ‘everyday interaction and communication’ (Assmann 2010: 111).
Hampton Sides writes that Second World War veterans ‘tended their memories in
silence’ (Sides 2010: 7), to which Thomas Sanders adds that ‘[m]any of the veterans
I photographed have passed away since we met. It […] has also been a powerful
reminder of why recording their images and memories is so urgently important’
(Sanders 2010: 9). In Memorial Day there is a crucial gap in the chain of trans-gen-
erational communication, for Kyle’s parents appear to be utterly oblivious to Bud’s
war (hi)story. Significantly, it is during the eponymous Memorial Day that the boy
asks his grandfather the crucial post-memory question which makes it clear why the
veteran must tell – and thus also relive – his memories: ‘What am I supposed to
remember?’ The Last Good War and Memorial Day explain the hitherto absent,
i.e. untold, (hi)stories by trauma-based repression of memories. Hampton Sides
writes: ‘The war was always playing in their heads – like ambient noise. They
had slaved and starved. They’d seen friends tortured. They had buried legions of
their comrades. They still woke up in the night, sweaty and scared, tormented by
visions’ (Sides 2010: 6–7). In Memorial Day, Bud Vogel explains to his grandson
why his Second World War memorabilia remained hidden in a footlocker for
almost half a century: ‘what you don’t count on is that they never let you forget’.
It is essential to acknowledge that war is not always remembered as inherently
traumatic. The Last Good War includes veterans’ voices such as ‘Nothing to say.
It’s in the past’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 82) or ‘I do not watch war pictures
or talk war. It is hell’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 124). Nevertheless, the vast
majority of the veterans included in the album do not express any regret for
having been involved in the war: ‘I enlisted because I was proud to be an American’
(Fried and O’Connor 2010: 48), ‘Now, I also think that the more character and
honor you have, the better suited you are to become a soldier’ (Fried and
O’Connor 2010: 52), ‘There […] was no question in my mind that wherever I
326 MARZENA SOKOŁOWSKA-PARYŻ

was and wherever I landed I was going to do what I had to do’ (Fried and O’Connor
2010: 64), ‘My most enduring memories can only be the bloodshed, the fear, and
the resolve of myself and fellow soldiers to do what had to be done’ (Fried and
O’Connor 2010: 210), ‘I was a damn good soldier’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010:
132), ‘That was the highlight of my job as a nurse to see them go home’ (Fried
and O’Connor 2010: 128). It is also significant that most veterans posed for the
photographs in uniforms. The front cover of the album shows the face of an old
man holding a USN badge to his forehead. The opening pages include a photograph
of a Second World War veteran hugging the US flag followed by an image of a man
standing with his back to the camera in order to display the patches on his leather
jacket stating ‘World War II Veteran’, ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’, and ‘It’s Only the Land
of the Free Because of the Brave’. The last photograph in the album shows an old
man saluting, a gesture signifying his pride in having been a soldier.
One needs to acknowledge that ‘cultural memory […] involves forgetting’, and ‘it
is only by forgetting what lies outside the horizon of the relevant that it performs an
identity function’ (Assmann 2010: 113). The recollections of the Second World War
veterans interviewed by Kavass depict a totally different vision of the US society
than the one construed by Sanders’ photographs. It is obvious that the full-page
photo-portraits were meant to be read as ideologically outweighing the ethically
problematic truths resounding from the (hi)stories of racial segregation and dis-
crimination of other-than-white Americans and women: ‘My parents [Japanese
immigrants] were confined to different camps […], [and] I [was] suddenly expelled
from school’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 24, 25), ‘I was born in […] Hawaii. […]
They had never seen our kind of people down south. […] The local people didn’t
want us there’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 27), ‘I was the only Mexican American
signalman, and there was a bit of anxiety at the beginning […]’ (Fried and
O’Connor 2010: 173), ‘I was born on the Pala Indian Reservation […]. When we
were young, the government didn’t want our parents to speak in our own
tongue’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 170), ‘The infantry didn’t want blacks in
there as their backup, even though we were the best ammo company over there’
(Fried and O’Connor 2010: 80), ‘We were being held back in order to show that
the blacks weren’t good enough to fight’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 102), ‘It
was challenging at times to prove to the Marine men that we [women] could do
the job’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 97), ‘We [WASPs] were sabotaged – sugar
put in gas tanks, wires cut’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 115).
The manipulation at the core of The Last Good War is that the ‘faces’ dominate
the ‘voices’ and combine into a conspicuously egalitarian portrait of the US society
in the present, with the veterans ostentatiously shown to represent different races,
ethnicities, and gender. It should also be noted that some of the veterans are
recorded to refer to the present-day change in attitudes towards minorities and
women: ‘We received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007, and President Bush
saluted the Tuskegee Airmen’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 103), ‘I am ninety-three
now. We have a black president. We have black congressmen. We have black
 UN-DOING THE VIETNAM WAR LEGACY 327

senators’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 31), ‘Then, in 2010, all WASPs, living or
dead, received the highest honor Congress can bestow upon a civilian, the Congres-
sional Gold Medal’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 115). One Afro-American veteran
states that, despite the racism he met with, he wanted to fight because ‘I had four
daughters and one son, and I wanted them to have equal rights, and in order to
do that, you have to fight’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 80), and a female veteran
claims all the hardships she suffered as a woman in the US Airforce were not in
vain: ‘We are all proud and glad we were a part of history, and helped pave the
way for future female pilots’ (Fried and O’Connor 2010: 115). Thus, a direct con-
nection is made between the sacrifices made during the Second World War and an
allegedly more ideal US society in the present day. The message is that because of
these veterans’ resolve to participate in the Second World War, and their fortitude
in light of all the then prevailing social and racial prejudices, they effectively con-
tributed to changing the US nation for ‘[h]istory does not exist until it is created.
And we create it in terms of our underlying values’ (Rosenstone 2009: 40).
The same degree of ideological manipulation can be detected in Memorial Day.
The three objects chosen by Kyle as part of a deal to prompt his grandfather to
speak about his war past ultimately prove to be connecting factors between a
Second World War veteran and an active combatant in the Iraq War. A gun inspires
Bud Vogel to recall Operation Market Garden, Holland, 1944, when he was
assigned to lead his men to ambush the enemy. One German officer was severely
wounded, yet helping this man would endanger the mission. Bud tells his grandson
how he took the man’s gun but left him to die, a fact which would henceforth
trouble his conscience. So as the viewer does not blame the American soldier for
such a seemingly unethical act, the close up on the insignia on the German’s
uniform reveal him to be an SS-officer, the expected connotations all too clear.
The film then switches back to the adult Kyle who returns for another military
tour to Iraq, where his unit is ordered to participate in a HVT (High-Value
Target) mission. An Iraqi insurgent is badly wounded and Kyle requests immediate
medical help, thus, albeit symbolically, rectifying the self-imposed guilt of his grand-
father. A piece of shrapnel prompts Kyle’s grandfather to tell the story of how he got
wounded during an attack by an SS unit in Belgium, December 1944. The adult
Kyle is then shown to be wounded by shrapnel when an IED detonates, evidence
of the treacherous character of the Iraqi insurgents as the explosive was concealed
in the body of a dead animal. A photograph brings back the memory of Cologne,
Germany, April 1945, when Bud’s closest comrade-in-arms was killed by a
German youth, and it was blatantly foul play. The camera shows – yet again –
the SS insignia on the uniforms of a German unit which, despicably, sent over a
child to kill American soldiers. Kyle’s water bottle is a personal memento from
his time in the ISF (Iraqi Security Forces) Recruiting Mission, Ramadi, Iraq,
2005. A close-up depicts one Iraqi behaving in a very suspicious manner, an
explosion follows. The water bottle is kept as a reminder of the perfidiousnature
of the enemy.
328 MARZENA SOKOŁOWSKA-PARYŻ

It is also not a coincidence that Bud Vogel is an American of German origin,

hence evoking a deliberate comparison between the American German and the
Nazi German. The wartime decisions of Lieutenant Bud Vogel, if not always strictly
honourable, are vindicated by his sense of guilt. Refusing to speak about the past
for so many years because one’s actions were on the borderline between right
and wrong may be well interpreted as bespeaking of this man’s exceptional
moral character. The parallel Second World War and the Iraq War plots in Memor-
ial Day validate contemporary US military interventions by constructing a specific
ethical perspective on Iraqi insurgents as mirror-images of SS-German soldiers.
Both are depicted as fanatical followers of orders, representing ideals alien to an
allegedly more ‘civilized’ world. In comparison, the American soldier emerges the
more vividly as a crusader fighting for a honorable cause, the more so when he
has moral misgivings about his own conduct. Memorial Day ends with Kyle visiting
the grave of his grandfather, the man who inspired him to join the US military force.

Conclusions
Cultural representations play a significant role in shaping people’s political and/or
ethical responses, and both documentary and fictional (re)definings of a given war
can potentially build support for an entirely different military conflict. And if
national support for a military intervention can be measured by the way the
society treats its war veterans, then in order to sway the nation’s political stance
on a given conflict, it is essential to ensure a nationwide respect for the soldiers
involved. ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II, The Greatest Gen-
eration, as well as Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers provided a perfect
blueprint for how to restore a monumental image of the US veteran. Despite the
famous words of President George Bush after the Gulf War, ‘By God, we’ve
kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!’ (cited in Herring 1991), this
does not seem the case, if there appears to be a consistent need to rectify the dom-
inating cultural image of the US Vietnam War veteran by invoking the Second
World War. Regardless of their moderate popular success, The Last Good War
and Memorial Day are, beyond doubt, noteworthy off-shoots of a more general
trend in contemporary American collective (national) memory.
The Last Good War and Memorial Day perfectly exemplify how both authentic
personal (hi)stories and fictional constructions of memory of a past war can be
(mis)used in order to ensure social respect for veterans of contemporary military
conflicts which defy easy ethical classifications. The Last Good War, with its
racially, ethnically, and gender-based diverse photographic images of Second
World War veterans, and the framing tributes by Hampton Sides, Thomas
Sanders, and Veronica Kavass, expose the underlying tenets of the socio-cultural
process of monumentalization, which is always oriented upon the present day, pro-
viding a contemporary perspective as an ideological filter for (re)interpreting
history. The veterans in the album are different people than they were during the
 UN-DOING THE VIETNAM WAR LEGACY 329

Second World War, and their ‘returns’ to the past were inevitably determined by
their present-day circumstances and attitudes. Their memories, in fact, testify not
to who they were but to who they are now, oriented towards ‘construct[ing] new
lives on the ruins of a past life’ (Hynes 2000 [1999]: 218). The title of the film Mem-
orial Day calls for a recognition of what the national holiday stands for. It is not
merely a day for families to meet together, but a day when contemporary gener-
ations should reach out to veterans and through them ‘seek the reality [of war] in
the personal witness of men who were there’ (Hynes 1997: xii). Representations
of past and present wars – be they a commemorative photographic album or a
popular film – should be treated with caution. And one must also question the
reasons for either the social ostracism or the national veneration of war veterans.
‘Cultural memory’ is never free from ideological bias.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż is Associate Professor at the University of Warsaw,
Poland. She is the author of Reimagining the War Memorial, Reinterpreting the
Great War: The Formats of British Commemorative Fiction (2012) and The
Myth of War in British and Polish Poetry, 1939-1945 (2002), and co-editor
(with Martin Löschnigg) of The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film
(2014) and The Enemy in Contemporary Film (2018). She is also editor for the lit-
erature and culture issues of Anglica: An International Journal for English Studies.

ORCID
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6775-9327

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