Has anyone sighted pickup trucks flying POW/MIA flags alongside of the American flag?

[Baitball Blogger]

Saw one driving on the road with fresh flags and I wondered if it was a statement on the Bundy situation. Lots of sovereigntist around here, so it would not surprise me.

[Lochloosa]

1. Pretty common in the South for years

[Human101948]

2. That's nothing new...

I've seen those dumbass flag flown ever since 1971...

THE STORY BEHIND THE POW/MIA FLAG

It memorializes Americans as the preeminent victims of the Vietnam War, a notion seared into the nation’s visual unconscious by the Oscar-nominated 1978 film The Deer Hunter, which depicts acts of sadism, which were documented to have been carried out by our South Vietnamese allies, as acts committed by our North Vietnamese enemies, including the famous scene pictured on The Deer Hunter poster: a pistol pointed at the American prisoner’s head at exactly the same angle of the gun in the famous photograph of the summary execution in the middle of the street of an alleged Communist spy by a South Vietnamese official.

By then, the league and its flag had become the Pentagon’s own Frankenstein’s monster. You can read about the mess that resulted in the definitive book on the subject: Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War by Northwestern University’s Michael J. Allen.

Allen describes how Vietnam’s “refusal” to “account for” a thousand phantoms became an impediment to reconciliation and diplomatic recognition between the two nations. (How bizarre, how insulting, how counterproductive this must have been to a nation that must have suffered missing corpses in the thousands upon thousands?)

http://www.newsweek.com/its-time-haul-down-another-flag-racist-hate-361929

[olddots]

3. no but I see loads of 60.000 $ pickups that look like they have never been worked

other than being driven to pilates classes by some pebble peckered wanna be John Wayne asswipe with an induction haircut and some uggly tattoos .

MERICA LAND OF THE DUMB .

[doc03]

4. I have but most of the time it is the so called rebel flag along side the American flag. n/t

[haele]

5. For the past 20 years or so. There's a variety reasons they do it.

Some fly it because they lost friends in Vietnam and they served. Some fly it as part of their patriotic shtick, "borrowing" military trappings (on edit -borrowed glory) even though they never served in combat. Some fly it as a complaint against the government because the soldiers were treated wrong.

However, all the Vietnam Vets I served with (went to service "A" and "C" school in 1977 at the same base where the River Rats were based stateside...) indicated that the only people known to be left behind had deserted or were in a local civilian jail for serious crimes (i.e., murder or child rape) and they were "problematic" to be returned to the US.
Known POWs were all accounted for during the prisoner exchanges in the early 70's, and there were quite a few MIA, between the tunnels and jungle patrols on both sides. But for the most part, it seemed that the MIA were already considered dead- killed in battle, and it was a matter of the inability to recover the body and send it home.
In fact, the first thing the US and Vietnamese governments did as soon as relations were re-established was to go searching for the MIA remains. While all of them have not been recovered yet, there is still an ongoing effort.

Haele

[Baitball Blogger]

6. Thanks for the info.

I do associate the flag with Vietnam, but I wondered if someone was using the flags for their own purposes because they looked brand new.

[LiberalElite]

8. Maybe (some of them)

have flown them all the while and they just needed to be replaced but some others are the rw "patriots."

[Mnemosyne]

7. Around here idiots fly the US flag and the slavery flag together on their big ass trucks with big

ass tires. NW Pa, idiot central.