ABSTRACT
The Vietnam War era US family was epitomized by its failing fathers: fathers who, however much they tried to, could not guarantee that their soldierly sons would inherit their moral certainties of WWII. Unofficially, as in the film The Quiet American, the Vietnam War reminds us that there is more we should wish we'd never been: government professionals so blinded by our own moral certainty that we crossed the line between do-gooders and evil-doers. Not only is the US official memory of WWII history conveniently sketchy; so, too, is the US official history in Vietnam, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Colombia, and Iraq, all the foreign locations that star in post-9/11 US cinema. In some respects, this is to be expected, for most of these post-9/11 films are fictions that play on/with facts but do not claim to represent them accurately.
