Website VietnamWarMyths.org is up and running & the marketing plan

Where do I fit?

Five years ago I would definitely fit in the paranoid crowd. My phone is on the “do not call list” and I have a phony birth date for the Internet. I still do not have my profile “finished” on Facebook. I mean anyone who really knows me, knows where I live and my birthday. If you don’t ... well ask me offline ... maybe I’ll tell you where I live ... if I trust you.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you (similar to Heller’s quote mentioned in the article) is an adage I’ve found useful in my life. It manifests itself in things such as using prepaid cards for Internet purchases and having a special email address to give sites that insist on an email address for whatever it is I wish to do on the site.

I have over the last couple of years, very reluctantly, surrendered elements of my privacy to social media ... it is the only way I can keep tabs on my grandchildren (several of whom live with my son’(s) exes, who have cut off the ex’s family, so FB is the only contact I have with them) and nieces and my younger children and their friends. I think somewhere I learned I have a parental responsibility to keep up to date with what my younger kids have been up to. It is very enlightening to peruse their Facebook pages.

So now because of pseudo-necessity, I am riding the middle line, but still closer to the paranoid side of the road than the put it all out there, “nothing to hide” side. I haven’t forgotten the FBI report that 75,000 Americans get their identity stolen every year. I still won’t trust online banking not because I doubt their encryption but because my terminal is not part of their system and is therefore vulnerable. 

I suppose I am slowly accepting the fact that some machine somewhere is keeping better track of me than I keep track of myself; just because there are too many things I need to do that I can’t do without that surrender of my privacy, but I really really don’t like it.

My biggest lament on this matter I suppose is that after all the fighting we did in the 60’s thru 80’s for privacy rights, there is now a whole generation of young people who surrender their privacy as if it weren’t worth the paper a copy of the constitution is written on. I fear that George Orwell had it all right, except the year.

I am still short about 4 Facebook likes. Please if you have not already liked my page, The Facebook url = https://www.facebook.com/VietnamWarMyths, please do so. The website http://www.VietnamWarMyths.org is close enough that I loaded this weekend, even though several pages are still under construction. I wrote the code for the page myself so some of the style weaknesses that you may note are because my knowledge of web code is limited. For instance I don’t know java script & my php is weak, so I haven’t used them at this point for this page.

Let me know what you think, please. Also if you could advise me of any glitches you find, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks

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mission statement

Our mission is to inform Vietnam Veterans, their families, historians, media professionals and the general public about the cornucopia of new information that is available about the Vietnam War; and the need to revise historical thought to accurately reflect an academic analysis of this new information, with a view toward building consensus concerning establishing correct historical accounts of the Vietnam War.

 

 image courtesy: http://www.blog.markloiseau.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Tsar_Bomba.jpg

About the facebook page Correcting Vietnam War Myths & publics analysis

My Facebook page will be concerned with dispelling myths about the Vietnam War.

Some personae of the target audience:

Jack D. just retired after turning sixty-five. Now that he has more free time he is plagued by the thoughts he used to be able to shove aside. The pressing events of the work a day world that allowed him to ignore those thoughts are now gone. He ponders the reasons why his generation was the only generation ever to loose a war. He considers that even though his outfit got hurt a few times in a battle and some firefights, he does not remember a time when he really thought his unit was loosing. He has been told a thousand times that he lost the War, but that is not the way he remembers it. Jack D. is seeking answers to resolve this dissonance.

Wyle T., 63, wondered at the news reports when he got back to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1971. While over there, he remembers everything was pretty much going our way. He doesn’t understand how it all went downhill after he left.

Tom C., pushing 70, is homeless and depressed. Ever since he returned from Vietnam life has not been what expected while growing up. Since his return he hasn’t held a job for more than three weeks. Well, there was that one job that lasted almost three months. He fought his way through three wives before he gave up on love and eventually life as well. He spends his days rooting for food and begging for spare change. Occasionally he visits the library and gets news from the Internet or reads a book. He lies awake nights thinking of the friends he lost and the people he killed in Vietnam. The War left him feeling like a looser and he never was able to shake that feeling.  

Johnny W., 46, never met his Dad. All he has is a letter his Dad wrote to him when he was still a baby. His Mother gave the letter to Johnny before she died. She said he left it with her for him before going back to Vietnam. The letter didn’t say much, “Sorry I can’t be there for you son. I just can’t make it in the world”. Johnny W. is still trying to figure out what that means.

Shirley T. was ten when she went with her mother and grandfather to pick up her father’s coffin. He was lost in Vietnam during Operation Junction City in 1967. She spent her entire life grieving because during the next seven years of the War she was bombarded by media rhetoric that portrayed her father’s sacrifice as useless, a waste, sometimes even as an abomination.

Virginia C. went with her Mom to pick up her father when he arrived home in 1970 from Vietnam. Her seven-year-old mind could not understand why those longhaired people on the other side of the fence were yelling foul things at her father and the other soldiers as they walked off the tarmac to meet their families. She watched her mother and father argue and fight a lot as she grew up. She watched her father do strange things that caused her mother to get angry with him. She watched him suffer torment for ten years before anyone even defined Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Since her Father’s recent death, Virginia has unanswered questions about the War and why it affected her father the way it did.

Tammy T., 27, is still teaching myths about the Vietnam War in her history class because those are the things that are written in the textbook she uses.