Gulf War. Wars have also become a lot more high tech in the years since Vietnam, switching from more of a ground based type of battle to more use of high tech laser guided missiles and long range attacks on unsuspecting targets. This makes it harder to report a war in terms of whose winning by just listing casualties and battles, because many of the operations are highly secretive maneuvers that the enemy cant know about. It was also easier to support the Gulf War because we had a tyrant to hate- Saddam Hussein. Everyone loved to hate Saddam during the Gulf war, just like it was easy to hate Hitler and Mossoulini and the boys. It was easy for the media to give us lots of propaganda against Hussein because he was so clearly anti- American and such a tyrant (according to what the media told us). In Vietnam there wasnt really a clear dictator or tyrant to hate, we just knew we were fighting for democracy which seemed to be less significant in light of the horrors our countrymen were facing. Whether giving us a face to hate is really helping us understand the war or not is another issue, but it did seem to help us to accept and support our involvement. Another part of this issue is the role movies play in our perception of the conflicts our country is involved in. Even though we generally see movies as just a form of entertainment for us to watch, movies can have a large impression on how we feel about our wars. Movies are even more notorious than other forms of media in the way they portray our soldiers as heroes. This is especially true in older movies, as recently more and more movies are having a tendency to show both sides of the issue, as it really probably was. If you ever watch an old movie about World War II you know for sure that the Americans are going to come across looking like heroes and the Germans and Japanese are going to look like the bad guys.All in all it is obvious that media has a huge impact on how we vi...
