Thursday, August 12, 2021

Roofs, Choppers, and Memes












There's the photo that every lazy news media intern will pull up this week to run with stories about the evacuation of U.S. Embassy Kabul.

That building wasn't the embassy in Saigon. The photo was misidentified way back then, and, even though at least some people know better, they find that image more satisfactory than the truth. In the popular mind it is the embassy in Saigon, and that's all that matters today. So, by extension, it's every other embassy as well.  

Fans of non-fiction about the evacuation of U.S. Embassy Saigon can see this.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

So long ago, almost another world!
Sennacherib

TSB said...

It's an odd kind of historical privilege to be an observer at both those events. After Vietnam, I would never have expected that the U.S. public would tolerate another Vietnam, much less one that lasted twice as long as the first, but so we did.

Anonymous said...

Yeah
Sennacherib