Nostalgia for Napalm

Listening to right-wing radio, one cannot help but notice a palpable nostalgia for the Vietnam War. Recently, people calling in to radio programs dealing with the presidential race tend to complain about John Kerry's eventual opposition to the war, implying that the U.S. war effort was somehow a righteous cause. The idea is that the U.S. effort, no matter how ideologically vague or politically misconstrued, was essentially altruistic as it represents an attempt by the "moral" U.S. to share democracy with the rest of the world (this, of course, before the evil lefty hippies stepped in and n…