Richard Perlstein, National Correspondent for the Washington Spectator has written an article titled The Story of the Other Racist Flag.  This article might never have been seen except that it was reposted by Newsweek.  Mr. Perlstein, born in 1969 and a graduate of the University of Chicago, earned his liberal street cred writing such books as Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge.  From the article:

I told the story in the first chapter of my 2014 book, The Invisible Bridge, The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, how Richard Nixon invented the cult of the POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim.

It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.

I have personally met and attended veteran services with quite a few Vietnam Veterans.  They do not see themselves or the United States of America as victims.  Victimhood is generally not a virtue among those who have served in the United States Military.  Captain Bill Robinson, United States Air Force, was the longest held enlisted Prisoner of War in the Vietnam War (he accepted a commission after his release).  This man is kind and gentle, but not a victim.

Perhaps, the change in terminology was not “opportunistic”, but a sensitive gesture to those loved ones who still held out hope that a body might be recovered in the “dense jungle of a place like Vietnam”.  Speaking of body recovery, Mr. Perlstein also writes:

By 1993, 17 Americans were stationed in Hanoi in charge of searching for the missing and working to repatriate remains. They were provided a budget of $100 million a year, “over 30 times the value of U.S. humanitarian aid paid to Vietnam,” Allen writes.

As a matter of fact bodies are still being identified and brought home from Vietnam, Korea and World War II.  The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency helps to give families closure.  If that is not an American ideal, then what is.  We do not leave our soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines behind.

Finally, Mr. Perlstein writes:

That damned flag: it’s a shroud. It smothers the complexity, the reality, of what really happened in Vietnam.

We’ve come to our senses about that other banner of lies. It’s time to do the same with this.

 This quote actually tells us all that we need to know about Richard Perlstein and what he believes.  “That damned flag” is not a shroud.   “That damned flag” is a symbol and outward sign to the Vietnam Veterans that they were not forgotten, that their sacrifice is remembered and that their lives do matter.

Mr. Perlstein never does describe what it is about the flag that is racist.