Honour Vietnam vets' service - not their mission

Cross of Iron is an unusual war film. Not only are all the leading characters German, but the action is set on the Russian Front in the dying days of World War II.

The film's ambiguous title (which conjures up not only the image of Germany's supreme war decoration, the Iron Cross, but also the Christian symbol of suffering and sacrifice) cleverly encapsulates the movie's central theme: the relationship between courage and morality.

The film's hero, Unteroffizier Rolf Steiner, played by the inimitable James Coburn, tries to avoid the dreadful moral questions raised by Nazi Germany's conduct of the war in the East, by concentrating all his energies on keeping the men of his unit alive.

This willingness to risk his own life for the safety of his comrades makes Steiner's name a talisman of reassurance among the rank-and-file. As the cynical Captain Kiesel remarks: "Steiner ... is a myth. Men like him are our last hope ... and in that sense, he is a truly dangerous man."

Of course, not even the bravery of Unteroffizier Steiner could keep the wider moral issues of the war at bay indefinitely. In the film's final sequence, Steiner and his men, after heroically fighting their way back to the safety of the German lines, are gunned down by their own side.

World War II, at least from the perspective of the victors, was an uncomplicated struggle between good and evil. The peoples of the "United Nations" - as the Allies called themselves at war's end - welcomed their fighting men home with gratitude and pride.

Few then, or since, gave much thought to how the German people should respond to their fighting men. They had carried Germany's banners to the ends of the earth: but those banners were also Hitler's banners and that was Germany's shame. No one doubted the effectiveness or the courage of the ordinary German soldier: but it was courage in a wrong cause.

The war in Vietnam was also a wrong cause, and this week New Zealanders must grapple with the same fraught question as the characters of Cross of Iron: the relationship between courage and morality.

Ask yourself: Is it possible for a soldier to separate himself from the war he is fighting?

As the years since the Vietnam War's end in 1975 have rolled by, the New Zealand authorities have opted to answer that question in the same way the Germans decided to answer it, by focusing on, and celebrating, the courage of the ordinary soldier, and remaining studiously silent about the evil purposes to which that courage was applied.

It has been the perennial complaint of Vietnam War veterans that they received no thanks from the New Zealand public when they returned home. Indeed, they were advised by the New Zealand army to slip back into civilian life as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. Evidently, service in Vietnam was nothing to boast about. In fact, in many quarters it was a trigger for condemnation and abuse.

Clearly, this has rankled, and finally, motivated partly by ethics, partly by politics, Helen Clark's Government has responded to the Vietnam veterans' repeated demands to have their wartime service recognised and honoured.

The Crown has also apologised for its failure to adequately care for the victims of Agent Orange, the poisonous chemical that the United States Government used to defoliate the Vietnamese soldiers' jungle cover.

Quite why it's our Government - as opposed to the US Government - issuing this apology escapes me.

As does the reason why the Vietnam veterans' heartfelt appeals on behalf of the Kiwi families afflicted by this dioxin- rich deformity-causing defoliant, never seem to be extended to its hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese victims.

Vietnam was a racist, imperialist war, which the New Zealand prime minister was reluctantly persuaded to enter in the name of preserving this country's military and economic relationships with the US.

All of the men who served in Vietnam were volunteers, regular force soldiers for whom soldiering was their chosen profession. They followed the orders of their political masters into a hell that followed them home.

Vietnam became a cross of iron upon which the slayers and the slain were crucified without distinction. That sacrifice deserves our recognition.

So, take time this weekend to honour the Vietnam veterans service. But do not honour their mission.