I don’t presume to know what the folks at Marvel were shooting for when they named a popcorn movie after the Winter Soldier hearings. It asked Americans to face the atrocities that were being committed, by their children, in their name.
It was an incredibly painful, incredibly important moment in the discourse around the Vietnam War. The soldiers who testified spoke about villages being destroyed, women and children being killed, and helped reveal to the public the secret war in Laos in which my father participated, and which the government was still denying had even occurred. In the Winter Soldier Hearings, VVAW presented testimony from American servicemembers who’d participated in the commission of war crimes. My father is a disabled veteran who helped start an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Rather than paraphrasing him, I reached out to Thorn about his feelings on the situation. Here is his reply: I first became curious about the origins of the term “Winter Soldier” after hearing podcast host Jesse Thorn mention it a few times on his show Jordan, Jesse, Go!He was put off by Marvel’s use of the phrase due to its association with the Vietnam War’s Winter Soldier Hearings.
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