Now, there is a difference between allegedly abandoning military members and abandoning U.S. civilians, though I’m not sure which is worse. The point, though, is this was a major part of the 1980s cultural zeitgeist, as movies like the Deerhunter and Apocalypse were replaced by hits like Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action (“One man who wouldn’t forget the Americans who were left behind” and “The war isn’t over until the last man comes home”) Gene Hackman’s Uncommon Valor (“C’mon, buddy, we’re going home”) and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo: First Blood Part II (“Sir, do we get to win this time?” and “You know there’s more men out there. Find them, or I’ll find you!”)

Those movies (all box offices hits) provided a venue for acting out our fantasies of rescuing Americans and exorcising a humiliating defeat at a time when there were numerous reported sightings and photos of long-lost prisoners of war and when you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing one of those black POW/MIA flags. In 1987, Ross Perot concluded a nine-month investigation of the issue, writing to President Ronald Reagan: “We left POWs behind at the end of the war in Vietnam.”

I’m not trying to relitigate Hollywood’s (and Perot’s) assertion, but to instead explain how widely and passionately believed this was for decades—and what that says about the feelings that linger when a war ends in humiliating defeat.