MB: My Bad

Amazingly wrongheaded essay on Hollywood's anti-war movies by Martha Bayles from The Claremont Institute. But I've argued against her soul-deadening understanding of art before--that doesn't interest me here. What does get to me is her factual misunderstandings. I could point to a number of questionable claims, but one line especially threw me for a loop. In discussing the Hollywood cliche of the brutalized, deranged Vietnam vet (which she doesn't seem to challenge), we get this:

...in the late 1970s, a slew of films appeared portraying soldiers and veterans as dangerous lunatics: Taxi Driver (1976), Rolling Thunder (1977), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Ninth Configuration (1980). The noble exception was The Deer Hunter (1978), and by the 1980s, it was no longer cool to portray Vietnam vets as nut jobs.

What, Deer Hunter is a "noble exception" to the nutty veteran rule? The film where Christopher Walken is a hollowed-out, drug-addicted veteran who makes his living playing Russian Roulette? Maybe Bayles left when the wedding ended. And what's this weird cut-off around 1980 when Vietnam vets were no longer seriously troubled? Has she not seen Cutter's Way (1981), First Blood (1982), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Distant Thunder (1988), Casualties Of War (1989), Jacknife (1989), In Country (1989), Jacob's Ladder (1990), Dead Presidents (1995), The Big Lebowski (1998) and hundreds of TV shows?