Good Guys

Hearts and minds. That's what the powers that be wanted to win in Vietnam. In order to stop the vile threat of worldwide communist domination, it was important to make sure that the Vietnamese were impressed with the duty and commitment of our soldiers on the ground. It's a pretty tough sell when you're asking nineteen and twenty year olds to put down their automatic weapons long enough to play soccer with the locals. Especially if the locals are as interested in killing you as you are them. Still, it's a noble notion that went horribly wrong with incidents such as the Mai Lai Massacre.
Maybe this sort of thing has its genesis in Sand Creek, sometimes euphemized as a "Battle." A band of native Americans, mostly women and children, were killed in Eastern Colorado. The discovery of gold brought settlers who needed the freedom to roam about and claim the land as their own. The Cheyenne and Arapaho that camped near Sand Creek were in the way. Keep in mind, gold was once more valuable than oil. After signing a number of treaties and assuring the tribes that were there far in advance of our white migration, the U.S. Army decided to rid the plains of the upstart "Dog Soldiers" who refused to play along with the negotiations of their chiefs.
There were no Dog Soldiers at Sand Creek. The massacre had the effect of inciting more raids and terrorizing settlers in that region over the next four years.
One hundred and fifty years later, we have U.S. soldiers urinating on the corpses of Taliban. And now Marines posing with a flag that is incredibly reminiscent of a Nazi flag from World War II. Investigators determined it was a "naive mistake."
Hearts and minds, boys. Hearts and minds.