Memorial Day weekend at Barstool is usually a blur of wiffle ball, burgers, High Noons and trivia tournaments. Somewhere between the cookouts and the content, though, the actual reason for the holiday tends to get a moment. This year that moment came late, and it came from Cons, who used the back end of Sunday night to point the timeline at a group of vets who historically got the short end of the stick.
Cons explains why Vietnam vets specifically deserve the extra effort this weekend.
our Vietnam Veterans were never properly welcomed home and thanked for their service We’re now far enough removed from that war that the men who fought there are dwindling in numbers So if you ever see someone wearing one of those Vietnam Vet hats, go up and tell them you appreciate their service. They deserve it
It's a fair point and one that doesn't get made enough. The guys who came home from Vietnam in the late 60s and early 70s walked into airports and college campuses where they were spit on instead of saluted. There were no parades, no free beers, no strangers buying their breakfast. Now the youngest of them are pushing 70 and the population is thinning out fast — the VA's own numbers have been ticking down for years. The window to actually walk up to one of those hats in a diner and say thanks is closing.
The rest of the company spent the weekend doing its own version of the same thing in different registers. Portnoy plugged Tunnel to Towers, which has become his go-to vehicle for this stuff, leaning into the recurring monthly donation pitch instead of a one-day post-and-forget.
Portnoy's Memorial Day pitch for the Tunnel to Towers foundation.
Large went the other direction and put a name and a face to it, posting Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler, the Delta operator killed in the 2015 hostage rescue raid in Iraq. That's the cleaner version of Memorial Day — not a generic flag emoji, an actual person.
A tribute post for Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler.
But Cons' framing is the one worth carrying past the weekend, because it doesn't expire on Tuesday morning. The Vietnam Vet hat is everywhere if you actually look — gas stations, hardware stores, the booth behind you at breakfast. Walking up and saying something takes about 4 seconds. The guys wearing them waited 50 years for it. Worth doing.