What Exactly Did We Learn from Vietnam?

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Abstract

nam a “little war”.That little war supposedly shaped my generation although a lot of us seem to have forgotten that our government lies to us whenever it’s convenient to do so. A surprising number of people who were supposedly of age and paying attention in 1970 were shocked to discover that the U.S. government lied about the dastardly weapons of mass destruction about to be deployed by Iraq.What did we learn from our spanking in Vietnam?Well, we sure learned to shut down the draft, thank you very much. It turned out that arbitrarily sending young men off to be killed in jungles a world away was bad optics. It riled up the kids and made otherwise patriotic mothers cranky. Now, of course, we still have the (ahem) Selective Service and every mother’s son in this country is required by law to get into that database although the draft itself

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has been eliminated. Not the daughters, mind you, and it’s curious how silent even the most dedicated feminist seems to be on that point.Really, though, as long as there are no meaningful career opportunities for entire swaths of the population, recruiting young people to go off and die in foreign lands isn’t such a chore.We also learned to stop broadcasting daily “body counts” on the evening news. Talk about bad optics.It turns out that those who profit from global conflict actually learned quite a lot and have put that knowledge to work as evidenced by the fact that this country has been at war constantly since World War II. Those of us who are expected to feed the war machine, however, need to start paying closer attention. The lessons are there every day.© Remington Write 2019. All Rights Reserved</article></body>

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Courtesy of GoodFreePhotos — Viet Cong prisoner captured in 1967 by the U.S. Army awaits interrogation

My takeaway growing up during the height of the “conflict” in Southeast Asia was that it was a lot better to be a girl because boys had to sign up for the draft and could wind up getting their legs shredded by a land mine in a rice paddy in Vietnam.

I remember getting indignant with my mother, who was a little kid during The Good War, WWII, for calling Vietnam a “little war”.

That little war supposedly shaped my generation although a lot of us seem to have forgotten that our government lies to us whenever it’s convenient to do so. A surprising number of people who were supposedly of age and paying attention in 1970 were shocked to discover that the U.S. government lied about the dastardly weapons of mass destruction about to be deployed by Iraq.

What did we learn from our spanking in Vietnam?

Well, we sure learned to shut down the draft, thank you very much. It turned out that arbitrarily sending young men off to be killed in jungles a world away was bad optics. It riled up the kids and made otherwise patriotic mothers cranky. Now, of course, we still have the (ahem) Selective Service and every mother’s son in this country is required by law to get into that database although the draft itself has been eliminated. Not the daughters, mind you, and it’s curious how silent even the most dedicated feminist seems to be on that point.

Really, though, as long as there are no meaningful career opportunities for entire swaths of the population, recruiting young people to go off and die in foreign lands isn’t such a chore.

We also learned to stop broadcasting daily “body counts” on the evening news. Talk about bad optics.

It turns out that those who profit from global conflict actually learned quite a lot and have put that knowledge to work as evidenced by the fact that this country has been at war constantly since World War II. Those of us who are expected to feed the war machine, however, need to start paying closer attention. The lessons are there every day.