13 thoughts on “On Memorial Day”

  1. I drew a draft number of 14, and had no clue what I’d do. Part of me was an obnoxious young Boston new-lefty just like everyone else I hung out with at the time, part of me was still the Michigan kid who’d played “Army” shooting up imaginary VC with a plastic tommy gun. I had nothing like strong convictions either way.

    They ended the draft just a few months later so I didn’t have to decide. Chances are I would have just gone with the flow, and chances are I would have been ID’d on the testing and sent off to school for something technical and never ended up finding out the reality of fighting in Vietnam.

    A year later I was well on my way away from the new left – actually going to live with the radicals and hippies can do that for you. Seven years of reading and paying attention later I had a clue who the good guys actually were. Forty years of reading and talking to people later, I have some limited clue what modern combat has actually been like for the kids who did go.

    My chief thought on it all is that grabbing eighteen year-old kids who don’t have a clue about anythng and teaching them to be soldiers sucks. I’m grateful for all of them who’ve gone out and done the job anyway, but in a perfect world they wouldn’t take anyone who didn’t already understand what it is they’re getting into.

    Ah well, in a perfect world, nobody’d have to fight at all.

    As for Simon, he, like a lot of us for a while, sounds to have been a useful idiot. I had a few encounters with the serious new-lefty organizer cadre types back then, of the steely-eyed doctrinaire control-freak sort. Them I seriously blame for doing a huge amount of harm since.

    1. Like Henry, I was one of those for whom vaguely liberal leanings in high school did not survive contact with the hard-core Left as an undergrad. It still baffles me how the Left seems to manage to recruit so many “useful idiots” when, on a one-to-one personal level, so many of the activist cadre are poisonous little shits. One of the great mysteries of our time.

      For those to whom the draft is ancient history, a little primer. For a long time, the draft was fairly opaque. Some were called, others weren’t, and there wasn’t any obvious reason why in either case. Local draft boards did their work in private. Plus, there were a lot of exemption categories, especially the one for college students. As Vietnam wore on there was more and more pressure to democratize the draft. The Left didn’t like that people whose parents could send them to college were exempt. After college students became the face of the “anti-war” movement, the Right didn’t see why these privileged punks shouldn’t take the same chances as high school graduate farm and factory hands. So the exemptions were almost entirely cancelled and a lottery was held once a year to assign the numbers 1 – 365 (or 366) to birthdays. The government, in the form of the Selective Service, would decide how many bodies it needed for the year and that would set the upper bound on the number, starting at 1, of the birthdates whose cohorts would be called up that year. If your birthday drew a number higher than this max, you didn’t get called.

      I wasn’t eligible for the draft lottery the first year (1969) – too young by about two weeks as I recall. That was the year they took, if memory serves, everybody with birthdays assigned to numbers 1 – 325. If I’d been eligible, I’d have been called for sure. I was eligible for the second year lottery. My birthday drew number 125. The Selective Service took birthdays numbered 1 – 110 that year. The Vietnam War was “Vietnamizing” and American involvement was winding down. So I was never faced with dodging the draft. As I have said many times since, “I didn’t dodge the draft; the draft dodged me.” Not that I would have run off to Canada or anything anyway. Given that I was an undergrad computer science major at the time, I’d probably have enlisted and spent my hitch like a former boss of mine did, safely ensconced in an air-conditioned, raised-floor room full of mainframes somewhere no closer to combat than downtown Saigon.

      I think they only did one more year of the draft lottery after my year and hardly took anyone. By what would have been year four of the lottery, the Selective Service was pretty much moribund and no lottery was held. The draft ended officially in 1975. Interestingly, the so-called “anti-war” movement faded in parallel. In the U.S. it hadn’t really been an “anti-war” movement so much as an anti-draft movement. With the draft gone, the actual war ceased to matter to most young Americans.

      So my involvement in the Vietnam War was all at a considerable remove, watching it on TV. I can’t say that it ever really engaged me much on a personal level. My father had spent WW2 in the Army Air Force and that war was intensely real to me – even though it had ended six years before I was born – in a way Vietnam, which actually happened on “my watch,” never was.

  2. I was pretty libertarian even then, which was terribly confusing to the people around me since the label did not exist yet. I was not anti-military; but I was very anti-Viet-Nam for the simple reason that I was against foreign adventures, period. I was a strong proponent of freedom of speech in an era when if you quoted the Bill of Rights people thought you were a Left Wing Commie. My how times have changed. Now if you quote it, folks think you are Right Wing Bible Thumper.

    No one should apologize for where they took their stand. If you looked at the world around you and decided upon what you thought was the right thing to do, that should be respected. If decades pass and you turn out to have been wrong, then so what? Hindsight is 20-20 as they say. You cannot predict the future. Then or now, you can only look around you and take your best shot at doing the right thing.

  3. The Vietnam war was a waste of money and americans.

    There was no strategic national vital interest, they hadn’t attacked us and
    we had no goals

    1. Oh, no. It was an important strategic success for the West. Remember, the strategy was Containment: keep Russia from eating up the world and using their conquests to fund more conquests. Vietnam was part of that, after Korea – chew up the other side’s resources, wait as the Soviet economy continues to deteriorate. Slow them down. Hope they collapse, which is what happened eventually. Remember that there are estimates that the Soviet Union used an incredible fraction of their GDP on the military, something like half. They could match us, but only by giving up everything else.
      It’s sad what happened to Vietnam and Cambodia, but irrelevant to the strategy.
      And even that was unnecessary; if the United States had kept giving support to South Vietnam after we pulled out, they probably would have been able to defend themselves. North Vietnam had no army left after the Tet Offensive. But we wouldn’t give them one bullet any more. It’s a mark of national shame how we treat our allies once we’ve decided we’ve had enough.

      1. Obviously you failed to understand what the Vietnwam conflict was about.

        The Vietnamese didn’t like China, just as they are disputing now they had a border
        war as soon as we left and they had border wars before.

        The Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh weren’t going to become a russian satellite.

        1. Hardly necessary to become a Russian satellite when you already are one. Uncle Ho was perfectly happy to make nice with the Russians. They were generous suppliers for reasons of their own and had their own problems with the Chinese, to whom Ho had no desire to be beholden.

          I’m curious. What, exactly, was the Vietnam conflict about, in your view?

          My own view is that it was an ultimately failed attempt to stem communist aggression in the third world as Korea had been a decade earlier; to forestall any “domino” or “bandwagon” effect that would suggest to the weaker sisters of the world community that the West was losing and they should throw in with the commies.

          Contra MikeR, the North Vietnamese had a very large army, largely intact after the Tet offensive. What Tet largely burned up was the Viet Cong who had outlived their usefulness to the North by that time anyway.

          The rest of the war was attempts by the North to conquer the South by use of conventional military weapons and tactics including armored blitzkrieg. The North was initially unsuccessful in these efforts, but after the Democrats in Congress cut off resupply to the South in the wake of American withdrawal, the North was ultimately the victor.

          The “dominos” of Laos and Cambodia went down along with South Vietnam, several million were subsequently murdered in the Cambodian Killing Fields and the South Vietnamese re-education camps, hundreds of thousands fled in the Boat People diaspora and Southern California gained new sadder-but-wiser immigrant communities along with hundreds of new donut shops, convenience stores and ethnic restaurants. Former generals in the South Vietnamese military and the Viet Cong became fellow members of the same Chambers of Commerce in Orange County.

          The Soviets, energized to continue their campaign of backwater conquests, next essayed the annexation of Afghanistan to their ultimate heavy cost. But that is another story.

      2. “But we wouldn’t give them one bullet any more. It’s a mark of national shame how we treat our allies once we’ve decided we’ve had enough.”

        Yup. And now people want to turn our backs on Iraq and Afghanistan.

  4. Well since we are strolling down memory lane….

    My draft number was 29 which, for me, was meaningless because I was in college, in the AFROTC as a pilot candidate. Walking around campus in my uniform, being subjected to epithets such as “baby-killer” and dodging eggs told me all I needed to know about the left. My senior year was 1976, I was learning how to fly, the war was pretty much over so I wasn’t going to be shooting down any Migs.

    As for the war itself I was in grammar school when it started in a big way and high school for most of it. I could not assess the rationale for our being in it in any sort of informed way, but I was of the opinion that winning is better than losing and since we were in it, we should do everything in our power to win it. It’s always better to be able to arrange he post-war set up if you win than to be told what it will be if you lose. I never understood why we weren’t going all out.

    Almost 40 years on…a lot of reading and thinking later, it seems to me that the big motivator for being in it was the “Domino Theory”. Same for Korea. I think the Domino theory is applicable in some cases and not so in others. One of the difficulties of governing is figuring out whether or not it’s applicable in any specific case.

    I also think that a hard-headed assessment in that is whether or not the leaders of the opposition were real true commies. Or just commies because that’s the best path to power for them. To know that, you need a real, working, non-clownish CIA. For if the opposition leader is a true Commie, weight must be given to the DT. If not, then the opposition leader might be someone you can deal with: sooner or later they are going to realize that as an economic system, Communism is a failure. It would be wise to tell them that up front and that when their system collapses, you’ll be there waiting with a few ideas and maybe some money. Vietnam also taught the difficulties and sometimes outright folly, of trying to defend a totally corrupt government (though sometimes it’s simply necessary). Would it have been better to side with the solid functioning government of the North, even though they were Commies, and later on suborn them with Coca Cola, rock music and Levi jeans?

    Governing is not easy.

    It takes brains, experience and guts. Which is why Obama was never ready for the office (still isn’t) and why guys like George H. W. Bush were.

  5. “It takes brains, experience and guts. Which is why Obama was never ready for the office (still isn’t) and why guys like George H. W. Bush were.”

    Was Bush 43 ready for office?

    2. “Was Bush 43 ready for office?”

      Ready enough. Not as ready as his father; far far more ready than Obama will ever be.

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