Why Did Baby Boomers Have a Personal Interest in the Vietnam War?

The sour public stance about the war led to a distaste for returning veterans

Excerpted from Indelible Vietnam: An American Generation and Its State of war , by James Wright, published past Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin'southward Press. Copyright 2017

Indelible Vietnam looks at the generation that grew upward in mail service–World War Ii America and their war. During the 1960s, and probable even more then as the years have passed, many veterans would reject the ownership implicit in calling the American War in Vietnam "their war." But it was that generation'due south war. Every bit youngsters, most joined older generations in supporting it at the outset and many served in it. If not always eagerly or even willingly, they served. They may legitimately deny responsibility for starting the war—their parents' and grandparents' generations did that for them—but they cannot deny that this state of war marked them profoundly. And they marked the war.

More than x million babe boomers served in the military in the 1960s and early 1970s. Nearly 10 percent of the men in that generation went to Vietnam. As the war dragged on in the 1960s, the proportion of draftees in the armed forces increased. But the majority of those who served enlisted, willingly as volunteers or less willingly in response to or in anticipation of a draft call.

Certainly all Americans knew almost the war in Vietnam at the time, only only a minor pct truly knew information technology. Politically, culturally, morally, the war and its images overwhelmed the period. People based their views on their assessment of the wisdom—and for some, their judgments about the morality—of this major war. Those opinions seldom were informed by the experience of the generation that was engaging in this state of war.

The diplomatic and the political developments, the broader global context and the public perceptions of the war are critical elements in agreement it. They all revolved around the question that politicians and their constituents increasingly asked after 1965: "Why are we in Vietnam?" While in that location had been opposition to the state of war from the outset, within a few years the war became increasingly a focus of public concern and public dissent. There was growing cynicism virtually its purported purpose and skepticism well-nigh the official narrative of its rationale, its behave and its costs. Ongoing debates nearly the Vietnam experience pretty consistently depict information technology as a mistake—a fault in commitment or a error in execution. Or both.

In the late 1960s, the growing dissent against the American War in Vietnam focused on costs and consequences. Critics increasingly pressed the case for recognizing moral costs and moral consequences. Equally the scale of U.Southward. involvement grew and the nature of the fighting intensified, and then did the volume of reports and accounts from Vietnam. These led to increasingly negative public attitudes toward the war and, for some, perceptions of the men fighting it.

By late 1969, particularly following the public disclosures of the My Lai massacre of several hundred Vietnamese civilians in March 1968, some accounts depicted the Americans no longer as victims but as eager perpetrators of the war, perpetrators often high on drugs. Although neither innocent victim nor cruel participant was a majority public view, those perspectives nonetheless often were dominating ones. Each was a cavalier and grossly distorted generalization.

For the troops who served there, Vietnam was a pretty basic world in which they focused on survival as a daily goal. Participants in all wars do that, of class, only in Vietnam it became harder to project this personal goal, to imagine the daily experience, within a broader and grander prepare of military objectives serving disquisitional national needs.

In the summer of 1969, a veteran reporter covered a group of 8,000 men of the ninth Marine Regiment as they prepared to join the first troops in the drawdown of forces. While they waited at Vandegrift Combat Base of operations in northern Due south Vietnam for flights to Okinawa, Nippon, at that place was "little gaiety." In one tent, James Sterba found the men listening to a tape recorder playing Country Joe and the Fish singing their iconic "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag." In another tent, men looked at the now-famous June 27 issue of Life magazine with photos of Americans who died in Vietnam during 1 week's combat; they found familiar faces. A young Marine said, "The people merely don't understand what these guys take been through." He predicted, "No i anywhere from now on will exist able to tell them anything near fearfulness and bravery and all that other stuff."

There is an intellectual and even a moral tension in trying to summarize the lives of the Vietnam generation in the decades following the war. One might generalize that despite the searing feel many had in Vietnam and despite the indifferent receptions some encountered when they came habitation, this generation, by most every measurement, adapted well. Simply the tension in this assessment is the danger of a Pollyannaish view that ignores the pain that many felt—and many continue to experience.

They accomplished their successes with niggling agreement and few helping easily from their contemporaries. Coming domicile was not a trivial process, and some experienced problems that were more than transitional. And for too many these problems would plough out to exist their companions for a lifetime.

Chronic difficulties included physical disabilities, untreated medical conditions, notably those caused by America's own Amanuensis Orange, the nightmares and personal demons of what came to be called mail­-traumatic stress disorder, booze and drug abuse, interpersonal tensions, unfulfilled dreams. I Marine, speaking virtually the 567 Marines and corpsmen of the 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, killed in action, said: "To this day, information technology is difficult to fully comprehend and reckon with the tragedy of these losses. For every death there were at least iv times, or five times or possibly half-dozen times that many of us wounded. At that place is no way to know exactly how many. And these wounds included horrible losses of limbs and bodily functions—non the kind you lot see in the old time Western movies. These were wounds that forever changed your life, and inflicted long-term suffering and misery."

Far too many Vietnam veterans carried uncomplainingly the hurt of engaging a land that waited too long to say "Thank you for your service"—and then seemed to retrieve the phrase was a magnanimous gesture that provided an adequate gratuity, a sufficient acquittance and amends from which all should so move on. One still-angry veteran said, "They're just trying to brand themselves feel better for the way they shit on usa 45 years ago. They say it automatically, much the same as people say 'Anoint you' when some sneeze." He added, "If those other people had to spend simply one night inside my nightmares, they would autumn to the floor with tears in their optics."

Some other said: "People may be more than accepting these days, simply they still practise non want to hear our stories. More recently I am hearing 'Thank you for your service.' Mostly from store clerks who seem to say it equally part of their grooming, or from the children and grandchildren of those who scorned us when we came habitation. When I hear those words, they really seem hollow. I wish they would just not say anything."

The hurting endures. There is a take chances of generalizing these lingering hurts into the stereotype of a pathetic, haunted, angry generation. The opposite risk is to ignore the personal agonies of too many. Or perhaps cruelest of all is to dismiss these as personal shortcomings or individual maladies, graphic symbol flaws that split up the status from the experience from which it stemmed.

For those who came home in the offset years of the war, from 1965 to 1968 or 1969, their encounters and transitions were sometimes strained, generally uncomfortable and often disappointing. But they were rarely hostile. This began to modify by 1969, every bit the image of the men fighting the war was filtered through the more negative view of the war itself. The about common manifestations of this were embarrassing encounters in which the state of war that had no proper name was not mentioned. Simply these sometimes flared into difficult confrontations. From 1969 into the early 1970s, the rapid drawdown of troops from Vietnam increased the number returning at a time when the domestic economic system was in a downturn and the stereotype of the Vietnam veteran was the most negative.

Veterans who have felt disappointed or frustrated or aroused about their reception are not unusual in American history. Just the mutual discomfort and fifty-fifty the abrasions of their homecoming had no precedent, and these were compounded because veterans encountered an American public that besides often was disappointed or aroused or frustrated about the war itself— its inception, its operations, their perception of its conduct and its conclusion. In retrospect, it is striking that there was not even any pretense of a welcome habitation except from families and some neighborhoods or communities. These veterans were a symbol of something their fellow citizens and even their family and friends were trying to forget.

The distinguished American historian Frank Freidel wrote in 1980 that unlike troops who served in previous American wars, few of those returning from Vietnam were ever viewed as heroes: "What has distinguished Vietnam veterans from virtually of their predecessors is . . . that a considerable part of the articulate abhorrence of the war seemed to spill onto them. They returned not equally heroes, but equally men suspected of complicity in atrocities or feared to exist drug addicts. Not simply the underprivileged but even the most prestigious were under a cloud."

By April 1975, those who had served in Vietnam watched on tv set the terminal scramble to evacuate Saigon. They were seldom surprised at this upshot, but some nevertheless had an emotional reaction to it. A Marine said simply that he was "glad it was over," and another said, in frustration, "Information technology stinks." One soldier who had risked his life in one case to relieve his M16 rifle now watched all of that equipment abased. He felt guilty about leaving backside all those "we were trying to help." A veteran watching information technology on Tv with his parents exclaimed: "Yous got to be kidding me! What a waste." A Hamburger Hill veteran said the fall of Saigon "just cemented the attitude that the whole affair was a terrible loss of life for no purpose." A soldier who had seen a lot of expiry said: "I was appalled and felt tremendously betrayed. That war cost me ii years of my immature, married life . . . probably fifty years counting the backwash. Nevertheless, for over 58,000 of our KIAs, information technology is a permanent disgrace." Someone else observed: "I followed the war after nosotros left and wasn't surprised by the fall and pretty disgusted near the whole thing. Lost a lot of friends there."

One veteran would continue to insist, "We didn't lose." He emphasized his point: "Nosotros. Didn't. Lose." Instead, "We were withdrawn." Some other described this as coming to terms with the conclusion that "information technology was like everything we did was for cipher. The year I spent putting my donkey on the line over there? Information technology was similar it didn't matter."

William Ortiz, a Vietnam veteran and vice president of the National Congress of Puerto Rican Veterans, admitted that the state of war "messes me up." He often believed that the United States "should step back in and practise something, but then I think we shouldn't because so many lives would be lost." Beallsville, Ohio, a blue­-neckband mining and manufacturing community of 450, lost seven young men in
Vietnam. In Apr 1975, it was struggling more with jobs and its economy than with the impending fall of Saigon. One male parent, looking at a high school graduation photo of his son who had died there, teared up every bit he said, "This little male child lost his life for nothing." His married woman added, "He was our simply child."

By a significant margin, most Americans idea we should stay out of Vietnam. In the leap of 1975, only 12 percent thought the United States should ship armed forces aid to Vietnam; 78 percentage opposed. The veterans of the war did non disagree. They lost again, though, because Americans, in their haste to forget the war, also forget those who had served there. Washington Mail columnist Mary McGrory had long criticized the war, but she believed the land had an obligation to those who had fought. She caustically asked the nation at the finish of 1975: "You remember the Vietnam veteran? There is no item reason why you should. Hardly anybody does. He had the poor taste to fight in an unpopular war, which made piffling sense while it was going on and none at all when it was lost." The prisoners of state of war received parades and gifts. "The grunt just came home."

McGrory observed that "defeat has vindicated them and deepened his sense of existence had." And, finally, he could not escape the stereotype: "When he sees a Vietnam veteran on a television drama, it's likely to be a drug­-crazed time bomb or a clean­cut baby killer, and that doesn't add to his cocky­-esteem." She ended that on pinnacle of all of this, the veteran confronted unemployment double the rate of nonveterans of his age, and the GI Bill was inadequate to meet his needs.

That assessment was a pretty comprehensive summary of the earth of many Vietnam veterans in the early 1970s. Most Americans did ignore them—many disliked them for what they represented, and some feared them for the night anger they believed the veterans harbored. One reporter wrote of the returning veteran, "Silently he is slipping thru the back door of the nation which sent him to war." There were no parades, "no frenzied homecoming celebrations." Instead, the veteran has been "vilified, condemned, ostracized. He has been branded a murderer, a junkie, an undisciplined disgrace." Perhaps most cutting, "for the showtime time in American military machine history, he has been labeled a loser." The stories of "heroism and dedication" had "been lost under a sea of public cloy."

Post-obit the Paris peace accords, the POWs returned home in the early jump of 1973. It was a powerfully emotional moment. One reporter sabbatum in a San Diego bar with a group of veterans, including a Marine missing his legs who saturday in a wheelchair. They joined an elated nation watching the return being celebrated on boob tube. They saw the emaciated POWs coming down the ramp from an plane, with armed forces and civilian officials waiting to welcome them and their emotional families watching for them, with war machine bands playing in the background. 1 of the men in the bar wept. This scene contrasted then sharply with his ain homecoming: "Instead of proverb, 'welcome abode' they gave me the finger."

One veteran in Chicago spoke of the return home from Vietnam: "When you're over there, it's supposed to mean something to come up home—but it don't hateful nothing. You feel excluded." Another, who had left a mill chore in Yonkers, New York, returned to find his job had been eliminated. "People don't want to be reminded of you. They don't desire to know y'all've been in Nam."

Certainly about veterans received a warm welcome from family and neighbors—but fifty-fifty those who cared deeply for them frequently responded with a common cold silence or at least an absence of curiosity about their war experiences. One came dwelling just before Thanksgiving, and at a large family celebration he expected to "exist bombarded by questions and stuff," simply no 1 mentioned Vietnam. So he never talked near it—for the next xl years.

One soldier returned home correct before Easter in 1970, and his parents had a big family gathering for him. "It didn't dawn on me till a couple of days later on, simply not one person said one give-and-take to me near anything. They would have asked somebody that went to Florida more questions most their tan . . . And that'south how it continued. Nobody—when I think back on it—nobody said a give-and-take to me virtually anything." But another recalled, "First thing Mom asked was to show her my wounds."

One soldier said that his dad, who had served with the Marines on Iwo Jima in World War II, never one time asked his son about Vietnam. Another said his parents never understood or wanted to know almost his experiences or asked him why he was having flashbacks. He admitted that he was "pissed that besides many people could care less about Vietnam." An injured Marine "never talked to nonveterans." He knew that they "wouldn't understand and didn't care anyhow."

Another veteran found that "there were two kinds of people…those who were dead­set against the war and all of us who were there, and those who were not the least bit interested in my problems." He admitted that he was troubled past those who "had successfully dodged the typhoon, how they did it, and what they had accomplished in the last 2 years." When Karl Marlantes returned, he was surprised that at that place were not more people waiting at the airport to welcome him habitation. "To me, and to my parents, I'd been gone an eternity; to everyone else a flash."

James Wright is president emeritus and the Eleazar Wheelock professor of history emeritus at Dartmouth Higher. He is the writer or editor of six books.

Published in the December 2017 issue ofVietnammag

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Source: https://www.historynet.com/generation-goes-war/

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