This replay was made in a Veterans Day-related conversation with a group of Vietnam War veterans.
As to your final feeling about the war, (“Never again. Go to win, or don’t go,”) as much as I’d wish it to be otherwise, I don’t believe present national culture remotely supports your view. I’m one of those who sense that the ‘60s represented the nascence of present day culture, come full flower (pun not intended), as it were, with its prevailing kinder and gentler value set. While I hate to say it, a part of me feels that our great nation no longer has the stomach for war, not to mention the staying power for a protracted struggle. Every conflict we’ve engaged in, starting with Vietnam has, to my way of thinking, indicated that. Sad, really, but understandable considering such an extremely narrow spectrum of our population presently serves in the military, comprising—if you’ll forgive me—a kind of modern day mercenary force. Most of our populace, having lived in relative peace and unprecedented abundance for so long, no longer knows war, much less the circumstances that drive a people to war, to fight for something they gut-level believe in. At the risk of waxing perhaps a tad over-dramatic, we have become final act Athens, with no Sparta to come to our rescue. As a leather-skinned, blue-eyed old cowboy I met this past weekend at my brother’s burial out on the Texas prairies observed, “Heck, don’t worry, give it time. The reckoning’ll come.”
“No worries”—the chirpy, happy, easy-going lingo of a vastly privileged and overripe culture living, perhaps, on borrowed time.
Jeff Denker