A heartbreaking trip down memory lane.

Recently, one of my teeth was giving me fits, and my local dentist sent me to the Big City Dentist for consultation.  Turned out, I only needed a crown, but that's another story.  The Big City Dentist has a very interesting waiting room, including old Saturday Evening Post magazines from the 50s and 60s.  I picked up one from the 60's that had an article about the Vietnam War, which was just getting started at the time the article was written.  It reminded me of that heartbreaking time. 

It is very difficult to communicate to those who are either significantly older than I am or younger than I am the impact of the Vietnam War on this country.  For younger generations (not yet draft age when the war ended) it was just something on TV, and they tended to echo their parents views on it.  For my generation, it was heartbreak. 

When the war started, my parent's generation, who had lived through WWII, saw the war the same way they saw WWII.  If the President said it was a good thing, then it was a good thing.  If your country called you to serve, and it did draft a LOT of young men, then you served.  Any other attitude was treason.  But soldiers came home with a very different account of the war.  The generals gave orders that seemed to guarantee defeat.  It wasn't uncommon for an army unit to spend time, energy, and soldier's lives to take a hill, only to abandon it the next day.  The government we were propping up was corrupt, and not much better than the government we were fighting.  It was impossible, in many cases, to tell friend from foe. And, in the end, why were we there?  We had no national interest in that fight. In short, it was a huge mistake. 

But talking about the war in these terms only angered our parents.  My father screamed at me and slammed his fist down on the table when I attempted a discussion.  The next day, he installed a permanent flag pole in the front yard, and hoisted an American flag on it.  This, he said, was for my benefit.  What I learned was to never again attempt any kind of serious discussion with him on any subject, and I did not, from then until the day he died.  Also, I can't fly the American flag on my front porch.  Too many bad memories.

This family argument was repeated in MANY homes throughout this country.  It created a generational rift that I believe has never been duplicated, before or since.  The interesting thing is that this rift created an attitude in the younger generation that, if our parents believe it, it must be wrong.  This expanded to the younger generation's attitudes about many, many things.  It spawned the women's movement, the gay rights movement, the trend away from organized religion, "free love", the drug culture, and lots of other societal changes, some good, some bad.  By the time the war ended, most of the older generation came to agree with our assessment of the war, but it was too late to stop the other societal changes that were well underway. 

More later on Vietnam.