Our Vietnam War -- now and then

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

I watched the first part of the latest Ken Burns/Lynn Novick  series, The Vietnam War.  It was well done – vivid visuals and rigorous research. But as someone who was smack in the middle of the Vietnam War generation (the older Baby Boomers)  and who edited news stories about the war in the ‘70s, I quibble with the assertion that after the war ended (for America), in May 1975, that neither Vietnam vets nor the public wanted to talk about it for years. In fact,  from that time and through the ‘70s, there was nonstop talk, writing, TV shows and movies about it, which, of course, goes on to the present.

Another quibbleis about the distracting cutting back and forth between deeper history (French colonial days, World War II, the French war with the Vietnamese Communists, etc.) and the American war. It would have worked better, in my opinion, as straight chronological history, from before the French to 1975. Indeed, the series would have done well to have included stuff about Vietnam's fraught relations with China over the centuries, which would have provided useful context.

Something I particularly remember from those times was the huge role of chance. A good friend of mine, Steve Perry, was #7 in the Selective Service lottery, was drafted and sent to Vietnam, where he was killed near Danang a month after arrival. I had #361,  and so barring a war with the Soviets, I was safe. And by the time I got out of college, in 1970, President Nixon had started to pull troops from that gorgeous if battered little nation.

There was also the role of class. Young men from middle-class and affluent families, who could afford to go to college, usually got higher-education deferments from their local draft boards; poorer people, however, who were less able to go to college, were much more likely to be drafted and sent to Vietnam.  We were very aware and uncomfortable about this in the late ‘60s.

The series reminded me of my late father and me watching CBS News in the summer of ’65 as the war was heating up. My dad, a combat veteran of World War II(North Africa, Europe and the Pacific) who retired from the Navy as a lieutenant commander, looked at me, and very quietly said: “I don’t think you’d look good in uniform.’’ Like many conservatives, he thought that the war was a fool’s errand – an extreme overreaching into a swamp, literal and otherwise.