Apr 26, 2020 3 min read

Imagine you are a Vietnam vet, probably drafted because you didn’t have a student deferment or weren’t from a rich family that could afford high-priced lawyers to show you legal ways to avoid the draft, or high-priced doctors who could help you fake medical ailments or show you how to temporarily suffer from medical ailments that got you a medical deferment.

So, there you are, a poor white kid from the southern or midwestern farmlands, or a poor black kid from the northeastern inner cities, fighting in the jungles of Vietnam until your term of service finally ends and you return home, or you are so badly wounded you are shipped home early for proper medical treatment.

Either way, you are happy to be home until you notice that most people aren’t happy to have you home. You are accosted by people with peace signs saying, “Stop the War!” You are called “baby killers.” You are yelled at, spit on, and have things thrown at you.

Whereas veterans of previous wars returned home to parades on Main Street, dinners in their honor at civic clubs, or various honors or civic acknowledgements by local officials before large, appreciative crowds, you are blackballed, shunned, wherever you go.

Why, you wonder? What did I do differently from any other soldier sent overseas?

Well, for starters, you fought in a lost war. When, this week (April 30) in 1975, Saigon, the capital of America’s ally in that war, South Vietnam, fell to the Communist North, the Vietnam war was over. The fact that this loss was in no way your fault didn’t matter. Americans look down on soldiers who fight in losing wars.

Second, and again not your fault, Vietnam was the longest war Americans had fought in up until then (the war in Afghanistan eventually would surpass it), inevitably leading to the people getting sick of it and everyone involved in it (especially you).

Third, still through no fault of yours, Americans were misled by both the military officers and politicians regarding the war’s conduct and the likelihood of victory. In Vietnam, a war fought mostly in jungles, the only way to determine who was winning or losing was body counts – the number of enemy dead – and political and military leaders vastly exaggerated enemy casualties, as well as military victories, in the quixotic hope that they could fool the people into supporting the war long enough to somehow win it.

That was never going to happen, so, again through no fault of your own, you became the target of another war – the domestic war of public opinion – that you had about as much chance of winning as you did the Vietnam War.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net/.