So you are David Zucchino of the LA Times, you make your living writing and you need to sell what you write on a regular basis to keep making that living. So you choose a subject and set out to write the story, most of the time the way you, the writer, see it.
The story lays out some statistics that are kind of misleading - for example - ‘While the U.S. waged a war in Vietnam 50 years ago with 2.7 million men conscripted from every segment of society’ - while that is true, every segment of society was represented, the upper middle class and the wealthy were dramatically under represented - thanks to the system of deferments that favored them. And it was actually around 9,000,000 serving during the Viet Nam War, 2.7 is the number that set foot on the ground. That 11-year war was fought by a large number draftees who did two years of service and then got out. About 1 in every 10 draft/military aged man served in the conflict.
VN was a polarizing war, just as is the GWOT. The difference is that the draftee during VN only served once, so there was a constant churn of troops, with each draftee serving a 12 to 13 month tour. Contrast the professional, all-volunteer Armed Forces of today. They didn’t reinstitute the draft, which led to a much more professional and capable force doing the fighting, but it also exposed many of you to repeated trips to the sandbox.
As a result not as many families had/have skin in the game, thus the disconnect.
I reckon if the Chickenhawks had reinstituted the draft for the GWOT we would have seen some protests that made those of the 60’s look like tea parties.
The fact is that the way we wage war has changed - we didn’t have to raise an Army from nothing, we had the all volunteer force.
[i]Opinion polls consistently find that the military is the most trusted American institution. A Gallup poll last June found that 74 percent of more than 1,000 Americans surveyed had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military – versus 58% in 1975, at the close of the Vietnam era.
Yet a 2011 Pew Research Center study titled “The Military-Civilian Gap” found that only a quarter of civilians who had no family ties to the military followed war news closely. Half said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made little difference in their lives, and half said they were not worth fighting.[/i]
I was in junior high and high school during the VN War, in Lincoln, Nebraska we didn’t follow the war that closely, there wasn’t near the coverage, so I’m not so sure that 1/4 of the population paying attention was far off. (FWIW, in 1972, two weeks after HS graduation, my butt was at MCRD San Diego getting trained up to kill a commie for mommy) In WWII, if our troops got beat there was a slight possibility that America would face an enemy invasion. I don’t think anyone really thought Ho was going to bring the fight to our shores. Same today.
Most people, myself included, would rather live in a world where no armies are needed. Of course that ain’t going to happen in our lives.
