“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much. Never have the consequences of their misunderstanding been so tragic.”

Richard Nixon, former President
 
In the latter part of Admiral Rex’s life, he was concerned about legacy and narrative. Like many vets, he was concerned that someone had stolen both, and he wanted them back. It was the last engagement of the war, and part of the great transition of the national leadership from the Greatest Generation to the tender care of the one they spawned when they got home.
 
I think Rex would agree with Senator Judd Gregg, (R-NH), who was not talking about this precise narrative yesterday. It was something else, the ballooning deficit, I think, that had momentarily caught his attention. But in small ways, even politicians can say something profound once in a while.
 
Mr. Gregg said the outcome of one of the votes this week was “yet another indication that Congress is more concerned with the next election than the next generation.”
 
Well, duh.
 
I do not claim there was any age in American politics- including the so-called Era of Good Feelings (1817–25)- in which insulting and salacious information about people standing for office was not used with gusto and zeal.
 
I would argue that even if the Era had a lack of public venom, it was due to a generational change. The War of 1812 is rarely considered as a defeat, unless you happen to be talking to a Canadian.
 
Still, the Federalist Party had largely dissolved and the nation was politically united behind the Democratic-Republican Party. After the Panic of 1819 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the national mood grew tenser. In the election of 1820, though, James Monroe was re-elected with all but one electoral vote. Local politics were still largely conducted without party labels or party conventions.
 
The relentless, daily, unending and bitter attacks by one party against the other did not resume until about 1828, when fiery Andrew Jackson thundered about the corrupt deal that had produced the election of John Quincy Adams. The result outraged Jackson and his supporters.
 
His crusade to regain the “stolen” presidency resulted in the Jackson victory of 1828, and you can say that the vituperation has not stopped since. Some of the issues are exactly the same.
 
Old Hickory had a good war record, and the victory over the British at New Orleans had a glow that lasted all his life, even if the battle was fought after the treaty had been signed and didn’t affect the peace at all.
 
In that way, it is a placeholder like the Paris Accords that ended US involvement in Vietnam in 1973. The Accords served a vital purpose for both sides; in that it got the Americans and their vast war machine out of the fight.
 
Vietnam was the last demonstration of the levee en mass mobilization principle pioneered by Napoleon. The American military was maintained by a draft system in which all young men were expected to report for military duty when directed by the Selective Service.
 
It was a contentious issue. The Vets who were called back to fight in Korea had their issues with it. Ike considered eliminating it, and reconsidered only on the strong recommendation of CNO Arleigh Burke, who needed sailors to man his fleet.
 
The long war in Vietnam, plus the huge standing army in Germany, meant that millions of young men were called up during the official Vietnam Era (1964-75). The US Census of 2004 reported there was a total of 8.2 million vets of the period, of which 2.59 million served their time “in country.”
 
The Draft ensured that there was a certain commonality of experience in every family across the land. Al Gore was born in 1948; Bill Clinton in 1946. Senator John Kerry is the oldest of the three Democratic Party Presidential nominees of the post-World War II era. George W. Bush was born in 1946.
 
I am not going to mention John McCain, since he is of a different generation, being born in 1936 along with Elvis Presley (1935). For them, everything was a lot clearer, if no less challenging.
 
They all had strategies to deal with the Draft that came to typify their time and political philosophy. Of the four, only Al Gore did the thing that Rex would have considered honorable. He certainly could have done something different, as many of his Harvard classmates did.
 
In 1969, Al was graduating from college. It was not a good time to be on the street without a 2-S (student) deferment, and worse, he had a low draft number.
 
I know the feeling. Mine was 76. Gore’s father, a long-time Senator from Tennessee, was in a bitter election struggle. Neither father nor son supported the Vietnam War. He talked about strategies to deal with the situation with his father, Many of his peers were taking refuge in the National Guard or the reserves, options that might save them from Vietnam. A few resisted. Some became conscientious objectors or left for Canada.
 
Gore has stated that he finally enlisted in the army for two reasons: he was concerned over the impact it would have upon his father’s career and he did not want someone with fewer advantages than he to go in his place. I think the latter is self-serving, which reflects my personal experience with the man, but we are getting to a key point here.
 
Whatever his final motivation, Al went, just like Elvis did.
 
Al did basic training at Fort Dix, did some journalism at Fort Rucker, finally shipped to Vietnam in January, 1971, after his father had lost his seat in the Senate. Al joined the 20th Engineer Brigade in Bien Hoa and was a journalist with The Castle Courier, the unit newspaper. He did his year and received an honorable discharge from the Army in May 1971.
 
We all know bout Jolly Bill and his strategy. He definitely preferred making love to the alternative. His strategy was to dissemble, invoke Congressional influence and manage to secure a Rhodes Scholarship to get away from his Draft Board. He even promised to join the ROTC program while at Law School, which of course he did not do, and in the end, wrote the famous letter about preserving his “political viability,” since the rules of the road at the time were that draft dodgers would never have a shot at elected office.
 
He was wrong about that, of course, just as Grover Cleveland proved a century before. At the same age that Bill was writing Colonel Holmes, LTJG George H.W. Bush was dodging anti-aircraft fire in order to reach his assigned target. In the end, Bill didn’t go.
 
I was part of the whole process, just like my buddies at school, but we had the luxury of being a precious couple years behind the luminaries. By the time it came to graduate and make the hard choices they did, the Accords were signed, and the Draft was toast.
 
Just in the nick of time.
 
Anyway, the way people dealt with the draft would have consequences that had to play on a much larger stage. Dick Cheney, for all his bellicosity, did what Bill Clinton and millions of other did. They used college as cover and dodged it that way. George W. Bush did what my roommate J.T., and managed to snag a National Guard billet.
 
We didn’t think any the worse of J.T., by the way. In a way we envied his luck. Who could have known that all that work wasn’t going to be necessary? It was honorable, and he served, which is more than we did. Of course, we knew we couldn’t get a billet without influence, and were resigned to take what came.
 
There was another way. I was going to get to it today, but damn, this is complicated. I have to do all the disclaimers, too, since I dodged the draft just as much as anyone who went to college and took a deferment.
 
That is part of the battle of the narrative, which took on a life of its own. Dick Nixon’s quote at the top of this piece is right on. Everything most folks take as gospel about the war in Vietnam is just flat wrong, except for the last part, which is that they are still there and we are not, except for Jack Graf and a thousand others.
 
That is too much for this morning, and we will have to come back to Rex, the Swifties, and the matter of John Kerry.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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