Military Families May Once Again Lead Us Out of War

[RedEarth]

Military Families May Once Again Lead Us Out of War
Casualties in the Heartland, 1968/2005

by Christian Appy


"You bet your goddamn dollar I'm bitter. It's people like us who give up our sons for the country," said a firefighter whose son was killed in action. "Let's face it: if you have a lot of money, or if you have the right connections, you don't end up on a firing line over there. I think we ought to win that war or pull out. What the hell else should we do -- sit and bleed ourselves to death, year after year?" His wife jumps in to add, "My husband and I can't help but thinking that our son gave his life for nothing, nothing at all."

These may sound like voices from the present, perhaps from grieving parents who have taken up Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Crawford, Texas as she visits her ailing mother. Actually though, they come from 1970, and their lost son died in Vietnam. In recent weeks, as American casualties in Iraq continued to mount and opposition from military families has grown, as Ohio families mourned their dead and the Cindy Sheehan story would not go away, I kept remembering the many people I had interviewed about a similar moment during the Vietnam War, a time in 1968 when millions of Americans who had trusted their government to tell the truth about a distant war and believed it was every citizen's absolute duty to "fight for your country," began to turn, like a giant aircraft carrier slowly arcing in another direction, began to doubt, question, and finally oppose their nation's policies.

Many voices of the Vietnam era are long forgotten or were never clearly heard, especially those of people like the firefighter and his wife. In their place, we have a canned image of Vietnam-era working-class whites as bigoted hard-hats, Archie Bunkers all (as in the famed 1970s television sit-com "All in the Family"), super-patriotic hawks who simply despised long-haired protestors and supported their presidents.

In that stereotype lies a partial, but misleading, truth. Many working-class families were indeed appalled by the antiwar movement of those years. "I hate those peace demonstrators," the same firefighter said. But his hostility did not make him a hawk. He was furious because he saw antiwar activists as privileged and disrespectful snobs who "insult everything we believe in" without having to share his family's military and economic sacrifices. In virtually the same breath, however, he said about the war of his time, "The sooner we get the hell out of there the better."

In fact, poor and working class Americans were profoundly disaffected by Vietnam. A Gallup poll in January 1971 showed that the less formal education you had, the more likely you were to want the military out of that country: 80% of Americans with grade school educations were in favor of a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam; 75% of high school graduates agreed; only among college graduates did the figure drop to 60%.


http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0824-28.htm