Via Roger L. Simon, I found a very disturbing post by neo-neocon -- "A mind is a difficult thing to change" -- which attempts to grapple with some very stubborn, unsettled issues still surrounding the Vietnam War. All her points are well taken, but I want to focus on the issue of the draft:

Then there was the fact that, despite this lack of conceptual understanding, all of the young men in the country were vulnerable to being called up to serve because of the draft. This particular combination--lack of a strong belief or clear evidence that the war was in our best interests, coupled with the fact that any young man could be drafted to fight it--led to feelings of special frustration and even rage on the part of those who might be called on to make the ultimate sacrifice (John Kerry perfectly expressed this feeling when he asked his famous question about who would want to be the last man to die for a mistake). The war itself was perceived as being so far away as to be almost irrelevant to America, while the danger to the average young man was potentially huge, up close and personal.

This geographic distance, combined with the lack of cognitive clarity about the reasons behind the war, and the powerful emotional valence of susceptibility to the draft, were a new and volatile mix in American history. For many, the combination led almost inevitably to action: antiwar sentiment and demonstrations, many of them pitting the younger generation against the older, whom they felt were callously sacrificing them on the altar of a war whose purpose was murky and whose execution was inept. So another new element (new, at least, in its intensity) was the idea of a generational war that pitted sons against fathers, and vice versa.

The widespread and new idea of the war as a "mistake" was twofold. For example, when Kerry used the word "mistake," he was speaking not only of the reasons behind the war, he was also speaking of the conduct and strategy of the war itself. Some moderates or conservatives (or even some liberals), who had no problem with the first (they accepted the domino theory, or felt strongly about the need to keep the South Vietnamese from Communist domination) were angry about the second--the limited war strategy, for example. So the idea of "mistakes" in this war came from all sides--left, right, and center, for somewhat different reasons for each group.

Somewhere along the line--and most agree it had certainly happened by the Tet offensive of 1968--press coverage of the war turned extremely negative. As far as I can tell, this was another huge change; to the best of my knowledge, it seems to have been the first time in American history that the press turned on a war en masse while that war was still ongoing. There are many studies of the role of the press during the war (Big Story by Peter Braestrup and The Military and the Media by William V. Kennedy, to mention two), and it is a subject far too vast for me to cover adequately here. But the general thrust of coverage changed after the Tet offensive, not because it was a military defeat for us (it was actually a military victory, particularly over the Vietcong, who after that were never again to be a major player), but because the press perceived it for the most part as both a military and a psychological defeat and presented it as such to the American people.

I'm referring to the worst kind of lie: an inability to acknowledge personal reality. The antiwar portion of the Vietnam generation (and that's a large and currently powerful portion, certainly the majority of the well-educated) was driven and consumed by one overarching, salient factor: THE DRAFT. If I could go back in time and draw a great dividing line in the draft age generation, it would be between those who were willing to serve, and those who were not. The latter lived in mortal fear of the draft, and (thanks to an inequitable and elitist deferment system) oriented their lives in a variety of ways calculated to do one thing: avoid the draft.

We can speculate about why some young men would avoid the draft, while others served, but that's what happened, and it remains the great division. It's always tough to generalize about people, but there is one thing I will never forget as long as I live, it's the way the massive numbers at antiwar demonstrations dried up completely as soon as the draft was ended.

Had the war to stop Communism suddenly become less "immoral?" No; what had happened was that the demonstrators had become less mortal.

I know this will sound simplistic, but it all comes down to fear.

Fear of DEATH.

We all have it to varying degrees. Bravery and cowardice are defined by how we respond to personal danger. It is my thesis that the draftable young men who avoided military service in Vietnam were more fearful than those who served, but that because it was unmanly to admit to cowardice, this fear had to be falsely disguised as virtue.

Therefore, opposition to the war was almost never (at least publicly) voiced as a fear of getting killed or wounded, but almost always voiced (usually at high decibels) in terms of the highest and noblest possible principle. They were so loud and so vociferous that even I as a cynical teenager believed them. It wasn't until I saw the demonstrators disappear that I began to wonder....

Might they have simply been afraid to die?

Might it have been that simple?

Certainly, it is understandable. I spent a decade watching my friends die, and I would have done anything to avoid it. I mean, nothing sucks like death. It's the end of everything. Just because I am intimately familiar with it and have held so many dying hands does not mean that I like it. No one likes it and no one wants it. That is why bravery is defined as the degree of willingness to risk it or face it.

To admit to cowardice is not easy to do, and it was harder in the early 70s than it is now. Remember, the parents of the Vietnam generation were the famous Greatest Generation. They'd won World War II and Korea, and cowardice was not part of their equation. It's tough to admit to such a dad that you don't want to serve because you're afraid of becoming a casualty. No; it's much easier (and seemingly much braver) to attack the war itself.

Better yet, claim your country is on the wrong side.

I'm sure there's nothing original about these thoughts, which are so obvious that they've probably been voiced many times by countless commentators. They're just my personal observations, and they're necessarily generalizations. No doubt the outer ends of the bell curve would include cowards who served, and heroes who avoided service.

Fortunately or unfortunately, my temporal accident of birth occurred in 1954, which put me into the tail end of the lottery system. I was never even close to being drafted, and I knew it. The year 1953 is another great division among Baby Boomers; those born before had to deal with the draft, while those born later didn't. It shows too. One of the most annoying aspects of this age cutoff was to be scolded by my slightly elder peers that I just "didn't understand" what it was like to face the draft. They were right; I really didn't, because it (the draft, which meant possible death) had never been personal and in my face.

And I didn't even begin to understand the power of death until the mid 1980s. When faced with this ultimate fear, denial of any sort becomes a sort of lifeline.

Neo-neocon's essay concludes:

So the investment in believing this particular "narrative" of Vietnam was huge for liberals. As the years went by, decades of beliefs, affiliations, and activities were added to the mix, and the stakes grew even higher. To have disbelieved it all at some later date would have meant facing a profound disillusionment, not just with institutions such as the press and the government, but with the self itself.

At the risk of sounding morbid, I'm not sure there's any getting over any of it.