The Vietnam Draft and the Purple Heart

Men My Age have a Story

The politics of this are tricky for Trump.    He can get away with being a draft dodger.  But he screwed up with the Purple Heart.   

He needed to have spoken respectfully about it.  Then about the man who gave it to him.   Then given it back.     He didn't.

I am returning to the subject of Trump and the draft, even though the issue may no longer have wide appeal.  Indeed, I suspect that people under the age of 55 scarcely understand the fuss, a controversy 50 years remote in time.

History Lesson to young folks:   But it is important to people my age, men in their 60s and early 70s, but to review:   America took over for the French their war to keep Vietnam a western aligned country.  It was previously a French colony and it was headed by a puppet government installed and preserved by the French.   We considered Vietnam a bulwark against the spread of Chinese communism, under the idea that there was a lineup of standing dominos and that one might fall causing another to fall and then another.  Vietnam wasn't just about Vietnam, therefore.  It was the first potential domino to fall adjacent to China and if it fell then Communism might spread across the world.

The war was unpopular at home.   The puppet government had negligible legitimacy, the local Vietnamese army was reluctant, and the people we were allegedly protecting seemed conflicted.  America needed to coax the "hearts and minds" of the South Vietnamese people even as we fought the Viet Cong (i.e. North Vietnamese) soldiers and their widespread collaborators within Vietnam.   Americans were getting injured and killed, there were stories of ugly encounters where non-combatants were considered enemies because friend, foe, and people who just wanted to stay alive all "looked alike".   American soldiers called everyone there a "gook", i.e. Vietnamese-Asian.  It was messy.

Plus, in order to attempt to show progress in the war the on-site generals began a system of "body counts".  Essentially Americans were directed to pacify and control the countryside and keep track of how many enemy soldiers were killed.   Everyone killed (again friend, foe, noncombatant) was considered an enemy.   The nightly news reported supposed progress: say 140 enemies (i.e. Asians) and only ten Americans.   The typical ratio was about ten to one--a great tradeoff, except that there were two billion Asians of the "gook" variety, reproducing at fifty million a year: five million Americans a year to break even. 

I wrote two days ago that there was a complicated draft program with lots of loopholes, exceptions, and randomness.   Men with a lot of social capital (middle class, friendly doctors, college access) frequently found some way to avoid the draft.  Men drafted were people who lacked that social capital, plus some unlucky people of all varieties.

"Over the top" into machine gun fire. Don't be a victim of stupidity.

It was not shameful at the time to finagle the system.   The idea was:  don't be a victim.  Don't let stupid generals send you off to your death for nothing simply because they lacked the imagination to realize this was a hopeless cause.  And maybe an evil one, with Americans killing people because they were "gooks", not because they were enemies.   Americans sympathized with veterans home from Vietnam, but with a mixed heart.   Were they serving America, or were they just tromping around under orders, killing innocent people.    Veterans who returned from Vietnam were not treated as heroes.   They were treated as suspects.

It was an ugly time.   

The 2016 Election  A great many men who are now senior leaders in their political parties and in the media were, forty and fifty years ago, young men with social capital.   There is no constituency for saying "Donald Trump is a Draft Doger.  For Shame!!!   There are too many people who did essentially what he did.  (Mitt Romney avoided the draft because he was in France, doing a mission for the Mormon Church.   Cheney had student deferments.  GW Bush got a placement in the Air National Guard in Alabama.  France, college, and Alabama were safer than the jungles of Vietnam.)  Democratic leaders, too: Bill Clinton, as I wrote earlier.  And me, happy at Harvard then getting draft number 202, just barely high enough.   Whew.)

So:  Donald Trump is safe on that count.

He is not so safe, however, in how he handled the Purple Heart gift.   There remains in America conflicted feelings and guilt regarding Vietnam and heroism.  Too many people believe they "got off easy" with either war-avoidance or comfortable duty in Germany or elsewhere.  People are sensitive to the idea that the lucky privileged people should not appropriate the benefits earned through danger, toil, injury, and death by soldiers who did hard duty.   Mr. Khan's accusation that Trump did not sacrifice might have disappeared into memory had Trump not picked a fight.   Trump publicly accepting the gift of a Purple Heart and saying "I always wanted one" is a pure example of the expropriation of sacrifice that is a political hazard.   

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Trump could hardly have constructed a worse scenario: privileged rich boy draft avoider treating a Purple Heart as an acquisition to enjoy by gift or inheritance, not by real sacrifice. It dovetails with the Trump-the-Hypocrite meme.   Trump talks about American jobs and America First but sources his ties in China and his suits in Mexico, and he builds ultra-luxury golf courses in Scotland, and his bankruptcies save himself but crush small contractors.

This was another self inflicted wound for Trump.


Feelings are strong and emotions run high in this area:  To give a feel for the depth of emotions the Vietnam war and draft elicit I will put here two comments this blog received recently from two readers who are close age cohorts of mine, Peter C in Virginia who was born about 1946 and Thad Guyer born in 1950.  Both were draft-eligible. 

Peter Coster writes:

 Scared the hell out of me. One day, the hawks in Congress decided that there were too many kids in college who were only there to avoid the draft. Bunch of draft dodgers they said. So, they decided to test everyone. I think it was in 1966. Anyway, one Saturday morning every man in college had to report to a college testing room and take the test. It was sort of an SAT type test. There was even a booklet with a helmet on the front to prepare you for the test. The deal was, if you flunked the test, you lost your 2S deferment. Talk about pressure. Pass or die. Well, we all took the test and waited for the results. Then the debates started. What if you were a music major or an art major or philosophy major? How would the test apply to them? They might flunk it, but still deserve to be in college. So, finally it was decided to drop the test. No one ever got their results. It was like it never happened. Strange times. There was only one way to on avoiding the Vietnam Draft

If Trump is saying he wants to put lots of troops on the ground and if the voters think this is a very good idea, then I hope they are prepared to bring their sons and daughters back in a box.

Thad Guyer writes:

As a combat Vietnam war veteran, I'm with Peter C's comment: "War is simply old men sending young men to fight and die. The young men have to trust the old men that it's for a good reason. For Vietnam, no one ever answered the question 'What are the fighting for?' That's why it was a bad war." Whether Trump or Hillary, or McCain or Kerry, or any other politician served in the military or dodged the draft, is irrelevant to me. Trump likes the "guys who didn't get captured". Personally, I like "the guys who didn't go" as much as those who did. If there is a candidate who was an active protestor against Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, that's the candidate who will get some extra points with me. I'm not a traumatized old soldier, I'm lucky that way, but I do have a lot of guilt, which is why I am living in Saigon now. I call it "my apology tour". For those of you like Peter C and Peter Sage, (and candidates Clinton and Kaine, and Trump and Pence), you should never have any regrets that you didn't serve in Vietnam and stand over the grotesquely mutilated corpses of young Vietnamese men and women who you killed in the jungles of their own homeland. I promise you, you would not feel better about yourself or your country if you had. Avoiding the draft by college or bone spurs in your feet, or by hanging out in Canada, that was the right the thing to do if you did not want to have blood on your hands, on your boots and clothes, or the sound in your ears of crying little people in straw hats who had no idea whatsoever why we were killing their children. 

The politicizing of military service in which the USA killed Vietnamese, Iraqis,and Afghanis in their own lands, after installing corrupt puppet regimes, for ideology, oil or whatever, is exactly that-- politics. The politics of war against these three peoples is an atrocity almost as bad as the ones I was sent to commit at age 19. I consider every bullet from our M16s, M60 machine guns, ball bearings from our Claymore ambush mines, rockets from our helicopters, artillery barrages from our navy out in the South China Sea, and bombs from our high tech aircraft, aimed at little peasants, themselves often conscripted, to have been atrocities. 

Today's New York Times has an op-ed by Ted Gup entitled "Why Trump Is Not Like Other Draft Dodgers" in which he proclaims: "Men like me who didn’t fight owe a debt to those who did." What debt is that, the one you owe me for taking the life a 22 year old woman Viet Cong along with her three comrades in the Central Highlands in May 1970? Or is it the debt for killing a father and his 12 year old son as collateral damage by a coastal riverside as they did their laundry of peasant rags? No, the only debt you owe me and other hapless draftees for what we did to the Vietnamese is to never think what we did to them was honorable. And the primary debt we owe to our soldiers who killed Iraqis and Afghanis, is to let them speak for themselves.