“Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!”
On the way home from work, I heard the story of an Army captain who had refused deployment to Iraq with his unit, which had returned from Afghanistan only 10 months earlier. Soldiers who had been told that guard deployments would be short and rare, rather than frequent and long, are beginning to resist.
When I got home, I went to Slate and read Michael Kinsley’s assessments of four Presidential candidates (Bush, Dean, Kerry, and Clark) based on how they responded to the peculiar moral challenge that was Vietnam. Usually, I find myself nodding in agreement and smiling when I read Kinsley, but this particular article seemed a bit dismissive.
It is easy in retrospect to say Vietnam was a big mistake, but the atmosphere of the time was more complex than many remember. Dissent was practically unheard of before 1967. So my scale of bravery gives the highest marks to those who detected the bullshit early and spoke out and took personal risk to oppose it - as well as those who fought there, despite or because of their personal beliefs, especially those who were wounded or died there. Kerry and Clark both took bullets.
In early 1965, knowing I was going to be drafted, I began to explore my options. One of these was the National Guard. That hope quickly disappeared. Already, that early on, the waiting lists were 4 years long. Oddly, however, I later learned of people who used family connections to get bumped up the list and avoid the moral dilemma of accepting the draft or decling it and paying the price. These people got risk-free “paper duty” while the others they bumped ended up serving in the real war. That "sorry, buddy" non-committal indulgence is probably about as low as you can sink.
Well, maybe I’m wrong. Suppose that such a person would later use the wealth and power given to him to fund misinformation about candidates who did answer the call of their country - such as the smear campaign used against Vietnam POW John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary (“he lost it in that concentration camp”), or the slanderous campaign against Max Cleland for a senate seat in Georgia (fading from Saddam to Osama to Max in a TV commercial). That character-defining moment would probably rate a little lower.
Philip Nolan got in a whole lot of trouble for a political statement far less cowardly, but that was only fiction, and it was a long, long time ago besides. Nowadays, maybe they could dress up ol’ Phil in an Admiral’s suit and strut him across the deck of the U.S Corvette throwing plump juicy sausages to his fellow sailors ("Here, boy!"), maybe followed with an emotional reading of a carefully crafted motivational speech. Get all this on film, edit out the bad parts, and play it on TV all weekend - damage controlling his poll ratings up a couple of notches. In a month or two, people would forget all about the treason!
6:58:57 PM 
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