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F.O.A.D.

On 9/10/13 12:15 PM, wrote:
On Tue, 10 Sep 2013 06:58:04 -0400, "F.O.A.D." wrote:

And once again, you simply missed the point. As previously stated, of
all the young men I knew in my high school graduating class, and I knew
a lot of them, only one went directly from high school into the
military. Not everyone went to college, but most of the guys I know did.
This was in the early 1960s, and there simply wasn't much going on
militarily for us anywhere, at least not much that was talked about on
the Nightly News. But by 1963, after Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire
to protest the Diem dictatorship in South Vietnam, many of us knew that
doing anything to support that government was just prolonging its reign
of corruption, and we also knew by then that the corruption had a lot
more to do with and was a lot deeper than the simple prevention of the
spread of communism. We basically were screwing the people of Vietnam,
just as the French did. I saw no reason to participate in that fraud. It
wasn't as if the North Vietnamese had their eyes on Mississippi or
anything other than the long-promised reunification of *their* country.
Why would someone voluntarily drop out of college to participate in that
military and political fraud? Our military apparatus, the officer corps,
was part and parcel of corruption in Vietnam.

My issues generally aren't with the individuals who were drafted or
enlisted and sent over to Vietnam. I do have issues, though, with
right-wingers who think there was something wonderful and honorable
about going over there to kill SE Asians because they were somehow being
"patriotic." That's a nice rationalization, but Vietnam wasn't Germany,
Japan, or even Italy.

You ducked the question, why didn't you join the peace corps, if war
was so horrible an idea for you.

Of course you could have joined the CG, Navy or Air Force and never
got close to Vietnam. (although you might have been supporting that
war remotely)

Because I was busy. I was in college for much of the 1960's, full-time,
pursuing a B.A. and an M.A., and for three of those same years, working
full-time at a newspaper. After I got my M.A. and returned to the paper,
I got an assignment to go to Vietnam to write a few feature stories
about civilian agricultural projects underway there with the assistance
of a U.S. agency and a handful of farmers and feedlot operators in the
midwest. After I returned, I was recruited by the U.S. agency to go back
to Vietnam and serve as a civilian program officer. I got some training
in the states and went to Vietnam again, supposedly for a year, but when
I got there, the program for which I had been recruited had been
terminated. Another assignment there for a totally different agency was
offered to me, and I took it.

It would have been difficult for me to accept a Peace Corps job or to
hide out in the Coast Guard or Texas Air National Guard while I was in
Vietnam, eh?

P.S. It wasn't that war, per se, was such a horrible idea to me at that
time...it was that the war in Vietnam was a horrible war we had no
business waging. Vietnam posed absolutely no threat to the United States.