Mark Moyar

When the US goes into Vietnam, there's actually very little protest.

Again, this is one of those areas where it's worth keeping in mind the chronology.

The protests don't start until 1967, and it coincides exactly with the reduction of draft deferments for students, for college students.

And so suddenly, and I'm not the first person to say it, but I think it's true that a lot of this opposition is driven by the fact that

when you tell some students, these college students didn't care that much about the war until they said, well, we're going to send you there.

And now some of them don't want to go.

And if you look in the nation's history, it's almost always the case that the manly thing, the civic thing to do is to go when your country calls you.

So if you're going to not go and not answer the country's call, you have to come up with a reason.

And so the reason is this was a terrible war and we never should have fought it.

And again, I think much of this is for self-serving reasons.

And if you actually look into the facts of the war, they don't bear those things out.

Well, I think there's certainly cases of that.

Now, it is interesting.

The polls that have been done, Vietnam veterans, there was a survey done a few years after the war.

It's about 90 percent of them say they were actually proud of their service.

Now, most of those people also said the problem was that we tied our hands behind our back.

So, again, they weren't that they didn't have gripes, but it was about how it was fought.

Now.

The question of psychological damage is an interesting one, too, because you have

the rise of certain psychiatrists who are arguing that there is some unique mental illness and we're going to call ptsd that's coming out of vietnam uh i think that's mostly been debunked in just in that if you look at any war there are people with these same problems coming back probably a little bit worse given that when people came home they weren't greeted as heroes yeah i would say that but um