Memorial Day Observations 2

 As Vietnam hove into the view of the US, safe behind my 2-S, I was more or less for it.  I remember reading that in China only socialist realism was allowed in their fiction. No characters were allowed who weren't either without fault (commies), or totally evil (anti commies).  I hated that good guy vs bad guy thing.  Even at that young age I liked stories where the good guy wasn't all that good and the bad guy wasn't all that bad, and I had hopes of becoming a writer, and what would be the point of writing good vs bad?  

So there it was.  Socialist realism was bad and we had to head them off in Vietnam lest literature fall into the dustbin of history.  When the gulf of Tonkin crap hit the papers I was all for giving those impertinent reds a swat.

It's kind of a mysterious thing to me but sometime around 1965 I went from being pro-war to anti-war.  I don't remember a specific day when I sat down and thought it out, I just changed.  Maybe it was because my 2-S was closer to running out.  Maybe it was because of the people around me.  Maybe it was a reasonable analysis.  Anyway there it was.

Nowadays I think that war was stupid, but back in the day I thought it was pure evil, naked Amelican aggression.  To take part in it would be wrong.  Well there were draft counselors all over campus, and there I was filling out the form.  The tricky thing was that you had to be against all wars.  And I didn't know.  Should we have just sat on our hands and let Hitler take over all of Europe?  I kind of just mumbled over that and the draft board didn't care because the army had told them to stop sending them guys that didn't want to be in the war.  Just too much damn trouble.

And then there was Al Gore, son of a senator who was anti war, anti war himself and yet he enlisted and went to Vietnam.  I used to think he did it entirely to help his political career and that would make him a pretty big hypocrite.  But morals in uneasy times can be tricky.  There was the argument that troubled me when I was getting my CO, wasn't I just shirking my slot and leaving some poor schlub, who didn't get to go to college where draft counselors were a dime a dozen, go in my place?  I didn't have an answer for that.

I didn't believe all wars were wrong (WW II) so didn't that mean that I believed some wars were just?  And if some wars were just then didn't we need an army?  And what good was an army where the soldiers decide what wars they wanted to take part in?