Excerpted from an essay by Karl Marlantes published in the New York Times Jan.7, 2017
The legacy of the war still shapes America, even if most of us are too young to remember it. Vietnam changed the way we looked at politics. We have switched from naïveté to cynicism. One could argue that they are opposites, but I think not. With naïveté you risk disillusionment, which is what happened to me and many of my generation. Cynicism, however, stops you before you start. It alienates us from “the government,” a phrase that today connotes bureaucratic quagmire. It threatens democracy, because it destroys the power of the people to even want to make change.
I live near Seattle, hardly Donald J. Trump territory. Most of my friends cynically deride Mr. Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, citing all that was wrong in the olden days. Indeed, it wasn’t paradise, particularly for minorities. But there’s some truth to it. We were greater then.
It was the war — not liberalism, not immigration, not globalization — that changed us.
The Vietnam War ushered in the end of the draft, and the creation of what the Pentagon calls the “allvolunteer military.” But I don’t. I call it the all-recruited military. Volunteers are people who rush down to the post office to sign up after Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center gets bombed. Recruits, well, it’s more complicated.
The Vietnam War continues to define us, even if we have forgotten how. But it’s not too late to remember, and to do something about it.
Karl Marlantes, the author of “What It Is Like to Go to War” and the novel “Matterhorn,” was a Marine in the Vietnam War. His essay is the first of in a series about the Vietnam War by veterans and historians, being published on Sundays by the New York Times. It can be read in its entirety online at : https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/opinion/sunday/vietnam-the-war-that-killed-trust.html