Air University Review, May-June 1982
I was an AFROTC student during the period of the Vietnam War on a campus that had an active antiwar movement. It was an exciting but distressing time to attend college. There were times when it was inadvisable to wear a uniform on campus. The harrassment could be intense because the political atmosphere was so highly charged by the time I graduated and went on active duty, I felt I had already been through a campaign of sorts.
But when I left active duty four years later and returned to the campus for graduate school, the Vietnam War was over and so was the campus unrest. Since then, as a graduate student and later as an instructor of undergraduate students in American government courses, I have tried to watch the campus closely for signs of student reaction to the contemporary political environment. I have developed an interest in the way students react to such issues as compulsory military service because I think that their reaction can be reflective of what the rest of the country thinks about these issues.
As a reserve officer involved in undergraduate education, I have had an excellent opportunity to observe today’s college-age youth. Some of my observations follow.
No one has been drafted for nine years, but to many students the prospect of being drafted for service in a future war is real and disconcerting. They seem to know that we live in a dangerous world and that it is the young who are always called on to fight. But despite what I read about rising ROTC enrollments and the end of the Vietnam syndrome, I believe that the bulk of today’s students would oppose a return to the draft on principle. The reason is still the Vietnam experience.
In class we discuss the presidency, foreign policymaking, and inevitably the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that formally limits the President’s personal power to make war. The best written and most interesting of the freshman American government textbooks dwell extensively on the problems experienced by postwar American presidents in their role of Commander in Chief. The impression created by these readings is that our postwar presidents have been less than masterful in the foreign policy arena and that the country has, on occasions such as Vietnam, paid a high price for their failures.
Vietnam is more than just history to these students because they fear that history may repeat itself. They do not lack patriotism or loyalty or any other virtue, so far as I can tell, but because of Vietnam, they do seem to be short on confidence in our current national leadership. They feel that civilian leaders of the Vietnam era lacked the skill to avoid war or to win it, and they want to be convinced that the leadership gap of the postwar years has been permanently closed.
Many students today feel that Vietnam was a fool’s errand for their older brothers—that the really smart guys found a way to get out of serving. Others feel that their older brothers had no choice but to serve, yet they were misused in the process. These seem to be among the main reasons why there are still strong reservations on campus about compulsory military service. But these reservations also reduce interest in serving in the all-volunteer forces of today, particularly in the combat arms. Such service is largely shunned by college-trained youth—among our most qualified potential soldiers and officers—not because it is difficult or possibly dangerous work but because doubts remain about the quality and intentions of our top civilian leadership. Most of all, students seem to wonder if our nation will get involved in another war that the top leadership has less than complete interest in winning.
As we move through the l980s, there may be opportunities or obligations to use military power to achieve political ends. But even if the nation has left behind the Vietnam syndrome, it still seems premature to assume that the nation is ready to use conscripted manpower to produce an outcome in another country which is again less than decisive in military terms. It seems clear to the students that achieving a decisive military outcome was never the main objective in Vietnam. The main objective seems to have centered on restoring the political status quo in another country. For good reason or bad, the students still do not understand what this kind of thing has to do with the defense of the United States or why they might be involved in such a campaign someday.
What they do understand, and speak clearly about, is the distinct difference between winning and losing; that getting killed when your side does not really want to win can seem pretty senseless. Soon the debate will build around the question of whether we should scrap the all-volunteer policy and return to the draft. But military service of any kind seems tied to the leadership question. To many students there is the notion of a contract about military service. If they are sent to war, they want to know that our civilian leaders intend to win, not recklessly, but decisively. If they are sent to war, they want to know that the need will be clear and unambiguous. On no account will there be enthusiasm on campus for a war that seeks to achieve political-military objectives which are either poorly defined or militarily inconclusive in nature. The experience of the Vietnam veterans makes this a certainty.
Most Vietnam veterans have now passed through college, but they have more than left their mark. I say "passed through" because some of them seemed unable to collect their wits sufficiently while they were there to construct a degree program of any kind. As a graduate student and college instructor, I have known dozens of them, and they generally fit into two categories: veterans of the combat arms and veterans of all other types of Southeast Asia service. There is no doubt that veterans who saw heavy action are different from those who did not. While veterans without service in the combat arms seemed generally able to get on with their lives, the others so often were to be the lost souls of campus life. Many of them apparently have not been able to draw a line between the past and the present; they either write passionate poetry about love or they love to start barroom brawls. But in the end, they are just passing through.
The younger students, without any kind of military experience, normally do not know what to make of the lost souls. But the smarter, more sensitive students sometimes think they see a connection between the anger in some veterans and Southeast Asia service in the combat arms. Sometimes they think such a veteran was attracted to this type of service because he had always been a fighter or because he had once been a young man with something to prove about himself. But more often they think that the veteran learned all he ever knew about fighting in the service and that he was still fighting years later because he did not know how to stop.
There are still a few Vietnam veterans on campus. Some, the most distressed, seem to carry around feelings of personal failure about the way the Vietnam War was fought and ended. In Vietnam, there was a conflict between the winning tradition of the American military services and the apparent objectives of the American civilian leadership. The leadership sought at most the preservation of American pride and honor—a worthy goal but not one immediately essential to the survival of the American way of life and one which, in any case, was not focused firmly enough on winning.
As a result, some Vietnam veterans may feel personally responsible for the way the war turned out. Their younger brothers hold them blameless, but the effect that military experience has had on the lives of these men is widely known on campus. I suspect that their impact has been at least as strong in other sectors of American life. The veterans have had an effect that tends to inhibit the natural urge to serve in those who follow.
The end of the Vietnam syndrome does not mean that we have wiped the slate clean of the past—that Vietnam never happened— only that we no longer choose to be fascinated and inhibited by our own recent history. We can and should proceed with confidence that we have the ability to protect American interests around the world with military force if necessary. But what is written on that slate is that many young Americans will always resist the opportunity to fight for the kind of objectives apparently sought in Vietnam.
Our civilian leadership continues to carry a burden. It is the burden of translating American interests into policies that reflect the values young Americans instinctively want to defend. When students sense that this process is complete, they will have renewed enthusiasm for military service. To draft them, before the process is complete, would be to risk repeating errors in a period of history when the price of failure could be higher.
The campus is now quiet. Occasionally someone organizes a rally against some aspect of American foreign policy or against draft registration. But few people ever show up. Now is a waiting time. The students are waiting to see what we have learned.
Tulsa Junior College, Oklahoma
Contributor
Major Jonathan G. Mark,
USAFR (BA., University of Texas; M.A., University of Pennsylvania; Ph.D., University of Oklahoma), a political science instructor at Tulsa Junior College, Oklahoma, is currently assigned to an Air Force Reserve Mobilization Augmentee position within the Air Force Intelligence Service Reserve program and operations and training officer for Detached Training Site 42 of AFIS/RE at Tinker AFB, Oklahoma.Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor