Part 2

Once people have given up their self-determination in exchange for the mutual protection of the tribe, a few of them will be asked (or compelled, in countries with a military draft) to become the trained warriors -- to be the sword and shield of tribal defense, when it becomes necessary. Self-defense against an aggressor may be a necessary thing -- even moral -- if the basis of ethics is the survival and freedom of innocent people. Being a warrior, willing to kill or die for the preservation of the tribe, can be an honorable role to play.

This honor goes away when -- in addition to their roles of protectors -- warriors are compelled to engage the armies of another tribe, solely because the tribe's leadership has a difference of opinion with the leadership of the opposing tribe. At least when the conflict is between groups of soldiers, those involved in the actual bloodshed have usually had at least some measure of training, are armed, and might get through it more or less intact.

If a person will concede -- for the sake of discussion, at least -- that there are degrees of depravity, how much more immoral is it when soldiers are sent to kill untrained, unarmed civilians?

Southeast Asia was that kind of war. All sides engaged in terrorism, torture and wholesale murder in order to try to pull off some kind of victory. If there ever was any driblet of justification for sending American troops to Vietnam, it was lost with the death or maiming of the first innocent.

Agitprop
During my youth, I was on the receiving end of two kinds of messages about the war -- two kinds of agitation propaganda. Since the American government was sending young people to kill or be killed for reasons that weren't entirely clear, and there are supposed to be elements of democracy in our system of government, they had to at least attempt to justify it. I didn't listen to their speeches personally, but their rhetoric was paraphrased and hawked up like phlegm from the mouths of most of the adults around me. They were of a generation that could shrug off the casualties of war -- even one they couldn't explain -- pretty readily, because they still trusted in the wisdom of our government.

Soldiers aren't born. They are made. As children they -- like we -- were taught that killing is wrong. To become a soldier, a person with the same respect for life that you and I have, must be trained to kill on command. In past centuries, soldiers saw the enemy as fellow professionals doing a job worthy of respect. This image had to change as war began to be extended to civilians and whole populations -- particularly during World War 2.

"Increasingly, we cannot fight without an image of the enemy as totally evil for whom any mercy or sympathy is incongruous, if not traitorous…. Most soldiers are able to kill and be killed more easily in warfare if they possess an image of the enemy sufficiently evil to inspire hatred and repugnance."

--J Glenn Gray, The Warriors

Make no mistake: those opposed to the war were engaging in agitprop too. There's nothing innately wrong with agitation, if it will motivate people that need to be motivated. And propaganda -- the systematic propagation of information -- isn't intrinsically bad either, especially if it's used to challenge incorrect information or to inform those who have only been exposed to rhetoric without facts.

Antiwar sentiments presented by ragged hippie folk singers and printed on posters will never be as systematic as the organized sort of disinformation that government can crank out -- given the resources available to any government. Nevertheless, these subtle and not so subtle nudges at the American conscience -- when added to the government's public relations mistakes (Kent State, to name a big one) served to eventually make the war unpopular. Nixon started pulling troops out in 1973 -- a mere nine years after North Vietnam first attempted to engage in the peace talks that Washington rejected.

Did America learn anything from that gruesome episode in our history? The government certainly did.