Veterans' Day

I am not a veteran. I was born in 1959, and the time when military service (or attending a military academy or joining ROTC) would have presented itself to me, roughly my college years from 1977 through 1981, were the years of the Carter presidency and "malaise." Military service when I was in college (and perhaps partly because of the college I attended, Princeton, where the liberal elites inculcated a profoundly anti-military ethos) was unthinkable. We were a generation weaned on images of military defeat in Vietnam, as filtered through the news media and Hollywood (Apocalypse Now, The Deerhunter, etc.). None of my friends joined the military; no one I knew joined the military. In retrospect, this fact is among my deepest regrets... I look back on my own shallowness and shudder.

For I have long since realized that the myth of the "madness" of the Vietnam veteran, and the myth of the incoherence and futility of American efforts to defeat communism there and around the world, were myths founded on propaganda. Now, in this campaign season I have witnessed the self-sacrifice and courage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and the ultimate defeat of the anti-Vietnam War candidate, John Kerry. And, more recently I have watched (more than once) Mel Gibson's paean to the Air Cavalry in the Ia Drang valley in 1965, We Were Soldiers. Finally, at long last, American culture seems to have returned to sanity about the Vietnam era.

God Bless the WW II and Korean War vets from my father's generation. God Bless our Vietnam vets. And God Bless our young men fighting today in Fallujah.