I was bragging to my colleague that I dodged the Military draft durin vietnam in

B

Barry

New member
1968, she told me not to tell? She said, I wouldn't go around telling people that if i were you.

Why would she say this? Why is it not a good idea to tell?

I am proud not to be a murderer or a state-paid assassin, aka hit man.
I am proud i did not kill millions of people based on there vietnamese race.
I am proud not to be racist.
How can anybody have a problem with peace, love, and refusing to kill people, refusing to kill people just because somebody in ds said so, or killing people just because of a different race.
40 years later, i still dont understand, why they think i was wrong.
I could not be more proud to have dodged it.

If anything i see myself courageous, to stand up to a corrupt government while I think it is pretty cowardly to simply bow down to a war-mongering regime and slaughter millions of vietnamese people who dont even the means to defend themselves.

I told her i simply hid in the u.s.a. , never went to canada, and never got caught, stayed in hotels, on farms, in big cities, all over. got a fake id, lived with aunts, cousins houses.

Plus, I work as a middle school teacher, where they cant critize me, they dont tolerate any negitive vibes towards the staff, and have a strict policy, so that is why i dont understand why she would tell me not to go around with pride of my resister of war.
 
I understand where you are coming from, but your colleague is obviously one of the people who will judge you negatively for your actions.

Nobody who went to Viet Nam went there to be a state-paid assassin, or a hit man. Many people who went there, like the young men and women who are currently in our all volunteer military, did so out of (possibly misguided?) trust in their country and their own high-minded ideals.

There are many people who see military service as a good thing, and while things were definitely different during the draft years, these people feel (rightfully, in my opinion) that you are painting all military people with a pretty broad brush when you go off on a tirade like you have.

Understand that not everyone shares your ideals, and that doesn't necessarily make them bad people. Lay the blame where it belongs - at the feet of the policy makers who started & escalated the Viet Nam war - not on the soldiers who truisted their leaders, for better or worse, and fought for what many of them truly believed was your freedom.

Hindsight and the long lens of history makes it easy to point out the mistakes we made back then, but it doesn't make you right to condemn those who couldn't see the long view because they were in the thick of it.
 
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