I’ve written elsewhere that what really distinguishes veteran’s reunions isn’t the stories they tell but the secrets they keep.

Here’s one dirty secret about war weariness. It’s cumulative. The “draft dodgers” during the Vietnam War got the headlines. Yet, in some families, the young men had less to do with their own legalized draft dodging than their mothers, and this was the result of their mothers’ pent-up frustration with WWII. Likewise, the isolationism of WWII was a result of war weariness from WWI and outrage at getting lied to about fake atrocities in Belgium.

It is unwise to forget the sheer resentment among Isolationists that America got dragged into World War II. Many Isolationists were honorable people who thought that America could and should remain as an oasis from the horrors elsewhere. Although the America First Committee had a vicious pro-Nazi demagogue in Charles Lindbergh, it also had statesmen such as Gerald Nye, Burton Wheeler, and Robert LaFollette Jr. “Isolationist” is used as a pejorative by the mainstream media, and yet the very Isolationist prose of the era would have been lauded by the mainstream media as brilliant if it had been written in 1967 in reference to the Vietnam War instead of being written in 1937.

When a war is popular with the powers that be, opposition against it is called “Isolationism”. Yet, when a war is unpopular with the powers that be, anti-war activism isn’t called “Isolationism” even when it patently is. Is Gore Vidal an Isolationist now? Well, he was certainly an Isolationist before World War II! My how times change.

For that matter, I suspect that the “Red Scare” and McCarthyism were payback for how Communists and their allies tried to smear the Isolationists as traitors during WWII. Communists like to portray themselves as the victims, but they weren’t particularly shy about attacking defeatism so long as America was a compliant ally of Uncle Joe. Imagine being an Isolationist who thinks that Communist infiltration of the Roosevelt administration meant that Stalin could maneuver the United States into provoking a Japanese attack. There would be rage against the Japanese, of course, but there would also be rage against the Communists. So, the Cold War would be an excellent opportunity for an Isolationist to seek a kind of revenge that was denied to him during World War II.

When an American prisoner of war injures his cartilage from slipping and falling on the ice during a forced march of American prisoners by the SS, and then when the war is over an Army doctor claims there is no injury, this has an effect on future generations. When the US government tells a soldier that his pain is a lie, this undermines morale. War can be a deeply isolating experience for a farm boy who fought while most of his neighbors throughout his county avoided military service. Who can he talk about his past with, especially when the memories are painful? Even with soldier reunions, when the experiences of a soldier are sufficiently different from those of other veterans, the reunions themselves can create more isolation than camaraderie.

American soldiers who got injured by the fighting in 1942 had a different perception of World War II than American soldiers who fought in 1945. For that matter, America’s soldiers from 1942 had a very different perception of the war than occupation soldiers who went on a looting spree in Germany. Prisoners of war were particularly prone to lack the jingoistic triumphalism of official historiography. I keep on hearing about the “greatest generation”, yet it’s interesting how many children were born during WWII to keep their fathers from getting drafted. Yet, it isn’t fashionable to talk about Americans dodging the draft during WWII, for the official historiography of that war often comes close to being hagiography with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as its patron saint. Compare that to the Vietnam War…