BobT
I’m having a hard time believing that we still suffer from some sort of Vietnam syndrome.
Well, you raise an interesting question: is there an age cut-off for Vietnam Syndrome?
Obviously John Kerry has “VS”; Don Rumsfeld has it, too. (The WEEKLY STANDARD had a fascinating article awhile back on this subject.)
This reminds me of my agent, years ago, who was dating up a storm, looking to Get Married and Have a Baby Before It Was Too Late!
At one point she was dating a guy who was quite a lot younger than she was, and she told me, “I don’t know. My age cut-off may be, Can you remember where you were when Kennedy was killed?”
She was pretty sure that a guy who hadn’t been born when Kennedy died was too young.
And the reason he was too young was: he didn’t remember when Kennedy was born.
Reading McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty made me wonder about this, because in it, as the Vietnam War gets underway, LBJ and all the rest are haunted by Korea.
I know virtually nothing about the Korean War, and I have no idea whether some ghost of that war lurks in my own mind. I don’t think so, but . . . would I recognize it if it did?
My guess is that the kind of severe trauma that accompanies a military defeat doesn’t affect only the generation alive when it happens. Path dependency and all. But I don’t know.
I’m beginning to educate myself in these issues, but there are a number of regulars here who are serious students of history; they may have ideas about this. (Skookumchuk, Knucklehead, & WichitaBoy for starters, and I’d love to hear from Terrye & Syl & DtP, too . . . and now that I’m naming names I should just go ahead and say that probably most of the people here know more about history than I do. So I’m all ears.)
Here’s a terrific book on the subject we’re circling around:
Also, here is a fairly bitter article on Vietnam Syndrome that was published by the LATIMES (link no longer works so I won’t post it):
IRAQ
Don’t Quit as We Did in Vietnam
By David Gelernter
