Somewhere between WW-II and
Posted By: C. Mudgeon on 2009-06-22
In Reply to: excuse me? - sm
Vietnam the US fighting spirit changed. After Pearl Harbor there was a draft but young guys with families were also volunteering to go fight for their country. Teenage boys were forging documents to pass for old enough to serve. They actually wanted to go, saw it as the right thing to do. When they got back they received a hero's welcome.
By the time we were involved in Vietnam patriotism and why we fight were much less clear and we had entered this self-absorbed era. Guys by the thousands were marrying or going to college or Canada to avoid the draft. When troops returned they were spat upon.
There's still a percentage of young men and women who see serving in the military as a patriotic act and rite of passage. Others join to find a way up and out of their circumstances. Some actually still want to join.
If we actively start implementing the draft again at this point in history I imagine the results will be very much like we experienced for the Vietnam War. After the 911 attacks there just wasn't a smoking gun or any way to tie the acts directly to any specific government, it was an ''ideology'' and a ''movement.'' Without some defining act of aggression by another country it will once again be, "Helll no, we won't go.'' And while we have been changing....so has the enemy, who has gotten smarter, sneakier and less overt.
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