Angry Planet - The Baby Boomers weren’t heroes

Episode Date: April 13, 2017

My father had a low draft number and always told me he couldn’t see himself trudging through the jungle with a machete. It was the early ‘70s and Vietnam would be over soon, but young Americans were still dying in Southeast Asia. So dad joined the Navy and served aboard the USS Enterprise. Unlike a lot of the other men of his generation and demographic, dad did his duty.While dad sweated on the Pacific Ocean and learned the joys of monsoon season, millions of other American men protested the unjust, expensive and bloody war and helped bring it to an end. The popular conception of that period is one of free love and political turmoil. It was an era when old men started unpopular wars and the righteous stayed behind.But that’s not an accurate picture, according to this week’s War College guest, Bruce Cannon Gibney. He lays out the case against the Boomer’s collective memory in his new book “A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America.”Boomers overwhelmingly...Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. In at least a few instances, bounties were placed on unpopular commanders in underground ChiI newspapers asking for the assassin's. of commanders who were a little bit too gung-ho about the war. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the

stories behind the front lines. Hello, and welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With me today is venture capitalist turned writer Bruce Cannon Gibney. Gimney's first book is the delightfully titled A Generation of Sociopaths, How Baby Boomers Betrayed America. He's here today to tell us about how everything we know about Vietnam War resistance is wrong. Bruce, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. All right, Bruce, so it was my understanding that baby boomers fought in the streets to end an

unjust, bloody, inexpensive war of aggression in Southeast Asia. Old politicians wanted to send the young to a meat grinder to die and the young would not go. And without those protests, marches, and civil disobedience, we might still be in Vietnam. And your book kind of tells me that all of that is wrong. Is that correct? Well, it is a narrative that is substantially misleading. There certainly was a coherent and principled anti-war collection of boomers, but it was not the majority of boomers. And this retroactive attempt after the strategic failure in Vietnam to appropriate the much smaller boomer minorities,

coherent opposition to the war by the vast majority of other boomers is just, it's not accurate and it's not helpful. So what actually happened in Vietnam is fairly different for most boomers than the conventional narrative. And this goes in both directions. So on the one hand, I have a critique of the boomers that the bulk of them didn't sort of end the war. But on the other hand, it's also not the case that they can be blamed for losing the war as some people have done. And the boomers themselves actually had much more heterogeneous views about the war. while it was happening. So retrospectively, about 70% of Americans now view Vietnam as a mistake. But that was not the case at the time. And in fact, younger groups were the age group most in favor

of escalation and least likely to view the war as a mistake until about 1969, 1970, when all groups basically sort of swung against the war, although the younger people were still distinct in their somewhat stronger support, even though it was now minorities among all age groups. The war, I think, ended simply because the Vietnamese did not want us there. Vietnam was very far away, and they were very dedicated to throwing off all sort of foreign parties. They did it with the Chinese over the course of the preceding thousand years. They did it with the French. They did it partially with the Japanese, with allied assistance, and ultimately they would do it to the United States as well. The conventional narrative now is that the great mass of boomers was against the war.

The opinion polls show something slightly different. The other troubling thing about the response to the war was the degree to which disobedience and draft avoidance created social problems at home that continue to linger to this day, so that the desire to avoid the draft did not end the draft in and of itself. The draft ended after the war ended. What it did do is shift the burden of service onto disadvantaged groups, particularly African-Americans and poor whites. And that's not just my view, but it's statistically corroborated by both the Selective Service Administration's annual reports. and even retrospectively by Senator McCain, who otherwise holds a fairly untroubled view of Vietnam.

And those social legacies continue to live with us. With respect to outright draft dodging, that was never nearly as prominent a strategy as the sort of subsequent semi-fictionalized histories have made out of only a fairly small number of people actually sort of outright dodged by leaving the government. country for Sweden. It was expensive. It was inconvenient. Equally, a fairly small number of people availed themselves of conscientious objector status. It was about 176,000. Selective services isn't particularly forthcoming about this data, but that's the rough count. So what Boomer's ended up doing was taking advantage of the deferral system, and that was completely legal. But again, it did tend to shift the burdens onto disadvantaged groups. Once Boomer's, arrived in Vietnam, they didn't comport themselves particularly well. It was actually probably the

worst behaved force since the Civil War and the worst behaved force that we've seen since the 1960s. So there have been nothing like the abuses that we saw in the Vietnam War that have been repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan by other generations. So the Vietnam War, about 70% of people actually volunteered. The other 30% were drafted. So it was not. a draft war as sort of conventional histories have made out. In terms of fatalities, it was not a particularly remarkable war. Now, all fatalities we'd like to avoid, but it's very difficult to do that in the course of a war. So about 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam. That was only somewhat higher than the number who died in Korea. It was certainly dramatically lower than in World War II and

World War I. And the idea that Vietnam represented a sort of world historical injustice to be protested by any means necessary seems in part to be a retrospective justification for some of the conduct around the draft system and also the conduct of the war once troops arrived in Vietnam. Let's dig into the draft system and the system of deferments. This was something I didn't really know about. and your book really lays out how boomers avoided going to war or how a specific subsection of boomers avoided going to war. Can you tell me about the differences between draft deferrals and conscientious objector status? Sure. So the draft system was set up by an older generation and one of the explicit goals of the draft system was social engineering and the draft boards

wanted to channel more talented students into occupations at home and send others to war. So it was, in a sense, inherently discriminatory. At first, the deferment system regime was incredibly complicated. So there were deferments for merit students, which made sense. There were deferments for college students who were finishing up their studies, so that that made sense. Deferments for hardships or for critical occupations at home, either in the military hierarchy or in agriculture or what have you.

But the most significant deferment was the college deferment. The requirements for that changed over time, but students were able to figure out how to employ the deferment system to maximum personal advantage. And because the Defense Department requisitioned a fixed number of people every year, the more the college deferment system was exploited, the more the burden of fighting the war was shifted onto people. who were more disadvantaged. And unfortunately, a lot of the people who were disadvantaged were admitted under relaxed criteria and suffered fatality rates that were significantly higher than standard troop cohorts who were not admitted under the relaxed standard. So there is a sort of causal link between heavy use of the deferment system, in some cases abuse of the deferment system and excess casualties in Vietnam. Essentially, rich white students were able to go to college and defer service,

and other people didn't have that option. And the military was going to take a certain amount of people every year regardless. They had a number to meet. And when the pool shrinks, they have to still get those people. Correct? That's right. And those people tended not to have as many options as the people who were taking advantage of deferrals. Now, deferrals, I should emphasize, were completely legal at the time, although there were some people who engaged in such a Baroque exploitation of the deferral system that one has to question sort of, you know, it's sort of total legality for those individuals or its sort of moral rightness. Can you give me an example of that Baroque manipulation? So Bill Clinton is probably the most prominent example. So,

So he availed himself of a number of deferments, as was customary and legal. Those deferments, you know, they were limited number, ultimately ran out. And he signed a deal with ROTC. The letter to his ROTC commander lays this all out, and it's a matter of public record. It was published in the New York Times in the 1990s when he was first running for office. He signed to deal with Rotsie. And, you know, the reason for that, I think, was because although there was a 100% chance of service in the Reserved Officer Training Corps, that service might take place after the war had

ended. And Nixon had been elected around the same time that Clinton was transitioning from standard of deferments into the ROTC maneuver on a pledge to bring an end to both the war and the draft. Eventually, Clinton reneged on his commitment to ROTC because a draft lottery was known to be coming and the war was known to be ending. And so rather than face a war, 100% chance of service with Rotsie, the odds were better to go with the draft lottery. And ultimately, he got a good draft number. And the net effect of this series of deferments, the sort of odd negotiation, and then reneging with Rotsie, and then the draft lottery in combination with the known sort of tailing

off of the war, allowed Clinton to avoid service. And this seems to be a phenomenon that, you know, while very few boomers, you know, pursued such complicated avoidance mechanisms, it does seem to affect a surprisingly large number of boomer politicians. So we've had questions about, you know, George W. Bush and his draft deferments. Dick Cheney got five draft deferments for school, less complicated than Clinton's, but still five deferments is a lot of deferments. deferments. Donald Trump and his bonespurs, that was another set of deferments. So there are a whole series of these boomer politicians who do seem to have, you know, avoided the war by means that, in retrospect, do seem somewhat unusual, you know, how many strings were pulled or how many advantages were employed by people higher up on the socioeconomic ladder to avoid the war. And of course, as you mentioned, the Defense Department just had a number it was going to hit every year. And if

wealthy heirs like Trump or George W. Bush or people with a certain talent for legal maneuvering like Bill Clinton were able to pull the deferral levers in very complicated ways. Other people further down the ladder didn't have the time or the resources of the education to do that. Another common tactic was to find a friendly psychiatrist or a physician who would provide a certification letter testifying to unfitness. And, you know, for people who were higher up on the socioeconomic ladder, that those letters were fairly easy to get. What about conscientious objector status, right? Because as you note in your book, the Pentagon towards the end of the war granted something like 73% of those claims to currently serving soldiers. And over the course of the entire war,

granted 175,000 or around there, you know, people's CO status. So why not? go that route instead. That seems like a more honest, you know, way to avoid service. So conscientious objection was a wholly legal and honorable way to avoid serving in the war. So if one had a firm moral conviction that war was wrong, as many boomers on the left professed to, one could simply apply for CO status. There were two difficulties. One was real and one was not. and that people argued made CO status less desirable than deferments or other maneuvering. The first was that in order to qualify for CO status, one usually had to do an alternative form of work that was usually low-paid and incommodious, although it was in the public interest.

And it was another form of public service. And for the most sort of extreme and sociopathic tilting cohorts, that wasn't pleasant. because the whole point of pulling all the deferment and avoidance levers was to avoid public service entirely. And so that made it a less popular option than simply going to college and availing oneself for the deferment. And I'll return to that because there were a lot of people who did go to college who had no genuine interest in college. If you look through the statistics, there's a spike, for example, in enrollments as the college deferment system changes, as people take advantage of it, not only in college, but also in things like seminaries, which provided an exemption as well. And you can sort of tease these statistical relationships out because, of course, women weren't subject to the draft.

And, you know, you can get a baseline both historically for men and against women of comparable ages in college enrollment. I'm not sure how well lying to God in a seminary application works out, but people appear to have done it, at least, as a statistical matter. The second thing on CO status that people have argued is that it wasn't a viable option for the simple reason that the government would never grant CO status, that the government was entirely run by Hawks, that they didn't really set up CO to be a viable alternative and they wanted to force people in the service. Well, certainly the government wanted people to serve. That was the whole point of the draft. But aside from the very earliest years of the ground war in the mid-1960s where CO was granted fairly reluctantly, it was granted fairly regularly by the middle to late 1960s on the order of two-thirds to almost three-quarters of petitions and even higher in the case of people who were presently serving and who having seen war, understandably decided that they just didn't want to participate in it.

So it was not the case that CO was sort of a fakeout on the part of the government. It actually did exist as a viable option, but you did have to find some other way to serve in the public interest, and many people preferred not to do that. There was another way to avoid the draft, and it was extremely problematic, but you also have to appreciate the difficult circumstances that people who did not have the option of going to college or finding a friendly local psychiatrist faced. And that was what was called dodging down. And dodging down involved committing a crime. So the Army clearly did not want people who were guilty of moral turpitude, who were likely to commit violence, who would be bad for morale.

And it was understood at the time that, you know, a criminal conviction would place you in that class of undesirables and the draft boards would just say, we don't want you and they would move on. This was typically something that the lower income potential soldiers availed themselves up to correct? That's right. So, you know, although college was much cheaper than it was now, it did require you to forego income. There were, you know, fees and books and what have you. So it was not something that if you were sort of in the bottom third of the economic lottery, that was easy for you to do. As a result, some people chose to dodge down. And the problem with dodging down is not only do you have to commit a crime, and not only was the crime usually fairly

significant in order to carry weight. I mean, not paying six parking ticks is not going to convince the Pentagon that, you know, you're going to be a terrible soldier, but maybe an armed robbery might. The problem with that is not only has a crime been committed, but that also permanently reduces the economic prospects, not only, of course, the victim, but of the person committing the crime. The draft system was the fault of prior generations. They set it up with the specific intent that it would channel people of greater talent or greater means into professions that the government wanted them to be in. In the end, of course, you know, when these loopholes existed, people ended up exploiting them and they exploited them very, very heavily. And,

I obviously was not alive at the time, so I can't place myself in the difficult position of people faced with a draft notice. But, you know, there were legal limits to how far the deferral system could be taken, and some people took them well beyond that. The other problem is leveraging the genuine pacifist movement to retroactively justify a lot of gray area draft avoidance. So it's not like the early 1500s where, you know, the saints accumulated this treasury of merit from which, you know, all other people could borrow through the means of indulgences, you know, leveraging the genuine and heartfelt protests of a small minority of pacifist boomers to sort of sanitize the draft avoidance and the consequences of draft avoidance

for everyone else's difficult. I want to jump into that a little bit more, but I need to pause for a break real quick. So you're listening to War College. We were talking to Bruce Canaan Gibney about his new book, A Generation of Sociopaths, How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. We'll be back in just a minute. Welcome back to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. Today we are talking to Bruce Canon Gibney about his new book, A Generation of Sociopaths, how Baby Boomers betrayed America. So we were talking about draft deferrals and those kinds of things right before the break. and I wanted to get back into that with a very specific question. And I'm going to start with a little bit of a quote from your book, if you don't mind.

So early on, boomer response to the war tended to track both the intensity of the war and the mechanics of the draft. So my question is, what happened in 1968 that really changed things for the boomers and made them much more, at least in the surface and in retrospect, anti-war than they actually were? Two things happened. one, the system of deferments tightened up over time, and two, the war itself began to deteriorate for the United States. And the second one is completely legitimate. People were becoming concerned that the war might not be easy or winnable. William Westmoreland had promised that victory would be fairly straightforward matter that would be accomplished in two, three, at the most

four years. And as that became less and less likely, people obviously re-evaluated their position to what was becoming known as a quagmire. But what also happened was that the deferment system tightened up considerably, and it became harder and harder to get deferment. So even though sort of peak inductions had happened before 68, there weren't the sort of protest that one saw in the late 1960s, in the mid-1960s, even though the number of bodies being funneled into the armed forces was high. higher. What happened was that for middle-class boomers, deferments became harder and harder to get. And it became a much chanceier thing. Not only were deferments harder to get,

but the introduction of a lottery was viewed by many people who would otherwise be able to get easy deferments as a negative. One of the interesting things is the student newspaper at Harvard commissioned a study earlier in the 1960s to see whether students believed that the deferral system, which was known to be discriminatory. It was known by everyone to be discriminatory, that was its explicit intent on the part of the government, whether that should be abolished in favor of a, quote, more equitable lottery. And 70% of Harvard students thought not. They were opposed to a more equitable distribution of the burdens of the war. Right, because that meant many of more of them would have to go serve.

That's exactly right. So the charitable interpretation is that students at Harvard believe that continuing their studies uninterrupted was a better means of social organization than sort of a random lottery. And the less charitable interpretation is that they wanted someone else to go in their place. And the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. But, you know, again, the real challenge of engaging with Vietnam, even in 2017, is that it spawns so many feelings for a war that was in many ways not that remarkable. I mean, it was very similar to the Korean War. We certainly don't wring our hands about the Korean War anymore. And I think that one of the reasons why Vietnam has such a poisonous legacy is because of the angst that people have over how the deferment system

was exploited and what consequences that had for people who were less advantaged. You know, today, you know, the Korean War lives on as MASH, and Vietnam just continues to fester as a boil on the body politic. And there has to be a reason why that is. And it's certainly not because the geostrategic importance of Vietnam. It's certainly not because Vietnam was a failure. You know, the Korean War is at best to have success. Iraq and Afghanistan are certainly not unqualified successes. It wasn't even because of the number of fatalities in Vietnam. 58,000 was only somewhat higher than the number of fatalities in the much shorter Korean War, much less than in World War I, much less than World War II.

Well, let's dig into that a little bit. I want to talk about the troop behavior, which you've touched on very lightly in our conversation. But you kind of lay out in your book that troop behavior in Vietnam by this generation was not good, to put it politely. Right. So Robert Heinle wrote in the Armed Forces Journal that basically this was the worst force the United States had fielded since probably the Civil War. Obviously, the Civil War was socially contentious and it was going to be problematic regardless. There were a series of behaviors that increased the dangers not only for Americans, but also for Vietnamese. So drug use was enormously widespread, as was the abuse. of alcohol. It was not infrequent for soldiers to turn up intoxicated and armed for duty. Insubordination was a serious problem in a way that it had not been in Korea and would not be

in Afghanistan and Iraq, which obviously featured no boomer combat troops. Sabotage was a frequent occurrence. The Navy recorded hundreds of instances of sabotage, anything from fires being set on ships, the dynamiting of a telephone exchange. There were obviously some war crimes perpetrated along the way. There were combat refusals. If there's one thing that has to work in an armed force, it's the principle of command that, you know, your superior officer issues a lawful order and that you obey it. And the principle of command deteriorated in Vietnam so that the 196th late infantry brigade simply sat down on the battlefield, and they were not alone. There were also combat refusals where troops in the field refused to fire at the enemy.

They would just fire into the jungle instead. Now, that was some strange thinking because, of course, you know, in a rainy jungle, it's not clear how the enemy is supposed to divine your Pacific intentions, but that was the thinking at the time. And I think all of these things, you know, led to access deaths, led to access brutality against the Vietnamese, led to higher casualty. among American troops. Tell me about officer bounties, because I had not heard this before. Yeah, that was shocking to me. So during the course of the war, not only was there insubordination in the sense of people

refused to follow orders, but they actually would order fraggings of their lieutenants and other commanding officers. And the fraggings were named after fragmentation grenades, which were the assassin's choice because they were difficult to trace. So there are a shockingly large number of fraggings. And the situation had deteriorated so much that in at least a few instances, bounties were placed on unpopular commanders in underground Chiayi newspapers asking for the assassination of commanders who were a little bit too gung-ho about the war.

And of course, we've seen nothing like that since. We didn't see anything like that, really, in North Korea. World War II was a bit more chaotic, but there are no indication. based on accident data that this was a problem at all. So what you see is an armed force that not only refuses to obey orders, but that's actually killing its senior officers. And that's pretty shocking. All right, let's go back to the home front.

And I want to talk about what I think is probably one of the most damning pieces of evidence that you present. And that's what happened after the war was over and how the boomers treated Vietnamese refugees. and you dive into that a little bit for us. Right. So there were three things that happened. You know, first the United States pulled out of Vietnam, in part because I think Nixon and the generals understood it was a lost cause. Arguably, everyone should have understood that earlier.

That meant that our ally collapsed, South Korea collapsed, which it duly did in 1975. The second thing that happened was that, you know, because our ally had collapsed, people that we'd fought side by side for and whose safety we had, you know, quasi-guaranteed, right? They were our friends. After the peninsula was reunified, there were enormous reprisals from the communist junta in the north. And we knew that this was going to happen. And there were calls for resettlement of Vietnamese friends in the United States. And some were resettled, notably in the United States. And some were resettled, notably in the United States.

in the upper Midwest, but there was a substantial pushback against any major resettlement, including by Jerry Brown, who was governor of California then. He's governor of California now, too, but back then, he was sort of an icon of the youthful left, and he thought that American jobs should go to Americans first, and that Vietnamese would have to be last in line. So even though the Vietnamese had suffered, even though that we knew that they were in physical danger, even though they were, of course, allies, priority was being given to people, to Americans who wanted work, younger Americans who wanted work, people who were at the time, boomers.

And then the third thing that happened was a comprehensive pardon by Ford and by Carter after the war concluded. So clearly there had been some abuses of the deferment system. And those are still, you know, actively prosecutable crimes in some cases, not all cases. Most deferments were completely legal. And young people demanded a pardon, which Ford wanted to condition based on public service. But of course, we know how public service went when it was offered as part of CEO. So ultimately, Carter gave a blanket pardon.

In fact, he thought it was sufficiently important. The boomer votes were becoming so important by the end of the 19. 1970s that Carter made a pardon, a blanket pardon, his first official act in office. Now, there were probably other things that were, you know, simmering on the president's plate in 1977, January 1977 when he took office. But that was the first thing he did. And it was direct concession to boomer power. And I'd like to circle back to the second thing, which is the resettlement of Vietnamese.

So one of the other difficulties this poses for the conventional narrative is, If the conventional narrative posits that the anti-war protests by young boomers were enough to end the war, if you take that as true, then almost by implication it has to be true that pro-resettlement protests or reparations protests or, you know, clearing the landmines, agitating for clearing the landmines and dealing with the defoliation that came as a consequence of Agent Orange. protests over those sorts of policies should have been effective as well. We did not see any of those sorts of protests. So, and I don't think that the young boomers actually could have pulled them off. But I think that also implies that if they were powerless to pull off these sorts of sympathetic reparations to the Vietnamese, South or North, if they weren't able to pull them off, then they probably weren't able to pull off ending the war. And if they were able to to pull them off, then that's something about what they were actually trying to achieve

in the course of avoiding service or protesting the war. Maybe it really wasn't about solidarity with the North Vietnamese communists. Maybe it really wasn't about helping Vietnam get on its feet. Maybe it really was actually just about avoiding the war. Right. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Bruce, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for debunking a lot of the cultural myths that still surround Vietnam.

Thank you for having me. This is Bruce Cannon-Gibney. His wonderful new book is A Generation of Sociopaths, How Baby Boomers Betrayed America. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heidt. It's hosted by Matthew Galt, who also wrangles our guests. It's produced by me, Bethel Hopday.

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