Opinions

Protester reflects on lessons of Vietnam

As a member of the 1960s hippie generation, I am also a child of the Vietnam War. I don't know if there are enough words to express what an overwhelming presence and force that war was to my generation.

It encompassed us like a tsunami. When it ended, it felt as though the whole world shuddered in an attempt to find the new normal. I think we all regret that the new normal turned out to be the '70s.

I started the '60s as a good little Catholic schoolgirl. It wasn't until I got to college in the mid-'60s that I noticed the whole world wasn't represented by the safe and insular world in which I'd been raised.

My first flirtation with civil disobedience and protests occurred within the realm of the civil rights movement. That opened a door to a whole other world for me.

Given that I was attending a Catholic women's college where virginity and Sunday Mass were two highly regarded requirements, it's not as though that door was thrown open. But I was in Philadelphia and things were happening outside of my campus that couldn't be ignored.

By the end of my college experience, the war protests were in full force. I was as smack dab in the middle as I could have been, given the 7:30 p.m. weekday curfew we endured.

['The Vietnam War' tells story with honesty and humanity]

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Under that curfew, being a dyed-in-the-wool, war-protesting, pot-smoking hippie was not easy. But I managed. I managed because I felt I needed to have my voice heard about a war that was destroying my generation.

Despite multiple explanations from varied talking heads, no one ever really gave me a good reason why we were fighting over there.

I can look back now and somewhat understand the war was being led by a generation that had been victorious in World War II, and the leaders didn't know how to retreat with honor from an unwinnable situation. No one wanted to admit America was losing.

I often wonder why protests over the wars in the Middle East have not arisen today as they did during Vietnam. The obvious answer is we no longer have the draft. Middle-class children are no longer in the crosshairs. People in the military are there by choice, they volunteer, not because their number was called in some lottery.

The wars we are fighting in the Middle East have been going on for over 15 years. They don't make the front page of the paper anymore. They barely get covered anywhere in the news.

Unless you are burying a loved one from these conflicts, it's as though we aren't really at war at all. With Vietnam, the images were plastered across our TV screens every night on the news.

Newspapers carried pictures of soldiers injured, huts burning, chaos in villages. The war was brought into our homes every evening. There was no avoiding it.

We seem to be successfully ignoring the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. We are inundated with tweets, and pictures of (for reasons no one can really explain) women famous for baring various parts of their anatomy to the public.

We are drowned in internecine battles within political parties. We have taken to gazing so intently at our navels, we no longer are aware of the outside world.

Every once in a while when a terrorist attack happens in Europe, we get the pictures and shouting headlines that were routine during the Vietnam War.

But when those suicide bombers blow up a market in the Mideast, causing mass casualties, we're lucky if that gets covered the fourth page, under a world news wrapup. It usually rates barely a mention, if that, on TV and radio news.

I guess we will finally be aware of the devastation of 15 years of war as more and more veterans return home wounded in body and spirit. We won't have enough money to care for them the way we should. We never do.

That's why underfunding at the Veterans Administration is an evergreen topic during any national campaign. We have money for bombs and bullets but not medicine and therapy.

As someone who has watched the fallout from war on her generation, let me suggest that ignoring these wars only pushes the pain down the road. Eventually, as a society, we will have to face the consequences of what these wars have done to a whole generation of men and women in the military.

For their sake, I hope we do better for them than we did for the walking wounded of Vietnam. Let's hope we at least learned that lesson.

Elise Sereni Patkotak has written two memoirs about her life in Alaska, both available at AlaskaBooksandCalendars.com.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com. 

Elise Patkotak

Elise Patkotak is an Alaska columnist and author. Her book "Coming Into the City" is available at AlaskaBooksandCalendars.com and at local bookstores.

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