Unlike Quayle, War Foes Took a Risky Stand for What They Believed

Vice President George Bush thought he was being innovative when he selected a baby-boomer, Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana, as his running mate on the Republican presidential ticket. But Bush didn’t take into account a trauma that scarred our otherwise blessed, maybe even spoiled, generation--Vietnam.

Bush now knows that this was a mistake. His campaign has been overshadowed by questions about Quayle’s military record during the war years. Did the young senator, one of the most outspoken hawks on Capitol Hill, use the influence of his rich and powerful family to get into the National Guard in 1969, thereby avoiding the possibility of being drafted and sent to Vietnam?

Despite all the efforts of the Bush campaign to divert attention from this question, it won’t go away. It could undermine the Republican ticket’s appeal to so-called “Reagan Democrats,” the patriotic blue-collar voters whose sons traditionally have served in the military, including in Vietnam.

A lot of those blue-collar patriots are Latino. Mexican-Americans, especially, have long seen special honor and value in military service. Even at the height of controversy over Vietnam, few Latinos resisted the draft. Many even volunteered for Vietnam. I know, because I was one of the few Chicanos who vociferously urged them not to go.

I was a high school student in the San Fernando Valley when the United States began to escalate its involvement in Vietnam. I was probably one of the biggest hawks on my campus. Only a discouraging conversation with an Air Force recruiter, who said that poor eyesight would keep me from ever flying, prevented me from enlisting right after graduation. Like many Chicanos of my generation, I could hardly wait to get into “our” war and show our elders, who had served so courageously in World War II, what we could do. Perhaps this youthful bravado will sound more sensible if you know that I was raised by a single mother and that my male role models were four uncles who had fought in the war, three of them returning with permanent disabilities and one with the Silver Star.

I was so hawkish in those days that an astute civics teacher, Ralph Ahn, assigned me to research the budding opposition to the war as my senior project. I was initially annoyed at the assignment, but it changed my life. I went at it with dogged thoroughness. And after reading dozens of articles in everything from the New York Times to Ramparts magazine, especially the works of historian Bernard Fall, I came away convinced that U.S. involvement there was a terrible mistake.

My anti-war sentiment became even more heartfelt in college, when I first became aware of the appalling statistics that showed how disproportionately young Latinos were represented among the casualties in Vietnam. Research by the late political scientist Ralph Guzman, for example, indicated that Latinos from the five Southwestern states were killed and wounded at twice the rate of their numbers in the general population.

That was why I took part in so many anti-war protests and wrote as many articles against the war as I could. I point this out because it seems fashionable these days for people like me to be somewhat apologetic about our activities back then. I am not.

I did not run off to Canada. I made no attempt to join the National Guard to avoid the draft, as at least some people (if not Quayle) did. In fact, I believed in the draft, and still do. So I did everything legal and up front. I registered and applied for a student deferment and awaited my turn. But I continued opposing the war as publicly and vociferously as I could in the meantime.

Luck was with me, and I was never called up. I am only sorry that the same luck was not with my two relatives and one good friend, Chicanos all, who died in Vietnam. I wept for them then; I still do, which is why I’m glad that those of my generation who did fight in Vietnam are finally being paid tribute for doing their duty, as they saw it.

But I remain angry that they had to sacrifice so much in defense of a policy that was so misguided.

And it angers me that Latino communities, especially, paid such a heavy price.

And it angers me when I hear ardent right-wingers like Quayle and his ideological kin in the Administration (Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state who wants so badly to invade Nicaragua, comes to mind) boast about rolling back communism when I know that they did not volunteer to fight communists when they had the chance. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko appropriately calls them “war wimps”--always ready for a fight as long as someone else does the fighting.

It is the hypocrisy of their stance that galls me. And it should gall anyone who believes that real patriotism is more than waving a flag and talking tough. It includes standing up for what you believe in, even when it’s unpopular. That’s what I felt in the 1960s, and I’m ready to defend my stance to this day. Over the next few weeks, Dan Quayle had best be prepared to do the same.