When the Elite Took a Stand for ‘Anything but Combat’

In 1969, the year that Dan Quayle joined the National Guard, there was little stigmatization involved in avoiding an assignment that might end up in Vietnam. If anything, staying out of the pipeline to Southeast Asia was a respected achievement, one shared with many of the best and brightest of one’s generation.

I finished a two-year Army stint the same summer that Quayle was starting his six months of active duty. It was not a good time to be in the military. I could tell from the way people reacted to my uniform as I walked through Boston’s Logan Airport that the era of universal esteem for servicemen was definitely over.

In fact, a surprising number of my fellow citizens were actively hostile to all things military. That spring, some of my former Andover classmates, exemplars of upper-class affluence, had battled riot police in a successful struggle to expunge the military’s presence from their college campuses. For their resistance they, and similar anti-military protesters, were hailed by many as the heroes of our generation.

Meanwhile, valor in Vietnam was rarely noted, let alone saluted. Nor were there victories to toast. The taking of Hamburger Hill in 1969 had been widely denounced, even on the floor of the U.S. Senate, as bloody and pointless bravado.

There was nothing remotely glorious about the war. Life magazine had just published a powerful display of one week’s dead, featuring the faces of several hundred young servicemen. The overall impression evoked was not of a roll of honor but of a terrible waste of American manhood.

By 1969 everyone agreed that the Vietnam conflict was a mess. Tens of thousands of young Americans had already been killed, and many more maimed, without bringing the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel” any closer.

The best that the new Administration could offer was the hope of maneuvering North Vietnam into a negotiated peace that would leave South Vietnam securely non-communist. In other words, we were playing for a tie.

For those in uniform, the sense of doing something crucial, let alone noble, had faded. Out in the country, the prevailing sentiment was for winding down America’s participation and bringing the boys back home. (The trick was that the public was not yet ready to accept defeat.)

Who would be eager to serve in such a situation? (I can’t claim that I would--when I was inducted in 1967 things weren’t nearly so negative.)

The upshot of it all was that military service had become, at best, a potentially deadly counterpart to jury duty--a time-consuming, arduous and unglamorous civic obligation, one for which any citizen’s distinctive individual contribution was likely to be minimal. The scramble for the exits was intense because serving could be a sentence of death.

Like jury duty, military service was by 1969 operating on a reverse merit system: The better people found better things to do. The stigma had shifted to those who served. Being excused meant that you were obviously shrewd enough, or well-connected enough, not to let yourself be confused with cannon fodder.

Young Dan Quayle was thus acting in the spirit of the times when he pursued a National Guard slot. Like plenty of his peers, Quayle finessed his military obligation in a relatively painless fashion and then got on with his life. Judging from his successful congressional and senatorial races, few Indianans thought the worse of him for that long-ago decision.

Service in the Vietnam era was, however, an issue that was bound to explode. Now it has. The Quayle case brought out the dirty secret of the later stages of the Vietnam War--elitism.

By 1969 the sons of privilege and affluence were by and large not serving in the combat branches, if they served at all. They had the influence, the access to deferments and medical excuses and divinity schools--all the ways to find safer havens. Their absence did not, though, mean empty spots in the ranks. Their places would simply be filled by other, less fortunate, Americans. In short, someone was fighting, and possibly dying, in their place.

Such substitutions by class do not sit well in a democracy. They also go against the grain of American history: George Bush, Lloyd Bentsen, John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. are just some of the upper-class young men who fought in World War II, embodying an aristocratic tradition that lingered at least until 1968, when Gen. John J. Pershing’s grandson was killed in Vietnam.

Quayle is especially vulnerable on the rich-kid-avoiding-combat issue because of his hawkishness--he didn’t put his body where his mouth was--but he will hardly be the last victim of a 1960s’ choice. Back then, what in retrospect appears to me to be the most self-centered generation in history truly believed that it could take the easy way out of hard choices and yet never be penalized.

We were wrong. In this matter Dan Quayle is indeed what last week’s Republican convention proclaimed him to be--a representative of the baby-boom generation--and he’s paying for it.