Perspective on Politics : PLATFORM : Remember What It Was Like in 1969

I served in Lai Kay and Long Binh in 1969, at the time Bill Clinton was evading the draft. Over the course of my Army tour, I saw infrequent but intense combat. My right shoulder was shattered and I was medevac’ed out. I saw good friends die; one was blown apart in front of my eyes. I did the things one does in combat that afterward, when you look back from the safety of years and continents, you wonder how you could possibly have done such things.

Now I find that Bill Clinton, a man whose political positions I respect, wheeled and dealed to get out of the draft, at least temporarily. And that he knew at age 23 that he would go into politics, and manipulated events to avoid giving the impression ex post facto that he had acted in an unworthy manner.

How do I feel about this? I don’t respect Clinton less. My feeling is that he made a philosophical choice to stay out of the Army and out of Vietnam, just as I made a philosophical choice to enlist. Obviously, he was also motivated by self-interest; but we have no reason to assume that was his only motivation.

It’s important to look at the time period involved. I and many like me enlisted in 1967, before the 1968 Tet offensive by North Vietnam. Before that, it was easy for Americans to fall for the prevailing patriotic line: The democratic South Vietnamese were being invaded by the despotic, Communist North Vietnamese. They needed help to defend themselves.

After Tet, which was welcomed by many South Vietnamese, it became clear that there was support in the South for the ouster of its own corrupt government, and that the North was not uniformly perceived as the bad guy.

When Clinton was doing his draft-manipulating in 1969, the situation was different than in 1967. Americans were aware by then that it was not really a question of good guys and bad guys. It was clear, or becoming clear, that this was not the noble cause it had seemed in 1967.

If a man believed in his heart that it was wrong to kill Vietnamese with whom he had no quarrel he was not immoral in choosing to resist the draft.

Further, if Clinton had the foresight to know that a life of leadership and public service (or call it politics, depending on one’s degree of cynicism) was what he wanted, there was nothing objectionable in trying not to undermine his future by casting his actions in the least damaging light.

Let’s not let our view of his actions in 1969 be colored by our experience of a recent popular war.

Many brave men fought in Vietnam, and many brave men resisted the draft and the war. I believe it’s wrong to impute self-interest as a man’s sole motivation for taking the lattercourse.