There has never seemed, to me, terribly much to celebrate about the anti-war protests in the late 1960s, though I’ve found it fascinating over the course of my life to hear people suggest that protesting the Vietnam War was some momentous act of courage by the participants, or some such. 

I’ll admit to harboring a natural bias on the subject. 

My father fought in that war, and he thankfully returned home and was able to raise our family.  He was also entirely convinced by the experience and by his life as a citizen that America’s stance against communist aggression in Vietnam was entirely justified, even though the war wasn’t prosecuted appropriately by the political class.

He instilled that understanding in me at an early age, and my years in college studying history, along with the ensuing decades of earnest study, have only further convinced me that my father is correct.  And it wasn’t for a lack of my trying to look for reasons that my father could have been wrong, I assure you.

It’s disheartening to watch modern historical revisionists on both sides of the political aisle imagine that they now know far better about the global threat that communism posed in the 1960s than the onlookers who had witnessed Eastern Europe become enslaved by the Soviets in the aftermath of World War II, and after having continued witnessing its malignant spread throughout Asia. 

And to be perfectly clear, no greater or deadlier threat to human freedom than communism has arguably ever existed.  In the twentieth century alone, more than 100 million people were killed at the hands of their own communist governments, and while that fact may be inconvenient for those now suggesting that America should have done nothing to intervene in the rapid and murderous spread of the communist scourge in Asia, that fact only solidifies the belief that American military involvement in Vietnam was a matter of our national interest.

This is not to say, however, that the reasons for the protests against the war weren’t valid.  Thousands of American soldiers were dying in defense of South Vietnam against the communist North, and the war seemed endless in the late 1960s.  Many Americans undoubtedly believed America’s military defense of South Vietnam to be bad foreign policy.  But let’s be honest with ourselves -- it wasn’t some sense of moral passion for a newsworthy conflict overseas that drove most protestors back then. 

Mostly, college protests against Vietnam at that time were a means of self-preservation.  “We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street,” sang Merle Haggard about Muskogee, Oklahoma.  That sounds like a fine place, but in many other places where the kids didn’t still “respect the college dean,” draft cards were certainly burned.  And for most of those kids, they were burning them because they just didn’t want to go to Vietnam. 

This, at least, is an understandable impulse for college students, their families, and their friends to oppose a foreign conflict, the outcome of which would determine America’s position in the world.  My problem with the collective memory of some imaginary selflessness or heroism among Vietnam protestors is the suggestion that it was due to moral indignation about some conflict which few of them truly knew anything about.

John Ratzenberger, of Cheers fame, lamented many years ago about how the Democrat party had devolved from its earlier brand to that of the “Woodstock hippies.”  He said:

I was at Woodstock. I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.

There is no better story to capture the visage of this cohort in American society than this, then and now. 

You might say that the Woodstock hippie was generally cut from a different cloth that the soldier fighting in Vietnam, and that’s about as generous a statement as could ever be made about that distinction. 

College was attainable by significantly fewer Americans at that time.  So, if you went to college, you were likely either academically extraordinary or had access to the financial, social, or political means to be there. 

My father, on the other hand, graduated high school in 1966.  By May of 1968, he was flying a Cobra attack-helicopter four miles northwest of Duc Hoa and earning the Distinguished Flying Cross, taking several hits from anti-aircraft fire while, as his commendation noted, he “would not desist in pouring accurate fire into enemy bunkers.” In December of that same year, he was shot down near Dalat, where he “continued to deliver fire” and was awarded the Air Medal for having “maintained fire with his personal weapon in defense of a wounded crew member.”

I might understandably be forgiven for not respecting any of those hippies’ stories about how LSD and “free love” were a path to world peace in the late 1960s.

My dad isn’t writing articles nowadays, and he’s not influential in social media, academia, or politics.  But a lot of the guys who were in college at that time are now writing articles about how there was no reason for America to defend South Vietnam, and many have found their way into academia and politics while arguing the same position. 

The 1960s hippies have been reimagined as heroes in the past half century, and for reasons that are likely to always elude me.  But somehow, pro-Hamas protestors across America today have managed to make those crying hippies at Woodstock actually seem committed, if not heroic.  These adult children are often affluent, and are nearly always ungrateful specimens who lack any knowledge whatsoever of the conflict in which they’ve chosen as the focus of their current passion. 

They have claimed to be victims of human rights abuses as a result of college officials refusing to provide vegan and gluten-free dishes for protestors who are illegally occupying public buildings, or perhaps most hilariously, committing to hunger strikes that are shorter than a typical daily fasting regimen that has become wildly popular these days among fitness enthusiasts. 

The current theatrics of pro-Hamas protestors and their Marxist pied-pipers in academia is nothing more than performative therapy to assuage their manufactured, self-imposed Western guilt.  Most Americans know this, which is one reason why we should assume that they will, quite understandably and for the foreseeable future, continue relating far more warmly to frat bros waving American flags than the keffiyeh-clad, pro-Hamas protestors now professing a desire of genocide against Jews while chanting “Death to America!”

Image: William Sullivan, by permission.