----------------------------
Absolutely, even more so in neighborhoods that were not upper middle class, especially the urban areas. The sons of the rich were safe. The closer you got to the Projects level of society the more vulnerable you were.
***************************************
If the war had been fought by a larger army of enlistees and volunteer reservists, without recourse to the draft, do you think it would have been seen differently by your neighbors?
------------------------------------
Moot point. They never would have gotten enough volunteers, that's why they had the draft.
*****************************
As to your last reference, apples and oranges. The enemy was different. If Saddam's army had been as dedicated and disciplined as Ho's our recent history would not be what it is. Think Tet in '68 and then imagine the insurgents pulling off anything near that scale.
Well, George Bush (41) did, despite a generally good environment for employment, which has always been seen as competition for Armed Forces recruiting. I'm not sure you're right about that at all.
As for the Vietnamese being so bad, a) they didn't own the jungle, as the Australians and the LRRP's proved -- in fact, it was the Australians who owned the jungle; they just let the NVA play in it, and b) the enemy had human limitations of their own, which led them to hate coming into contact with the ROK's. The ROK's were very tough in hand-to-hand combat (every man a black belt in tae kwon do), and the Viets really disliked having to go up against them -- and would have equally disliked going up against similarly well-trained U.S. troops, such as those we deploy now to Iraq regularly. Then, c) a change in warfighting tactics from Westmoreland's "search-and-destroy" operations that didn't work to something that did, such as fully-backed LRRP's might have paid big dividends. American use of LRRP tactics would have been much more successful if we had had the hosses to counter the NVA anti-LRRP tactics of observers everywhere and 10-man rapid-reaction HUK squads to counter and follow up. If we had made a real study of it, we could have made the NVA pay a very high price for chasing our Ranger and Marine LRRP's around.
Serious, purposeful application of our resources in Vietnam would have made that war another study in "screw with the best, die like the rest." We didn't try -- we didn't try at the top, we didn't try in the middle, and no wonder people didn't try at street level, either.
But then, that's the kind of leadership we had back then, with Lyndon Johnson in the White House supported by roomfuls of Harvard "warriors" who looked down their noses at him -- and us.