THE MOST IMPORTANT LEGACY OF THE VIETNAM CONFLICT: A WHITEBOARD

[rangerrebew]

 THE MOST IMPORTANT LEGACY OF THE VIETNAM CONFLICT: A WHITEBOARD
By War Room October 28, 2019

    The very existence of the draft motivated enough men to enlist voluntarily that all branches of service were able to fill their quotas, often without conscripts.

For this whiteboard we reached out again to several scholars and asked the following:
What, to date, has been the most important legacy of the Vietnam Conflict?
 

Memories of the Vietnam-era draft left such scars on the collective American psyche that when a handful of politicians and pundits advocated its reinstatement as a way to staff the War on Terror, their calls were almost universally met with derision.  In such a context, it is hard to remember that between 1948 and 1965, when a different handful of politicians and pundits called for the end of the draft, their calls were equally met with derision.  The end of the Cold War draft in the United States, therefore, is one of the Vietnam War’s most important domestic legacies. The death of conscription changed the calculus of American military engagement by dictating how conflicts would be fought and who would do that fighting.

https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/special-series/whiteboard/legacy-of-vietnam/

[Bigun]

For me personally, the most important thing I learned from my Vietnam experience is that the media lies and to never trust them.

[Texas Yellow Rose]

For me personally, the most important thing I learned from my Vietnam experience is that the media lies and to never trust them.

After my (soon to be) husband's tour, his family and I learned very quickly to turn the television off or change the channel when the news was coming on. He'd get furious at the lies and it would take what seemed like forever to calm him down.

[Bigun]

After my (soon to be) husband's tour, his family and I learned very quickly to turn the television off or change the channel when the news was coming on. He'd get furious at the lies and it would take what seemed like forever to calm him down.

   My family could not understand why I was calling their "newsman" (Walter Cronkite) a damned liar all the time.

Congratulations on the upcoming wedding @Texas Yellow Rose

[sneakypete]

For me it was the South Vietnamese Boat People,who would rather take their whole familes to sea in small boats to try to escape from communism,rather than be forced t live with it,

Well,that and the absolutely stunning sudden lack of interest in the anti-war movement once the draft ended.

Both events tell profound truths about the war we weren't allowed to win.