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They Didn’t Have Bone Spurs – Or Fallopian Tubes
Whoopi Goldberg, famous for playing herself in a nun’s habit, dreadlocks, and her unwavering support for the Vietnam War (you didn’t know that?) has used her platform on The Stew to attack our President for avoiding the draft due to “bone spurs”. There are several things wrong with this approach which I doubt The Stew audience will grasp, but let’s get the easy ones out of the way first.
The Vietnam War was different than WWII in nature. (I hope our Democrat friends can accept that statement without my having to elaborate)
It was a different era, a different zeitgeist, and we will never know if Donald Trump would have tried to avoid that war (although I suspect he wouldn’t have, since at minimum being labeled 4-F was for ‘losers’, as Trump haters might imagine him saying, and a cynic would imagine him vying for an officers job away from combat due to his military school background, but couldn’t do such a thing without impugning almost every other military officer). In those days, men really didn’t have a choice but to join the service without social repercussions.
Trump was asked about this the other day by Piers Morgan, and I thought he gave a remarkably candid answer. He said it was a different war and he did not agree with it. He did not claim any real handicap from bone spurs.
Anyone living during that era knew hundreds of young men who were finding some loophole to avoid being sent to a jungle ambush in Southeast Asia. You could even get a ‘student deferment’ which worked for the better-heeled.
While I won’t assign heroism to this diverse group that ranges from exiles to Canada to simple college students and people pretending to be gay or crazy, I’m neither going to condemn them after learning the background and nature of that war. Neither will I claim this lack of enthusiasm to serve in that era disqualifies a man from being President ( including Bill Clinton) or for giving speeches lauding the heroism of Americans. At least as long as he doesn’t claim hero-status for himself.
So now to my main point:
I’ve gotten so used to hearing the phrase “the men and women who fought and died…” that I was a bit shocked at hearing the references to the “men who fought and died” on the beaches of Normandy, absent the inclusion of “women”. Quickly I realized it was accurate. No women were there to die, or even fight. Not one. Note, this is not a slight on females or their overall contribution ( including being the mothers of these young men) to the war effort.
For about as long as this phrase has been in common use, I’ve been somewhat annoyed, since, even today, the number of men who die in battle and in our modern ‘wars’ amount to about 99% of all casualties, yet women as a gender class get 50% of the credit (albeit men still get top billing at least). Even today it is only men who must register for the draft, and it looks like that ‘right’ remains uncontested by our feminist sisters and brothers. I’m unaware of Whoopi’s position on making her sisters required to register for Selective Service, or in a retrospective hypothetical, whether Whoopi would have refused any loopholes herself so as to be drafted to heroically serve her country in Vietnam.
Our new logical standards, promoted mostly but not exclusively by women, dictate that if only one woman out of a hundred is a casualty of war, or invented some part of a telescope, then she stands as a representative of her gender and shouldn’t be overlooked. This is fair enough. She should not be overlooked, but does her entire gender get rhetorical credit by mere proxy? Somehow the obvious must remain unacknowledged.
Nevertheless, when women are disproportionately affected by something, whether it’s jobs in science and maths, or pregnancy (100%, but lessening due to modern advances in ‘medicine’) it’s either a societal problem that must be addressed and/or some political right that females have special privileges to control, even to the exclusion of male input or sensibilities.
In this spirit, I contend that Whoopi, or any female not having served in the US military in a combat division in the Vietnam era (which is every female in existence), has no right to criticize Trump’s draft status or even question the validity of his medical claim of bone spurs.
Published in General
It’s funny how polarized we are. I was pretty clear that I like Trump. That doesn’t mean I respect everything he did or does.
I’ve got no problems with anyone who did or didn’t serve. I do have a problem with DaNang Dick and Pete Buttybutt,the REMF who hints of heroism to diminish the non service of others. People who have served know that harms way is generally random. Far better men than I gave their all.
Great post. Thanks for sharing your observations.
Even three years ago, when I made remarks on liberal political boards that women my age should quit with the weeping and gnashing of teeth over their concerns of being second class citizens, as after all, none of us Vietnam era women were drafted, I was told to shut up by most people.
But to me the fact that my body did not end up in pieces plastered across rice paddies in Vietnam was one major benefit of being female at that time. Also I was given far more latitude by the “System” in taking my time about figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. Men were far more likely to be expected to come out of HS and immediately know what they wanted to do for the next 40 years.
Were women of my generation held back a good deal? Perhaps, but there were things that offset that discrimination. Perhaps the worst of the discrimination facing young middle class women was in the mindset of parents who raised the Baby Boomer generation. I had girl friends who had to work two jobs to get through college, as their parents offered up part of dad’s salary only to the boy’s in the family. (Even if the boys were lugheads who couldn’t read or add numbers up.)
One other thing: after Vietnam, many of the guys I knew who had avoided the draft became quite conservative. This was especially true of those young men whose dads never fought in WWII or Korea. If their fathers had been expecting to go to Europe or Japan, and then never made it to those war theaters, there seemed to be a residual effect on the offspring. They more easily embraced the idea that all the wars after Vietnam were totally necessary, almost as if to make up for the fact that they and their family members had not yet served.
It could also be said that plenty of people were in the Army and served in Vietnam and chased skirts. The two are not mutually exclusive.
The risk/reward balance was quite a bit different, however!
OK. I see you did serve. That tone usually comes from Bulwark readers who didn’t. He had a long career when he did some foolish things and said some foolish things. I have seen no evidence, for example, that he did anything but have his photo taken with the porn actress(why are they “stars?”).
I was pre-Vietnam as were both of my partners in surgery. We had served as enlisted men, not doctors. Sorry I had not seen your profile.
I disagree that they died for naught. While I agree the country was duped, that duplicity led to the landslide election for Nixon and the end of the war on terms favorable to the US.
It was the despicable actions of the Congress when North Vietnam again invaded the South that led to the collapse and directly to the killing fields of Cambodia.
It also was important to keep the Soviets from expanding even further. Had we not resisted in Vietnam, countries all over the world that did rely on us would have rather placated the Soviets and eventually become enslaved. Soviet expansion was thus limited and it led to their eventual collapse only sixteen years later. A lot of people don’t like that was, and the way it was fought was just stupid, but it wasn’t completely senseless to resist Soviet/communist expansion.
It’s popular now to think the war in Iraq was for nought, too. But although we gave up a lot that we won, we did stop an abrupt power grab by Iran and al Qaeda. It was necessary and very effective.
True.
Iraq, and in particular Kurdish Iraq, learned the lesson about what happens when we leave without some sort of strategic partnership agreement. (Hello Isis)
You are also correct about the ‘domino theory’ as it was called then.
Yup, but I felt that if I used that term, it being so loaded with baggage, then my point wouldn’t be as effective.
My objection is to the post war occupation. My heart dropped when Bush appointed Bremer instead of Jay Garner. Garner had a pretty good record with the Kurds, as I understand it. I think he would have been less interested in empire building.
One of the failures of Johnson and the whole establishment is that this was unusual. Of all the guys who went to college with me, two volunteered for the USAF, and the guys who went to medical school all served. Nobody else I knew in college ever served.