Are We a Nation of Wimps?

No!

But, we are a people who have forgotten our own history.

That's what makes us look to outsiders as if we are a nation of wimps.

The Geek isn't talking about ancient history. You know like World War II. No. We've forgotten what happened forty and fewer years ago on the home front of the Vietnam War.

This forgetfulness strikes the Geek as weird. Think about it. The majority of the politicians, journalists, academics and other so-called public opinion leaders who are against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are members of the Vietnam generation.

So are most of those who support the wars.

As for those people on both sides of the war divide who are too young to have lived through the turmoil (and flat out fun) of the Sixties, their ignorance is excusable. The Geek knows just how poorly recent American history is taught at the high school and college levels. Ignorance may not be bliss but it is a treatable condition.

Vietnam is the gold standard of American self-inflicted defeats. The Geek makes that claim with all due regard to the strategic brilliance of the North Vietnamese and the fighting capabilities of their troops as well as those of the National Liberation Front/Viet Cong. They didn't win. We lost. There's a world of difference. And, much to be learned if we are not going to lose in the current wars which, as the Geek has written before, are wars which the US can not afford to lose.

A question. Why aren't the streets of American cities littered with anti-war demonstrations as they were forty years ago?

There are a bunch of potential answers. The kids now days just don't give a damn. There's no draft. Demonstrations are passe.

OK. The Geek accepts all of the above as plausible. But, he offers, how about this one? The war is simply too small scale to excite passions, rile the blood, and get the feet on the pavement and the slogans in the air.

Compared to Vietnam, the current wars in Afghanistan and (the bigger one now) Iraq are very small exercises. For example, forty years ago the personnel ceiling on the Vietnam deployment was right around five hundred thousand. A few months later, following the Tet Offensive, it was raised to 549,500. That's a lot of men.

Today the US has less than half that many deployed to the two wars.

In the first four years of combat troop deployment in Vietnam (April 1965 to March 1969), US fatailities both operational and due to hostile action numbered approximately 30,000. Compare that with the approximately 4,000 between Afghanistan and Iraq. Again, that number combines both operational and hostile action fatalities.

In Vietnam US forces fought organised units of both Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars. The combat was in most essential tactical respects conventional using infantry, mechanised and artillery units in ways that were well within standard operating practices. Helicopters and tactical air power added to the lethality and rapidity of operation but didn't change the basic mix from what it had been in earlier wars against conventional opponents.

The war was bloody because it involved relatively large units on both sides ranging up to divisional equivalents. As a result the US had many, many weeks where well over one hundred American troops were killed. That's more than one hundred per week as compared to a handful of months where the butcher's bill in Iraq has made triple digits. Around the time of the Tet Offensive in early 1969, there were weeks where the US lost four to five hundred plus men killed in action or died of wounds.

Sure, the Vietnam War was no enormous meat grinder like the Western Front in World War I where five hundred men killed a day would have been considered very light losses. Nor was it in the league of World War II. Still, it was a real man killer compared with our present wars.

The other day, one of the presidential contenders, Mitt Romney, suggested that Americans were turning against the war because of frustration. We weren't winning and the public gets very irritated rather quickly when the home team isn't obviously winning after four years.

The Geek doesn't know if Romney is right. That's because the Geek is no lover of public opinion polls. But, if history is a guide the former governor probably is.

That's why so many Americans went on the anti-war path thirty-nine or forty years ago. There were other reasons to be sure. The draft was a big one on campus. Another was the perceived immorality of the war.

While willing to listen respectfully to members of his age group who argue even today that they opposed the war for principled reasons, the Geek is suspicious. He believes that most were motivated by the same reason that inspired his future significant other to demonstrate her little heart out in the foreign policy center of the US--Santa Fe--while the Geek was taking little nature hikes in-country.

In her words, "We weren't winning. That's what was wrong."

The Geek is willing to bet several inches of his Apache braids that the reason so many people oppose the war today has less to do with fears of imperialism or matters of morality than with the simple fact that we aren't winning.

The central question of this war, like all wars which center on the political will of the opponents is simply, "How do we know if we're winning?"

The next post will take a hard look at this hard question.