DÉJÀ VU—VIETNAM ALL OVER AGAIN

It is obvious that our government wants us to go to war. And as a citizen of this country and father of two boys who could someday be asked to fight, I have reason to be concerned. But what disturbs me most is that I am beginning to recognize something I’ve seen before; a scene reminiscent of the time I was drafted and sent off to fight in Vietnam.

Way back then, because it was so difficult to understand why we were participating in that war, our government thought it necessary to create a marketing campaign to sell the idea of the war to both its citizens and its army. We soldiers flew halfway around the world to fight the evildoer Ho Chi Minh and his evil soldiers, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. We had learned to hate them so much that we virtually turned them into cartoon characters and called them gooks. By the time we arrived in country we faced an enemy we had come to believe was truly diabolic.

Looking back after all these years, it seems to me that our enemy then was not really all that different from us. They were as much the pawns of marketing strategies as we were. The young Vietnamese soldiers were also fighting the personification of evil. Unfortunately, what takes place in any war on the battlefield ends up having little to do with strategies. As the main character in my book Beneath Buddha’s Eyes explains to his therapist years later, "war is about one thing only—it’s about death and dying." Over time, war becomes distilled down to battles being fought by individuals, and in the end many of the individuals die.

What is happening right now in our country is so sad because we have forgotten that in the end wars are fought by individuals. Obviously, we didn’t learn the lesson of Vietnam.

It seems as if this all happened just yesterday—the government’s Marketing Plan set in motion at the same time as the build-up of troops and munitions on foreign soil has begun. Especially because I’ve seen this all before, the inevitability of war is frightening.

I’m not against fighting evildoers; I’m on the side of the Hobbits. But what I’d like to see is our Marketing Directors—the President and his advisors—marching into Baghdad, gas masks in hand, at the front of the column before our sons.