Well duh…as a former recruiter it would be kinda stupid if the materials they gave us to show applicants had pictures of guys in the hospital or caskets. There was a commercial I saw years ago around the time I enlisted that showed guys freezing in a foxhole, though.
…or a soldier. They let my platoon in basic trainig watch that movie as a reward for getting the top platoon at the range. Our drill sergeant told us afterward that idf any of us even dreamed of shooting him we’d better wake up and apologize.
I agree that there was genuinly widespread opposition to the war in the U.S. for a multitude of reasons ranging from honestly felt moral convictions all the way down to physical cowardice of varying strengths with quite probably many who didn’t fancy military discipline,leaving their homes and parents etc…
But that is my opinion based on my own experience of humanity in general and who knows I could be completely and utterly wrong…
Except that why hadn’t all these highly principled people who cared so deeply about the Vietnamses s right to have a Communist regime thrust upon them and were so outraged by outside “imperialist” intervention in that nation taken to the streets,petiitioned the government(s),embassies and whatnot when it was the French doing the fighting?
I realise that many of the draftees were maybe too young previously and only “Found religion” when they realised that they personally were going to have to make sacrifices themselves to one degree or another.
Where were all the protests when Britain fought her own “Vietnam” against Communist guerilla fighters/terrorists in Malaya a few years previously ?
(Incidentally with a conscript army who won the conflict)
All these Americans so violently anti U.S. Army and pro N.Vietnam out of deeply felt convictions and no other reasons.
Though they didn’t feel strongly enough to make their way to Vietnam and enlist in the N.V.A./vietcong and actually risk their necks. fighting for their cause.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world to answer their callup,go to Vietnam and then defect to the people they so cared about AND they would have been trained in weapons and tactics and come equipped with their own weapons.
O.K. going through military basic training is bloody unpleasant(And yes I have beenthrough it myself and hated every second of it) but these activists cared so DEEPLY.
When trained propogandists go to work they dont even attempt to try and convert those who are diametrically opposed to their cause,they go for the waiverers,the non comitted and the suggestible.
And people like to rationalise their own self interested motives into reasons that are less selfish or even motives that they are ashamed of.
It is a very,very humiliating feeling to think that you are scared or even a downright coward and so dont really want to go off and risk your neck in a war but if someone else suggests that it would be alright for you to not go on grounds of conscience then it isn’t going to be very difficult at all to win you over.
You’ll be convincing yourself more then anything else and once you made the decision you’ll never change your mind because to do so would be to admit to something you probably feel ashamed of.
And this is what the agents of influence work on.
I remember in the U.K. there was a huge anti American/Vietnam war demonstration at the time outside of the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square.
I knew a great many people who went to it and out of all them not a single one of them had ever even expressed an opinion about the war,let alone condemned it.
They went because it made them look sexy and edgy in front of the women,it was exciting and also in their own minds made them look hip.
I by no means condemn every single person who is/was anti V/W as being a shallow self server but I think there were a hell of a lot of them.
Those who were/are genuine I admire greatly.
Lust4Life, I seriously wonder what thread you addressed in your last post. It certainly has little bearing on my posts even though you opened your post quoting me.
I made no claim that the opposition to the war was based on idealistic pursuits of any sort. I simply noted that the opposition began prior to the establishment of the Fifth Directorate (which was created to suppress internal dissent in the Soviet Union), and that the overall images of the military took a beating from the many photos and stories that came back from the war every night on television. Different people opposed the war for widely varying reasons, from altruistic opposition to all conflict to a sincere (if less than noble) desire to avoid having to spend a year in a hot, humid country while people attempted to kill one.
Images such as those of the My Lai massacre and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executing Nguyen Van Lem who had been identified (correctly or incorrectly) as the murderer of several Vietnamese policemen and their families played an enormous role in the shaping of opinions toward the military. (General Loan was not a U.S. soldier, obviously, but the U.S. was on “his side” and the association was made in the minds of many people in the U.S.
In support of my belief on the issue, I note that in every subsequent conflict in which the U.S. has been involved, the military has brought increasing pressure to muzzle the news media and to prevent the sort of day-to-day television coverage that distinguished the Vietnam conflict from the wars that preceded or followed it.
At a time when the presentation of live action across the world is orders of magnitude greater than anything available from 1965 through 1973, we are actually seeing fewer images of actual conflict than were presented during WWII or Korea. It is quite possible the the military is justified in the suppression of those images–that is a separate debate–however, I suggest that that sort of relentless and ongoing display of images of violence, death, grit, and blood, (along with the frequent images of coffins lined up at airfieds), was far more important in changing views of the military than any clumsy puported Soviet propaganda campaign.
I will admit that if Iraq as it is now had happened when I first thought about enlisting I may not have done so. I still may have, but I can’t say.
**
Tomndebb**, you have a point. during desert Storm some reporters interviewed people in the battalion i was in. But they were only allowed to speak to soldiers that were selected by the powers that be. I knew I wouldn’t be one of them due to my big yap.
I love the Army like a relative tha you care about but pisses you off. there are days I wish i was out, there are days I wish I had never joined. But there are days I feel like I’m ten feet tall and doing the job that has to be done.
I think it also depends on where you are. I’ve only been in Fayetteville for five days, but with the proximity of Bragg I’ve found that people respect the soldier more here. People have told me “Welcome home” and “We’re proud of you guys!” more here than anywhere else I’ve been. Heck, a guy paid for my coffee at a store today and only said “God bless you for serving” when I thanked him.
I’m sorry that you have difficulty making connections between statements so I’ll try to make my post as simple for you as I possibly can so that you can understand at least some of the points.
I’m afraid that googling and the Wiki are not actually substitutes for knowledge.
GI,GO.
Soviet intelligence services and their various subsections did not spring fully formed from a vacuum .
Just as Smersh eventually evolved into the K.G.B. so did the subsections themselves evolve,often as a result of empire building and internicine fighting.
Department titles and leaders changed, but a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet…
As to the supposedly exclusive internal nature of the Fifth Directorates mandate
this was not the case,either for that or other Warpact intelligence services.
The G.R.U. was supposed to be a strictly military intelligence organisation but also gathered commercial intelligence on electronics etc when it had the opportunity.
The E.German "internal"security service had at various times people working in E.Asia and Africa.
Allegedly there has been some quite heated rows between the two main British intelligence services about the counterintelligence service MI5 operating outside of our national boundaries which is the domain of the Secret intelligence Service…
I will reply to the rest of your points in a seperate post in case this vanishes into the ether.
Soldiering lost a lot of its appeal when we as a nation stopped trusting in our leaders and government as embodying a way of life that was worth fighting for, and stopped believing that military power directly protected and secured that way of life.
Those who serve today largely still believe that, or at least are stoic enough to keep their cynicism way deep down inside. Most of us don’t.
True. However, your comment to which I responded did not talk about vague efforts of the Soviet Intelligence system to manipulate Westerrn opinions–an effort in which they were frequently quite active, (and notoriously incompetent outside the imaginations of the John Birch Society and a few others).
You specifically referred to the Fifth Directorate–a specific bureau started on a specific date, (using the name of a previous bureau from multiple decades earlier), for the purpose of trying to compromise, embarrass, and ultimately quell internal dissent.
Your original claim fails on three points: the Directorate was initiated after the change in attitude had already begun; the Directorate was founded for a completely different purpose (for which there is ample documentation); and the Soviet Intelligence, generally, was not the actual agent for many attitude changes attributed to it. Pointing out that intelligence groups poach on each other’s territories with a certain regularity is nice, but it hardly provides evidence that this unit engaged in these activities–and fails to demonstrate that it was responsible for actions that were under way before it began or that it actually accomplished anything.
Did any Soviet agency attempt to use propaganda to manipulate attitudes in the U.S.? Of course. On one or two rare occasions they even were successful in getting one pundit or politician or another to include their message in opinions being published. Were they actually responsible for any actual changes in attitudes in the U.S., or particularly for initiating any such changes? No.
I wish to apologize for galumphing in and answering the header question this late in the thread. As a Doper of some years’ standing, I should know by now that mature threads are for dense fact-based arguments that have little to do with the original issue, and seeing as I lack both the erudition for that type of discussion and the desire to engage in it, I’ll bow out. Thanks and do beg pardon.
I think people have already accepted “death” as an acceptable price for war, but it’s the ones that suffer mental injuries, get disfigured, or come back as maladjusted people that makes people really shy away from the military. Medicine is better and if they can piece you back together, they will, but you may not have an arm, a leg, your face may be disfigured, you may suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but that doesn’t make your life better.
It never did. People join up for many reasons, boredom, conviction, family history, could’nt find a job. In Iraq they are oversuscribed for poistions with the army, you would have thought that it would be about the least popular profession there.
Why don’t you save your reply using a word processor before hitting “submit”?
After losing several lengthy posts way back when, I always do this for longer posts. For short posts, I generally save them in the clipboard, at least.
The cynic in me was going to say it may have lost it’s appeal once your chances of dieing in a glorious and honorable fashion on the battlefield became lower than your chances of living the rest of your life as a mentally tramatized multiple amputee.