[QUOTE=yamiyugikun; I asked a friend of mine why some liberal professors get mad when you advocate points of view that differ from theirs.
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Naomi,

It sounds like a study of the institutional incentive structure of academia might be in order. You’ll have to think about what incentives are your liberal profs responding to. BTW, they were as inane in the 70s as they are now.

You are correct that the visceral reaction to the military still hinges on one's view of the Vietnam experience. For many, the Vietnam War besmirched the image of America as Camelot, the shining ‘city on a hill’, and the military was blamed for the failure, whether one’s perspective was a failure to win or a failure to avoid foreign entanglements. To help counter the argument that the military was responsible for the Vietnam debacle, you should read “Why Vietnam Matters” by Rufus Phillips. Philips was CIA (under Lansdale) in Vietnam in the 50s and 60s. He has just published his memoirs and he comes down hardest on the politicians and their advisors (who were mostly former liberal academicians) who controlled the military. A 3-part youtube interview on Vietnamese TV can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVaMi...eature=related . The book has a website http://www.whyvietnammatters.com/. Of course, the classic, and contemporaneous, piece is David Halberstam’s 1972, “The Best and the Brightest”.

One other factor you need to take into consideration when comparing the civilian/military nexus, then and now, is The Draft. The modern US draft formally began in 1940 and ran until 1973. (Eighteen year old boys still need to register, but no one has been called up in over a generation.) There were always illegal draft evaders, but the Vietnam era spawned a process of legal evasion that was heavily biased towards the rich, particularly through college deferments. After the shock of Tet, the shift in middle class opinion away from support for the war was strongly influenced by the view that the sons of the less well off were dying for the mistakes of the upper class decision makers.

Your views are quite similar to those of a woman exactly your age who worked for me in Kabul (I just left, she is still there). She easily liaises with ISAF, DoD, as well as Norwegian, Canadian, Czech, and US PRTs.

Paul