Heroism and Self-Sacrifice: The Vietnam War as a Case in Point

Abstract

At first glance, the case of Vietnam qualifies almost as a role model for the theory of a post-heroic society's unwillingness to fight wars and its severely decreased tolerance for casualties in war.1 When during the Second World War and the Korean War almost all fit men reaching call-up age each year were mobilized, in the mid-1960s general conscription existed only on paper. Approximately half of the 27 million young men of military age in the 1960s benefited from deferment of some kind or were exempted from military service. More than half of the soldiers sent to Vietnam came from working class families and a further quarter from poor backgrounds with a precarious livelihood often below the poverty line. The well-educated middle classes with above-average earnings accounted for a only quarter. Not even at the height of the war did the Johnson Administration call up reservists and members of the National Guard. Instead it sent into the field the youngest sons of those who did not live in leafy suburbs and who played an increasingly marginal role in the calculations of their electoral strategists. Between 1964 and 1966 from 20 to 25 per cent of all Americans killed in action were black, while the proportion of Afro-Americans in Vietnam was 10.6 per cent, which corresponded to demographic distribution within the American population. In general, an infantry rifle company was anything but representative of America's younger generation: half of it consisted of blacks and soldiers of Latin American and Asian origin.