[speaker001:] uh I'm of the age that could have gone although I didn't and uh I guess um looking back on it I tend to think it was pretty uh mostly a mistake
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] on the other hand um the more I learn about the history the more I see it was incremental uh decisions anyone of which was sort of understandable at the time
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] and uh but on the whole I think it uh probably was the wrong thing to do how about you
[speaker002:] well I'm uh I I was just uh in high school I guess when it when it ended ended up being I was in the last last lottery
[speaker001:] um-hum yeah
[speaker002:] and I was glad it was over by then I've never really totally understood what our purpose was over there just because you know we didn't really do anything when we went over it seems like
[speaker001:] right yeah
[speaker002:] you know we um those people that I know I worked with several that were over there and for some of them it was just kind of I don't know not so much a holiday I guess that's how they tend to talk about it but that they just kind of lived out in the woods and every now and then they'd go and shoot their rifles and then they'd come back and you know
[speaker001:] yeah
[speaker002:] but that they weren't really allowed to do anything I uh to me it seems like we only went halfway if even halfway
[speaker001:] yes  yeah it's funny tonight I was um helping my kid with an essay on uh Stalin
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] and I was thinking in the course of talking to him about it how uh in World War Two the personalties of Stalin Hitler and Churchill more or less defined the war and actually when you think back on the big events of the war it was uh it was almost a personal struggle among these three uh I guess you'd have to call them great men in some sense um
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] they're certainly all leaders and um and uh with their nations pretty pretty solidly behind each one of them
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] and I got a feeling that some of that was involved in the uh early decisions in the Vietnam war that the uh people saw the cold war as uh you had to draw a line and and defend it otherwise there'd be uh they'd get you someplace else
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] looking back it seems like that was only partly true that uh there might have been a better place to draw the line um I guess you can I guess you can say that a a certain amount of resolve and willingness to fight um brought the cold war to an end but I don't think you can just fight anywhere just just in order to um call the bully out and beat him and I have a feeling that that's part of what was involved in the Vietnamese war they felt like this was a place where we could draw a line beat them and they wouldn't come forward and uh we were wrong
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] but I um you know the like how they said the more I hear about it the more I can see each decision that was made as being understandable but the cumulative effect was to really get into a a hopeless situation where and as you say uh going halfway was probably worse than um committing um committing to a completely and um winning it whatever that would mean
[speaker002:] yeah well I I I think we did I think we did learn some lessons that we weren't uh we weren't prepared for I guess the best word is the atrocities of war
[speaker001:] yeah huh yeah
[speaker002:] uh I mean the other wars seemed like a valiant war I mean they you know they seemed like a valiant thing you knew you knew who was good you knew who was bad and it was a it was a traditional
[speaker001:] yeah
[speaker002:] the traditional battle of kind of good versus evil if you you know whichever way it is but in in in the Vietnam war it seems like it was
[speaker001:] well you're not you're you're
[speaker002:] the sides and the lines that were drawn were all confused as to who's good and who's bad and
[speaker001:] it's ambivalent yeah
[speaker002:] and uh you know the even it seems like even the people you know had the South Vietnamese the North Vietnamese and of course the Laotians and the Cambodians weren't even supposed to be involved but
[speaker001:] what about what about the domestic effects like I was thinking that maybe the most important effect it had was to make it uh possible and even popular to um criticize the government and they that pendulum started to swing um maybe maybe even too far uh to the point where um um supporting a government decision in foreign policy was sort of optional from the Vietnam war on and that tradition is still I mean it's dying now but it's still alive as opposed to
[speaker002:] yeah yeah
[speaker001:] this Desert Storm stuff may have uh killed it but I think that was one of the biggest that you know the uh this domestic unrest that it
[speaker002:] yeah