Sending the Old Folks to War

MY CHILDHOOD WAS ACCOMPANIED by the Viet Nam police action. Each night, on the news, there it was. The first made for television war. It got good reviews, so it aired for several seasons. Then, the American people turned against the war, largely due to the gruesome TV images, and the military-industrial complex brought the conflict to an end. The gruesome images, and the dead, wounded, and missing in action numbers displayed every day on TV like a scoreboard, making it look like the United States was winning, like it couldn't possibly last much longer, because of the enormous number of enemy killed. And it kept looking that way, week after week, year after year. By the time I was a teenager I was starting to wonder whether the war would ever end. By the time I was seventeen I had decided that if drafted, I would move to Canada. I kept my thoughts to myself, because I didn't want to be accused of unpatriotism, but I wasn't goin' to any Viet Nam. In retrospect, Viet Nam was certainly worth moving to Canada over. If only everyone who got drafted into Viet Nam had moved to Canada instead. Albert Einstein encouraged everyone to refuse military service. If everyone in the world refused military service, there would be no more war, his theory went. And maybe that wasn't such a bad idea. If nothing else, the human race should stop drafting and sending its young to fight and die in wars. It would be more appropiate to send the oldest, not the youngest to fight and perhaps die for their country. What in the world have the eighteen year olds ever done to create war? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The young are sent to fight the wars manufactured by the old people. Let the old go and fight the wars they create! After all, not only have the old had more time and opportunity than the young to chooses between war and peace, old people have at least had a chance to live out their full life spans, and for the old to die in war would not be such a tragic loss of life. And besides, it might be kind of interesting; war in slow motion. Like senior doubles tennis, or bowling. A new rule of war, that only the very old can fight.