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LAST MAY, after I wrote a column comparing Iraq to Vietnam, I received an irate letter from one man who said, in effect, that I was crazy, that within a year our boys would be home.
Well, that year will be up in a few weeks and we seem no closer to getting out of Iraq. And our soldiers are still dying at the rate of more than one per day.
Those who don't see Iraq as another Vietnam are right in one respect. During Vietnam, America cared. Now it seems that only a handful of us even acknowledge there is still a war going on.
Every poll I have seen lately places the economy at the top of America's trouble list. In other words, we are more concerned with money than the lives of our soldiers.
I suppose that's understandable. It is our money, but, for most, it is someone else's son or daughter over there getting shot at.
The primary reason for this obvious distance between Americans and their soldiers is conscription--or the lack of it. During Vietnam, there was hardly a household that didn't worry that a son or a grandson would be drafted.
Now we know our kids will be safe, unless they choose to join the military.
The draft--at least the draft during the 1940s, '50s, and most of the '60s--did not discriminate between the rich and the poor. If you were fit, you got drafted. College graduates and high school dropouts bunked together in the same barracks.
Now, for the most part, the fighting element of the military is made up of less-affluent Americans. Let's face it, few recent graduates with master's degrees are going to trade a $50,000-a-year job for Army pay.
It is easy to talk about making war when you know that your son or daughter will not be forced to fight.
But now we don't even talk about the war. We treat Iraq as if it no longer exists. Americans don't like unpleasantries, and Iraq has become an unpleasantry.
Even the media has tired of Iraq. One or two dead soldiers seldom make the front pages any more and there is no daily battle footage on the nightly news. That kind of stuff might be disturbing to children or sensitive viewers.
We seem to view Iraq as we view slaughterhouses. We don't mind what goes on inside, we just don't want to see it. It wasn't that way during the Vietnam War.
It has been almost a year since we marched haughtily into Baghdad, and now we are finding that we are stuck there. If we pull out, we lose face. If we stay, we lose soldiers.
Sure sounds like Vietnam to me.
And what happened to all that rhetoric about the Iraqi people showing their love for us once Saddam Hussein was killed or captured? We've got him and they're still shooting at us.
Could it be the Iraqis just don't want to be dominated by a foreign power? I know if another country invaded America I'd fight to the last breath in my body to run them out. That's called patriotic pride.
Meanwhile, American soldiers are coming home in body bags (they don't show that kind of stuff anymore because it also is disturbing) or with their arms or legs blown off. When we hear that a soldier was wounded, we tend to think it is only a scratch. Many of those injured in Iraq will be crippled for life.
What a mess!
Meanwhile, President George W. Bush is telling us that sending American jobs (like American soldiers) overseas is really good for our economy, and trying to prove where he was during the Vietnam War.
There are a great many out-of-work Americans who don't buy the jobs argument and who feel they know where the President was during those five missing months in 1972.
Maybe Bush was on a secret National Guard mission looking for weapons of mass destruction. He didn't find them in Alabama and he hasn't found them in Iraq.
They say that war is hell. But that's not true if someone else is doing your fighting.
Let us not forget that while we're sitting in our easy chairs watching Janet Jackson bare her breast, there are American soldiers in Iraq getting their limbs blown off.
Like Vietnam, Iraq is getting more complex by the day. And, like Vietnam, there seems to be no easy way out.
To reach DONNIE JOHNSTON: DJohn40330@aol.com