The Boys Who Went Away

I thought I was done for the moment with my spewing of vitriol, but there is one more bit on the topic of the 60s, “The Girls Who Went Away” and me that’s clanging away in my head.

The boys.

They went away, too, and many … far too many … never came back.

I know I’m leaping far out of Older Parent Adoption Blog territory here, but it’s impossible for me to separate the system that set me and a bazillion other girls up to get pregnant in the 1960s and the one that sent our male counterparts off to Vietnam.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s there were thousands of pregnant teen girls going to funerals for dead teen boys. I know I went to a lot of them.

And how’s this for the classic example of the times? A friend of mine, another 17-year-old, was pregnant by her long-term boyfriend and they married just after he received his draft notice. He was shipped off to Vietnam and died days before his daughter was born.

They were two kids, and neither had a choice. Pregnancy and war were what happened to anyone not lucky enough to somehow avoid those assumed and preprogramed eventualities.

I wanted to see just how many of my friends and my friends friends died in that stupid war, and Google Answers came up with this:

The official number is 58,148 killed during service. An additional 114
were captured and died in captivity.

In the 5 years following the war, the suicide rate of veterans was 1.7 times the non-Veteran population, yielding an estimate of 9,000 suicides as a direct result of the war. After 5 years, suicide rates fall back in line with the general population.

Also on the American “side” were 223,748 South Vietnamese soldiers killed, as well as 5,282 of other nationalities.

Vietnamese casualties are far less specific, and they were deliberately falsified prior to 1995, leading to some of the confusion. According to the Agence France Presse (French Press Agency) as reported on http://www.rjsmith.com/kia_tbl.html , “…the true civilian casualties of the Vietnam War were 2,000,000 in the north,
and 2,000,000 in the south. Military casualties were 1.1 million killed and 600,000 wounded in 21 years of war. These figures were deliberately falsified during the war by the North Vietnamese Communists to avoid demoralizing the population.”

So approximately 5.1 million total Vietnamese casualites.

And a grand total of approximately 5.4 million.

This doesn’t include the deaths in the “overflow areas” of Laos and Cambodia. In Cambodia in particular, a published Khmer Rouge estimate was that the population declined from 7,000,000 to under 4,000,000 over the course of the war.
That probably gives a close order of magnitude estimate of the casualties there.

So, 67,000 American sons, brothers, boyfriends, husbands, fathers, friends, and some women, too … along with more than 5 million equally valuable lives … squandered for political clout. Men in suits and comfy chairs made the rules. Millions died.

Thinking back 40 years, it feels intentional, this set-up of my generation: give the girls no options, grab the boys away, and steal the youth, the dreams … the very life … from them!

Those of us that survived must see to it that those days are truly over. We need to remember the truth of the times, no matter how painful it is to cough up those hair balls, and to explain to people who weren’t there what it was like to have no choices, no control.

It’s up to us to guard against the re-writing of our history. Revising the past to fit in a nice, rosy, patriotic, family values, we-should-all-just-be-obedient-kids box is just a way to make another trap for another generation.

We all need to keep fighting for the same freedoms over and over and over again, because if we turn our backs for a moment, if we blink, they will be taken away; then it’s back to the cages, boys and girls.

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