I’m entering a competition with this and a second narrative poem.

You, my friend, are prescient! Got any Powerball numbers for me?

Given what Ike, JFK, and LBJ knew at the time, if I had been in their place I would have probably been sucked in too. Only Nixon seemed to fully understand what was really going on.

By itself, this was not necessarily a bad assessment. After all, it seemed pretty obvious at the time that Russia and China were threats to our freedom and our way of life, and that they both threatened our national security. Although our concerns did turn out to be somewhat exaggerated, at the time they were perfectly reasonable, and they did indeed contain a strong element of truth.

The deep, fundamental cause was economic. The Soviets and China represented a challenge to our economic model of reality, as well as a direct threat to our markets, our sources of raw materials, and our trade routes. We just chose to emphasize the first concern, and (publicly, at least) to not publicize the others.

What we are only now starting to realize is that the threat to our markets, materiel, and trade has not gone away now that these countries have adopted a more capitalist system of economic organization. Consequently, they are still a threat to our prosperity and security, and after all, that is what freedom is all about. In other words, we really weren’t fighting Communism, we were fighting our economic rivals, just like they, and every other country has since Bogg clubbed Ugg for rights to the waterhole.

I remember in high school shocking my friends by flippantly saying, “If you think the Commies are trouble now, wait ’til they decide to turn Capitalist.” I had no idea how right I would eventually turn out to be.

As with a lot of these things, this was not strictly correct, but that’s another story.

Did you know that less than a third of those who went to Vietnam were drafted? In WWII, it was almost exactly the reverse.