ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on attitudes toward potential US military intervention and public resistance to participation in military actions already underway. Vietnam veterans, more so than others, as these pages have attested, continue to search their wartime experience for meaning and understanding, in quest of connective tissue between past and present. The Vietnam War opened up a series of issues about citizens' rights and government powers in deciding whether or not to wage war and the obligations to serve in a war once undertaken, officially or unofficially. A substantial majority of Vietnam veterans are against future United States military involvement in conflicts like Vietnam, with only 29% supporting such actions. The chapter emphasizes the relevance of the Vietnam experience in the politics of contemporary America. The crystallized imagery of the war profoundly influences attitudes about the relationship of the United States to social change and upheavals in the Third World.
