Image by Mathieu Stern.

I spent the summer of 1965 arguing about the Vietnam War. I was 13, and my interlocutor was my 18-year-old camp counselor in Vermont. She was headed for U.C. Berkeley in the fall, where she would, as she later described it, “major in history and minor in rioting.” Meanwhile, I was headed back to junior high school. I was already convinced that our government was lying about why we were fighting in Vietnam (supposedly to protect our sworn ally, the South Vietnamese government, in response to a trumped-up “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin). I was also convinced that the war was unjustified and wrong. She seemed less certain about the war but was similarly convinced that expending energy opposing it would distract activists from supporting the Civil Rights movement.

As it turned out, we were both right.

Our summer camp subscribed to the Boston Globe, which I read daily, probably when I was supposed to be doing something more physically edifying like playing tennis. I remember the day the Globe ran a story quoting an informal advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson — it might have been Dean Acheson — suggesting that, even if the South Vietnamese government were to ask the United States to withdraw its forces, it wouldn’t do so. I cut the article out (property damage is not violence!) and ran to show her. “See? I was right. They’re lying about the war.”

It’s been 60 years since that summer and she and I are still arguing about politics, now as life partners of more than four decades. (Don’t worry: it took me another 14 years to convince her I was a grown-up and therefore a legitimate object of romantic affection.)

The Vietnam War Was Wrong and Some of Us Knew It

Although she and I are indeed still arguing about politics, like millions of people in this country and around the world, we were right then about Vietnam. We may not have foreseen it all — the assassinations, carpet bombings, tiger cages, and the Phoenix Program (the CIA’s first mass torture scheme) — but we were hardly surprised when it all finally came out. Today, there’s a consensus in this country that the Vietnam War was more than a mistake; it was a decade-long exercise in overreach and overkill.

That war would eventually result in the deaths of 58,000 members of the American military and millions of Vietnamese, both soldiers and civilians. We’d see a generation of Vietnam veterans come home with visible (and invisible) injuries: amputations; cancers born of exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange, used by the U.S. Air Force to defoliate jungle terrain; heroin habits; the illness we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD; and moral injuries caused by following orders to murder civilians. It tells you something about that war that Vietnam vets would prove more likely to become homeless than the veterans of previous or later wars. They would also suffer contempt from many of their fellow Americans for having been drafted into a vicious and ultimately pointless conflict.

Many who actively opposed the war also suffered. I knew young men who went to jail for resisting the draft. Others took on false identities — it was easier in those pre-internet days — or moved to Canada to avoid being drafted. My college boyfriend never registered for the draft (also easier before networked computers permeated the country and when you had to apply for a Social Security number rather than........

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