And the American people lied to themselves about the War. As long as the boys fighting it were blacks and Latinos and members of the underclass, everything was fine. The Defense contracts were fat and everybody was eating high on the hog.
As in the fable, it was the children, the college students, who first told us that the Emperor had no clothes. And for a while, our first impulse was to shoot the messenger--literally. Finally, however, the gap between what we wanted to believe and what we could no longer deny simply grew too large.
By the late 1960s, the fabric of lies that had sustained the War started to unravel. The Tet offensive in early 1968 demolished the upbeat fiction that we were winning the War. Stories of massacres like My Lai began to leak out. Idiocies like, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," crept into the public lexicon.
Live news footage showed the horrors of saturation bombing, defoliation, and napalm. Supposedly serious voices spoke supposedly seriously about, "bombing them back into the stone age." News anchors began intoning a nightly body count of American lives lost. And with the student deferment abolished, middle class suburban white boys began coming home in body bags.
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