As civil rights had divided the country by region into those who were heroically fighting for equality and those who could justly be assigned to receive moral instruction, Vietnam did the same by class. The defenders of peace and justice were disproportionately to be found at rich men’s universities—and their innocence of military involvement would give them much more in common with those who came of age in the demilitarized decade or so that followed. The working class would wind up tainted by the popular culture’s portrayal of the military as burners of villages and marauders in free-fire
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