Table 2. Educational Attainment of Vietnam Veterans at Time of Separation from the
Armed Forces, 1966- 197 I (Percent)
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
Total,
1966-71
22.9
23.6
19.6
18.3
17.5
14.7
19.4
62.5
61.8
65.5
60.0
56.9
55.4
60.3
8.3
9.0
9.7
15.9
17.0
19.4
13.2
6.3
5.6
6.2
5.8
8.6
10.5
7.2
Source: Reports and Statistics Service, Office of Controller, Veterans' Administration, 11
April 1972, in Helmer, Bringing the War Home, p. 303.
their military service. However, the Legacies study found that by 1981
only 22 percent of veterans had completed college compared with 46
percent of nonveterans.31
The portion of soldiers with at least some college education increased
significantly in the late 1960s as draft calls increased and most graduate
school deferments ended. By 1970 roughly 25 percent of American forces
in Vietnam had some college education. Impressive as this increase was, it
still fell well below the 50 percent for the age group as a whole, and it came
as American troop levels in Vietnam were beginning to drop. Moreover,
college education per se was no longer so clear a mark of privilege as it had
been prior to World War II. Higher education in the post-World War II
era expanded enormously, especially among junior and state colleges, the
kinds of schools that enrolled the greatest number of working-class stu-
dents. Between 1962 and 1972, enrollments in two-year colleges tripled.
College students who went to Vietnam were far more likely to come from
these institutions than from elite, four-year, private colleges. A survey of
Harvard's class of 1970, for example, found only two men who served in
Vietnam. College students who did go to Vietnam usually secured non-
combat assignments. Among soldiers in Vietnam, high school dropouts
were three times more likely to experience heavy combat than were
college graduates.32
Table 3. Percentage of Males Enrolled in School, 1965-1970
19
Blue-Collar
men have fought in all wars, but U .S. forces in Vietnam were
on average, the youngest in our history. In previous wars many
service, and men of that
volunteered. During the Vietnam War most of the
In
War II, by contrast, the average American soldier was twenty-six
old. At age eighteen young men could join or be drafted into the
At seventeen, with the consent of a guardian, boys could enlist in
--'- Early in the war, hundreds of seventeenn-year-old ma-
Vietnam. In November 1965 the Pentagon ordered that all
-, ' -J ---' .
, Working-Class Majority, p. 121.
80
49
20
White-Collar
so, the average age remained low. Twenty-two-year-old soldiers
kidded about their advanced age ("hey, old man") by the
--men in their units. Most American troops wwere not even old
vote. The voting age did not drop from twenty-one to eighteen
.Thus, most of the Americans who fought in Vietnam were
working-class teenagers sent to fight an undeclared war by
not even eligible to vote.33
--profile can do justice to the complexity oof individual
-but without these broad outlines our undersstanding would be
fragmented. A class breakdown of American forces cannot be
precise, but I believe the following is a reasonable estimate:
in Vietnam were comprised of about 25 percent poor, 55
working class, and 20 percent middle class, with a statistically
Most Americans in Vietnam were nineteen-
.They grew up in the white, working-class
West Side; in the black ghettos
and Birmingham; in the small rural towns of Oklahoma and
and in the housing developments of working-class suburbs. They
92
73
43
(
geocities.com/yaoleechenb2)