A wry satisfaction to be enjoyed in reading histories of events of your youth is that it uncovers your prejudices at that time. It reassures you that you have grown wiser but also makes you wonder whether your present attitudes will need revisiting. The retelling of a complex past can be illuminating, too, as you reflect on similar situations today.
Save Our Sons, Carolyn Collins’ detailed and even-handed study of women’s campaign against conscription during the Vietnam War, offered such pleasures. It recalled dimly remembered events and characters, entered their own experience and perception of the events, and brought back my own immediate response and the wider view of the world on which it was based. It also reminded me how far my attitudes have changed.
In 1965, when the story begins, I was in favour of the Australian involvement in the Vietnam war. That was partly because my fellow Catholics had been persecuted in North Vietnam and faced a similar lack of freedom were the Vietcong victorious. As a child I had lamented the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. For many Catholics there was something tribal in the war, as there had been in the Spanish Civil War for a previous generation.
I had also accepted in general terms the popular geopolitical justifications offered for the invasion: the image of communism as a homogeneous and united world movement, the image of coordinated communist subversive forces in every nation, of Communists as an incredibly relentless and energetic force, the fear of dominoes falling, the belief that those who opposed communism were more noble and superior ethically to their opponents, and the image of communism as a relentless and inhuman force. This led easily to the view that Australia should be involved in war against the communist forces in Vietnam, that conscription would be justifiable, and that peace movements and protests were controlled by shadowy communist agents.
At that time I did not make any distinction between women who protested against the war and those who protested against conscription. I imagined them to have been manipulated, and their public protest to be unfeminine, and certainly not what I would have liked my own mother to be involved in. Mothers were supposed to bear courageously and silently the sacrifices their sons made.
The Vietnam war and its aftermath undermined these adolescent views. I saw that communism was inherently divisive and did not unite nations