Even those young men and women who are ready and willing to fight have a hard time envisioning themselves with automatic weapons strapped on their backs, climbing across the mountains of Afghanistan to fight the enemy. This is a generation raised on the horrors of Vietnam (brought vividly home in movies like "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon"), whose most recent war, Operation Desert Storm, came over CNN like a video war game, with few American casualties. To them, the idea of a ground war is both appalling and antiquated. Most seem to hope that we can avoid this scenario altogether but they aren't entirely sure what the alternative would be.
"Everybody's saying it's going to be a different war than has ever been fought," said Steve Browne, a 23-year-old student at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. "I think there should be a lot of Special Forces in this war because we don't know how to fight over there, you know what I'm saying? I don't want another Vietnam."
"I don't think Americans understand the scope of the situation. Right now, everyone is rallying to fight, but what about two, three years from now when young Americans are dead?" says Manuel Corral, a 24-year-old San Francisco State student. "With our advanced technology, we should find some other means of achieving our military goals to protect our freedom."
Many of the young Americans we talked to were also aghast at the notion of killing innocent civilians, fearing that military action would bring the U.S. down to the level of its attackers while inspiring further terrorist assaults. "If we can find that one person or one group that's responsible, you know, and go and get them, that's fine," said Brent Boesdorfer, 20, of St. Louis University. "But I don't think that taking on a whole country or something, a bunch of innocent people, would be worthwhile."
And some of the young men with foreign-born parents were suspicious of the American government's motives in declaring war on unidentified terrorists whom it may have quietly supported in the past. Many among this generation of young men and women have ancestry that affords them some first- or second-hand knowledge of the last decades' wars and skirmishes in the Middle East and Latin America -- conflicts in which the U.S. role sometimes provoked heated controversies.
"If we're going to war, it's partly due to the U.S. being there before. I don't know why I should go to war when it's the government's problem. Why are we in the Middle East in the first place? I don't believe in fighting for oil, since it will be gone in 50 years anyway," said Azarias Castro, a 19-year-old San Franciscan of Salvadorean ancestry. Castro says he'd only be willing to fight "if they came here, knocked on my door and started killing people."
Indeed, the specter of more terrorism carnage on American soil seemed to be the only threat capable of driving even the most skeptical of these young people to enlist.
"If it is putting into question our way of life, would it be worth dying for?" pondered Jonathan Sakti, 21, of San Francisco State. "I don't know if it would be now, but if they get into biological warfare and people are dying all around me, and I'm going to be dying anyway one way or another, I guess so."
About the writer
Janelle Brown is a senior writer for Salon.
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon.
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