ArcaMax

A word on generations. I'm from the "his mom found his pot" generation, which, speaking in substances, comes after the "Spanish fly makes girls crazy" generation and the "cocaine isn't really addictive, like heroin is" generation.

In other words, I graduated from high school in a proudly all-white, working-class Midwestern suburb in 1975.

And Vietnam, which was the worst trouble a kid from my suburb could get into in, say, 1970. We joined, of course. We were the children of auto plant and steel mill workers. We were drafted, too, because we were the children of auto plant and steel mill workers.

I graduated the same month it ended. I wasn't going anywhere except college.

I've been asked if I went to Vietnam, mostly by people in their 20s, and I say no because before they called it "stolen valor," we said, "It's a sin to tell a lie."

I did not know anyone who went to Canada to avoid the draft. I didn't come from that kind of place. I knew people who didn't come back from Vietnam. I came from that kind of place.

Ernest Hemingway semi-famously said, "Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war."

Ernie was a blowhard, but he'd been wounded in World War I, and he knew about war.

And my own brain isn't papered over with either the American flag or the Vietnam-era poster that said, "War is not healthy for children and other living things."

I grew up with The Vietnam War. It started two years before I was born and ended when I got out of high school. Place names like Khe Sanh, Hue and Pleiku all mean something to me.

But we lost in Vietnam, sure enough. When you're scrambling to get your people off the embassy roof before the winning army shows up, you've lost like the Nazis lost Berlin.

All through the Vietnam War, I heard older people who didn't want to quit say, "America has never lost a war."

In other words, they wanted to keep the streak going.

And it's always seemed to me that losing the war in Vietnam was the definitive end of American confidence. We'd never been forced to slink out of a place before, and after that, our military began to fight draws, like a boxer who is undefeated and then has the confidence blown out of him by a knockout loss and goes down in the rankings fight by fight.

It's supposed to be the day the music died or the day Kennedy was shot, but to me, the confident, heavy-muscled America vanished with the loss in Vietnam. We stumbled on for a little while longer in a welter of always stronger drugs and paper money, but we bragged more than we fought.

Only a country that lost in Vietnam could have elected a flag-kissing, patriotism pimp like Donald Trump. We would have been too proud to need his perpetual pumping-up of the country that was lost in that lost war.

This week, Vietnam celebrated the 50th anniversary of their victory.

And America lived with the consequences of its first loss.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.