"I remember serving in Vietnam in that war, and many of us at the major Lieutenant Colonel, colonel level were frustrated that no one in the U.S. wanted to debate it that way"
About this Quote
Memory does a lot of work here: Odom isn’t just recalling Vietnam, he’s staking a claim to the kind of authority that comes from having been inside the machine while it was failing. The line is built like an insider’s complaint, but the real target isn’t the battlefield. It’s the home front’s refusal to treat the war as the thing it was to the officer corps: a strategic argument with stakes, tradeoffs, and accountability.
The telling phrase is “debate it that way.” Odom narrows the “way” to a particular register: the operational, institutional language of lieutenant colonels and colonels, where questions sound like: What is the objective? What metrics matter? What ends justify what means? His frustration implies a gap between elite military cognition and American public discourse, which, in the Vietnam years, often collapsed into moral protest, partisan reflex, or vague patriotic insistence. He isn’t dismissing those frames so much as pointing to what they left untouched: whether the war was winnable on its own terms, and whether those terms were ever coherent.
There’s subtextual bitterness toward civilian leadership and media ecosystems that couldn’t or wouldn’t host that kind of argument in public. Vietnam, in this reading, becomes not only a policy failure but a failure of deliberation: a democracy that either avoided strategic candor or lacked the vocabulary for it. Odom’s sentence quietly reveals an officer’s fear that wars can be lost twice - once in the field, then again in the stories a nation is willing to tell about why it fought.
The telling phrase is “debate it that way.” Odom narrows the “way” to a particular register: the operational, institutional language of lieutenant colonels and colonels, where questions sound like: What is the objective? What metrics matter? What ends justify what means? His frustration implies a gap between elite military cognition and American public discourse, which, in the Vietnam years, often collapsed into moral protest, partisan reflex, or vague patriotic insistence. He isn’t dismissing those frames so much as pointing to what they left untouched: whether the war was winnable on its own terms, and whether those terms were ever coherent.
There’s subtextual bitterness toward civilian leadership and media ecosystems that couldn’t or wouldn’t host that kind of argument in public. Vietnam, in this reading, becomes not only a policy failure but a failure of deliberation: a democracy that either avoided strategic candor or lacked the vocabulary for it. Odom’s sentence quietly reveals an officer’s fear that wars can be lost twice - once in the field, then again in the stories a nation is willing to tell about why it fought.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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