My great-uncle served in Vietnam.
That statement in and of itself is hardly remarkable. At least half the people I know have a relative who fought in that war, one of the most brutal our country has ever known. What was remarkable, though, was the man I knew.
There's a story that's been circulated well throughout my family. I heard it from my father, who'd gotten it straight from the horse's mouth. What I know of it is simple and the details scarce, and for good reason. My great-uncle was a Marine (he later served in the Army, but always a Marine). At some point, during one of multiple tours in Vietnam, he and his men were trapped in a foxhole someplace in the God-only-knows-where jungle, being pelted with enemy fire. They'd run out of ammo and had even less hope. Devoid of another option, my uncle, figuring he was going to die anyway, crawled out of the dirt and charged enemy lines, carrying nothing but the foldable shovel he had in his pack. Somehow, by the grace of God, he managed to make his way past the machine guns and into the enemy's trench. After a little while, he and his shovel came back out.
The other guys didn't.
He didn't like telling the story. To the best of my knowledge, he only told it to my father the once. By the end of the war he had several Purple Hearts and PTSD that haunted him for the rest of his life. For my uncle and tens of thousands of American soldiers like him, that was Vietnam. Blood and severed limbs and death and a bag full of nightmares they brought home and never unpacked.
As the number of Americans who’ve died from COVID-19 surged past 60,000 this week, many on the left – and even some on the right – have jumped at the chance to label the coronavirus “this generation’s Vietnam,” drawing a rather wild comparison between the virus and a nearly two-decade-long war that cost more than 58,000 American lives, many of them in horrifically brutal fashion. Of course, it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison at best, and that’s being generous. To draw a parallel between a virus and a bloody war seems a bit ridiculous for more reasons than one – namely because one is a non-discriminating pathogen like so many other deadly bugs before it, and the other was a willing and entirely man-made conflict between countries.
But it seems many have rushed to draw the comparison nonetheless, largely in an effort to discredit Donald Trump, faulting him for dragging us into our current mess despite the fact that a president can’t control a flu bug any more than he could demand the skies to stop emptying out every time a flash flood wipes out a coastal neighborhood. NPR compared Trump's response to the current pandemic with Lyndon Johnson's overly-optimistic portrayal of the Vietnam War, saying they both demonstrated a "credibility gap." The Bulwark, a publication self-marketed as a conservative, anti-Trump outlet for opinion and analysis, declared this week that "COVID-19 Is This Generation's Vietnam," bizarrely asserting that dying from a contagious and uncontrollable virus is somehow the same as being drafted into war and gunned down by enemy fire, and blaming "political leadership" for both the current tragedy and wartime atrocity.
But if one is truly committed to the false claim that a viral contagion is just like a war based solely on the death count, and that a president responsible for those deaths simply because they happened during his term, it seems only fair to point out other medical conditions that also take more American lives per year than were lost during the entire Vietnam War. After all, death is death, no?
For example, during the 2017 flu season, more than 80,000 Americans – including 180 children – died from the seasonal flu, many of them over one single consecutive three-week span of time. It marked the highest flu-related death tally in four decades and resulted in nearly 22,000 more American lives lost than during Vietnam...and exactly zero shutdowns.
And when compared to other medical conditions, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
According to the CDC, nearly 650,000 people die each year from heart disease. Cancer is expected to take another 600,000 lives this year alone. Roughly 121,000 were lost to Alzheimer’s last year, while 83,000 deaths are attributable to diabetes.
Now, the pushback to any argument that there are far more deadly diseases than COVID-19 taking exponentially more lives each year is that the coronavirus is transmittable from person to person, and is therefore avoidable via measures like shutdowns that force behavioral change and supposedly mitigate our risk.
But that’s certainly not how we treat every avoidable and deadly health threat.
Take cigarettes, for example. The CDC attributes roughly 480,000 deaths per year to tobacco-related causes, including 41,000 deaths from second-hand smoke. And yet, no one rushes to compare cigarette deaths to World War II – or seek to place blame on a sitting president for continued widespread tobacco use, arguably as voluntary an act as going to church during a known pandemic.
Likewise, alcohol accounts for 88,000 deaths annually, per that same CDC. Opioid overdoses kill roughly 67,000 per year – and that doesn’t include deaths from all other drugs. Obesity, which even certain “socially-conscious” segments of Hollywood have sought to normalize, contributes to a whopping 300,000 deaths per year.
Elective abortion, the left’s Holy Grail and easily the number one killer of Americans every single year, claims between 860,000 and 1 million lives annually, more than twice the number of Americans lost in all of World War II.
That comparison, however, never seems to land on a chyron.
It is true, and tragically so, that COVID-19 is deadly to many, particularly the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. So is pneumonia. So is the flu. So is tobacco.
So are a dozen other things, from unavoidable medical conditions to voluntary vices, things that never prompt mass shutdowns, never interrupt supply chains, never cause millions of Americans to remain holed up in their homes afraid to go to the grocery store, and are certainly never weaponized as a political bullet aimed at a president that the left decided long ago was to blame for everything.
COVID-19 is a virus. It's not a war. It's not even our deadliest disease, our most dangerous health threat or our deepest self-inflicted wound.
And it sure as hell isn't Vietnam.