Just Finished Reading Indignation by Philip Roth

Philip Roth, one of whose quotes I discussed a couple of days ago, is probably best known for his novels Goodbye Columbus and American Pastoral.  He was a keen observer of the American scene during his time (1933-2018) and did a lot of it from the perspective of a Jewish man living in the northeast.  Indignation, from 2008, sticks to this pattern as his protagonist, Marcus Messner, is a young Jewish college student from Newark, New Jersey, where he spent much of his youth putting in long hours helping his father, a kosher butcher, at their shop.  But although he had positive experiences at Robert Treat, his local college, Marcus's father has become unbearably overprotective and accusatory, even locking him out of the house one night because he thought his son was up to no good...when in reality he was just studying at the library.  So Marcus transfers to a small public college, Winesburg, in Ohio to escape his father's impossible presence.  But before we go any further, I must mention a crucial detail: it is 1951, the military draft is still in effect, and war rages in Korea with substantially large casualties for those fighting there. Marcus fears induction into the draft and that war without a college deferment, so he assiduously studies and maintains a strong A average...even though he works several hours a week as a waiter to defer some of his parents' expenses in sending him there.  It seems that Marcus is always trying to do the right thing, but those around him seem equally determined to undermine his studies and future...is he fated to end up in one of those Korean foxholes, attacked and killed by the Chinese?  Roth wrote this story from a unique perspective, which I leave for you to discover should you choose to read it.  Instead, I'd like to discuss one aspect from Indignation that made an impact on me: the draft, a protracted war, and how young men of the time viewed it all...

When the American participation in the Vietnam War started in earnest in 1965, I was eight going on nine.  By early in 1966, it was all escalating with no end in sight, and I was in the fourth grade.  We had a special class at the time in Nova Elementary School (Davie, Florida) that focused on what America was all about and was designed to foster patriotism among us.  One day while this was going on, a number of us met in the library's conference room with the librarian (I can't for the life of me remember her name) and one of our team teachers, Mr. Johnston, who was a big military enthusiast who collected all sorts of memorabilia and medals.  The two stood there explaining to us how important it was to fight in Vietnam...the librarian was very proud of her son, who was one of the soldiers over there, and said in effect that it was a great thing to give up your life for your country, making it seem to me at the time like an inevitability.  I knew nothing about the draft or college deferments then, but that meeting really creeped me out, young as I was.  While I was in my mid-teens, the war was still dragging on, with Nixon succeeding Johnson in prolonging it.  But by the time I was eligible to be drafted, not only had the war ended, but so had the military draft!  Looking back, I realized very strongly how the government was plucking young men out of their lives and sending them to be targets of the enemy...to draw out their fire, so to speak...in order to pinpoint their location so that we could hit them from the skies: a very cynical strategy.  I imagine something similar was used in Korea as well.  Anyway, if you were a teenager or college-age young man living during these times of conscription and seemingly endless war, you couldn't imagine the cloud hanging over your life...