This is a quote from the Paul Williamson reading. And it is directed at his college age son. Wow, that’s all that came to my mind after I read his short letter to his son. You can clearly get the sense of the father’s views of the war, as well as the sons’. We can gather that the son is a “radical college student” during the time of the Vietnam War, and we can assume he has or will join some protests against the war. His father by contrast is a doctor and has a very high sense of nationalism and love for America.
The father is basically saying; if you don’t want to get shot and killed, then do not protest with other college students. Williamson almost seems like he wants his son to get shot, so he can be taught a lesson and learn. He is very blunt about his feeling towards his son and America; I think he is more for America then his son.
In this short reading we can gauge a bit, how America was during the latter years of the Vietnam War. There were older adults who seemed to have a high sense of nationalism and felt that protesting the government was the wrong thing to do during a time of war. And on the other hand you had a younger generation that was anti-war, and veterans of the Vietnam War, often joined these college students who were protesting. I believe that America was not split so much between war and no war, but rather America was split between protesting the government, radically and protesting the government in a more formal way.