One good thing came out of Vietnam: 18 year olds won the right to vote. More of them should use it.

As the 1968 presidential election careened to conclusion, in my ninth month as an eyewitness to the disaster of Vietnam, my disillusionment was completed by absurdity: I was too young to vote. The majority of us were too young to vote.

Tragic hypocrisy laid bare: shameful conscription of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds who had no political voice — to fight, and die, young.

Worse yet, I realized that executive, legislative and military decision-makers, compromised by personal egos, political motivations and professional interests were incapable of fashioning an exit. My last hope, a system-correcting electoral process, via election of a president committed to quickly ending the slaughter, dissipated with Nixon vs. Humphrey.

I was disheartened by an election between two exceedingly poor candidates whose priorities were personal and partisan, and not the interests of those killing and dying in Vietnam.

The “law-and-order” candidate, Richard Nixon, intimating a “war” against the antiwar and civil-rights movements, also hinted at a secret plan to end the war. Winning by one percent, Nixon intensified and escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of around an additional 25,000 American lives. He finally settled for a peace agreement in 1973 that would have been possible in 1968.

The dissolving illusions of America’s myth-laden ideology left soldiers blowing in the wind. Many chose to ignore disconfirming realities; others took them on. Identity, adrift, can double down on familiar beliefs and opinions (namely the biases and prejudices we all owned) or it can be transformative — paramount to freedom from mental slavery and liberation to re-create a conscious self.

“When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies…” Jefferson Airplane wailed the conundrum many felt. Grace Slick’s resolution: “...you gotta find somebody to love,” wasn’t an option. Searching for truth, independent thinking or a truly principled identity, thankfully, was.

As the war raged through its deadliest months, a singular glimmer of hope emerged: The Paris Peace Talks.

Having declared my anti-war sentiments to command, physically debilitated by a sciatic nerve (pinched diving for protection behind sandbag walls), I was fortuitously assigned to the Vietnamese/American Intelligence Center. There, in Orwellian fashion, I censored atrocities from battlefield reports, and then prepared briefing documents for American negotiators in Paris. My hope — that I could contribute to peace by providing statistical analysis — saved my soul temporarily.

Truth is the first victim of war, and I quickly learned nothing mangles truth like statistics — especially when misreported, mistranslated, miscalculated, manipulated or censored out of existence. My concern became that the “talks” should revolve around philosophical approaches to peace, for which stats were meaningless.

My naïve enthusiasm was challenged by debate over who should have a seat at, and the corresponding shape of, the negotiating table in Paris, which caused delay after deadly delay. My hope, though battered, nonetheless sustained me through my tour.

We’re hard-pressed to identify good results from the American war in Vietnam. An obvious one: The 26th amendment, ratified March 1971.

Since WWII, Congress had failed to lower the voting age. After Korea, General-turned-President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1954 State of the Union Address publicly supported a constitutional amendment: “For years our citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 have, in time of peril, been summoned to fight for America. They should participate in the political process that produces this fateful summons.”

Fateful indeed. More than half of American servicemen killed in Vietnam were between 18 and 20.

The 26th Amendment gave youth the vote, but they don’t vote. Why? Typical youthful self-absorption? Voter suppression laws? Politics presented as merely an “interest”’ choice? Or — calculated to protect political and economic power — the pervasive disparagement of politics as too corrupt to work, or even care about?

Doesn’t matter. Because important change often comes uniquely with generational change, ways must be found to engage them beyond party identification and ideological labels, the bane of our political participation.

Model for them, teach them: To honor Vietnam veterans, to support troops generally, can’t mean inconsequential symbolism, platitudes of gratitude, or “just” voting. Our democracy will survive only with an informed electorate as the final counterbalance to the tribal partisanship and destruction of the checks and balances system we witness today.

Approaching the 2018 and 2020 elections, I feel the same urgency of Election ’68. A pivotal time when the youth vote may well have fueled a peace candidate’s victory, changing history in Vietnam and America.

The future again in the balance, we must harness the energy of youthful indignation (#MeToo, school shootings, Black Lives Matter…) to recognize the limits of political action via social media and believe in the viability and necessity of our electoral process.