Well, I hadn't offered the statistic as scientific, just as illustrative of why the meaning of Vietnam remains a live issue, especially in an academic setting, where arriving at some rational basis for interpreting events is important. It's what we do. I'm very sure that a substantial majority of our students interpret Vietnam in ways that offer no real challenge to a traditional understanding of the U.S. as occupying the moral high ground, and those who were critical of the war as somewhere on a spectrum ranging from misguided to treasonous.

I'll amend to, "my perception, based on the positions taken by those speaking in class, is about 4/5 identify with culturally conservative positions." Our campus has a student voting precinct, and they go very heavily republican, though not quite to the degree the surrounding (rural) areas do. A really systematic approach would want to correlate party affiliation/ideological identification with indices of political participation, from reading through voting to letter-writing and active campaigning. But I'll stick to my guesstimate as such. Anyhow, studies indicate that 89.53% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Adam