Questions Like,

‘Would You Rather Fight Them Here Or In Pasadena?’”

From: Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam, by Christian G. Appy, U. Of North Carolina Press, 1984

The justification of the war that new soldiers found most persuasive was a version of the domino theory that emphasized the threat to the United States if communism triumphed in Vietnam.
The focus was not so much on the potential threat to other nations.
Instead, the soldiers were most drawn to interpretations that stressed the necessity of the war to prevent a direct attack on American security.
Moskos found these common responses: “The only way we’ll keep them out of the States is to kill them here,” “Let’s get it over now, before they’re too strong to stop,” “They have to be stopped somewhere,” and “Better to zap this country than let them do the same to us.”
John Sack quotes this statement as typical: “The communists win in Vietnam it’ll just be Laos, Thailand, the Philippines, and then we’ll have to fight in California.”
In 1968, Michael Herr found such views most pervasive among the top brass, who were fond of asking skeptical journalists questions like, “Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?”
(“Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena, I’d think, but I wouldn’t say it,” Herr writes.)
Many “lifers” - career officers and NCOs -- did their best to indoctrinate their troops with this either/or proposition; either you fought in Vietnam or the entire U.S. population would be attacked.
Soldiers were to believe that even though they were on the other side of the planet, they were truly fighting for the folks back home.
Frank Mathews had his first experience of killing in 1966. After looking at the Viet Cong corpse, he vomited and remained sick and depressed for several days.
An “old salt” sergeant tried to lift his spirits with these words: “Just figure it this way -- that [man you killed] could have been the one that was in the States screwing your mama, or your wife, or your girlfriend, and that’s the reason you killed him.”
This psychosexual version of domino theory “made a lot of sense” to the young soldier.
He was a gung-ho combat volunteer and remained so through the remainder of his tour. While his motivation centered on avenging the deaths of buddies who had died -- a desire to pay back the enemy -- whenever he looked for a larger rationale for the war, he always returned to the sergeant’s promise that the war was protecting American women.