As a former conscript John Cummins (Your Say, March 19) is angry about aspects of the Vietnam War but directs that anger against the anti-Vietnam War movement, and those currently protesting against war in Iraq.

Back in the 1960s young men were selectively conscripted.

They did not have the right to vote.

Many of them did not have the information we have today about the Vietnam War.

Instead of anger against the anti-war movement, maybe Vietnam veterans would be better directing their anger against Liberal Party leaders of the time like John Gorton, Don Chipp and Malcolm Fraser, who during the 1960s sent a generation of young men off to a war they claimed was necessary and in the best interests of Australia.

Years later these same men each recanted.

Even the American architect of the Vietnam War Robert McNamara did a backflip in 1995 and admitted the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake.

Anger too would be better directed at American strategists and chemical companies for recklessly dumping tonnes of herbicides over Vietnam, contaminating American and Australian troops in the process, thereby contributing to the creation of the post-traumatic stress disorders and illnesses that continue to haunt so many Vietnam veterans.

Wars are not mystical events that cannot be understood.

Nor are they unavoidable forces of history.

Wars are political events manufactured by human beings for geo-political reasons.

In the end, whether or not you support a war is a political decision.

And as killing, death and destruction are involved, that decision is also a moral decision.

Over centuries moral philosophers have clearly established that this moral decision is an individual decision.

We are all morally responsible as individuals for what we do, or do not do, during a war.

As with Vietnam, so too with the war against Iraq.

There is no moral imperative, no binding social contract, to behave as part of a herd and follow or support in any way the banners of war and those who troop after them.