A great many Americans are laboring under the misperception that the United States learned nothing from the Vietnam War. Here, for instance, is a sampling of comments posted in response to a YouTube video on the war:

“Replace Vietnam with Afghanistan and Iraq and you have the same story.”

“This is the same lesson that Americans STILL don’t get to this day. We have continued this through Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.”

“The situation was exactly the same in Afghanistan. We fought and lost the exact same war in two different places decades apart. Those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

“It’s a terrible pity the US didn’t learn the lessons of the Vietnam war. They’ve been repeating them ever since.”

But this perception is simply not true. In fact, the wrong people learned the wrong lessons from America’s war in Vietnam. And the lessons these people learned—the foreign policymakers and power brokers in Washington, D.C., in the State and Defense departments—have notably insulated American foreign policy from the consequences of American domestic politics.

How else can one explain American combat troops in Afghanistan in a war that became the longest war in U.S. history without any significant anti-war movement? How many Americans know—or care—that the United States still has 2,500 soldiers in Iraq? How many Americans know that we have 2,000 soldiers in Syria? And who cares? Not the American people.

Why should they? The simple truth is that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not care what is done under their flag, in their name, and with their tax dollars so long as their kids are not the ones coming home in body bags.

This is the first great lesson learned by the wrong people as a result of the Vietnam War. Policymakers actually began to realize this in the later years of the Vietnam War when Richard Nixon reduced American casualties and withdrew U.S. soldiers while drastically increasing military weaponry and munitions to the Saigon regime, resulting in skyrocketing Vietnamese casualties.

By the time this lesson was learned, however, the American people were already disenchanted with our war in Vietnam—not for any moral objections but because their kids kept coming home dead with no end in sight—so the lesson couldn’t be applied to Vietnam.

But by the time of the Reagan Wars in Central America, the lesson was applied with great vigor, and it succeeded. During the decade of the 1980s, American taxpayers were pumping millions of dollars a day—every day, year in and year out—into suppressing peasant attempts to create just and equitable societies in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, causing untold human misery, along with thousands of deaths. But the dead were not Americans.

This is the first lesson the wrong people learned. The second involves the creation of the so-called All-Volunteer Army, which I happen to believe is the single worst result of the American War in Vietnam.

While the civilian anti-war movement during the Vietnam War got most of the headlines and news coverage, and while I will not say it had no impact on how the war played out, its influence was far smaller than most people realize. Without an anti-war movement, Lyndon Johnson may have run for office again in 1968. And I’m pretty sure that Nixon would have been happy to go on killing Vietnamese until the cows came home.

But 50,000 demonstrators in the streets of Washington didn’t stop the war. Nor did 500,000. Nor did the thousands and thousands who took to the streets time and again in every city in the nation. Indeed, a significant number of their fellow citizens considered them unwashed hippies and cowards and traitors who ought to be imprisoned or shot.

The anti-war movement that eventually brought the war to an end was the resistance to the war from veterans themselves, and even more compellingly, among the active-duty members of the armed services. Vietnam Veterans Against the War, first founded in 1967, began to garner national attention in 1970 with very public actions like Operation Rapid American Withdrawal, a march from Morristown, N.J., to Valley Forge, Pa.; the Winter Soldier Investigation of U.S. war crimes early 1971; and that spring’s Operation Dewey Canyon III, which culminated with veterans tossing their medals onto the steps of Congress.

But even more problematic was growing resistance within the active-duty ranks. As early as 1969, entire companies of soldiers were refusing to obey their commanders’ orders to go into combat (look up Co. A, 3rd Bn, 196th Brig). This refusal to obey orders only accelerated as the war went on, and grew to include “fragging” (murdering officers and senior noncommissioned officers who were too “gung ho”), deliberate sabotaging of military equipment, and heavy drug use.

In June 1971, Armed Forces Journal published an article by Marine Col. Robert J. Heinl Jr., titled “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,” detailing what I’ve written about above. Well before American ground troops finally left Vietnam, the military brass were telling Nixon, in effect, “You had better get the military out of Vietnam while you still have a military to withdraw.”

In the wake of the near-destruction of the U.S. military—it took most of the 1970s to restore even a semblance of order and discipline—the Pentagon was never going to let that happen again. And the generals believed—not without reason—that much of the problem stemmed from compulsory military conscription.

A significant portion of the U.S. Army was made up of draftees. Many others enlisted only because they knew they would be drafted eventually and felt they might get better assignments if they enlisted. Moreover, many other young Americans enlisted in the Air Force or the Navy or the Coast Guard rather than waiting to get drafted into the Army. But as the war went on and on, fewer and fewer of these draftees and “volunteers” supported the war or cared about it. Long before the war ended, the big question became: “Who’s going to be the last sucker to die in Vietnam?”

So the Pentagon demanded an end to the draft and the creation of a non-conscripted military. Who volunteers today? A certain percentage are the same testosterone-fueled adventure-seekers who have always signed up. And today, I imagine this even includes a number of women who are out to prove they can do anything men can do.

Many other “volunteers” are, in effect, economic draftees, young people with few resources and limited job opportunities for whom the military offers a career, some kind of training, or money in the future for college they could never otherwise afford. In short, young people from the segment of our population with the least clout and the least voice in our political system.

So if they are among the unfortunate few who die in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria, so what? For goodness’ sake, four American soldiers were killed in Niger a few years back! Niger? And who cared about that except the families of those four dead soldiers? They were volunteers, anyway.

Moreover, they are part of a hermetically sealed society that is trained to see themselves as warriors. They do not question the mission. Their loyalty is to each other and their service. They are professionals. And they are just what the military leadership and civilian policymakers want. Do what you’re told, and don’t ask why.

For many years, I taught high school at an elite private boys’ school. The cost to send a kid to my school, by the time I retired six years ago, had reached over $45,000 a year. This was not a boarding school. And if you wanted lunch, you had to pay extra.

I taught perhaps 1,600 kids in my time there. And in all those 19 years, not a single student of mine did what I did: that is, forgo college and enlist in the U.S. military as a private. Not one. And why not? Because every last one of them had better options.

I taught U.S. representatives’ kids and U.S. senators’ kids. The children of high-powered lawyers and chief executive officers, movers and shakers. People with clout. Major league, bigtime political clout. And here’s where lesson #1 and lesson #2 intersect.

Why should the parents of my students give a big rat’s ass about what the U.S. government is doing in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria? Their kids will never die in Niger. Except for the one or two each year who go to a service academy, get a free education, and become officers with a guaranteed job that will serve as a springboard for better things to come, none of the kids I taught will ever serve a day in uniform.

These, alas, are the two greatest lessons learned by the wrong people as a result of the Vietnam War. The blood price paid for American foreign policy is now borne by only a tiny segment of our population, the segment with the least voice in American politics, and the American people don’t care who is dying at the wrong end of their tax dollars so long as it’s not their kids. Those in charge of U.S. foreign policy learned those lessons all too well.

One of the most well-known and prolific poets, essayists, and memoirists to emerge from the Vietnam War, W.D. Ehrhart is a Marine Corps veteran of both the American War in Vietnam and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He is the author or editor of multiple books, including Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir and Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems.