One of the most deeply ingrained prejudices in America's perception of the world is the belief that war and international conflict in general can best be defined, and are most clearly understood, in the image of a game; specifically, in the image of an athletic contest. Wars, for Americans, are events which are won or lost, in the same way that a game is won or lost, that is, adversary encounters with unequivocal rules and clearly defined goals; and the winning or losing of a war depends upon the achievement of certifiable, quantifiable results, in the same way that scanning a score determines who is the winner or loser of an athletic encounter. This prejudice is deeply buried in the consciousness of Americans, whose life is dominated by competitive values, a metaphoric imagery of athletic contests, a culture of games, which comprise such a large part of our daily experience.

Such an image is profoundly misleading and lies at the heart of serious misconceptions and distortions in our perception of war and international affairs. This image, for instance, effectively prevented us from developing a realistic view of the Vietnam War and gave plausibility to a "hawk" definition of that conflict which failed, precisely because it was based on a false analogy between wars and games.

The frustrations of the Vietnam War stemmed from the fact that by all "scoring" rules, Vietnam was a "victory" for the American military: body counts, kill ratios, bombs dropped, equipment destroyed, territory captured, all the well-known numerical counters by which military victory is traditionally defined. But this military "victory," somehow, could not be translated into changes in the larger world which were considered advantageous to American interests. Barry Goldwater's repeated criticism of a political leadership which did not know how to "win" the war, or General Westmoreland's carping attempt to demonstrate that he did not "lose" the war, continue to strike a responsive chord in an American public which has become disenchanted with Vietnam, but which remains conditioned to the view that war is a game, and is unable to comprehend how we failed to "win" that particular contest.