Those Who Have Borne the Battle (32 page)

The distinguished American historian Frank Freidel wrote the foreword to a 1980 publication that brought together a set of essays on the experiences of the Vietnam veterans. He described some of the embarrassing things that had happened to them, noting that their treatment as a group had no counterpart in US history. He wrote of these veterans, “It is difficult to visualize any number ever living to look with nostalgia upon their experiences, as did Civil War veterans, but the future should bring them a sense of dignity and pride.”
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There is little doubt that many veterans came home from Vietnam feeling frustrated if not angry and generally feeling unappreciated by a nation that had turned its back on their war. The only real historical antecedent for this was the Korean veterans who felt—and were—ignored. But Vietnam seemed a step beyond this. As Americans increasingly perceived the war as a negative experience, a mistake, there was a disposition for some to blame those who had fought it. And this had no precedent. It is not clear, however, just how much people really blamed the warriors for the war for which their country had drafted them and sent them to fight.

The men who had served in Vietnam often came home lonely and alone. They flew on charter flights and entered a terminal and went back into civilian life. For Vietnam veterans the logistics of arrival alone deprived them of any sense of accomplishment or service. It was possible to be back in the States within forty-eight hours of being in combat—and with no sense of success, of welcome, of gratitude, or of decompression. The Korean veterans came home typically on troop ships, which provided them some comrades with whom they could talk for the two- or three-week trip and generally meant a passing serenade of welcome by a band at a port facility.

Jack McLean recorded coming out of heavy combat and then flying from Da Nang to Travis Air Base in California. “There were no crowds. There were no parades.” These never came. The good-byes had come in Vietnam with his Charlie Company, those who survived, up at Landing Zone Loon. James Reston Jr. wrote that after 1968 Vietnam veterans were the first ever in US history “to be openly deprived of the battlefield mythology of gallantry and victory.” Max Cleland, a triple-amputee combat veteran, said that Vietnam veterans never had a ticker-tape parade and were thought of as “co-conspirators in some escapade with sinister overtones.”
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For my purposes, it is hard to sort out and summarize the public view of the Vietnam veterans because it is hard to reconcile some of the conflicts in this political drama. Vietnam veterans such as Jan Barry, one of the leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, proclaimed that “every last Vietnam [veteran] is guilty along with Calley of committing war
crimes.” And VVAW member (and later US Senator) John Kerry admitted to directing indiscriminate fire on civilians. If the government would try Lieutenant Calley, Kerry said, then “you must in fact try the country.”
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We were all guilty, by this powerful interpretation. Except we were not, other than in the most abstract sense. More to the point, neither were all who fought there guilty in the most tangible sense.

Clearly, the free-fire zones of Vietnam provided opportunities for tragic killings of civilians; there is ample testimony of American troops doing this intentionally in a moment of fear or misunderstanding or anger. There were individual soldiers for whom such acts had nothing to do with fear or misunderstanding or even anger; they were executions, murder, and there were those who did not do those things but may have witnessed them and felt the guilt of an accomplice. Vietnam was a nasty, vicious war. But none of these instances add up to the indiscriminate generalizations that were tossed about by some on the antiwar Left. Activist psychiatrist Robert Lifton insisted that atrocities were “endemic” in Vietnam and that all veterans had deep emotional scars. As a result, troops who might have avoided, opposed, resisted, escaped these tragedies in Vietnam could not evade being linked with them once they came home.

The prowar Right, normally considered the natural allies of military forces and veterans, was of little help to the Vietnam veterans. There was on the part of some conservatives, particularly among veterans groups, a sense that the Vietnam veterans were weak drug addicts and whiners. This was indirectly extended by a campaign on the part of President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew to dismiss all of the antiwar activists as being hostile to American fighting men. But Nixon also implicitly accepted the idea that the Vietnam campaign had been short-sheeted by peaceniks and drug addicts serving in the military in Vietnam. So this political tactic ironically swept more broadly the wide brush of criticism.

Nixon cynically told Henry Kissinger that there was no political advantage in supporting the military judgment on Calley. As far as he was concerned, “Most of the people don't give a shit whether he killed them or not.” He essentially accepted the “we are all guilty” allegation. He also thought My Lai finally was no big deal. He wanted to challenge the “obsolete idea that war is a game with rules.”
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It was a big deal. It was a powerful narrative that held the troops in Vietnam guilty of horrible conduct. Defenses against these accounts proved complicating; some dismissed the stories as a politicized exaggeration of the natural cruelty of war, and others generalized the accounts as standard behavior in this war, something that all troops and all Americans shared. But the common assumption for each position was that the Americans serving in Vietnam all engaged in brutal behavior. This was the unkindest cut of all.

Lewis Puller Jr., whose father, Chesty Puller, was one of the truly legendary marine heroes, went to Vietnam as a marine officer and was cruelly mutilated when he stepped onto a mine. He later wrote that he “was deeply offended by the notion that the hideous atrocities committed by Calley and his men were commonplace in Vietnam.” Puller acknowledged that there were what he called “forces of darkness” among American units in Vietnam, but there were also units marked by “discipline and courage” who did not conduct themselves this way.
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The depressing image of scarred veterans returning to civilian life was shaped by the narrative of the cruel war. Public opinion polls indicate that most Americans did have positive views of veterans—but they also felt a sense of pity for them, a sometimes condescending sense of pity. California senator Alan Cranston, for example, was an early advocate of greater counseling support for veterans. He was a friend of those who served. In proposing legislation to enable this in 1971, he accepted the prevailing stereotype when he said that “Vietnam veterans seem especially likely to suffer from” problems dealing with substance abuse. World War II and Korean War veterans in positions of leadership in the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars pushed back. They argued that these new veterans did not need special programs—that “crackpot, screwball” antiwar psychiatrists were trying to get government money. And they suspected that the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and other similar groups “were probably all crazy before they got into the service in the first place.”
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The legislation was defeated that year—and every year for the next several years.

In addition to critically acclaimed Hollywood feature films such as
The Deer Hunter
,
Taxi Driver
, and
Coming Home
that included veterans of
Vietnam suffering from addiction and from trauma, television used these figures as a standard stereotype. One scholar describes it as “the stereotype of the drug-abusing, psychopathic Vietnam veteran, prone to flashbacks in which he would return to combat mode.” An example of the wide net cast here was one
Kojak
episode in which the main character, Telly Savalas, looking for an unknown murderer, tells his staff to get a list of “recently-discharged Vietnam veterans.”
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The stereotype of the lonely, perhaps slightly loony, Vietnam veteran, feared and shunned by society, deeply distorted the reality. Veterans were not marginal, nor were they largely marginalized. In 1971 a Harris poll revealed that 94 percent of respondents agreed that veterans of Vietnam deserved the same “warm reception” as those who fought in previous wars, even as 61 percent thought they were sent to a war “we could never win.” And a survey among Vietnam veterans showed that 96 percent believed that family and friends “did everything they could” to make them feel at home. Studies in the 1980s indicated that Vietnam veterans were as well adjusted as their peers. At age thirty-six they were better educated than nonveterans; they did not have higher levels of substance abuse or criminality; their pattern of home ownership and level of saving were equal to nonveterans.
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If the dramatic stories of veterans being shunned and disrespected are exaggerated, they are not simply fiction. Stories of abusive welcome did capture part of the complexity of the homecoming of American troops from Vietnam. In the late 1980s, syndicated columnist Bob Greene posed a question to his Vietnam veteran readers: How were you received? More specifically, were you spat upon by protesters and critics? He received a number of letters, and some reported spitting incidents and others talked of generally hostile welcomes. One said, “The American people can go to hell before I or my sons fight another war for them.” One veteran, who said he was welcomed warmly, wrote, “If the number of ‘spitting' incidents are inflated, it doesn't change for a minute the feelings of rejection and scorn that a bunch of depressed and confused young men experienced when they returned home from doing what their country told them to do.”
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Robert Lembcke, on the other hand, concludes that the “spitting” incidents and many of the tales of hostility were part of an exaggerated
myth. He argues that all of this was part of a political agenda that sought to marginalize liberal opponents of the flexing of military force. He attributes much of this to the Nixon-Agnew attacks on the “effete snobs” who opposed the war.
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It was the case that Greene himself was concerned that some of the letters seemed to be part of an organized effort. Certainly, the opinion polls of the 1970s do not confirm that such treatment was widespread. Not being widespread does not mean that returning veterans did not suffer from humiliating treatment.

Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes recently wrote that he thinks the number of spitting incidents was small. “The image of being spit upon, however, became a metaphor for what happened to returning Vietnam veterans. I think that this is what fuels the belief that spitting was a more common occurrence than it was, in reality.” Despite this general observation, Marlantes recalled his own experience, sitting on a train in uniform, and being spat upon by a “a nice-looking woman.”
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Given the attitudes toward the war, the veterans came home without really expecting any sense of heroic welcome; indeed, they basically passed on expecting any type of public welcome, any public expression of gratitude. If public respect, gratitude, and even affection were greater than the stories of hostility, nonetheless, these positive responses were also often perfunctory or condescending. In any event, official recognition and support did not follow this positive view of veterans.

 

 

Early discussions about veterans with postwar psychological problems labeled these as part of a “post-Vietnam syndrome.” It was a condition, specific to this war, that antiwar activists described as a natural if not “endemic” consequence of this cruel war. Fortunately, the clinical discussion moved beyond the politics of the war and helped to frame a new and broader understanding of the potential medical impact of traumatic stress. Observations about the psychological effect of fighting in war are as old as Homer and Shakespeare. In the American Civil War, the soldiers and veterans who suffered psychologically from the experience were described as having “soldier's heart.” In World War I, it was called “shell shock,” and in World War II and Korea it was called “combat [or battle] fatigue.” In these
earlier wars, attitudes toward it ranged from angry dismissals of men who were cowards—General Patton slapping a GI in an Italian hospital dramatically illustrated this—to a more understanding view that linked it to exhaustion and something that could be cured with time. Most men who suffered from it suffered as quietly as they could. We will never know how many may have suffered, as quietly as they could, for a lifetime.

As psychiatrists and counselors identified emotional trauma on the part of some Vietnam veterans, they had great difficulty securing any sort of public or medical understanding of it. In the early 1970s the Nixon administration found the idea of traumatized veterans part of the subversive argument of antiwar doctors and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. This, of course, compromised politically any Vietnam veteran who suffered from depression or other conditions—they were not necessarily prepared to be linked with groups who criticized the conduct of the war.

Older veterans groups opposed any new clinical category having to do with trauma—they told the Vietnam veterans to get over it, as
their
generation had. And the American Psychiatric Association had not recognized this condition as a clinical disorder. In the 1970s the Senate passed legislation several times to provide counseling to veterans; each time the House Committee on Veterans Affairs killed the legislation. Congressman Olin “Tiger” Teague was chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs. He was a heavily decorated veteran of World War II with two Purple Hearts. He was the major supporter of veterans legislation in Congress, but was not very sympathetic to legislation that would provide counseling, believing his generation of warriors did not need it.
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