Bringing It All Back Home (32 page)

Everyone I know who went to Vietnam either came back all screwed up and I didn't really want to know him or was killing himself, a slow suicide with drugs and alcohol.

As veterans began to find one another, McGowan became instrumental in the process. The inaugural meeting of New York City's first chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America took place at the YMCA on Sixty-Third Street in 1983. The YMCA gave them a room, and they put out a call by word of mouth. A small group of men showed up. None of them knew each other at all, but they had one thing in common: they all seemed to be seeking a connection with other veterans who understood what they had been through. McGowan asserts that without other veterans it was too easy to be sad, lonely, and sometimes desperate and fall into bad habits.

You're angry, you're hurt physically, [you were] certainly wounded mentally, even if not physically, and you're listening to the paper every day telling you what a jerk you are.

The sense of loneliness that seemed to become a theme for so many Vietnam veterans came, from McGowan's perspective, because
everybody wanted to be on your side, but nobody wanted to do anything substantive. So you end up very much alone.

These veterans found one another as a matter of self-preservation. The Vietnam Veterans of America grew out of a desire to create connections between veterans and society at large. For McGowan, what's especially interesting about this particular organization is that it is largely run by enlisted men, without the help of officers.

The officers seemed to just move on; they want to forget about it.

Some men had done well after Vietnam, achieving success to varying degrees, like Robert Ptachik and Richard Eggers. Many, however, were continuing to struggle. Combat veterans in particular seemed to have the most trouble adjusting to civilian life.

McGowan, the founding president of VVA Chapter 126 and leader of the original group, recalls that they all felt
very strongly as combat veterans that we were misunderstood, that we had been maligned, that the system was against us, that our story was not being told. There was a lot of sensationalism but not a lot of facts being represented, and the only stories that were getting out were the horror stories.

In the very beginning, one of the first obstacles the VVA faced was an internal conflict. The veterans pushing to get a charter from Congress as a veterans' service organization were not combat veterans, but had served in other capacities. McGowan felt that they were looking to use the organization to lobby for veterans' rights and benefits. This was, he thought, a valuable thing to do,
but it doesn't help the individual who needed help at the time.

In contrast, McGowan and his colleagues wanted the organization to focus on providing services. This was necessary, in his opinion, because the public attitude toward Vietnam veterans was one of
distrust, disregard, and contempt. I've had the experience of being asked to leave American Legion halls because [they said], “You're not really a veteran; you're from Vietnam.”

In the early days the organization would spend ten or fifteen minutes doing business and then head for a local bar. They would spend the evening telling stories and discussing issues that affected them.

By the early 1980s, with unemployment still an issue, knowing how to work with computers had become a marketable job skill. But many veterans didn't possess that skill. The city and its job market shifted profoundly in the 1950s and 1960s. As “white flight” drew mostly older workers to suburban areas, the city's white population declined from 87 percent in 1950 to 67 percent in 1970. African Americans began arriving in larger numbers, while the city also experienced a significant immigration of Puerto Ricans. At the same time, factories like the foundry where Anthony Wallace's father, Ben, had worked were disappearing. In 1950, manufacturing jobs accounted for 33.6 percent of the available employment in New York City. By the time Anthony Wallace returned home with a Purple Heart in 1970, these types of jobs would make up only 23.5 percent of the total jobs available. The manufacturing sector was hit particularly hard between 1969 and 1972, shedding forty-nine thousand such jobs and declining by 8.3 percent in 1971 alone.
3

By the time New York City's veterans came home, it was extremely difficult to find a blue-collar job, let alone make a living wage.

The marketplace was changing. Guys like myself, and most of the guys who were in this community, had fairly typical 1950s, early-'60s skills. I could fix a carburetor, and I could install windows. I could do a lot of stuff administratively, but all that died while we were away. By the time you come back, the world has changed. I mean, the materials you would use were junk-tiques and you were a junk-tique, you know, and that's real.

In other words, his skills had become junk and antique at the same time. As the decade of the 1970s slipped into the 1980s, a chronic employment problem for veterans became a crisis. As a result, McGowan and others participated in the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program, where they learned to use computers and upgraded their skills.

At the time of our first interview in 2005, McGowan was deeply involved with encouraging the Marine Corps to continue utilizing the small-unit concept; he believed the Combined Action Platoon he'd served in was a good model for counterinsurgency. In his opinion, putting military men among the ordinary people of Iraq and allowing them to help the people
who want to be helped, and give them the authority and the equipment and the support to get it done,
is an effective tactic. He says that his own son served with the Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, because he believes in that mission, too.

McGowan talked about some of the fluctuations in the organization. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Vietnam Veterans were in their thirties, seeking like-minded veterans with whom they could share their experiences. Later there was a plateau as these men aged. Then, as they reached their early fifties, there was a rejuvenation, coinciding with the 1990s, the first Gulf War, and the fact that some men began to retire at that age. Currently, interest in the chapter seems to have waned again.

Today, McGowan is the chief operating officer at Battery Park City Parks Conservancy in lower Manhattan, overseeing a staff of more than 150 and a $12 million budget. He is also the president of the United War Veterans Council, the organization that puts on the annual Veterans Day Parade in Manhattan—the nation's largest. He sits on the mayor's Veterans Advisory Board and has received the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal from the secretary of the Army.

Despite taking pride in his efforts over the years, at times McGowan still feels a deep sense of loss.

Some of the best and brightest, in my view, of the Vietnam veterans are long dead, or long incarcerated because society couldn't handle them. They're lost to the world in so many different ways.

15

THE DIVERSITY OF THE VETERAN EXPERIENCE

The long-term consequences of service in Vietnam for veterans are defined by physical and psychological changes, as well as by the ways that veterans approach their public and private worlds. Their minds and bodies changed as a result of service, as did their interactions with friends, families, and the world at large.

Physical changes took a variety of forms, of which wounds are the most obvious. Other physical changes, like heart disease and the variety of illnesses connected to Agent Orange exposure, took longer to become evident.

The discussion of psychological changes brought about by service in Vietnam has been dominated by the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder, and indeed PTSD loomed large in my interviews. The disorder has affected perhaps 30 percent of American Vietnam veterans at one time or another in their lives, leading sometimes to substance abuse, violence, and divorce. But other kinds of changes, including increased self-esteem and pride, have resulted as well.

Finally, interviews with New York City's Vietnam veterans make clear that military service has connected many veterans to their wider communities, providing instruction on citizenship, commitment, and selflessness that has lasted a lifetime.

For some veterans, the long-term significance of Vietnam lies in what it did to their health. Tony Velez, whose father served for four years during World War II, grew up in the Cypress Hills housing project in Brooklyn and vividly recalls the ethnic and racial antagonism directed at him and all the other Puerto Rican kids he went to school with. There was
a pretty hostile environment in the community, in the church, in the public school
, he remembers. Drafted into the military, he served with the Blackhorse Regiment, the Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment, as an engineer.

Now a professor of fine arts at Kean University in New Jersey, Velez explains what Agent Orange, one of several defoliants used in Vietnam, did to his health:

I suffer from a residue of Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, and it's been defined in terms of cancer for me … and I've had it now for at least nine years. I had an operation nine years ago when it was detected. I've had radiation last year, and this year it seems that the cancer is still active in my body. Where it is, no one knows. President Clinton, about six months after I had my prostate out nine years ago in 1994—in August, I actually had the operation—about six months later, I noticed that he—in
The New York Times
—he had signed the bill allotting benefits and compensation to veterans who had prostate cancer and a whole other slew of cancers that are connected to exposure [to Agent Orange]. Large numbers of veterans are coming down with these kinds of cancers, and early in their lives. I happen to have been forty-six years old when it was detected, and I volunteered, I asked my doctor, actually, to take some blood out of me extra.

Anyone who knows anything about prostate cancer knows it's a very, very slow-growing cancer. Therefore, to get to a number of nine or ten at age forty-six quite simply means that I had it in my body for some time. I probably had it, I suspect, somewhere in my early forties, maybe my late thirties. No one can really say exactly. And it's still around. It's known that many of these cancers from environmental causes show up twenty, twenty-five years later. I'm right on the money. I'm right in there. I came out at twenty from the United States Army in Vietnam, and I was forty-six when it was discovered at a very high rate, and it's a slow-growing cancer that needed a long time to gain a critical mass to be picked up, and it was picked up, you know, in a sky-high number; then it's been with me for some time. So there's an obvious connection there.

When I interviewed him in 2005, Velez emphasized that the benefits he received from the Veterans Administration were inadequate. At that time they were paying him $81 a month in compensation for the loss of an organ (his prostate). His brothers, both of whom served in the military—one in Germany and the other in Vietnam—received more in the way of financial compensation than he did. He felt fortunate that he had a good insurance policy through his employer, which permitted him to get and pay for the necessary medical treatments, including surgery, radiation, and testing.

At the same time, when we spoke, Velez was doing well. That day, he said, was a good day. As an artist, he works to find ways of dealing with his illness. He teaches, speaks with groups and classes, and more. At this point, cancer has become part of his life, and he has tried to learn how to accept it and live with it.

I get educated. I read a lot about my cancer, about issues related to the war, to the past. I look at the past. I reevaluate it. I think about myself. And being a teacher, it's incorporated into my curriculum because as a photographer, as an artist, there's a big chunk of photography called war photography that has existed from the beginning of the invention of the medium. And, of course, all artists and all art forms have expressed war, and every civilization depicts war through its sculpture, its painting, in one way or the other.

And so I do my part, and I'm able to communicate my own feelings, my own personal experiences, in my own classes when it comes to that area. And I can bring in my own photographs, and I talk in a very personal way about it.

John Hamill, among many others, makes the connection between Agent Orange and the ability to have children. His story, in contrast to many, has a positive outcome. Hamill served as a medic with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam and returned in 1968.

My daughter is ten, and it took us fourteen years to have her. That was another Vietnam hangover. I got dosed with Agent Orange. It was a low-grade infection that was exacerbating things like dioxin. [The doctor] was like a genetic detective. He's the only one who ever took a thorough medical history, and it took him all of about three months, and then we were able to do the gift, you know, the in vitro thing. But fourteen years for having kids. So, you know, for me it's like a gift.

Paul DeSaro, who volunteered to serve in the Army in 1966 and served with the 303rd Radio Research Battalion in Vietnam, now has Agent Orange–related type 2 diabetes.
Because of my diabetes and related diseases caused by being exposed to Agent Orange, the Veterans Administration provides the medications to treat me.

I am taking two types of insulin [fast-acting and long-lasting] to control the spread of this disease. My legs, eyes, and vascular system are slowly deteriorating due to my exposure to Agent Orange, which caused my diabetes. Now that I am retired and have more time on my hands, I am starting to remember events that I had forgotten, or the impact it had on me at the time it happened. For example, ammo sites being blown up very close to where I was camped. I am experiencing how I felt then, instead of just recording the event in my mind.