On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (30 page)

World War II soldiers joined for the duration. A soldier may have come into combat as an individual replacement, but he knew that he would be with his unit for the rest of the war. He was very invested in establishing himself with his newfound unit, and those who were already in the unit had equal cause to bond with this individual, who they knew would be their comrade until the war was over. These individuals developed very mature, fulfilling relationships that for most of them have lasted throughout their lives.

270

KILLING IN V I E T N A M

In Vietnam most soldiers arrived on the battlefield alone, afraid, and without friends. A soldier joined a unit where he was an FNG, a "f- ing new guy," whose inexperience and incompetence represented a threat to the continued survival of those in the unit.

In a few months, for a brief period, he became an old hand who was bonded to a few friends and able to function well in combat.

But then, all too soon, his friends left him via death, injury, or the end of their tours, and he too became a short timer, whose only concern was surviving until the end of his tour of duty. Unit morale, cohesion, and bonding suffered tremendously. All but the best of units became just a collection of men experiencing endless leavings and arrivals, and that sacred process of bonding, which makes it possible for men to do what they must do in combat, became a tattered and torn remnant of the support structure experienced by veterans of past American wars.

That does not mean that no bonds were forged, for men will always forge strong bonds in the face of death, but they were few and all too fleeting, destined never to last longer than a year and usually much less than that.

The First Pharmacological War

One of the major factors that combined with the rotation policy to suppress or delay dealing with psychological trauma was the use of a powerful new family of drugs. Soldiers in past wars often drank themselves into numbness, and Vietnam was no exception.

But Vietnam was also the first war in which the forces of modern pharmacology were directed to empower the battlefield soldier.

The administration of tranquillizing drugs and phenothiazines on the combat front first occurred in Vietnam. The soldiers who became psychiatric casualties were generally placed in psychiatric-care facilities in close proximity to the combat zone where these drugs were prescribed by MDs and psychiatrists. The soldiers under their care readily took their "medicine," and this program was touted as a major factor in reducing the incidence of evacuations of psychiatric casualties.5

In the same way, many soldiers "self-prescribed" marijuana and, to a lesser extent, opium and heroin to help them deal with the W H A T HAVE W E D O N E T O O U R SOLDIERS? 271

stress they were facing. At first it appeared that this widespread use of illegal drugs had no negative psychiatric result, but we soon came to realize that the effect of these drugs was much the same as the effect of the legally prescribed tranquilizers.

Basically, whether legally or illegally used, these drugs combined with the one-year tour (with the knowledge that all you had to do was "gut o u t " twelve months to escape) to submerge or delay combat-stress reactions. Tranquilizers do not deal with psychological stressors; they merely do what insulin does for a diabetic: they treat the symptoms, but the disease is still there.

Drugs may help make an individual more susceptible to some forms of therapy,
if
therapy is available. But if drugs are given while the stressor is still being experienced, then they will arrest or supersede the development of effective coping mechanisms, resulting in an increase in the long-term trauma from the stress.

What happened in Vietnam is the moral equivalent of giving a soldier a local anesthetic for a gunshot wound and then sending him back into combat.

At their best these drugs only served to delay the inevitable confrontation with the pain, suffering, grief, and guilt that the Vietnam veteran repressed and buried deep inside himself. And at worst they actually increased the impact of the trauma suffered by the soldier.

The Uncleansed Veteran

The traditional cooldown period while marching or sailing home in intact units forms a kind of group therapy that was not available to the Vietnam veteran. This, too, is essential to the mental health of the returning veteran, and this too was denied the American veteran of Vietnam.

Arthur Hadley is a master of military psychological operations (psyops), author of the excellent book
Straw Giant,
and one of this century's great military intellectuals.6 After his tour as a psyops commander in World War II (for which he was awarded two Silver Stars), Hadley conducted an extensive study on major warrior societies around the world. In this study he concluded that
all
warrior societies, tribes, and nations incorporate some form of 272 KILLING IN V I E T N A M

purification ritual for their returning soldiers, and this ritual appears to be essential to the health of both the returning warrior and the society as a whole.

Gabriel understands and powerfully illuminates the role of this purification ritual, and the price of its absence: Societies have always recognized that war changes men, that they are not the same after they return. That is why primitive societies often require soldiers to perform purification rites before allowing them to rejoin their communities. These rites often involved washing or other forms of ceremonial cleansing. Psychologically, these rituals provided soldiers with a way of ridding themselves of stress and the terrible guilt that always accompanies the sane after war.

It was also a way of treating guilt by providing a mechanism through which fighting men could decompress and relive their terror without feeling weak or exposed. Finally, it was a way of telling the soldier that what he did was right and that the community for which he fought was grateful and that, above all, his community of sane and normal men welcomed him back.

Modern armies have similar mechanisms of purification. In WWII soldiers en route home often spent days together on troopships. Among themselves, the warriors could relive their feelings, express grief for lost comrades, tell each other about their fears, and, above all, receive the support of their fellow soldiers. They were provided with a sounding board for their own sanity. Upon reaching home, soldiers were often honored with parades or other civic tributes. They received the respect of their communities as stories of their experiences were told to children and relatives by proud parents and wives. All this served the same cleansing purpose as the rituals of the past.

When soldiers are denied these rituals they often tend to become emotionally disturbed. Unable to purge their guilt or be reassured that what they did was right, they turned their emotions inward.

Soldiers returning from the Vietnam War were victims of this kind of neglect. There were no long troopship voyages where they could confide in their comrades. Instead, soldiers who had finished their tour of duty were flown home to arrive "back in the world"

WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO O U R SOLDIERS? 273

often within days, and sometimes within hours, of their last combat with the enemy. There were no fellow soldiers to meet them and to serve as a sympathetic sounding board for their experiences; no one to convince them of their own sanity.

Since Vietnam, several different returning armies have applied this vital lesson. The British troops returning from the Falklands could have been airlifted home, but instead they made the long, dreary, and therapeutic South Atlantic crossing with their navy.

In the same way, Israel addressed the need for a cooldown period among their soldiers returning from the nation's extremely unpopular 1982 incursion into Lebanon. They were aware that in the United States there occurred what some have termed a

"conspiracy of silence" in discussing the Vietnam War and its moral issues upon its conclusion. Recognizing this problem and the need for psychological decompression, the Israelis did what was probably one of the healthiest things they could have done for the mental welfare of those who participated in their Vietnam.

According to Shalit, the withdrawing Israeli soldiers were gathered by unit in meetings in which they could relax for the first time after many months. There they went through a lengthy process of "ventilating their feelings, questions, doubts, and criticisms about all issues: from the failure of military action and planning, to the unnecessary sacrifice of life and the feeling of total failure."

And the U.S. troops deployed to Grenada, Panama, and Iraq left these conflicts in intact units. The continued stability of these units after departing the combat zone ensured that detailed (and psychologically essential) after-action briefings and reviews could be conducted at home stations.

The Defeated Veteran

The Vietnam veteran's belief in the justice of his cause and the necessity for his acts was constantly challenged and ultimately bankrupt when South Vietnam fell to an invasion from the North in 1975. A dim foreshadowing of this form of trauma can be seen in World War I, when the war ended without the unconditional 274 KILLING IN V I E T N A M

surrender of the enemy, and many veterans bitterly understood that it wasn't really over, over there.

With the collapse of the Soviet U n i o n and the end of the Cold War it might be legitimately argued that we did not lose in Vietnam any more than we lost in the Battle of the Bulge: we got pushed back for a while, but ultimately we w o n the war. But today such a perspective is small consolation to the Vietnam vet. For the Vietnam veteran there is no walking Flanders Field, no reenactment of D Day, no commemoration of Inchon, or any other celebration by grateful nations whose peace and prosperity was preserved by American blood and sweat and tears. For too many years the Vietnam veterans knew only the defeat of a nation they fought and suffered for and the victory of a regime that many of them believed to be evil and malignant enough to risk dying to fight against.

Ultimately, they have been vindicated. The containment policy that they were an instrument of has been successful. N o w the Russians themselves will concede the evils of communism. H u n -

dreds of thousands of boat people attest to the disastrous nature of the North Vietnamese regime. N o w the Cold War has ended in victory. And from one perspective we were no more defeated in Vietnam than the U.S. forces were in the Philippines or at the Battle of the Bulge. They lost the battle but they w o n the war.

And the war was worth fighting. Perhaps we can see Vietnam from that perspective now, and I believe that there is truth and healing in that perspective. But for most Vietnam veterans this

"victory" comes more than two decades too late.

Unwelcomed Veterans and Unmourned Dead

T w o sources of public recognition and affirmation vital to the soldier are the parades that have traditionally welcomed them home from combat and the memorials and monuments that have commemorated and mourned their dead comrades. Parades are an essential rite of passage to the returning veteran in the same way that bar mitzvahs, confirmations, graduations, weddings, and other public ceremonies are to other individuals at key periods of their lives. Memorials and monuments mean to the grieving veteran WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO O U R SOLDIERS? 275

what funerals and tombstones do to any bereaved loved one. But rather than parades and memorials the Vietnam veteran, who had only done what society had trained and ordered him to do, was greeted by a hostile environment in which he was ashamed to even wear the uniform and decorations that became such a vital part of who he was.

Even the twenty-year-late Vietnam Veterans Memorial had to be constructed in the face of the same indignity and misunderstanding that the veterans had endured for so long. Initially the memorial was not to have the flag and statue traditionally associated with such edifices: instead the monument to our nation's longest war was going to be just a "black gash of shame" with the names of the fallen engraved upon it. It was only after a long and bitter battle that veterans' groups were able to get a statue and a flagpole flying the U.S. flag added to their memorial.

At their own monument, our veterans had to fight to fly the flag that meant so much to them.

The thousands of veterans who wept at "the wall" and marched with tear-streaked faces at welcome-home parades, given two decades after the fact, represented a sincere grieving and a true pain that most Americans did not even know existed. But most of all it represented reconciliation and healing.

The veterans who spurn this reconciliation and "get all they need down at the American Legion" may simply be those who have withdrawn the most deeply into their shells, and as we will see in our look at PTSD, the cost of that shell is significant. But perhaps they have a right to remain in their shells, and it may be that the society that drove them there has no right to expect reconciliation or forgiveness from them.

The Lonely Veteran

The experience of the Vietnam veteran was distinctly different from that of the veterans of previous American wars. Once he completed his tour of duty, he usually severed all bonds with his unit and comrades. It was extremely rare for a veteran to write to his buddies who were still in combat, and (in strong contrast to the endless reunions of World War II veterans) for more than a 276 KILLING IN V I E T N A M

decade it was even rarer for two or more of them to get together after the war. In
PTSD: A Handbook for Clinicians,
Vietnam vet Jim Goodwin hypothesizes (I think correctly) that "guilt about leaving one's buddies to an unknown fate in Vietnam apparently proved so strong that many veterans were often too frightened to find out what happened to those left behind." Only now, two decades after the fact, are Vietnam veterans beginning to get over this survivor guilt and form veterans' associations and coalitions.

For the Vietnam vet, the postwar years were long, lonely ones.