The Evil Hours (22 page)

This sink-or-swim mentality would dominate the veteran's experience and the societal notion of trauma for decades.

Until Vietnam.

 

II. Vietnam

 

As many observers have pointed out, the intervention in Indochina instigated a second American civil war, altering the political and social landscape in ways so vast they are difficult to perceive today. Among the many things that Vietnam changed is the way that people talk about trauma.
Before Vietnam, the terms used to describe the psychological disorders of war came and went, each one beholden to the conflict from which it emerged. Five years after the fall of Saigon, there was an entirely new psychiatric category designed to address the needs of
all
trauma survivors, not just war veterans. This category—post-traumatic stress disorder—is a product of the American experience in Vietnam and the feverish political environment it helped create. Its emergence represents a revolution in trauma, one that continues to inform how millions of people all over the world—who have faced a wide variety of extreme events—are diagnosed and treated. This revolution in thinking has even extended into the past, as Jay Winter, a professor of history at Yale, explained in an article on shell shock: “One of the most powerful stimuli to a new generation of historical thinking on World War I has been the Vietnam War.”

But even beyond the “invention” of PTSD, the Vietnam War changed the public's perception of extreme events, ushering in a new way of thinking and talking about violence and death, creating what some critics have called a “culture of trauma.”
Before Vietnam,
trauma
was a term generally used to describe a life-threatening event experienced by an individual. After Vietnam,
trauma
was applied widely and was increasingly used to describe a broader range of experiences, many of which might have, in other eras, simply been called “rough going” or “tough sledding,” as in “I'm still recovering from the trauma of getting laid off.”

Within the American imagination, the words “Vietnam” and “trauma” are practically synonymous. Among veterans who served in Vietnam, it is not uncommon to hear the other word used as a means of encapsulating the entire experience, as if the conflict was so complicated, filled with so many confounding events, that a word that could summarize the psychological fallout without explicitly taking a side was needed. Hence,
trauma
.
The war is technically over, but its meaning remains unknown. It has lost none of its power to anger and confuse. As Tim O'Brien would later write in his novel
In the Lake of the Woods
, “The war itself was a mystery. Nobody knew what it was about, or why they were there, or who started it, or who was winning, or how it might end.”
It is this sense of uncertainty that has helped keep the memory of Vietnam alive and malleable within the American mind. Every manner of lesson can be derived from it. For a young Marine lieutenant in training at Quantico in the mid-1990s, for instance, it was not uncommon to hear officers who had fought at Hue City or Dong Ha talk about the “trauma of Vietnam” as a way of introducing a short lecture on the importance of small unit leadership or the “offensive spirit”—or any other practical topic for that matter.

Vietnam has come to represent many things to Americans. For people on the left, it is the ultimate symbol of American hubris and the catalyst for a new kind of political consciousness. On the right, it is often viewed as a just war lost because of a lack of American resolve or a disloyal press. It is this sort of ongoing disagreement over basic themes and facts regarding the war, the sense one gets from historians that the jury is still out on Vietnam, that might have led Bill Nash, a psychiatrist who would go on to lead the navy's PTSD task force in Washington, to declare in 2006, at a presentation to a group of military social workers, that “we are still fighting the Vietnam War.”
Despite the war's uncertain place in history, one thing is clear: Vietnam and the political climate it created made a public conversation about trauma possible.

One of the great students of this climate was a Yale professor of psychiatry named Robert Jay Lifton.
Lifton had served as an air force psychiatrist in Korea, an assignment that began a lifelong fascination with psychological responses to war. By 1970, Lifton was one of the most famous psychiatrists in America and had won the National Book Award for his study on Hiroshima survivors,
Death in Life
. A practitioner of an unorthodox academic field known as psychohistory, which sought to explain historical events using a mixture of principles drawn from psychology and the social sciences, he was the consummate dove.
(At one point, Lifton said, “I was opposed to the Vietnam War before it even began.”)
Indeed, his entire life was an embodiment of psychohistory: as a public intellectual, he was always on the move, shifting between leading problems of the day, forever probing into the fault lines between public issues with a constant stream of lectures and articles. He seemed to take world issues like nuclear disarmament personally, as if the integrity of his intellect was on the line. He was less focused on a tangible political outcome than on the process of insight itself. Somber, well mannered, and somewhat patrician in his bearing, Lifton was in his manner, if not his worldview, an unlikely advocate for a group of disgruntled veterans.

The change for Lifton came in November 1969, when on a flight to Toronto, where he was to deliver a lecture on the arms race, he read an article in the
New York Times
about My Lai, where American G.I.s had massacred hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese.
Later, he would write of his “shame and rage” at My Lai. The rage, he said, “was directed partly toward the warmakers in power, and partly toward myself for not having personally done more to confront or resist American slaughter of Vietnamese.” Soon, Lifton was speaking out against the war in public lectures and before Congress, arguing that the war with its “permanent free-fire zones,” industrialized slaughter and focus on enemy body counts was fundamentally evil, an “atrocity-producing situation.”

In November 1970, Lifton received a letter from Jan Barry, the leader of a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Formed in the late 1960s, VVAW's membership was small, but because it was composed entirely of veterans, the group enjoyed a prestige denied other, larger protest groups. Of them, Hunter S. Thompson would later write that “There is no anti-war or even anti-establishment group in America today with the psychic leverage of the VVAW.”
In the letter, Barry asked for Lifton's help, describing “the severe psychological problems of many Vietnam veterans because of their experiences,” caused by “the military policy of the war which results in war crimes and veterans' nightmares.”

Barry saw the politics of the war and the psychological problems suffered by veterans as inseparable.
He and other VVAW members felt exploited and abused by a war that had, according to one like-minded veteran, “turned them into animals.” As animals, they no longer knew how to fit into civil society, a society that, while loosely familiar with the horrors of Vietnam, was far more concerned, in Barry's words, about “making a buck.” This collision of realities jolted many veterans into a kind of identity crisis. Unlike their fathers, who had fought in World War II, they felt little sense of accomplishment. Some VVAWers, like Joe Urgo, an air force veteran who had seen action during the Tet Offensive, felt that the very basis of their upbringing, their belief in American civilization as a unique force for good, had been destroyed by Vietnam.
All wars are damaging, went the reasoning, but Vietnam was especially damaging because it was built on lies, and far from being simply unjust, it represented a crime against humanity. Along with John Kerry, the VVAW's most famous member, they felt compelled to take action on a number of fronts.

Part of what troubled veterans like Urgo was the rank inability of stateside Americans (the “normals”) to grasp what they had been through, a feeling echoed by many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans today. They were, in a sense, trapped in Van Gennep's liminal state, caught between worlds: they were in some ways welded to the war, defined by it, but they didn't belong to it anymore, nor could they make their own countrymen understand where they'd come from, which showed them that they didn't belong to their country anymore either. Some of them described the experience as feeling like they were tumbleweeds. They didn't belong anywhere.
(Lifton would later say that this restlessness was “a constant subject of discussion.”) “You couldn't explain to people how you just got through murdering people, that you were nothing more than a murderer, a rapist, a baby killer,” Urgo spat. “You couldn't come back to the society—with its bread and circuses, with
The Beverly Hillbillies
—and tell people, ‘This is what we were doing over there.'” One Marine veteran said to a therapist, “I want to scream at friends and relatives that people are still dying while the NFL is playing—but how can I?”

Over the course of their activism against the war, Barry and other vets found themselves rocked by emotions that they couldn't understand. They were committed to ending the war but found that their personal issues were often taking center stage, sabotaging their ability to live coherently, let alone work. All this was right up Lifton's alley, classic psychohistory. According to Lifton, Barry said two things in his letter: “Guys are hurting. They're opposed to the war, and they want to deal with their hurt, and they don't want to go to the VA. They also want to make known to the world what the war was like. Can you help us in some way?”

Along with Chaim Shatan, a New York University psychoanalyst and friend, Lifton met with Barry and a handful of VVAW members after delivering a lecture at NYU titled “My Lai and Kent State.”
Hearing how intensely the veterans “rapped” about their feelings toward the war and American society, along with their desire for psychological insight into their struggles, Lifton suggested they schedule a regular series of meetings on “their own turf.” In Shatan, Lifton had, by sheer accident, stumbled onto the perfect partner.
A working therapist who'd treated a number of returning veterans through NYU's free psychoanalytic clinic, Shatan was practical where Lifton was cerebral. Both were appalled by Vietnam. Before he became involved with the VVAW, Shatan, who was a French-Canadian Jew, had been thinking about moving back to Canada so that his children wouldn't be drafted and sent to Vietnam, going so far as to visit Vancouver to look into the possibility of relocating there. His meetings with the VVAW convinced him that there might be a reason to stay in the United States.

The first “rap group” met on Saturday, December 12, 1970, at the cramped VVAW headquarters at 156 Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan.
Arthur Egendorf, a Vietnam veteran who would become a pillar of the group, walked into one of the early meetings and saw “about twelve guys, most of them in fatigue shirts, with beards, unkempt hair and heavy looks.”
What happened next shocked everyone. “The explosion of feeling that occurred, associated as it was with a war whose pain pervaded all of our lives, rendered those first meetings unforgettable in their emotional power,” Lifton would recall.
The rap groups, originally scheduled for two hours, stretched into the evening, sometimes going on for seven or eight hours.

Shatan recalled one early meeting: looking around, he saw men sitting on packing cases and filing cabinets in the run-down VVAW office.
The group that day included Bob, a former Marine gripped by “unpredictable episodes of disorientation and panic.” Another was a former helicopter door gunner who tried to forget his “pleasure in killing [his] first 16-year-old Commie for Christ” by racing down the freeway at night on his motorcycle.

Needless to say, the first meetings were intense, with veterans unleashing feelings that had been bottled up for years, the charged atmosphere heightened by the fact that the war itself was still going on and seemed, in fact, to be metastasizing—the invasion of Cambodia had taken place just a few months earlier. For many of the veterans, these rap sessions were a life-altering experience. One former army sergeant remembered that “here was the first opportunity that I really had to talk with guys who had gone through the same thing. They were having the same doubts about themselves, you know, and digging inside themselves—and you didn't want to do that with just anybody . . . I said, Wow! You got something here.” Egendorf, who was an outlier in the group, having served as a counterintelligence sergeant after graduating from Harvard, said, “When I found myself sitting in a rap group with fellow veterans—and my veteran-ness, and my understanding of this, and my going through the same business . . . I didn't know to pray or say something like that, but it was like an inner relief:
Ah! This is like heaven-sent
.”

For Egendorf, the rap groups represented a pivotal step in a personal odyssey that had begun for him in the crucible of Vietnam.
From a privileged Philadelphia family, he had planned on going to law school before the war happened. In Vietnam, he had worked as a “spy-handler,” running a network of local informers, a job that kept him out of the line of fire but showed him how the entire war was built on a series of lies. Even more disturbing to him was the fact that his work in intelligence had forced him to live behind a façade of deceptions. It became hard for him to let anyone get close. About the only thing that got past the façade and elicited something resembling a human emotion was the sight of the prostitutes on Saigon's Tu Do Street. One night, atop his hotel in Saigon, he was looking down at the women in their
ao dais
working the street below when another soldier on the roof yelled out, “Goddamn, now that's a gorgeous sight!”
Looking over at him, Egendorf realized that the other man was, in fact, watching a flight of helicopter gunships shooting up a neighborhood in the distance. In
Healing from the War
, his memoir about the experience, he wrote that “in a flash I saw beyond the flames, to the people being incinerated like trash. I knew then that something had touched me, and that I'd never be the same.”