The Evil Hours (23 page)

The structure of the rap groups was unusual in that they had no structure. Lifton's suggestion that they take place on the veterans' home turf turned out to be a small act of genius.
(The VVAW crew, like many of their Vietnam veteran peers, were deeply suspicious of the Veterans Administration, which refused to acknowledge their psychological problems.
Part of this was due to the fact that in 1966 the Pentagon had declared that psychiatric casualties in Vietnam were lower than in any previous war.)
At ease in their own territory, the veterans cut loose, channeling the dark feelings of the era into the group.
In line with this accommodating atmosphere, Lifton and Shatan abandoned the traditional labels, referring to themselves as simply “professionals” rather than “therapists,” though the vets dispensed with both, referring to them as “shrinks.” From the beginning, Lifton and Shatan had the feeling that they had stumbled into a new group form, one that transcended the hierarchical medical model of doctor and patient and pushed into some new higher plane of social consciousness. It felt like the beginning of a revolution of some kind.

In fact, what the VVAWers were doing had some precedent in the “consciousness-raising” small groups of the women's movement as well as being part of the exploratory spirit of the late 1960s.
As Egendorf explained in an interview years later, “The idea for rap groups came from the rap groups in therapeutic communities for drug treatment, Synanon and . . . encounter groups. But most prominently, where guys encountered it most frequently, was with their girlfriends going to women's groups.”
These groups, like San Francisco's “Sudsofloppen” collective, held “Free Space” sessions that offered women a forum to “think about our lives, our society, and our potential for being creative individuals and for building a women's movement.” Like the rap groups that followed them, these women's groups held to a philosophy that said “the personal is political,” a belief that would play a crucial role connecting the pain that vets were feeling with the need for larger social change. Both traditions emphasized openness and an agendaless discussion. Egendorf, who later spoke of the need for male veterans to embrace the healing power of women and to see VVAW as a way for male vets to, in a sense, “catch up” with feminism, wrote in
Healing from the War
that “we had the women's movement as a constant example, with their use of consciousness raising groups as a major organizing tool.”

The women's movement of the 1970s
not only helped give form to a growing veterans movement, it also began to tackle the great invisible problem that had plagued society since the dawn of history: rape. In 1971, the first rape crisis center opened
its doors in Oakland. After her fifteen-year-old foster daughter was raped, Oleta Kirk Adams took her to the hospital. “She was treated like a piece of meat,” another daughter remembered. “There was no compassion, nothing that helped her deal with the emotion” of the experience. Livid over her treatment, Adams, along with two other women, founded the nonprofit organization Bay Area Women Against Rape. It was all part of a vast national phenomenon. The Civil Rights Movement of the fifties and sixties had opened the door to a grassroots movement, but it wasn't until the seventies that the women's liberation movement took to the national stage. Confronting reported cases of rape, which had seen a 121 percent increase over the course of the sixties, was one of the movement's first priorities. “Rape is only a slightly forbidden fruit,” feminists charged in 1971.

Around the same time, Ann Burgess and Lynda Holmstrom, researchers at Boston College, began studying the psychological effects of rape.
There were hundreds of studies about rape as a crime, but they noticed that no one had ever spoken to the victims. The two made an arrangement with a local hospital to be on call day or night in order to interview any rape victim admitted to the emergency room. They noticed almost immediately that, with few exceptions, the victims they spoke with looked at being raped as a life-threatening event. After a year, they had interviewed 92 women and 37 children. Looking over their interviews, they noticed a pattern of postrape symptoms: sleeplessness, paranoia, an exaggerated startle response, nightmares, and a host of phobias related to the circumstances of their attack. Deciding to call this phenomenon “rape trauma syndrome,” they noted that the same symptoms they had observed had been described thirty years before in survivors of war.

The rap groups, which had begun as an explosion of feeling, evolved into a more exploratory forum for vets to synthesize their feelings in an open, nonjudgmental environment, something that was not available at the VA. As Egendorf described it, “One vet would usually begin the conversation by talking about a problem he was having. Before long, another guy would respond, then a few more would take turns, almost like a jam session. There was nothing you were supposed to say, except that everybody shared a few common ideas: The war was a horror, and it's good to talk it out . . . the inquiry would frequently unfold as men recalled an event, then realized that although they were detached when it first happened, they were much closer to it looking back. Suddenly emotions would come, often pain, anger, or sorrow, as the men ceased feeling removed and let what happened touch them, as if reflecting on the moment at some later time allowed for a more intimate reinterpretation.”

One problem that emerged early on was Lifton's compulsive note taking.
When one veteran complained that Lifton couldn't be an equal member of the group and write about it at the same time, he put his notepad away. Still, despite their wide-ranging backgrounds and experiences, the group began to bond. A large measure of this was simply due to the novelty of the group: from a veterans' standpoint, nothing like it had ever happened before. Veterans in American history have often held to an unspoken code of silence. This phenomenon is most easily seen in the World War II generation, where veterans, in part because they grew up in the Great Depression, believed that dwelling on one's personal struggles was unseemly.
Not so with this generation and with the VVAW, which viewed the war as a moral catastrophe that had brought their lives into crisis and changed everything. It had to be stopped. Suddenly, everything was on the table. Their inner lives, the morality of the war, questions about what it meant to be a man, feelings that they didn't even know the names of. Topics that had never been addressed before were right in front of them now. The normal divisions, where the questions stopped, were gone. No one knew where it would all go. Egendorf, reflecting on the feelings of the time, remarked that there was an almost utopian impulse at work, to “make it new right here and now.”

One person who was very concerned about where such newness might lead was Richard Nixon.
Like Hunter S. Thompson, Nixon was keenly aware of the political leverage that an organization like the VVAW had, and as the group continued to garner public attention, he launched a broad campaign to blunt its impact. In particular, Nixon was concerned about the group's public statements about the war's atrocities and the havoc it wreaked on the minds of veterans, which fit into a larger trend of media reports suggesting that the Vietnam War was creating a “different breed” of veteran, as the
Capital Times
of Madison, Wisconsin, reported in February 1971. One statement from a VA psychologist in the
Capital Times
article, which was forwarded to Chuck Colson, Nixon's point man on the VVAW, was particularly damning.
“Vietnam combat veterans tend to see their experience as an exercise in survival rather than a defense of national values. The majority, given the opportunity in [the] company of their peers, express both intense anger and much guilt.” The article, which reads almost like an advertisement for the rap groups, went on to describe a host of other symptoms that VA doctors were beginning to see in Vietnam veterans, including a general paranoia and “uptightness,” “shaky masculine identity,” and of greatest concern, a “hostility toward authoritarian figures and institutions.”

The man who forwarded the article to Colson was Donald E. Johnson, director of the VA under President Nixon.
Along with the article, Johnson included a note that read, in part, “Attached is a news story from Madison, Wisconsin, which explains in some detail the problems we in the Veterans Administration are encountering . . . As a country, and particularly the Government, we have failed to adequately inform these young men that their service has indeed been a defense of national values. We in the VA have noted a profound difference between the dischargee of 1967 and the dischargee of 1970.” Tellingly, the dates Johnson listed roughly correlate to the ruinous Tet Offensive of 1968, after which American attitudes toward the war, both stateside and in-theater, began to shift dramatically.

Two months later, soon after the VVAW's highly publicized “Dewey Canyon III” protest in Washington, which saw hundreds of veterans throwing their medals onto the steps of the Capitol, Nixon ordered Colson to look into having the IRS revoke the group's tax-exempt status.
Colson, who later went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, also took a number of steps to try to publicly discredit the VVAW, encouraging leaders of the “Big Four” veterans organizations (the American Legion, the Disabled American Veterans, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars) to speak out against them. At Colson's request, Herbert Rainwater, head of the VFW, held a press conference in Washington, where he charged that groups like the VVAW were communist inspired.

The effort to undermine the group went well beyond these overt steps and in time would come to include the FBI's infamous “Counter-Intelligence Program,” or COINTELPRO, which infiltrated and surveilled a number of left-wing organizations.
At one point, certain parts of the organization were filled with so many informers and agents provocateurs that they actually outnumbered the bona fide members. Soon after Chaim Shatan began working with the VVAW, he noticed that his mail was being tampered with.
In an article in the
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
, describing what he called the “grief of soldiers,” he appended a “note of caution” to other clinicians interested in working with veterans, explaining how his mail from veterans' organizations and Lifton was being opened and then resealed with sticky paper and stamped
DAMAGED IN HANDLING AT U.S. POST OFFICE
. (Lifton reported this irregularity as well.) Shatan later described an incident where a VVAW member had dropped by their New York office on a Sunday afternoon and found a man he didn't recognize riffling through their files. The man had flashed an FBI badge and made a hasty exit.

Despite Nixon's attempts to disrupt the VVAW, veterans kept showing up to the New York rap group. Eventually, the group got so big they ran out of room, forcing it to split in two, with Lifton staying with the original Fifth Avenue cohort. By Lifton's count, around 115 veterans eventually cycled through the group during his tenure, including a number of the VVAW's leaders, who were frequently crisscrossing the country, spreading the word about the group in the course of their organizing against the war.

The veterans movement was building, slowly, incrementally, working openly to end the war while at the same time trying to make sense of the violence in-theater that they'd been a part of, but what really lit a fire under it was the violence at home. On April 30, 1971, Dwight Johnson, a recently discharged army Medal of Honor winner, was shot and killed while trying to rob a Detroit liquor store.
Unemployed and angry at the army, Johnson had been diagnosed by VA doctors as suffering from “depression caused by post-Vietnam adjustment problems.” Ordinarily, a death like this wouldn't have attracted much notice, but because Johnson had been awarded the Medal of Honor by the president in a White House ceremony, the story of his postwar struggle was soon on the front page of the
New York Times
. Shatan, reading of Johnson's death, was deeply moved, and he quickly wrote an op-ed for the
Times
and prepared a longer scholarly article for publication. The
Times
, for a variety of reasons, waffled on Shatan's op-ed, with the opinion editor saying he had reservations about it.

Nevertheless, a year later, on May 6, 1972, the
Times
published the piece, titled “Post-Vietnam Syndrome.” In it, Shatan described the work of the rap groups, opening with the story of “Steve,” a Marine veteran of Vietnam, who after being discharged from the Corps for psychiatric reasons still suffered from “unpredictable episodes of terror and disorientation.”
Shatan also described the emotional numbing many vets experienced, how they felt alienated “from their feelings and from other human beings: after systematically numbing their humane responses, veterans find it difficult and painful to experience compassion for others.” The trauma of Vietnam finally had a human face.

According to Shatan, once the op-ed hit newsstands, “the telephone started jumping off the wall.”

 

In April 1973, just as the Watergate scandal was picking up steam, Shatan, Lifton, and a grab bag of veterans' advocates held a summit in St. Louis hosted by the Lutheran Synod of Missouri.
The brainchild of Mark Hanson, a Presbyterian minister and friend of Arthur Egendorf, the conference included ninety vets, sixty shrinks, thirty chaplains, and a handful of VA staffers who, according to Shatan, jumped on at the last minute. Impressed by Egendorf and the work of the New York group, Hanson, who worked at the National Council of Churches building in upper Manhattan (known at the time as the “God Box”), had launched a one-man offensive, setting up rap groups across the country. Also in St. Louis were Shad Meshad and Ron Kovic from Los Angeles, a former military chaplain from San Diego named Bill Mahedy, and Jack McCloskey and Chester Adams from San Francisco, who had started a group called Twice Born Men that ministered to a group of veterans recently released from prison.