Those Who Have Borne the Battle (33 page)

In 1978 a committee of the American Psychiatric Association recommended a new edition of its
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
.
DSM-III
, published in 1980, included post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a clinical condition, a mental disorder. Approval of this by the committee, along with the retirement of Congressman Teague and the election of Jimmy Carter as president, with his appointment of Max Cleland as head of the Department of Veterans Affairs, facilitated approval of counseling as a VA service. In 1979 a Harris poll revealed that 52 percent of the respondents believed that the problems of Vietnam veterans were greater than veterans of World War II or of Korea. Only 3
percent thought they were lesser. And 94 percent agreed that the federal government should provide “psychological counseling or psychiatric treatment” for Vietnam veterans.

Doctors Ann Pollinger Haas and Herbert Hendin counseled Vietnam veterans beginning in the 1970s. In the early 1980s they published an important book describing the psychological trauma that some of these veterans carried. They wrote, “Our need to see our soldiers as heroes in war and to forget them in peace, and our tendency to regard their postwar difficulties as weaknesses interfering with our idealized picture of them, caused us not to notice that even heroes pay a high price for their wartime actions. Only since World War II have we begun to realize that killing, sustained exposure to the possibility of sudden death, and witnessing the violent deaths of friends have lasting traumatic consequences for a high percentage of combat soldiers.”
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The National Vietnam Veterans' Readjustment Study in 1983 did a comprehensive study of the incidence of PTSD among Vietnam veterans. It revealed that 15.2 percent of men and 8.5 percent of women who served in the Vietnam theater had symptoms of PTSD. It also found that 35.8 percent of the men who had “war-zone exposure” had these symptoms. Follow-up studies by the VA determined that more than thirty-plus years after the war, nearly 31 percent of the men and 27 percent of the women had PTSD symptoms. The later study revealed that “only a small number” of the veterans sought treatment for the condition.
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PTSD may have been finally clinically recognized following the Vietnam War, but it was a condition as old as war. Some Vietnam veterans also carried a clinical burden unique to their war. Between 1965 and 1971, American forces in Vietnam sprayed some eleven million gallons of the herbicide called Agent Orange on Vietnam jungles. It was part of a campaign to defoliate those areas that could provide cover and sanctuary for Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops. The 12th Air Commando squadron motto was “Only We Can Prevent Forests.”

Many American servicemen—and significantly more Vietnamese—were exposed to these chemical defoliants. By 1978 several hundred veterans claimed that their exposure to this product while in Vietnam had created health problems for them, and some described abnormalities
among children born after their return. Despite scientific claims and evidence dating to the 1960s that Agent Orange was a significant health risk, neither the government nor the chemical companies who manufactured Agent Orange were very sympathetic to these claims and allegations, so a number of the affected veterans organized.

In 1979 Mayor Ed Koch and some New York City officials agreed to have a ceremony honoring and thanking those who had fought in Vietnam. This was part of a national Vietnam Veterans Week. It was representative of the mood, and perhaps the clumsiness, in the years after the war of reconciling with these veterans. There were arrangements for speakers and for a band at a gathering in Central Park. It proved to be something of an embarrassment when only one hundred people turned out for the program. One of the speakers was Bobby Muller, a marine who had suffered paralyzing gunshot wounds during combat in Vietnam and was the organizer of a group called Vietnam Veterans of America. He had been featured in 1970 in a
Life
story showing horrible conditions in a VA hospital. In a ward with amputees and veterans suffering from paralysis, the patients were setting out their own rat traps to kill the rats that infested the hospital in order to protect those who could not protect themselves.
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They had learned in Vietnam to look out for each other.

A few days before the Central Park event, Muller told a reporter that while going to war was traditionally a defining experience in anyone's life, Vietnam veterans had learned to keep quiet about it. He said that “we came home and were told we were either fools or killers. Guys came home after this significant life experience and they've never had the opportunity to talk about it. It's torn people apart. It's unnatural.”
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When Muller spoke at the Vietnam recognition event, he got everyone's attention. The paraplegic was forceful and commanding, “punctuating his remarks by pounding his knee with a clenched fist.” He told them that five men who had been in his VA ward had committed suicide because the stereotypes were humiliating: “Lieutenant Calley types, junkies, crazed psychos or dummies that couldn't find their way to Canada.” He criticized the absence of support: “You people really ran a number on us. Your guilt, your hang-ups, your uneasiness, made it socially unacceptable to mention the fact that we were Vietnam veterans. Whenever we
brought it up, you walked away from the conversation.” Muller said, “That really hurts when you remember the pride we had. We fought hard and we fought well.” He reminded them that the marines had suffered more casualties in Vietnam than they had in World War II. (This was true of casualties, but more marines were killed in World War II than in Vietnam.) Muller urged all to remember of Vietnam that “it was a war.” After a standing and emotional ovation, Mayor Koch said, “They were sent to fight a battle and they fought it well and we have to thank them.”
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In the 1980s the momentum shifted, and the narrative moved to somewhere between heroes and victims. Neither of these labels fit comfortably on those who fought in the war. They understood the complexity of their service. They wanted others to begin to understand and to respect them as men who came when called. And they wanted those they had lost there to be remembered as young Americans who came when called and who sacrificed, to be remembered as real people with real lives that were never lived to the fullness of their hopes.

A number of veterans and their families joined in a class-action lawsuit against the major chemical companies that produced Agent Orange. In 1984 Monsanto, Diamond Shamrock, and Dow Chemical settled the suit. Many of the families were disillusioned at the size of the payments they finally received. In 1991 Congress finally approved the Agent Orange Act, which gave the Department of Veterans Affairs authority to proclaim certain conditions as presumptively caused by Agent Orange. Over the years the number of conditions that were covered under this legislation expanded. As of April 2011, the Department of Veterans Affairs had granted 47,985 claims under “presumptive” Agent Orange conditions. These totaled more than $1 billion. In 2007 the US government made a $3 million payment to Vietnam to help clean up some of the hot spots there and to assist with support for the estimated 200,000 Vietnamese victims of the herbicide.

The Vietnam Memorial in Washington would prove to be an important symbol of remembering, honoring, and reconciling—even if in its formative years it too got caught up in significant and emotional debates
over the design and the message. The focus and discipline and commitment of Jan Scruggs, who had been wounded while serving in the army in Vietnam, was critical for this process. He never wavered from his conviction that the veterans—and the country—needed to have the memorial. Scruggs believed that reconciliation could only follow remembering. He quoted from Archibald MacLeish: “We were young. We have died. Remember us.”

Robert Doubek, who signed on with Scruggs and helped organize fund-raising for the memorial with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, wrote, “The memorial will make no political statement regarding the war or its conduct. It will transcend those issues. The hope is that the creation of the memorial will begin a healing process.”
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It did, even if at the outset it fueled some divisions and caused in some ways the Vietnam veterans to continue to feel, uniquely among American war veterans, isolated and disrespected in an ungrateful nation.

President Jimmy Carter signed legislation in 1980 that authorized the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to raise money in order to establish a memorial on the National Mall in Washington. Carter had earlier provided a presidential pardon for all of those accused of draft evasion during the Vietnam War. He had regularly insisted that it was time for Americans to move beyond the divisions of Vietnam. Criticism of the war was appropriate; criticism of the warriors was not.

The National Mall site for the Vietnam Memorial was a prestigious address, and Scruggs and his group set out aggressively, if sometimes naively, to raise the money that it would need. They also established a committee to oversee a competition for the design of the memorial. Maya Lin, a Yale architectural student, won the design for two plain black walls, sloping with the ground and connected at a sharp angle, that would contain all of the names of the American servicemen killed in, or directly as a result of, service in Vietnam. The arts community was largely pleased; not all traditionalists were.

Opposition to the wall stemmed from some political assumptions and some aesthetic ones. Some veterans and their supporters believed that the group Scruggs had assembled was an antiwar group. Seemingly related to this was a reaction to the Maya Lin design as lacking any sense of
heroism or accomplishment. Ronald Reagan's secretary of the interior, James Watt, refused to sign off on the plan until there was agreement to incorporate there an American flag and a traditional statue, designed by Frederick Hart, representing servicemen in Vietnam. With some reluctance, the committee agreed.

Criticism of the Lin design was led by Vietnam veteran Thomas Carhart. He wanted a heroic memorial—Felix de Weldon's Iwo Jima statue that was the Marine Corps War Memorial was his example of such a structure, “heroic figures rising in triumph.”
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He was joined by Ross Perot and James Webb. The latter was a significant opponent, as he was a highly decorated Vietnam veteran who was originally on the committee. He believed that he had been misled and that the design was not sensitive to those whose names were inscribed there and was too influenced by war critics. It was not a design of “honor and recognition.” Charles Krauthammer called it a “disservice to history,” and Thomas Wolfe called the Lin design a “tribute to Jane Fonda.”
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Despite this significant criticism, the wall was constructed.

The belated Veterans Day 1982 Vietnam veterans' “homecoming” celebration and the dedication of the Wall were examples of the ongoing politics of the war. Those who sought a more “heroic” memorial continued to be frustrated that the Wall did not have any traditional statuary—the Frederick Hart statue
Three Infantrymen
had not yet joined Maya Lin's wall. There was also concern from some groups that the antiwar veterans movement had too much influence over the celebrations. This apprehension caused President Ronald Reagan finally to decline to appear at the dedication ceremony. It nonetheless proved to be an occasion when reconciliation truly began. In a ceremony at the National Cathedral, individuals, primarily Vietnam veterans and family members of those who were killed there, read each of the names on the wall. They started on November 10 and concluded on November 12.

The
Chattanooga Times
wrote of the dedication: “It is a good time for the nation to turn back to Vietnam, if only long enough to say we realize those who fought there were not responsible for the war and ought not to have suffered the extra burden of reproach. It is a good time to say thank you.” Columnist Mary McGrory observed of the Vietnam veterans, “Naturally
they had to organize [the “homecoming” parade] themselves, just as they had to raise money for their wall, just as they had to counsel each other in their rap centers, just as they had to raise the cry about Agent Orange.”
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In his inaugural in 1989, President George Bush pointed out that “the final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.” Four years later the World War II hero, Mr. Bush, was defeated by Bill Clinton, the “baby boomer” who had avoided the Vietnam War draft through deferments and who had been an antiwar student. These quite different men seemed to share at least a sense of the need to escape the divisions of Vietnam. Echoing President Bush's plea, President Clinton asked at his inauguration that the Vietnam War “not divide us as a people any longer.” Keith Beattie points to the irony of Bush and Clinton sharing this perspective but also notes that in each case, “Vietnam is foregrounded as a rupturing presence within American culture while
at the same time
it is used to evoke the need for unity.”
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This complexity was there at the outset. And it would not go away. Memories of Vietnam continue to shadow and influence our politics and our culture—and to provide another, more recent, set of instructional “lessons” of history. And as is often true of such rationalizations, the accuracy of the history or of the memory has not been crucial for many glibly to use it. If the “lesson of Munich” was often misused or misapplied by the post–World War II generation, at least most people understood the basic principle of what this lesson was. It would be hard to make the same generalization for Vietnam. This has not had any noticeable impact on those who have called upon it to justify any of a number of actions or inactions.
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