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.[43]
In the same way, many soldiers “self-prescribed” marijuana and, to a lesser extent, opium and heroin to help them deal with the 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 out” 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,
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 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
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” 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 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 surrender of the enemy, and many veterans bitterly understood that it wasn’t really over, over there.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union 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 won 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. Now the Russians themselves will concede the evils of communism. Hundreds of thousands of boat people attest to the disastrous nature of the North Vietnamese regime. Now 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 won the war. And the war was worth fighting. Perhaps we can see
