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.
Two 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 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veterans who spurn this reconciliation and “get all they need down at the American Legion” may simply be those who have withdrawn the most deeply into their shells, and as we will see in our look at PTSD, the cost of that shell is significant.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 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 decade it was even rarer for two or more of them to get together after the war. In
For the Vietnam vet, the postwar years were long, lonely ones. But the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Memorial Day parades in their honor have fortified and cleansed them, and now they are finally beginning to find the strength and courage to reunite with long lost brothers and welcome one another home.
On returning from Vietnam minus my right arm, I was accosted twice… by individuals who inquired, “Where did you lose your arm? Vietnam?” I replied, “Yes.” The response was “Good. Serves you right.”
Even more important than parades and monuments are the basic, day-to-day attitudes toward the returning veteran. Lord Moran felt that public support was a key factor in the returning veteran’s psychological health. He believed that Britain’s failure to provide her World War I and World War II soldiers the support they needed resulted in many psychological problems.
If Lord Moran could detect a lack of concern and acceptance that had a significant impact on the psychological welfare of World War I and World War II veterans in England, how much greater was the adverse impact of the Vietnam vet’s much more hostile homecoming?
Richard Gabriel describes the experience:
The presence of a Viet Nam veteran in uniform in his home town was often the occasion for glares and slurs. He was not told that he had fought well; nor was he reassured that he had done only what his country and fellow citizens had asked him to do. Instead of reassurance there was often condemnation — baby killer, murderer — until he too began to question what he had done and, ultimately, his sanity. The result was that at least 500,000 — perhaps as many as 1,500,000 — returning Viet Nam veterans suffered some degree of psychiatric debilitation, called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, an illness which has become associated in the public mind with an entire generation of soldiers sent to war in Vietnam.
As a result of this, Gabriel concludes that Vietnam produced more psychiatric casualties than any other war in American history.
Numerous psychological studies have found that the social support system — or lack thereof — upon returning from combat is a critical factor in the veteran’s psychological health. Indeed, social support after war has been demonstrated in a large body of research (by psychiatrists, military psychologists, Veterans Administration mental-health professionals, and sociologists) to be more crucial than even the intensity of combat experienced.[45] When the Vietnam War began to become unpopular the soldiers who were fighting that war began to pay a psychological price for it, even before they returned home.
Psychiatric casualties increase greatly when the soldier feels isolated, and psychological and social isolation from home and society was one of the results of the growing antiwar sentiment in the United States. One manifestation of this isolation, noted by numerous authors such as Gabriel, was an increase in Dear John letters. As the war became more and more unpopular back home, it became increasingly common for girlfriends, fiancees, and even wives to dump the soldiers who depended upon them. Their letters were an umbilical cord to the sanity and decency that they believed they were fighting for. And a significant increase in such letters as well as many other forms of psychological and social isolation probably account for much of the tremendous increase in psychiatric casualties suffered late in that war. According to Gabriel, early in the war evacuations for psychiatric conditions reached only 6 percent of total medical evacuations, but by 1971, the percentage represented by psychiatric casualties had increased to 50 percent. These psychiatric casualty ratings were similar to home-front approval ratings for the war, and an argument can be made that psychiatric casualties can be impacted by public disapproval.
The greatest indignity heaped upon the soldier waited for him when he returned home. Often veterans were verbally abused and physically attacked or even spit upon. The phenomenon of returning soldiers being spit on deserves special attention here. Many Americans do not believe (or do not want to believe) that such events ever occurred. Bob Greene, a syndicated newspaper columnist, was one of those who believed these accounts were probably a myth. Greene issued a request in his column for anyone who had actually experienced such an event to
