of the high points of his life, and today even just the remembrance of it tends to make his chest swell a little with pride.
Our truck driver, like the majority of returning vets, did not participate in a ticker-tape parade, but he would probably say that it made him feel good to know that vets were being honored. And next Memorial Day he did march in his hometown parade as part of the American Legion’s commemoration ceremonies. No one was making him do it, but he did it anyway because, well damn it, because he felt like it, and he would keep on doing it every year just like the World War I vets in his town had done as he was growing up.
Both our veterans generally stayed in touch with their World War II buddies, and they linked up with their old comrades in reunions and informal get-togethers. And that was nice, but what was really best about being a veteran was being able to hold your head high and knowing just how much your family, friends, community, and nation respected you and were proud of you. The GI Bill was passed, and if some politician or bureaucrat or organization didn’t give the vet the respect he deserved, well, buddy, they would have to answer to the influence and votes of the American Legion and the VFW, who would make damn sure you got treated right.
On our social-support scale, social support provided to these two veterans can be rated as very supportive. Not all returning World War II vets got this kind of support, and it was no bed of roses to return from combat under the best of circumstances, but their nation generally did the best for them that it could.
Remember that the relationship between the degree-of-trauma scale and the social-support scale is multiplicative. These two factors amplify each other. For our infantryman that means that his highly traumatic experience was largely (but perhaps not completely) negated by the very supportive social structure he returned to. Our truck driver, suffering very little trauma and having received a great deal of support, will probably be able to deal with his combat experiences. Our infantryman may tend to medicate himself pretty regularly down at the bar at the American Legion, but like most veterans he will probably continue to function and lead a perfectly healthy life.
PTSD in the Vietnam Veteran
Now let us consider two hypothetical Vietnam veterans, an eighteen-year-old infantryman and a nineteen- year-old truck driver. The infantryman arrived at the combat zone, like most every other soldier in Vietnam, as an individual replacement who didn’t know a soul in his unit. Eventually he engaged in extensive close combat. He killed several enemy soldiers, but the hard part was that they were wearing civilian clothes, and one of them, well, damn, he was just a kid, couldn’t have been more than twelve. And he had his best buddy die in his arms during a firefight. The trauma he endured definitely rates at the top end of the scale. Maybe fighting kids in civilian clothes, with no rear lines and no chance to ever really rest and get away from the battle, maybe that makes the trauma he endured greater than that of the World War II vet, but at the top of the trauma scale there probably isn’t much value in trying to distinguish between shades of black.
The truck driver also arrived alone, but although his job was the same as a World War II truck driver, the environment in which he had to do it had changed. There was no rear area for him, you could never really let your guard down, even when you were off duty, and convoys were one long hell of fear from ambushes and mines. It was like living in the Battle of the Bulge all the time. Convoys into base camps were often like some kind of “Relief of Bastogne,” and his truck was always armored and sandbagged in a way that a World War II truck driver would probably never even have considered doing. Fortunately, he never did have to shoot at anybody, but that was always a possibility, and he kept his weapon handy and loaded all the time, and plenty of people were shooting in his general direction on several occasions. Our Vietnam-era truck driver might rate low on the trauma scale, slightly higher than his counterpart in World War II, but not unmanageably so.
Our two Vietnam veterans departed the war the way they had arrived: alone. They departed with a mixture of joy at having survived and shame at having left their buddies behind. Instead of returning to parades, they found antiwar marches. Instead of luxury hotels, they were sent to locked and guarded military bases where they were processed back to civilian life in a few days. Instead of movies about the veteran, his struggles, and his vulnerable emotional state upon reentry into civilian life, the media prepared the American people by calling the returning veterans “depraved fiends” and “psychopathic killers,” and beautiful young movie stars led the accusing chant of a nation that echoed through the veteran’s soul: “Baby killers… murderers… butchers…”
They were rejected by girlfriends, spit on, and accused by strangers and finally dared not even admit to close friends that they were veterans. They did not show up for Memorial Day parades (which had gone out of style), they did not join the VFW or the American Legion, and they did not participate in any reunions or get- togethers with old comrades. They denied their experiences and buried their pain and grieving beneath a shell.
Some Vietnam vets had families and communities that could insulate them from this, but the vast majority had only to turn on the TV to find themselves being attacked. Even the most average of Vietnam vets endured an absolutely unprecedented degree of societal condemnation. On our social-support scale, our two Vietnam veterans rated at the “condemn” end of the scale.
Remember the multiplicative, amplifying relationship between trauma and social support. For our truck driver the interaction between his limited combat trauma in Vietnam and the societal condemnation that he endured afterward resulted in a total experience that might very well have been more conducive to posttraumatic stress than that experienced by a veteran of close combat in World War II. For our infantry veteran of Vietnam the magnitude of the total trauma experienced is beyond description.
The diffusion of responsibility that happens in combat is a two-way street. It absolves a killer of a part of his guilt, diffusing it to the leaders who gave the order and the truck driver who brought the ammo and hauled back the bodies, but it does so by giving a piece of the killer’s guilt to others, and those others must then deal with it just as surely as must the killer. If these “accessories” to killing in combat are accused and condemned, then their slice of the trauma, guilt, and responsibility is amplified, and it will reverberate in their souls as shock and horror.
The Vietnam vet, the average vet who did no killing, is suffering an agony of guilt and torment created by society’s condemnation. During and immediately after Vietnam our society judged and condemned millions of returning veterans as accessories to murder. At one level many, even most, of these horrified, confused veterans accepted society’s media-driven, kangaroo-court conviction as justice and locked themselves in prisons of the worst kind, prisons in their mind. A prison whose name was PTSD.
I have known these men, both our two “hypothetical” World War II vets and our two Vietnam vets. They are not hypothetical at all. They are real. Their pain is real. Societies that ask men to fight on their behalf should be aware of what the consequences and what the price of their actions may so easily be.
CHAPTER FOUR
PTSD and Vietnam: A Nexus of Impact upon Society
For the Vietnam infantryman in the example in the last chapter, the condemnation upon his return amplified the horror of his combat experiences to result in a staggering degree of horror. By the very nature of its unique historical causation, the existence of any significant number of individuals in such a condition is unprecedented in the history of Western civilization.
Although this model only crudely reflects what has happened, it begins to represent the relevant forces.[46] Statistics on the horrible number of suicides among Vietnam vets, on the tragic number of homeless who are Vietnam vets, on divorce rates, drug-use rates, and so on, give evidence that something has occurred that is significantly, startlingly different from that occurring after World War II or any other war our nation has ever encountered.[47]
