There is a nexus of events and causation linking the death of enemy soldiers and the spittle of war protesters with a pattern of suicide, homelessness, mental illness, and divorce that will ripple through the United States for generations to come.
The 1978 President’s Commission on Mental Health tells us that approximately 2.8 million Americans served in Southeast Asia, and almost 1 million of them saw active combat service or were exposed to hostile, life- threatening situations. If we accept the Veterans Administration’s conservative figures of 15 percent incidence of PTSD among Vietnam veterans, then more than 400,000 individuals in the United States suffer from PTSD. Other figures place this number as high as 1.5 million veterans suffering from PTSD as a result of the Vietnam War. Whatever their numbers, there are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of them, they are four times more likely to be divorced or separated (and those not divorced are significantly more likely to have a troubled marriage), they represent a large proportion of America’s homeless population, and as the years go by they are increasingly more likely to commit suicide.
Thus, the long-term legacy of the Vietnam War upon American society is not just hundreds of thousands of troubled veterans, it is also hundreds of thousands of troubled marriages impacting women, children, and future generations. For we know that children of broken families are more likely to be physically and sexually abused, and that children of divorce are more likely to become divorced as adults, and that victims of child abuse are more likely to become child-abusing adults. And this is only one facet of the price this nation will pay for those personal kills in the jungles of Vietnam.
It may indeed be necessary to engage in a war, but we must begin to understand the potential long-term price of such endeavors.
The Legacy and the Lesson
Man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.
We may have enhanced the killing ability of the average soldier through training (that is, conditioning), but at what price? The ultimate cost of our body counts in Vietnam has been, and continues to be, much more than dollars and lives. We can, and have, conditioned soldiers to kill — they are eager and willing and trust our judgment. But in doing so we have not made them capable of handling the moral and social burdens of these acts, and we have a moral responsibility to consider the long-term effects of our commands. Moral direction and philosophical guidance, based on a firm understanding of the processes involved, must come with the combat training and deployment of our soldiers.
At the national strategic level, a recognition of the potential social cost of modern warfare has been obtained at a terrible price, and a form of moral and philosophical guidance gained from this experience can be found in the Weinberger doctrine — named after Caspar Weinberger, secretary of defense for President Reagan. This doctrine represents an initial attempt to form the kind of moral direction and philosophical guidance that can be built upon the lessons of Vietnam. The Weinberger doctrine states that:
• “The United States should not commit forces to combat unless our vital interests are at stake.”
• “We must commit them in sufficient numbers and with sufficient support to win.”
• “We must have clearly defined political and military objectives.”
• “We must never again commit forces to a war we do not intend to win.”
• “Before the United States commits forces abroad, the U.S. government should have some reasonable assurance of the support of the American people and their elected representatives in the Congress…. U.S. troops cannot be asked to fight a battle with the Congress at home while attempting to win a war overseas. Nor will the American people sit by and watch U.S. troops committed as expendable pawns on some grand diplomatic chessboard.”
• “Finally, the commitment of U.S. troops should be as a last resort.”
The Weinberger doctrine represents, in part, the recognition that a nation that sends men out to kill must understand the price that it may have to ultimately pay for these seemingly isolated deeds in distant lands. If this doctrine and the spirit in which it is intended prevails, it may prevent a recurrence of the Vietnam experience.
But this is just the beginning of a basis for understanding the potentially devastating social costs of modern war at other levels. Commanders, families, and society need to understand the soldier’s desperate need for recognition and acceptance, his vulnerability, and his desperate need to be constantly reassured that what he (or she) did was right and necessary, and the terrible social costs of failing to provide for these needs with the traditional acts of affirmation and acceptance. It is to our national shame that it has taken us almost twenty years to recognize and fulfill these needs with the Vietnam War Memorial and the veterans’ parades that have allowed our veterans to “wipe a little spit off their hearts.”
The military also must understand the need for unit integrity during and after combat. We are beginning to do so with the army’s new personnel system (which assigns and replaces whole units instead of single individuals in combat), and we must continue to do so; and like the British, who took their soldiers home from the Falklands by long, slow sea voyage, we must understand the need for cooldown periods, parades, and unit integrity during the vulnerable period of returning from war. During the 1991 Gulf War it appears that we generally got these things right, but we must make sure that we always do so in the future.
The psychological, psychiatric, medical, counseling, and social work communities must understand the impact of combat kills on the soldier and must attempt to further understand and reinforce the rationalization and acceptance process outlined in this book. In their 1988 research on PTSD Stellman and Stellman, both chemists by training, were the first to conduct a large-scale correlation study on the relationship between combat experience and PTSD. They reported that the “great majority” of veterans turning to mental-health services were not asked about their combat experiences, let alone their personal kills.
Last, we must attempt to understand the basic act of killing, not just in war, but throughout our society.
A Personal Note
“Who the f*** are the two guys up here with the machine gun?” I asked, slinking back over the edge of the cliff.
“That’s gotta be Charlie, you asshole… Blow their ass up and run….”
They didn’t know I existed. Low underbrush shielded the edge of the cliff from their view, but I sure as hell saw them. My body started to shake and spasm as I rested my elbow on the hard laterite. I sighted down the barrel and put the front sight under one guy’s chest. He was sitting closest to the machine gun, and he would die because of it.
This is one f***ed up way to die, I thought as I squeezed softly on the trigger.
The explosion of the round roared like a cannon in my ear. My target flattened out, and for an instant I couldn’t tell if he ducked or had been hit. The doubts disappeared when I saw his foot quiver and his body shudder
