The Violent Veterans

Like many a Texas barroom brawl, the fight between a Viet Nam veteran and a friend in the Panhandle town of Phillips was ostensibly over a girl. But by the time it ended, the friend lay dead of seven gunshot wounds. The veteran, a former Green Beret, dazed and thinking he had just killed an attacking Viet Cong, was stripping the body so that it could not be rigged with booby traps.

For Harvard Sociologist Charles Levy, whose testimony saved the veteran from a murder conviction (he was acquitted), the bizarre case underscored the kind of psychological disorientation suffered by many G.I.s long after returning from Southeast Asia. Over a two-year period, Levy has studied a randomly selected group of 60 ex-Marine combat veterans in an Irish working-class neighborhood of Boston. Through interviews, rap sessions and conversations in bars, he discovered a common tendency on the part of his subjects to carry into civilian life the unbridled violence that served them well in combat. "They have learned to react violently, spontaneously and without premeditation," says Levy. "It's a situation that keeps them alive over there, but gets them into prison back here."

Veterans of other U.S. wars were also trained to be killers, but the readjustment problem seems more pronounced among Viet Nam veterans. That may be, according to Levy, because of some G.I.s' inability to direct their hostility primarily against the enemy in Viet Nam. Instead, they grudgingly learn to admire the courage and skill of the Communists, and often vent their anger against their South Vietnamese comrades, whom they see as inept, and against their own officers, sometimes brutally injuring or killing them.

Once back home, Levy discovered, some of the veterans still treated allies like enemies. Relatives and friends often took the place of officers and the South Vietnamese as targets for misdirected hostility. One ex-Marine told the sociologist: "When I got back from Viet Nam, my sister yelled at me. I split her leg open with a lamp. Then my mother said something to me one night and I threw a portable TV at her. It makes you an animal. You can't reason." At times, the connection between the veteran's Viet Nam experience and the present is more explicit; at least twice a member of the group indulged his hatred for "gooks" by attacking a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. During the two-year study, two of the 60 subjects have been indicted for murder, and five have been charged with attempting it.

Levy concedes that many of the subjects of his Boston study group were probably violent long before going to war. "But the level of violence has now changed," he insists. "Now it has no boundaries." As a result, the veterans themselves are dominated by a fear of their own brutality, a fear that in turn discourages them from seeking employment or even normal social interaction.

Berries. Some of Levy's veterans are dropouts from society--drug-using "heads" or alcoholic "berries." But a number of them have managed to capitalize on their wartime experience. One typical ex-Marine whose service record helped him land a job in the police department explained that his reason for becoming a cop was "to get those hippies and niggers." Another who learned "staging"--which involves occupying enemy buildings--has put his skills to use as a burglar.

To help the Viet Nam veteran adapt psychologically to civilian life, Levy believes the military should place as much emphasis on preparing the soldier for peace as it does training him for war. This, he says, could be accomplished by setting up store-front readjustment centers, which he likens to "boot camps in reverse." There, veterans about to be discharged could receive legal and psychological guidance for re-entry into the world of the civilian.

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