Bringing the Viet Nam Vets Home

By LANCE MORROW

For a long time now, the chief ceremonial function of Memorial Day has been simply to inform Americans that their summer has begun. Of course, residual touches of drum-thumping Americana still cling to the occasion--men in deep middle age parading up and down the holiday, strutting the flag. It is a formal rite of remembering, but remembering at a major distance. In their V.F.W. or American Legion caps the old soldiers have long since made peace with their generation's war. They have worn their memories of combat smooth with the retelling. They have grown easy with what they did for their country as young men; they won, and they are proud of it. The horrors that they saw--or performed--so long ago in other countries have been effaced by time, by the approval of history and of the nation they fought for.

The soldiers who fought America's latest and longest war, in Viet Nam, do not participate very often in Memorial Day parades. The U.S. has not developed a moral context for them yet, and no one parades without a moral context. A nation does not fondly celebrate the memory of its convulsions.

Viet Nam arrived in the American mind like some strange, violent hallucination, just when the nation was most prosperous and ambitious, shooting spaceships at the moon. Sweet America cracked open like a geode. The bizarre catastrophe of that war shattered so much in American life (pride in country, faith in government, the idea of manhood and the worth of the dollar, to begin the list) that even now the damage has not yet been properly assessed. When the country came to, some time in the mid-'70s, it was stunned. In moral recoil from the military failure and the huge, lurid futility of the excursion, Americans did a humanly understandable thing: they suppressed the memory of Viet Nam. They tried to recover from the wound by denying it.

But of course the veterans of Viet Nam were tangible evidence, the breathing testimony, that it had all been humiliatingly real. Whether walking straight or riding wheelchairs, whether prospering at their work or glaring out at the rest of the nation from a daze of rage and drugs and night sweats, they reminded America that the war had cost and that it had hurt. For years, at least some part of every Viet Nam veteran has inhabited a limbo of denial--the nation's or his own--often overcome by guilt and shame, and almost always by anger. Among other things, he has tended to think of himself as an awful sucker to have risked so much for so little. Most veterans (contrary to stereotype) have readjusted reasonably well to the civilian world. But many found that coming home was harder than fighting the war.

After World War I and World War II, the soldiers returned together with their units; they had the long trip back in which to hear each other's confessions and apologies. And of course the piers in New York or San Francisco were crammed with waiting wives and children, the grateful nation craning to get a look at its boys, its heroes. During Viet Nam, in keeping with an almost sinister Government tendency to treat the war as an elaborate bureaucratic illusion, the military shipped people out alone and brought them back alone. The process caused surreal dislocations: one day in a firefight in I Corps, the next day standing on the American tarmac somewhere, as if nothing had happened. One veteran remembers the awful solitude of homecoming: "They let us off on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge. I had to hitchhike to the San Francisco airport because of a transit strike." The Americans who fought in Viet Nam responded when their country asked them to give up their freedom and possibly their lives to do violence in the name of something the Government deemed right. Veteran Ron Kovic's painful book Bom on the Fourth of July described how the image of John Wayne unreeling in the adolescent mind functioned as recruiting poster and subliminal role model. In any case, they went. But psychically at least, the country did not want them back.

Now that may be changing. A new attitude seems to be developing, in both Viet Nam veterans and the nation at large. Americans seem more disposed than at any time in the 13 years since the Tet offensive to admit that the Viet Nam veterans have borne too much of the moral burden for a war that went all wrong. If there is a burden to be carried, it should be assigned to the men who conceived and directed the war; or, more broadly, it should be shared--in the most profound explorations of which they are capable--by all Americans, including those who went to Canada.

The denial has been peeling away slowly for several years. An odd breakthrough occurred last January after the extravagantly emotional, almost giddy welcome home that America staged for the 52 hostages from Iran. The nation was an orgy of yellow ribbons and misting eyes. But then, a few days later, a countertheme surfaced. Viet Nam veterans watched the spectacle of welcome (the routes of motorcades lined with cheering, weeping Americans, the nation glued to its TV sets, the new President doing the hostages proud in the Rose Garden) and their years of bitterness boiled up to a choked cry: WHERE THE HELL IS MY PARADE? The nation, flushed from its somewhat too easy outpouring over the hostages, began acquiring the grace to admit that the Viet Nam veterans had a point.

Perhaps, too, enough history has passed to allow the country to proceed to the next stage, to acknowledge the Viet Nam veterans without setting off a civil war or a national nervous breakdown. Fresh history has added a few new perspectives. Ronald Reagan, who last August described Viet Nam as a "noble cause," nonetheless proposed to eliminate $691 million in benefits for the Viet Nam veterans, including $30 million for the 91 valuable and even lifesaving storefront veterans' counseling centers around the country. Congress will probably save the counseling centers and some other benefits, and lobbying groups like the Viet Nam Veterans of America may find allies now among the voters who were not there before.

It is difficult to generalize about the Viet Nam veteran. The TV scriptwriter's vision in the '70s pictured him as a damply sweating crazo-junkie who would erupt toward the end of the plot line and grease half of Southern California. A veteran named Glen Young took an elevator to a job interview recently and had a fellow passenger ask: "Are you one of the baby killers?"

A comprehensive group portrait of the veterans has become available in the past few weeks. The Veterans Administration has published a five-volume study of Viet Nam veterans by the Center for Policy Research in New York City. Viet Nam veterans, the study concluded, have been paying a disproportionate social price for their experience. The war tore loose the wiring in many of their lives.

But it is a mistake to view all Viet Nam veterans as profoundly troubled, as walking wounded. About half of the veterans, the study found, still carry disturbing, unsettling psychic baggage from Viet Nam. Even so, most cope pretty well. Americans may now be too quick to indulge in a "Lo, the Poor Vet" rhetoric. Dr. Arthur Egendorf, a Viet Nam veteran and a psychologist who was a principal author of the study, points out that those who pity Viet Nam veterans simply relegate them to the role of victim (which is not much help to the veterans). Liberals use their pity to help prove that the war was wrong. Some veterans, denied respect, make do with pity, and even trade on it. But that is sad.

Was the Viet Nam experience unique for those who fought it? History would have to go on a manically inventive jag to top Viet Nam for wild, lethal ironies and stage effects--"a black looneytune," Writer Michael Herr called it in his Viet Nam masterpiece Dispatches, Indochina became the demented intersection of a bizarrely inventive killer technology (all of those "daisy cutters" and carpet-laying B-52s and mad swarms of choppers and infra-red nightscopes) with a tunnel-digging peasantry in rubber-tire sandals: the amazing, night-dwelling Victor Charlie.

Still, Viet Nam was not unique in its effects upon the men who fought there. From Odysseus onward, almost all soldiers have come back angry from war. And they have had problems. In Elizabethan England, a disbandment of armies automatically meant a major increase in the number of thieves and highwaymen preying on civilians. In fact, veterans are almost always treated badly after a war, even if the brass bands do turn out for a ceremonial welcome home. During the '20s, the windows of the nation's pawnshops were filled with soldiers' medals for heroism from the Great War. Catiline, Hitler and Mussolini constructed their sinister power bases upon the grievances of veterans.

The fact is that fighting a war, any war, is a grisly, shattering business. Many men take years to recover from it; many never do. Curiously, societies almost always neglect their veterans for the first ten years after a war. Then the veterans get themselves organized into a political force (like the Grand Army of the Republic after the Civil War or the V.F.W. and American Legion after World War I) and politically extract the benefits and pensions that civilian gratitude or pity never got around to bestowing.

But Viet Nam was different from other American wars in one crucial respect: the U.S. lost it. When a man soldiers on the winning side, the social contract of arms holds up; the young conscript is asked to endure all discomforts of the field, including death, but if he returns, the grateful nation (though it may soon grow indifferent) promises at least a banal ration of glory, a ceremonious welcome, the admiring opinion of his fellow citizens. Sometime between Tet and the last helicopter off the embassy roof in 1975, America threw away its social contract with the soldiers and left them to straggle back into the society as best they could. A lot of them have still not made it.

But Americans can renegotiate the contract, can extract lessons and meaning from the disaster. They might begin by trying to help Viet Nam veterans restore their lives. Many veterans say that it is too late for rhetoric, too late for symbols such as the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial that will be built not far from the Lincoln Memorial next year. Such vets want concrete help: more assistance finding jobs, more time to use the G.I. Bill. They should get it. There is something notably irresponsible about a Government that dispatches its young to be chewed up in an obscure land and then does not know their names when it all goes bad. Among other things, that sort of disloyalty may make it difficult to recruit the young for future military enterprises.

But symbols and rhetoric are also incalculably important. The hostages' return last January, with its powerful, complex effects, was all ceremony and TV. Many veterans want chiefly to be thanked for what they did, for doing as their nation asked. They crave an acknowledgment, a respect from their fellow Americans that they have never had and may never get. The victor always gets respect, even if it is of a shallow and predictable kind. The veterans of Viet Nam are entitled to a deeper, different respect: the kind that goes to someone who has endured deep anguish, even failure, and survived.

Viet Nam still chokes Americans. The nation will not recover from it, or learn from all of that slaughter and guilt, until it acknowledges that the men who fought the nation's first teen-age war (average age: 19.2 years) did not cook up that war themselves in a mischievous moment. That was all of America out there. "It was a collective enterprise," says Dr. Egendorf, "and we were all damaged by it. A family melodrama is still going on. Sometimes a psychologist cannot treat the individual alone; he must see the whole family together."

America lost 56,480 men in Viet Nam, the last irreclaimable body count. The nation also misplaced many thousands of men and women who did make it home. To embrace them now may be a complicated, belated and awkward exercise, but it should be done--done with a clear historical eye, without pity or jingo or other illusions. It would mitigate an injustice and might even improve the nation's collective mental health. It would help to settle America's tedious quarrel with itself. Americans should be able to repeat Robert Lowell's line in a calm inward murmur: "My eyes have seen what my hand did."

--By Lance Morrow

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