The Forgotten Warriors

By LANCE MORROW

COVER STORY

A nation begins to understand, as the Viet Nam vets wait for their parade

Among the Monumbos of German New Guinea anyone who has slain a foe in war becomes thereby "unclean "... [He] must remain a long time in the men's clubhouse . .. He may touch nobody, not even his own wife and children; if he were to touch them it is believed that they would be covered with sores. He becomes clean again by washing and using other modes of purification.

--Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

Americans have always been good at homecoming ceremonies, the public splashes with which victors are cleansed: "The men will cheer, the boys will shout/ the ladies they will all turn out/ and we'll all feel gay/ when Johnny comes marching home."

After Kilroy crushed Tojo and Hitler, and sailed home en masse, all the nation came down to the docks: to wave the flag, to weep, to gather its own back into the American embrace.

Nothing was too good for those wonderful guys. The mere uniform made a man a hero: He could hardly pay for his own drinks. Congress stuffed his pockets with benefits. He joined the proud brotherhood of the "ruptured duck," the eagle that everyone wore in his lapel to prove he'd been in it, had done his part. The awful memories of combat and carnage were bathed away in the great national wash of relief and welcome. Hardly any Americans thought much then, or even afterward, about Dresden blasted, Hamburg gone, Hiroshima and Nagasaki reduced to radioactive powder. All of those American firestorms had, of course, consumed innocent civilians. But, the ceremonies said, never mind, evil went down for the count. Ego te absolvo. You boys did what you had to do. Where were you anyway--the Bulge? Anzio? Tarawa? Iwo? Say, that must have been tough. Tell me about it. Let me buy you another one.

The troops who went to Korea got a muted version of the welcome. But then came America's longest, strangest war. From that one, in Viet Nam, the boys came home alone, mostly one by one. Sometimes they would arrive in the middle of the night, almost as if they were sneaking back. It was an abrupt, surreal transition--36 hours earlier, they had been in Nam, humping through that alien place with too much firepower and confusion and moral responsibility on their backs. Then they were plucked out of their bizarre yearlong excursion, set down in commercial jetliners, the stewardesses passing among them like sweet American hallucinations, Hefner visions, and dropped out of the sky back into an America that had turned ugly. In Seattle, some pus-gut in an American Legion cap used to greet the boys by spitting at them. "Losers!" he screamed. "Candy-ass losers!"

A trooper would head for the bar and order a beer. "You got ID?" the bartender would demand. Well, it was the nation's first teen-aged war. An adolescent might be old enough to look upon (even to perform) horrors that would make Goya turn away. But back home, he was not old enough to drink. And in a day or two, if the soldier stayed in uniform, a fellow American would ask some stunning, stopping version of: "How many babies did you kill?" For many Viet Nam veterans, the moment of return, that bleak homecoming, was the beginning of a long rage.

The brick buildings of the Sepulveda Veterans Administration Medical Center lie low among acres of vacant grass in the hot afternoon sun of California's San Fernando Valley. In the lobby of Building Four, some men in their 30s congregate, self-consciously checking their watches. One is a musician; another a Los Angeles policeman; two are unemployed; two have police records. They have only one thing in common: Viet Nam.

Dr. David Lopata, a slim, bearded VA psychologist, lets the men into a conference room. It is the afternoon group therapy outpatient session for veterans suffering from a disorder called "posttraumatic stress." Several patients light cigarettes. Lopata asks softly, "Okay, where do we begin today?" A stocky blond veteran opens up slowly: "I don't feel that I trust anybody ... Maybe it's just that they don't understand. I don't know, but look at us. None of us at this table has any real friends." "How do you talk about what happened over there?" another asks.

As the session develops emotional focus, the American public emerges as an enemy to be distrusted, or more subtly, as a parent who has withheld love and approval so long that the veteran can think only to writhe in frustration, or lash back.

"They don't want to bring themselves to look at it," storms a heavy, T shirted man with blotchy skin. "They're the losers, man! We're the winners!"

"How do you deal with people who say, 'War's over, dummy, why can't you forget?' How many times you heard that one, right?"

A quiet Mexican American puts his postwar experience succinctly: "Other people got invited to parties. I got invited to fights." Everyone laughs.

"Does your wife understand?" Dr. Lopata asks. "She says she does," the man replies, "but I don't think she does."

The Los Angeles cop embarks on a dark soliloquy: "If I don't have a piece [a gun], I feel naked. That's why I became a cop, I think, because I got to carry a piece. In Nam, killing was a job, you look at somebody like a piece of hamburger. I just feel like telling someone who's bothering me, 'You know, I could blow your ass away.' I walk away ... What the hell am I doing here? I don't think we lost. Am I weak? What did I do wrong? I did my job ... The concrete we laid, the jungle we cleared! What happened to the South Vietnamese who fought with us? ... A month ago, I was going to commit suicide. It's hard for me not to think of blowing people away. I'm afraid of going back to work. I'm afraid of life."

The men's thoughts drop irregularly into their common pool of hurt.

"One half of the country said, 'You lost it.' The other half says, 'You're a goddamned sucker for having gone there.' And then there's the guy in the corner bragging about how he went to Canada."

"Yeah, and how many politicians' sons did you see over there?"

The frustration of fighting the war comes back: "We couldn't shoot back. But they were allowed to blow us up all over the place. They train you to kill. Then they pull your teeth. They didn't let us do the job, and then on top of that, we come back and catch all the flak from people who thought we were beasts."

"I had a great time till the war. What happened to that period of our lives? The war was nothing. It was insane. Stupid. And that busted up my life. It busted up everybody's life."

After two hours, the session is over. One of the vets ends sadly: "I want to rise out of the ashes with a little of what I left behind."

Well, everyone is getting older now. A child who was born during the Tet offensive of early 1968 is already a teenager. The last helicopter went whumping ignominiously off the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon more than six years ago. And the Viet Nam veterans are not kids any more. They are losing hair and getting fat and sighting down the road toward middle age. Why is it that so many of them, so many of those Americans who fought the war, still return to it with sharp, deep, sometimes obsessive memories--tonguing the bad tooth, re-enacting the most vivid playlets of pain and horror? Why can't they let it go? Bad war. Sorry about that. Now get on with it, son, you're pushing 40.

In the summer of 1981, the war in Viet Nam is re-emerging as an item of profoundly unfinished moral and psychological business. It is not so much a nasty secret as a subject that Americans tacitly agreed not to discuss for a time.

Some 2.9 million Americans served in Indochina. The majority of them managed to put their lives together after the war and proceed calmly enough. They have their careers, their children, some memories --not always unpleasant--of Indochina.

But nearly 100,000 vets came back with severe physical disabilities: fast evacuation by helicopter and excellent medical care saved thousands of men--many without arms and legs--who might otherwise have died. Another 50,000 fear that they may have got cancer from the blitzing American herbicide Agent Orange.

But the real devils of the war work in the mind. Something like a quarter of those who served may still be suffering from substantial psychological problems. They get flashbacks, nightmares, depression, startle reactions, and that wild red haze of rage in the brain when self-control goes and adrenaline shakes the whole frame, and some terrific violence struggles to cut loose. That is Viet Nam combat doing its wild repertory in the theater of a vet's nerves.

The nation energetically repressed the whole experience of Viet Nam for much of the '70s. All the logic of the Me Generation was actually headlong flight from the lethal surprises found in obscure Cochin China. Journalist Gloria Emerson, who wrote with brilliant indignation about the war, pronounced bitterly a few years ago: "We are a people who drop the past, and then forget where it has been put." But the war in Viet Nam cannot be discarded with impetuous American blitheness. The civic and psychic mechanics don't work that way. The men (and as many as 7,500 women) who served in the war brought back with them pain and problems -- rage and guilt, sorrows and confusions -- that have gone ignored and unattended for years. Now, at last, they seem to be commanding some attention.

The veterans returned in the elation of their sheer survival. But then, weirdly, they vanished into America's oblivion. This spring and summer some of them have been trying to rise out of that denial and make themselves visible. Some have staged protests reminiscent of the '60s, or of the old days of the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. But the exercises have been a bit forlorn. Last March, an ex-Marine named James Hopkins crashed his Jeep into the lobby of a West Los Angeles Veterans Hospital and blasted away at the walls with a pistol and rifle, screaming that he was losing his mind because of Agent Orange. Two months later, he was found dead with a jug of whisky and an empty pill bottle beside him. A former artillery sergeant, Steve Androff, 33, went on last week with a fast he began on May 27 in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. It is a vet's version of the I.R.A. protest, designed to coerce some attention to victims of Agent Orange. Over the July Fourth weekend some vets planned a demonstration on the site in Washington where a Viet Nam memorial will be built -- a dark, somberly graceful V of granite bearing the names of the 57,692 Americans who died in the war. It took the best part of a decade to get America to want that memorial.

Some veterans ruefully suspect that they are being merely patronized as this season's cause -- the moral equivalent of snail darters or baby seals. But the vets' anger, emerging now less encumbered by the old shame of the loser, less haunted by the guilt of the war's uniquely vivid violence, has a new force. It contains a certain aggressive pride, expressed almost for the first time. The Viet Nam veterans may have been knocked off the tracks of their careers by two or three years; they may not have caught up yet with their peers, but they now insist that they are a resource for the nation, not an embarrassment. They are taking on positions of influence--many are, at least.

Indeed, the new attention to the problems of the Viet Nam vet really does amount to something deeper than fad. The dimensions of the change are practical, symbolic and, in the widest sense, spiritual. Congress recently has been showing itself remarkably responsive to the veteran's needs, even in these days of Reagan's almost-everything-must-go budget cuts. Congressmen are sensitive to public sentiments. Besides, there are 31 Viet Nam-era vets sitting in Congress now. The Administration's plans to cut $131 million out of veterans' counseling, employment and education programs detonated real indignation among Congressmen and editorial writers. Among the programs on the hit list were the readjustment counseling centers that have helped more than 67,000 Viet Nam veterans since they opened in late 1979. These storefront operations allow Viet Nam vets to come in and talk to the only people in the world who seem to understand what they have been through: other vets. They literally and probably save men's lives. Last month, the House unanimously approved (388 to 0) a bill that would extend the counseling program for three years. In the same package, the House decided that Viet Nam veterans could qualify for treatment at VA hospitals if doctors determined that certain physical problems "may be associated with exposure" to Agent Orange or other chemicals. The House has also passed a program that would make qualified Viet Nam-era vets eligible for low-cost $200,000 Small Business Administration loans. Both the House and Senate agreed to extend for two years eligibility for the G.I. Bill's vocational and on-the-job training.

But this sort of legislation can only make a dent in the Viet Nam vet's profound sense of exclusion, his bruised conviction that America --a nation that cherishes almost an ideology of its own fairness--has done him deeply wrong. The vet's first port of call, the Veterans Administration, seems to him abundant evidence that the nation he risked his skin for cares very little in return. The VA is, they say, a $23 billion-a-year bureaucracy devoted mainly to older vets (the World War II generation), a social service agency dispensing health care not to the wounded-in-battle but the merely aged. Officials of the VA answer that many of these critics are unaware of benefits for which they are eligible.

The women who served in Viet Nam make a case against the VA as well. Their chief organizer in Washington is Lynda Van Devanter, 34, a nurse lieutenant who labored in an evacuation hospital in Pleiku in 1969-70. "Women veterans are the last minority," she says.

The symbolic--and emotional--change in attitude toward the Viet Nam veterans began last January. The extravagant, even slightly hysterical, welcome home that America proffered the hostages from the embassy in Tehran filled many vets with a sense of maddening unfairness. Business at the 91 veterans' counseling centers dramatically increased immediately after Americans festooned the nation from coast to coast with yellow ribbons. The 52 hostages, after 444 days of captivity, got lifetime passes to baseball games; thousands of Viet Nam vets, who spent years in a form of internal exile, had been rewarded with either contempt or oblivion.

One Viet Nam veteran in New York City spends all his days on his back porch, throwing lighted matches into a pail. Another has not been out of his house in ten years: a literal hostage to the war that goes banging on in his own mind. Robert Moore, 32, spent eight years hiding at home, before he joined a VA-supported outreach center in Queens. There, he and two other veterans work as a team to locate similar cases of radical withdrawal --men hunkered down in their little psychic tunnels, like Viet Cong staying safe from all that American rolling thunder.

Wives, mothers and brothers call every day to help vets who will not leave their rooms. After a vet in Rochester killed his mother and went berserk in a bank, the counseling center heard from hundreds of mothers who feared that the ex-teenager upstairs was a human bomb, waiting to explode and take his little corner of America with him.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (DSM-III), an official publication of the American Psychiatric Association, is the definitive word on psychological disturbances. Viet Nam veterans (along with rape victims, among others) achieved some psychiatric status when DSM-III in 1980 officially defined their suffering as "posttraumatic stress disorder." In such distress, a person develops vivid symptoms after a psychologically traumatic event that is outside the range of usual human experience: he or she grows numb toward the external world, or else hyperalert, jumpy, insomniac; in nightmares the event that brought on the trauma is obsessively replayed.

Mitchell Samples came out of Strange Creek, W. Va. The son of a coal miner, he is not the sort of man to question an order to report to his draft board: "The area I was from, I guess you would call real patriotic." Samples first saw action in June 1968 at Chu Lai. When he started firing at Viet Cong in a paddyfield, he told himself with a certain wonder, "This is fun." That day he won a Bronze Star for taking out a V.C. position at great personal risk. But there followed a different kind of killing. Samples came upon a Viet Cong gunner who was wounded, lying on his back, begging for help. "We radioed the company and said, 'What do you want us to do with him? He's still alive.' They said, 'Kill him.' So we did." Samples never discussed the killing with anyone. Ever. He never had problems readjusting to civilian life. But the killing haunts him a little now.

Viet Nam was different from other wars; that difference defines the distinctive isolation and grievance of many Viet Nam veterans. Douglas MacArthur warned against an Asian land war; he was right. There were no front lines. Reality tended to melt into layers of unknowability. The same person could be a friend and an enemy--the smiling laundress in the morning carried a V.C. satchel charge at night. The enemy might even be a child with a basket. The ambiguity made Americans twitch. "My Lai?" says Larry Mitchell. "There were lots of My Lais."

Larry Mitchell would know. He understands the murderous brew of rage and fear and firepower that produced My Lai. A Philadelphia-born black, Mitchell, 38, went to Viet Nam in 1965 as a sergeant in the Green Berets. "They told us that we were going to make the country a democracy," he remembers now. "I still thought of war in John Wayne terms: only the bad guys got killed." Mitchell was chastened in a hurry; he was rocketed a few minutes after he arrived in the combat zone. "You never saw the enemy. That was the most frightening part. Even though you shot thousands of rounds, you never saw no bodies but those of your friends. We knew the enemy was all around. But he was invisible."

Mitchell went back to Viet Nam for a second tour in 1967, this time as a lieutenant assigned to a combat squad. "The big thing when I came back," he recalls, "was the body count. It put pressure on you to kill." One day Mitchell was running a search-and-destroy mission in the Central Highlands. "As we approached the village," he says, "we drew fire. The shooting got started good. Then we got into the village and started going through it, house by house. I was searching one of the houses, when I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye. I just turned and fired a full clip. Then I looked ... It was a woman, maybe eight months pregnant. The burst had taken her right across the midline. The fetus was hanging out ..." His voice is halting and husky in the telling. "I was so cold about it. When we were adding up the dead, I counted the fetus. It was a body."

Mitchell spent most of 1968 lurching between alcoholic numbness--he was drinking a fifth a night--and the surreal alertness of hunt-and-kill missions. At his tour's end, he was captured by the Viet Cong and held for 2 1/2 years. Abruptly, in the spring of 1971, he was freed. His homecoming was "devastating." The American air was dense with hostility. Outside a veterans' hospital in New York City, Mitchell was pushed around by police who thought he had just held up a service station. Amazingly, Mitchell sought out war again--shipping off to fight as a mercenary with guerrillas in Angola. "This time," he says with some pleasure, "I was the Viet Cong." Today he is a highly respected social worker in Harlem and the director of public relations for the Congress of Racial Equality in New York City.

In World War II the military mission was clear. In Korea it was less obvious but discernible to most of those who fought there and to the nation that supported them. The men who fought in Viet Nam rarely knew why they were fighting; the mission degenerated to individual survival for one year--the soldier's obligation pared down to an irreducible cynicism. The ally did not help: the South Vietnamese military and government looked spectacularly corrupt. Tactics collapsed into an exhaustingly futile sequence: take it by day, lose it by night, fight to the death for a patch of incomprehensible land, then call in the choppers to pull everyone out. There was no standard of victory, of progress, except the slippery figure in the black bag: the body count. In-country, when no one was looking, some played games from Heart of Darkness, calculating the toll with ears around their neck. If a gook was dead, he was V.C.

War seldom makes sense. Viet Nam, from the viewpoint of those who fought there, made no sense at all, on any level. The typical Viet Nam firefight was intense, murderous, brief and utterly pointless--like a summer storm. What killed was almost always invisible, beyond the tree line or hidden in booby traps, trip wires, pungi sticks. Viet Nam was a land of unlikable surprise. The boys tamped down their antipathy to the place by taking drugs: grass, heroin, opium, speed. They had their talismans, their superstitions. They gave themselves nicknames: Delta Death Dealers, Ground Pounders, Jungle Eaters. HIGH ON WAR read the legend on the helmet, the brag of the oafish, ostentatious grunt who, having survived three months, concluded he was immortal. Of course, it is part of the lingering turmoil of Viet Nam that a lot of men who fought there did love the action: they had never felt so wildly alive as they did under fire. They took a sneaking pleasure in the power and shellfire and even the killing. The world since has seemed anticlimactic.

Richard Fulton, 37, of Los Angeles spent 28 months in Viet Nam as a Marine. "I died in Viet Nam," he says. "I had a lot of allegiance to the Marine Corps. I had no more allegiance to America." In Viet Nam, Fulton was sent into the bush to kill payroll masters and other important V.C.--a way of sabotaging enemy business. He saw combat. He stepped on a mine and spent time in the hospital.

He lost friends. More than that: he lost two brothers. All four Fulton boys joined the Marines. Two died in Viet Nam. The third came home with a heroin habit; one day he stepped into the street, shot a stranger, and was sent to Washington State Penitentiary. "We thought we were going to be like the Sullivans," says Fulton, referring to the five Navy brothers who died in the sinking of the U.S.S. Juneau in 1942. He wound up eating out of garbage cans on Los Angeles' Skid Row, but he eventually recovered.

When Fulton thinks of Vietvets, he thinks of blacks. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara encouraged them to enlist with his "new standard" programs--mental and physical standards were lowered in 1966, supposedly to help blacks and other minorities get ahead. Alas, it merely coaxed them more quickly into the freshman class of cannon fodder. Fulton is a little off the point: the injustices of recruiting for Viet Nam involved class more than race. It was the lower-middle and lower classes, regardless of race, who went to shed blood, while their betters observed from society's good seats.

Viet Nam was like a complicated and painful death in the American family. The war and all the vividly theatrical, surrounding violence of the '60s profoundly damaged the nation's spirit, its faith in itself, its authorities, its institutions. Citizens no longer knew what their citizenship meant; men no longer knew what their manhood demanded. The war cost more than Americans could immediately pay. It put the nation into a kind of mourning; perhaps Americans will not be rid of the experience until they have passed through the customary stages of grief: denial, anger, depression and, ultimately, acceptance.

If that is true, a revived concern about the Viet Nam veterans reflects an end to denial--perhaps even to anger. Says Yale Psychiatrist Art Blank, himself a vet: "America is trying to confront Viet Nam through the veterans; the country had suppressed the war, didn't want to deal with it." Now the nation may be evaluating the long-term damage.

For years, publishers and literary agents assumed that Americans were terminally exhausted on Viet Nam; books on the subject would not move. A buried --and elitist--corollary of that theory held that since the nation's best and brightest sat out the war under the protection of draft exemptions, the less literate men who went to do the fighting were incapable of producing a literature of the war. Certainly they could not create anything comparable to the splendid output of the English after World War I --the generation of Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon.

But Viet Nam has brought forth excellent work: Ron Glasser's 365 Days, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, James Webb's Fields of Fire, Phil Caputo's A Rumor of War. Now, more veterans seem to be emerging from their long, isolated silence. They have recorded their memories of the war in two new oral histories: Al Santoli's Everything We Had and Mark Baker's Nam. A group of actors led by Tom Bird have formed the Veterans Experience Theater Company in New York City. T.J. Anderson, Fletcher Professor of Music at Tufts University, is working on an opera called Soldier Boy, Soldier, about the readjustment problems of a black Viet Nam vet. A San Francisco veteran named Tad Foster has come forth with a mordant collection of cartoons called The Viet Nam Funny Book. The Viet Nam War is even, finally, good for laughs.

Georgia-born Blake Clark, 35, now works the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, drawling through a nervy routine that may prove Americans are far enough away from Viet Nam to find it unexpectedly funny. "Hi," Clark begins, bunking into the lights. "I'm a veteran, went to Viet Nam. It's always hard to say that. People have these preconceived notions about you. They think we're all crazy, on drugs, weird, strange, deranged." Pause. "Pretty well sums up my life." He tells the audience about flying into Atlanta in 1971, dressed in his Army uniform: "I was walking through the airport. This guy comes up and calls me a warmonger and a murderer. He called me that!" Another pause. "So I killed him." The audience explodes with laughter.

"People can now see the comic pathos of Viet Nam," says Clark. "They would not have laughed five years ago. It would have been like going to a funeral and laughing." For a long time, Clark could not joke about Viet Nam. As a second lieutenant in the infantry, he "found war" in 1971, during the 72-day incursion into Laos known as Dewey Canyon II. Of the 35 men who set out with him in his platoon, only eleven returned. Clark later went through the familiar agony of nightmares and flashbacks. "There were times when I was hell to live with," he recalls. "In 1975, when they had all those TV specials on Viet Nam, they would show coffins with flags draped on them. I knew people in those coffins, and I would just cry."

Viet Nam brought on a cultural civil war in the U.S.--a deep and basic fracture. The conflict within the immense baby-boom generation--the Americans who came of age just in time for Viet Nam --almost amounted to this century's equivalent of the War Between the States. But now, here and there, are signs that the terrible poisons and destructive intractabilities of the time are yielding to some charity and acceptance. Many antiwar activists are learning a certain sympathy for the Viet Nam veterans that they never displayed before. Says Journalist Doug Kamholz, an antiwar radical in the '60s: "I have been feeling guilty about blaming the war on the warriors. I never yelled 'baby killer,' but I didn't oppose it either. It was a moral and political mistake for the antiwar movement not to see the difference. I hope it's not too late."

One veteran who is trying to reconcile those who served and those who did not is James Webb. A much decorated, twice-wounded Annapolis graduate who led a company of Marines in Viet Nam, Webb recently resigned as minority counsel to the House Veterans' Affairs Committee to devote full time to writing. "We're going to lead this country side by side," Webb says of those converging constituencies.

"We're going to have to resolve this. The easiest way is for people who didn't serve in those years to come off this pretentiousness of moral commitment and realize that the guys who went to combat are the ones who suffered the most. They are also the ones who gave the most." For that reason, Webb believes, the Viet Nam vets "in the aggregate are probably the strongest people in their age group."

Are they? That raises an interesting Darwinian problem: Which group is stronger; which is fitter? The young who demonstrated their moral energy--as well as their social clout, often enough--by avoiding the draft, by staying in college or heading across to Canada? Or the so-called suckers who got caught in the draft? (Were they stupid? Patriotic? Defenseless?) Those suckers passed through a physical and moral test that the others (however principled their refusal) will never know. So which side came out of the argument the stronger? Which side is more fit now to exercise command? The answer had better lie in some form of collaboration.

Coming to terms with Viet Nam --"processing it," as psychologists say--is not merely an exercise in cultural diversion; the meaning that Americans extract from their failure in Indochina will substantively affect their future. Says John Terzano, a lobbyist for the Viet Nam Veterans of America: "We are products of the World War II generation. We were brought up with a high sense of duty, honor and service to our country. John Kennedy was talking to us when he said: 'Ask what you can do for your country.' The generation following us is going to look at us like we looked at our parents. They'll see how we were treated and make decisions based on that." Terzano argues that unless Viet Nam veterans receive both practical help and symbolic acknowledgement of the sacrifice they made, younger Americans will be left with the inescapable impression that only suckers sign up--that service merely invites contempt.

The moral emptiness in the eddies of Viet Nam recalls the funk and disillusion that followed World War I. Someone has suggested that the U.S. after Saigon fell was something like Germany after 1918. The analogy, farfetched and literally false, contains a touch of truth. World War I was hard to beat as an example of dunderheaded, pointless slaughter. The men who fought it hated it just as much--and even in the same vocabularies--as the men who fought in Viet Nam. They went into it with the same illusions: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, Horace told the boys in the public schools. John Wayne played the part of Horace in America. But finally, after Passchendaele in 1917, Lieut. General Sir Launcelot Kiggell saw the thing honestly. He looked out at the mud-soaked fields, burst into tears and muttered: "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?"

The mark of a first-rate intelligence, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, is the capacity to entertain two contradictory propositions in one's mind simultaneously without going crazy. The Viet Nam era had its psychotic moments. It may be a sign of American mental health, and intelligence, that the nation is ready to try to repay its complicated debt to the men and women who left their youth in Viet Nam, doing what their country asked them to do. Those who went to Viet Nam (whether they were volunteers, or draftees dragged there kicking and screaming) suffered through a violent complexity. It may have been meaningless. Or perhaps the war should instruct the nation in several dozen ways. Viet Nam was a painful learning experience for America, a civics lesson that dealt out violent penalties on both sides.

Joyce, a 26-year-old woman from Georgia, met her husband Don in 1972, six months after he returned from Viet Nam. He told her funny stories about the war. He did not tell her the scary ones about how, as a scout for the 101st Airborne, he would disappear into the jungle to search out enemy positions and kill Viet Cong stragglers. Joyce and Don were married. Then Don began an agony of delayed stress: sudden flashbacks, explosions of anger, a restlessness that propelled him from job to job. Joyce heard about the Atlanta vet center on a TV commercial. The couple went to a rap session there. It was a revelation for Don, who still attends meetings at the center every Wednesday night. He's doing well now, and so is the marriage. Joyce would like to see the counseling program expanded--and one thing more. Says she with a wan smile: "I'd love to see a great big parade--one time, national." --By Lance Morrow. Reported by Jeff Melvoin/Los Angeles and Peter Staler/New York, with other U.S. bureaus

With reporting by Jeff Melvoin, Peter Staler, other U.S. bureaus

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