Hard Men Humble: Vietnam Veterans Who Wouldn't Come Home

Book by Stevenson Jonathan

Chapter 1: Home Alone

You couldn't easily find a more marginalized group of men. Even many of their former comrades dismiss them as "the losers of the lunatic fringe." "What makes you think that the overwhelming majority of Vietnam veterans share anything with the misfits and malcontents who decided that they couldn't cope with life in America and choose instead to live in a third-world country where the women are subservient and the work ethic is virtually nonexistent?" So asks a former Vietnam tank commander.

There are close to a thousand expatriate veterans living in Southeast Asia. If their brethren disdain them, the rest of their countrymen simply do not care about them. They constitute an awkward, out-of-the-way fringe group of veterans of a war that most of us would just as soon forget. As a student put it to her professor, "I had the feeling you weren't supposed to ask questions about Vietnam. It's like some dark family secret that nobody wants to talk about around the children."

Certainly there are moments that force us to remember. Bob Kerrey talks of a long-ago mission that went awry. Robert McNamara offers an apology twenty-five years after the fact. Although the Reagan and Bush (senior) administrations engineered an apparent national reconciliation between the public and the veterans, in retrospect it may have been cynically aimed at galvanizing support for military interventions that carried the whiff of Vietnam. Whatever its purpose, it had that effect. Endorsed by two-thirds of Americans a year after it ended, the Gulf War was still deemed worthwhile by a statistically identical proportion on the tenth anniversary of the coalition victory in February 2001. Yet many Vietnam veterans felt slighted yet again when soldiers of the Gulf War -- an incomparably less bloody engagement -- received the festive homecoming and won the vicarious esteem that the Vietnam vets were denied.

For them the home front of cultural memory remains one of domestic betrayal lamented. Soldiers were castigated upon returning home in the sixties and seventies, and that was only the beginning. When they went to a movie theater or read a novel, they saw themselves depicted as sad sacks or nut cases. If they had few job skills, they found traditional heavy industries depressed and jobs hard to come by. The counterpoise of strife and respite -- a comfort, if not a salvation, for a generation of British men after the Great War and American men after the Second World War -- was rendered difficult by the roiling protest at home, then by the cultural amnesia that healing was deemed to require.

Vietnam has become the antihero's war. Having served there confers not so much a patina of dutifulness as the unhealable scars that come from staring into a moral abyss. For some men on the edges of society, lying about soldiering in Vietnam has become a popular way to glom the prestige of hard experience, made all the more credible by the fact that it was not necessarily even something to be proud of. In the 1998 book Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History, B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley compiled thousands of instances of homeless men and others purporting to be Vietnam veterans traumatized by the war. They turned out never to have set foot in-country at all, lied about their experience to get government benefits, or were never even in the military. A guy in Central Park wearing a fatigue jacket tells you he's a Nam vet and asks you for subway fare; you flip him a token before you realize he couldn't have been more than two years old when Saigon was evacuated. A convict on death row for murder convinces three networks and a parole board that Vietnam War trauma made him do it when he was never in combat. Acclaimed historian Joseph Ellis lies to students and journalists about having served in Vietnam and then protested the war, apparently to enhance his claim to have participated in history. These anecdotes, more than any admirable exploits of actual Vietnam soldiers, have bored deeply into public consciousness.

There were, of course, plenty of American heroes in the Vietnam War. Will they ever get their due? Hundreds of expat vets have given up hoping. Some of their stateside fellows have simply stopped talking about the war, and have reached an uneasy truce with the hostile attitudes that pop up unbidden from even the kindest of strangers. For those several hundred expats, however, such obscure and unanswered doubts are unacceptable.

Strategically dubious and morally ambiguous, Vietnam remains the hard case. Whereas World War II made the twentieth "the American century," Vietnam jeopardized that tribute. Intervention in Vietnam did not clearly enable either Americans or Vietnamese to live better lives. As a consequence, nobody's "good life" can vindicate the deaths of those who perished. Perhaps World War II has forced an unfair burden on Vietnam veterans. After all, murky moral purpose and senseless violence have been the rule of war, not the exception. Slightly redrafting the map of Europe hardly justified the idiotic carnage of the First World War. The U.S. Civil War was organized suicide. From the Iran-Iraq War back to the Hundred Years War, millions of men have died for dubious reasons. With Vietnam, war merely reverted to moral ambiguity. The Cold War geopolitics underlying the Vietnam War was far harder to understand than Hitler's evil.

The Worst War in History?

In his classic study The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell traces much of modern Western society's -- especially Britain's -- collective sense of irony to the immense discrepancy between what was expected of World War I (glory and heroism) and what actually emerged from the trenches (morbid attrition and anonymous death). On this criterion, Vietnam should be a comparably rich source of irony for Americans: they anticipated a military cakewalk and in fact got an agonizing defeat.

For Americans Vietnam marked the decisive termination of the tradition of romanticizing battle, the end of war's status as "the great adventure." In Europe, this cultural watershed occurred earlier, after the First World War. But during that war, nationalism, brotherhood, and perhaps a tinge of homoeroticism flourished, and perfumed the incomparable terror of trench warfare. The Great War in Britain's modern memory has remained an inspirational source of strength through another devastating world war and beyond. To this day nearly everyone in Great Britain wears a red paper poppy during the week of Veterans' Day, remembering Flanders fields. British television news broadcasts celebrate events that do not qualify as triumphs, like the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in May 1940. Not so with Vietnam. It produced no Blundens and no Graveses, no Owens and no Sassoons, to memorialize the finer aspects of national service in a cynical war.

This departure had plenty to do with the rise of realism in general, and with the trend, during the war-ridden twentieth century, toward de-romanticizing war, which is quite independent of what happened in Vietnam. The war also coincided with the dramatization of violence via the television camera. The result is that Americans regard Vietnam as uniquely tainted. While some (mostly veterans) respectfully affix Stars-and-Stripes pins to their lapels, they offer no gestures comparable to the reverence of the British for valor in victory and defeat alike. Any war is hell. Vietnam was not the first war in which the indigenous population, putative benefactor of the foreigners' intervention, in fact resented them. And Vietnam certainly was not the only war in which expeditionary combatants found conditions less than ideal.

Atrocities occurred in Vietnam, as they do in all wars. But thanks perhaps to the My Lai massacre in March 1968, when a U.S. army company killed 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in South Vietnam, as well as unprecedented television coverage, atrocity as an idiom of combat is peculiarly associated with the Vietnam War. Just ask Bob Kerrey. The picture of the crazed GI exterminating "gooks" has reached mythical proportions, and the imagery to emerge from Vietnam establishes a visceral semicriminality rather than anything like good old-fashioned American heroism. As a group, Vietnam veterans are too often misremembered by sheepish contemporaries as drug-addled basket cases, shell-shocked baby killers, or treasonous "fraggers" who deserved the jeers and taunts that some received at Travis Air Force Base on their Date of Expected Return from Overseas -- the once-cherished "DEROS."

A 1979 Harris survey conducted for the Veterans Administration indicated that 52.3 percent of Americans over eighteen believed that Vietnam veterans had more serious problems than those of other wars; among teachers and employers, the figures were 68.4 percent and 59.7 percent, respectively. In the twenty years since, public perceptions have softened little. Yet Department of Veterans Affairs statistical surveys completed in 1999 reveal that Vietnam veterans compare very favorably both with their nonveteran contemporaries and with younger veterans and nonveterans in terms of educational attainment and level of employment. The DVA also puts the number of suicides among Vietnam veterans -- which other popular, professional, and clinical sources have pegged at 60,000 to 100,000 -- at no higher than 20,000.

Vietnam veterans haven't done so badly, but they did miss the parade. They remain frustrated that their fellow Americans seem not to understand that the futility of that war does not necessarily diminish every man who fought it. Americans yearn for moral clarity that the Vietnam War, like most wars, cannot provide. Signally lacking strategic coherence and logistical definition from the start, Vietnam presents an especially daunting narrative. Even veterans groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion at times have derided Vietnam vets as "losers."

Succeeding generations of nonservers -- at their most charitable -...