I was born in 1969. I have a few memories that date to the Vietnam era. My earliest political memory was the death, on December 26, 1972, of Harry Truman. I remember the gas lines from 1973. I remember Gerald Ford coming to Philadelphia for the 1976 bicentennial. I even remember Ford quoting FDR:
But, even though I can recollect a few political snapshots from my early childhood, I only became aware of Vietnam through the movies The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979).
I don’t remember anyone disparaging the service of Vietnam veterans. I never heard anyone call them ‘baby-killers’ or saw anyone spitting on returning vets. I’m sure it happened here and there, but it wasn’t part of my worldview.
Growing up in the liberal bastion of Princeton, New Jersey, it was an universal truism that Vietnam had been a blunder, but the men and women that served there were never blamed for the failures of our leadership in Washington.
And I will never blame Iraq veterans for the bad leadership of the Bush administration. Moreover, I will be active in making sure that Iraq veterans get better medical treatment than their Vietnam predecessors:
NYT
I am most disturbed to learn the following about my former Congressman, wingnut Chris Smith:
I’ve worked tirelessly against Chris Smith, who is so crazed in his opposition to abortion that he wont even visit the largest hospital in his district because abortions are performed there. But he doesn’t deserve this, and neither do the casualties of our ill-advised war in Iraq.
that this front-pager has recieved no comments yet.
Booman, as you may imagine, I am in total agreement with the thrust of your post, but — from a strictly historical accuracy point of view — I have to disagree with some of your assertions.
I understand you couch your remarks by saying that you personally did not experience certain things. Fair enough. But if I may give you the benefit of my expereience as a Vietnam veteran living through the time you refer to, most Vietnam vets felt that they were personae non gratae in society.
I agree, as I have posted elsewhere, that the whole myth of anti-war protestors spitting on returning veterans was just that — an urban myth that anyone who has investigated it, has been unable to find someone it happened to. But let me tell you Booman, in the late seventies, the American public were totally fed up with Vietnam, and all the divisiveness it caused in our society. People didn’t want to think about Vietnam, they didn’t want to talk about Vietnam, they didn’t want to deal with the fact that we lost. Vietnam veterans reminded people of the war, and people didn’t want to be reminded of it. There was tremendous ambivelence about what we as a nation had done there, and an unconscious societal desire to shift the blame elsewhere; the Vietnam vets were the natural recipients of that blame shift.
You mention you learned about Vietnam from the movies Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. So did a lot of other people. Of course, these movies had nothing to do with the reality of Vietnam (the first major movie that dealt with Vietnam in a realistic way was Platoon). They were allegories, fantasy tales that tried to convey “the truth” about Vietnam without dealing with the reality. And, in my opinion, these movies further alienated people from Vietnam vets, because we were these people who had somehow existed in this bizarre, unreal world that they were seeing on the screen, so we must be crazy for having lived through it. I can’t tell you how many people asked me if I ever saw or heard of the central metaphor from Deer Hunter — the “Russian roulette” scenes. It was fantasy, but people actually believed that happened.
Check out other B movies from the time, and television shows. See how many times when the plot called for a psychopathic killer totally unfeeling and unremorseful, they made him a Vietnam vet, and no other character motivation was necessary.
The tide turned in the early eighties. I can actually pinpoint it; it was the return of the hostages from Iran. As the hostages were being wined and dined and indulged in their fifteen minutes of fame, a number of people said, hey, what about the Vietnam veterans? We never treated them that way.
In one of my many incarnations during my life, I was Executive Director of the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, which raised private money to build a memorial for Vietnam veterans in NYC. We did a lot of fundraising on Wall Street, and we had Nam vets coming out of the woodwork down there to help us. I gotta tell ya, how many guys told me how they had NEVER before that ever let anyone at work know that they were a vet. To admit before then to vet status was to seriously jeopardize your chances of professional advancement.
One of the events we sponsored as part of the dedication of the memorial was a ticker tape homecoming parade for Vietnam veterans. Our homecoming parade — which we organized ourselves — happened TEN YEARS after the war finished. Now, why do you think that was?
I certainly hope that the Iraqi vets have it better than we did. Certainly, I will contribute every bit of knowledge and experience I have, and every trick I have in my trickbag, to help them.
If we are to make the lot of the returning Iraq vet what it ought to be, I just think we ought to be clear about what happened to Vietnam vets, so it will not be repeated.
treated the veitnam veterans I have met with respect and curiosity.
We may feel ambivalence towards our Iraq veterans too. But they must always receive the best we have to offer in care.
And they never should be blamed for the failures of their leadership.
Just trying to set the historical record straight (from my perspective).
Sorry for the delay in getting here but the ISP has been performing maintenance all morning…been in withdrawal…worse than running out of cigarettes…
Agreed that it was dicey to acknowledge Vietnam experience back then…we used to keep lists of employers that were vet-friendly and those that weren’t, and helped folks adjust their CV accordingly…for years I kept an article that I had seen in a business journal that advised against hiring Vietnam vets at all, on the basis that screening mechanisms were insufficient to differentiate between vets with problems – drugs, etc. – and those without. Sigh…
Also agree on the mythology of spitting on vets: in thousands of vets that I have met, I have yet to hears a single credible, personal anecdote – it is always a buddy, a cousin, or someone that they heard about. Ironically, it is almost always those who think “we lost because of the protestors, the media, and the politicians, and should go back and do it right” that are the ones who swear that this happened. Literal? Almost certainly not. Metaphor for the treatment received on return? Much more likely.
And most of all, agree that we carry a responsibility to go full out for today’s vets, as well as to make certain that what happened back then is never forgotten.
LV, do you stay in touch with any of the folks from the NY Memorial Commission? I knew several of them.
is in the diary I just posted The Spitting Image. I’d be very interested in your thoughts on Lembcke’s work.
Very interesting and illuminating comment, LeftVet.
I am not a veteran (I lucked out with the lottery–was 1-A but got a high number) but I was involved in anti-war activity. The stories about antipathy to vets, when they started to appear, puzzled me.
All of the anti-war groups I was involved with (outside of my church groups) were vet-heavy. If Vietnam veterans did not actually dominate, their presence was an extremely important one. At every demonstration I went to, the vets present were treated as heros–especially since they were heros who now wanted to save their “brothers in arms” from an insane war.
Your comment makes me realize that, yes, it was the desire to forget the war that hurt the vets. It wasn’t during the war that they were abused, but just after it. And it wasn’t the anti-war people responsible for the abuse but (and we should all be ashamed) every single one of us.
Thanks for your post and your service–even if it was in a war I opposed (that has no impact on the value of your service).
but it was nearly always the antiwar folks who came through for the vets in the early days, through the 70s, when things were at their worst. When we needed funding for the storefronts, they came through; when we needed to place someone in a job or get them admitted to a college, it was routine for the people involved to, at some point, identify themselves as having been in the anti-war movement.
Again, maybe my experience wasn’t universal, but we had the most difficulty with the older vets from WWII who were active in the traditional veteran organizations. Some of that may have been based on political ideology of the concept that we lost the war, but I think mostly it came from their perception that we were a threat to their iron-fisted control of the government veteran benefit mechanisms.
Trust me, you have nothing to apologize for – quite the opposite in fact.
My father was a WWII vet who was very anti-Vietnam. Sometimes, I think, he felt a little alone because so few of his fellows agreed with him.
Your father was a rare one indeed. My father was Republican to the core, and supported the war until my older brother and I both came back on stretchers, and then my younger brother nearly go drafted. It cut deep, but he changed.
My older brother to this day thinks we were right to be there, and I have been vociferously anti-war since before I left Vietnam.
Makes for intersting dialogue at Thanksgiving..heh
“The stories about antipathy to vets, when they started to appear, puzzled me.
The stories are more than puzzling. According to Lembcke in his book The Spitting Image, they were a very calculated effort to discredit the anti-war vets, who were the most credible opponents to the war. By discrediting all of the opponents to the war – by insisting that they were guilty of the reprehensible attacks on returning vets – they neatly discredited the vets active in the peace movement.
Diary with quotes from Lembcke here.