The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (review)

Among the images of the Vietnam War burned into the American consciousness was that of the drug-addicted veteran—unstable, constantly on the verge of a breakdown, a living casualty of an immoral conflict. It is this symbol that Jeremy Kuzmarov convincingly challenges, arguing that while U.S. troops in Vietnam engaged in recreational marijuana use, almost always outside of combat, the notion that widespread heroin addiction had crippled American servicemen was a myth perpetuated by both the right and the left to serve their two disparate political agendas. Sensational media portrayals of stoned GIs and veterans returning to the United States as junkies aided both sides in the creation and perpetuation of the myth, providing photographs, quotes, and analysis that convinced the American public of the domestic threat it faced from addicted vets and of U.S. complicity in the international drug trade. Along with the "prisoner-of-war-myth," the "stab-in-the-back" myth, and the "spat-upon-veteran" myth, Kuzmarov contends, the myth of the drug-addicted GI allowed policymakers, as well as conservative and liberal critics of the war, to shift attention away from America's "collective responsibility" for the damage that U.S. military intervention caused in Vietnam (7). Through these myths, Americans cast veterans as victims of a tragic military defeat, an image that aimed to overshadow efforts to reconsider the ideological underpinnings of U.S. policies regarding Vietnam.

Drawing on a diverse set of sources, from Drug Enforcement Administration records to policymakers' papers to Army studies of drug use within its ranks, Kuzmarov documents the contradiction between the image of the GI junkie and the reality about drug use among American servicemen in Vietnam. Citing studies conducted by the Defense Department, the U.S. Army Research Office, and Walter Reed Army Medical Center, he demonstrates that while media reports claimed that as many as ninety percent of U.S. troops in Vietnam were drug addicts, approximately one-third of troops had tried marijuana, with much lower numbers using heroin. Alcohol abuse was a much bigger problem, as Army memoranda and the records of psychiatric treatment facilities in Vietnam illustrate. Because it was legal, use of alcohol was considered to be more socially acceptable than smoking pot or using harder drugs, and Kuzmarov cites doctors, GIs, and even General William Westmoreland expressing concern about and describing drunkenness among U.S. servicemen. As one GI put it, "a beer was cheaper to get than a soda" in Vietnam (28). Despite these realities, respectable media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and U.S.News and World Report fixated on a handful of stories about GI drug abuse and raised public fears about the instability of returning veterans, linking psychological problems of former servicemen to drug use. As support for the war plummeted along with troop morale in the late 1960s and early 1970s, mainstream newspapers and magazines repeatedly ran articles about the negative impact of drug use on the U.S. military mission in Vietnam, including its supposed fueling of GI antiwar dissent. Coinciding with home front concerns about inner-city drug abuse, sensationalized reporting about drug use among servicemen in Vietnam created public support for Nixon administration policies that eventually led to the so-called War on Drugs. For conservatives, access to drugs weakened the U.S. military in a conflict it otherwise could have won.

In Kuzmarov's telling of the story, liberal opponents of the Vietnam War were also responsible for spreading the myth of drug-addicted American troops. They, too, cast GIs as victims, not of the drugs themselves, but of imperialistic American economic policies that bolstered the international drug trade. An army of heroin abusers became a symbol of what liberal critics considered immoral U.S. expansion aided by the machinations of the CIA. Kuzmarov specifically addresses the findings of historian Alfred W. McCoy...