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Chapter 2: "Something Rather Dark and Bloody": Atrocities, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the Pathologization of Vietnam Veterans
- University of Massachusetts Press
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2 “Something Rather Dark and Bloody” Atrocities, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the Pathologization of Vietnam Veterans ✯ The cultural construction of Vietnam veterans played a central role in shaping the remembrance of the war. The veterans were living embodiments of the war and their difficult readjustment to civilian society became a metaphor for the nation’s problems in integrating the Vietnam experience into the pattern of national life. In the early 1970s, antiwar veterans, the most publicly visible and organized body of Vietnam veterans, were an anomalous, alienated group challenging received ideas about the moral virtues of the American military.1 By the end of the decade, though, veterans’ image had undergone a sea change. They remained plaintive figures but their complaints were shorn of their foreign-policy content.2 The major demand that veterans’ advocates made was no longer for an end to American imperialism; now the veterans were said merely to crave recognition and acceptance by their fellow Americans. In this guise, they would benefit from the “healing” that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial promised. The difficulties the troops faced on their return from Southeast Asia to what they called “the World” were not unique, but Vietnam veterans as a group faced a particularly difficult homecoming.3 Other unpopular wars, such as World War I, had the compensating virtue of victory, but Vietnam veterans could not claim its laurels. Instead, they carried the stains of defeat and disgrace.4 Revelations about atrocities against Vietnamese civilians tarnished Vietnam veterans’ reputation in the eyes of their compatriots as well as undermining the government’s claims about the morality of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. While antiwar veterans claimed in 1971 that violence against Vietnamese civilians was standard operating procedure in Vietnam, veterans who denied this claim resented the stigma that it attached to service in Vietnam. In 1971, they could do little but silently rage when they saw opponents of the war tarring every member of the U.S. forces in Vietnam with the stain of atrocity—rage, and bide their time until they had the chance to set the record straight. 49 50 “Something Rather Dark and Bloody” The most vocal and publicly visible veterans in the early 1970s were activists in Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization that came to the fore just as other antiwar groups were dissolving into factional fighting.5 In April 1971, VVAW organized “Operation Dewey Canyon III,” a series of demonstrations in Washington, DC, that brought the antiwar veterans national prominence.6 Although half a million antiwar protesters demonstrated in Washington and 250,000 rallied in San Francisco, the protests by the 900 veterans of VVAW stood out among the remainder of the week’s activities. John Kerry, a navy veteran and VVAW leader, gave an eloquent oration before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971 (a month before appearing at the dedication of the Angel Fire memorial). Clean-cut and well-spoken, Kerry denounced U.S. military violations of the Geneva Conventions and condemned many of the “accepted policies” of U.S. forces in Vietnam. He referred the senators to VVAW members’ testimony that war crimes in Vietnam were commonplace.7 The following day, veterans returned their military decorations to Congress, one man calling them “my merit badges for murder.”8 Its membership never exceeded a few thousand, but VVAW’s influence on public discourse about the war did not depend on numbers.9 “Antiwar warriors,” veterans protesting against a war while it still went on, were an unusual, if not unprecedented, phenomenon.10 Because VVAW consisted of those who had served their nation in Vietnam, they could not be dismissed as hippies and radicals.11 Nor could they be accused of wishing to avoid service; they had already done their stint in Vietnam and “carried the weight of tested patriotism.”12 The White House’s Pat Buchanan observed during Dewey Canyon III that VVAW “are getting tremendous publicity; they have an articulate spokesman; they are being received in a far more sympathetic fashion than other demonstrators.”13 The Vietnam veteran and writer Philip Caputo felt that VVAW were “the only people who have a right to say anything against the war” (emphasis in original).14 Allen Lynch, a Medal of Honor winner, said that antiwar veterans had a right to protest because “they were there, they walked in the jungles. . . . If anybody had a right to make a statement, they did.”15 By the time VVAW...