Vietnam war is still taking its toll among U.S. veterans

Press, 19 May 1981, Page 23

Vietnam war is still taking its toll among U.S. veterans

By

PHILIP JACOBSON,

The last United States soldiers were pulled out of Vietnam almost a decade

ago but American casualties from that long, divisive war are still mounting. Hardly a week has passed since then without a Vietnam veteran paying the price of his involvement: almost as many suicides as there were combat deaths; alcoholism, drugaddiction, broken marriages, mental collapse. Unemployment among black veterans is far higher than among blacks as a whole — which means very high indeed. There is also abundant evidence that for both' black and white veterans who have jobs, Vietnam service has. of ten damaged or destroyed career prospects. Vietnam was the most exhaustively scrutinised conflict in history. Doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists, as well as military experts, were monitoring the impact of the fighting on what was essentially a conscript army from the first day of America’s largescale involvement. The most complete study, however, has taken. almost

eight years to appear. It was initiated by the Centre for Policy Research in 1973, immediately after the United States withdrew the last of its combat troops. The results have just been published in a five-volume report

which draws upon more than 1300 interviews, and which makes.very sad reading. A third or more of all soldiers who experienced heavy combat — perhaps as many as 700,000 men — are officially classified as victims of what the professionals call, “post-traumatic stress disorder” — rage, confusion, despair, terrible dreams, and an obscure but deeply troubling sense of guilt... .... Lumped together, the symptoms constitute the “Vietnam syndrome,”, which sounds like consulting .room ’jargon but describes ..the suffering of the ordinary soldiers for whom Vietnam, 10 or 15 years on, will, not go away. . Part of the trouble is, of course, "that a great many

“Sunday Times,” London

other Americans fervently wish it would. For many of the soldiers coming home from the only war the country has ever lost, home to a nation where 62 per cent of the population opposed the war, it was devastating: shaken, grieving, mentally and physically exhausted, they were knocked completely off-balance by the hostility they encountered. “Stress-related symptoms are concentrated among men who served in combat during and after 1968, when the conduct of the war changed and the lack of consensus on the war’s objectives among the American people became manifest,” says the new report. Dan Spranger, decorated combat infantryman, was a typical case. Returning to Detroit, he could escape the withering scorn and suspicion only by claiming to have been a non-combatant cook. “At least no-one could ask me if I killed any women or children.”

The report also presents

new material which will greatly interest all those whose job it is to prepare soldiers to fight. It has long been thought that men from unstable family backgrounds, especially those with unhappy childhoods, were more likely to crack up after combat. In Vietnam that held true for light skirmishes, but exposure to enough heavy fighting produced the same stress, symptoms among troops of all personalities and backgrounds. “Every man has his breaking point,” the report says.

The principal responsibility for helping former Vietnam soldiers lies with the Veterans Administration, and the report is not over-im-pressed by the way that the government agency is handling the job. “Veterans are used politically, without any serious effort to redress the problems they have, and that we have with them,” a director of the project maintains. The best , therapy for severe cases of Vietnam syndrome has come from the advice centres established specially for those who fought in Vietnam to meet

and talk about their problems. Talking with people who shared your ordeal, many veterans insist, is the only way to exorcise the demons of combat. They see in the Veterans Administration’s tendency to minimise the impact of the Vietnam syndrome a reflection of their country’s wish to have done with the war and all its painful memories.

It may well be true, as the Veterans Administration maintains, that 80 per cent of all who served in Vietnam have stepped successfully back into civilian life: many veterans whose problems

refuse to disappear resent the image of them as “ticking time bombs,” waiting to explode with the bloody results portrayed in the film “Taxi Driver” (in which an unbalanced Vietnam veteran is driven to an assassination bid against a presidential candidate).

Yet the Veterans Administration itself acknowledges that the Vietnam syndrome has already demonstrated a disturbing tendency to develop considerably later than shock reactions from previous wars, and it has undoubtedly affected a far greater proportion of those who went

through heavy fighting. In 1979, mounting evidence of the damage which the Vietnam syndrome could cause impelled the United States Government.to establish a $2O million programme to fund 91 of the advice centres which troubled veterans found so valuable. The new Reagan Administration’s budget director, David Stockman — who was exempt from service in Vietnam because he was attending divinity school — has sought to abolish the programme, and there is no certainty that indignant opposition within Congress will succeed in saving it.

For the veterans this is merely another act of betrayal by a nation which resents having to remember Vietnam. The new study talks about the war as “an undigested experience” for men of the Vietnam generation. t

For Dan . Spranger,. this means a recurring nightmare in which his unit is mortar-, ing a village in the Mekong Delta: women and children run screaming from their huts and Spranger sees to his horror that they are Americans, and that among them are his wife and little daughter.