Never has a war inspired the imagination (lurid and otherwise) of so many Americans, and yet the lives of the actual soldiers interested so few.  A review of B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley's Stolen Valor and Gerald Nicosia's Home to War.

B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley: Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation was Robbed of its Heroes and its History 

Gerald Nicosia: Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement 

I recall as a child being told to not ask Vietnam veterans about their experiences in Vietnam. No one ever said exactly why, but I assumed it was because something horrible was hidden in the past of these otherwise normal guys. The questioning of an inquisitive eight year old, I surmised, might uncover dark and lurid secrets.

Later, after finding the courage to venture a solicitous "Wow, you were in Vietnam," I was invariably disappointed. I never found the alluring tales of savagery, haze of hallucinogenic drug use, and harems of willing oriental women, that I knew had to be there. The stories the vets would tell were remarkable for never living up to the secret "'Nam" I knew and loved.

It wasn't until I read Mark Baker's Nam decades later, that I discovered the real Vietnam experience, even if it had eluded the vets who had actually been there. When the book's historical credibility was called into question, I said to myself, "no matter, he captured the sentiment perfectly."

Years later I asked an old friend, Phil Benham (520 Engineers, 1968-1969) why he never said much about his experience in Vietnam. "No one asked me," he said, "and so I assumed no one was that interested."  

Never has a war inspired the imagination (lurid and otherwise) of so many Americans, and yet the lives of the actual soldiers interested so few. Both B.G. Burkett's Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation was Robbed of its Heroes and its History, and Gerald Nicosia's Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement address the question of "what has been taken away from the Vietnam veteran." The first, Burkett's Stolen Valor, argues that the honor due Vietnam veterans has been misappropriated by opportunists and needs to be reclaimed.

The second, Nicosia's Home to War, argues that the Vietnam veteran has been victimized by a conflict which tore from him health, dignity and respect. The veterans' movement, Nicosia writes, is the story of veterans' efforts to regain what the war had taken away. In both books, the war itself is understood less as the cause than as a symptom of broader social ills. The veteran is defined less by service to his or her country than by a variety of social concerns distant from the war.

Burkett's argument is deceptively simple. Perplexed at what he calls the "pervasive stereotype" of Vietnam veterans as "victims, losers and moral degenerates," Burkett believes he can distinguish the "real" Vietnam veteran from phonies by using the Freedom of Information act to access government records of actual veterans' service. He seeks to discredit the phonies by revealing that many never served in Vietnam, or often exaggerate the nature of their service.

But what is provocative about his book is his broad equation of "authentic service" with a set of values distinct from those Burkett attributes to the "victims, losers and moral degenerates." While this would seem to be a dubious starting point for a scholarly work, it affords Burkett a perspective on the war and the culture surrounding the war which has been lost to academic writing on the topic. In fact, Stolen Valor's greatest contribution lies in its ruthless exposure of the prejudices underlying the academic vision of the war and how these prejudices spread to popular culture, the psychological understanding of the Vietnam Veteran, the nature of his/her treatment, and the historical rituals in which this ideology was enshrined as truth.

Hence the synoptic nature of Burkett's account of the war. It really isn't just about exposing phony vets by checking their resumes. It's about exposing a phony culture; and this makes Stolen Valor one of the most provocative books published on the war in the past decade.

While Burkett seeks to find the authentic Vietnam vet by stripping away the stereotypes and other images which conceal him, Nicosia's Home to War is a passionate attempt to write the history of the veterans' movement; a history from the perspective of that which the war had taken from them. In Nicosia's account, the war is understood as a massive social and cultural act of deprivation, whose principal legacy is to create victims. Nicosia's veterans' movement consists of the efforts of vets and their allies to reclaim something that has been lost.

In this way, Nicosia's account conceptually runs parallel to that of Burkett's. Nicosia begins his account of the veterans' movement by sketching the origins and early activities of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).  The story begins inauspiciously with Jan Barry Crumb, a vet who had been in Vietnam in 1963 and served with the Army's 18th Aviation Company; and Carl Rogers, a young draft resister who was finally sent to Vietnam as a clerk. Both disliked what they perceived as the army's mistreatment of civilians, and became the original leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, whose ideas Nicosia somewhat misleadingly identifies with Vietnam veterans in general. Nicosia provides few dates, names and numbers with which to assess their significance and it is possible the group was more of a name or principle than actually a real organization.

After the 1968 Democratic convention, Nicosia says the group all but died. Moral dignity becomes the first loss of Nicosia's Vietnam vet. What really brought VVAW to life was the entry of Al Hubbard in the fall of 1969. Hubbard was a colorful character who spent a significant amount of time inventing himself while simultaneously making VVAW a nationally known group. Hubbard aligned the fledgling organization with militant groups such as the Black Panthers and other flamboyant activist groups. Though small, VVAW attempted several high profile publicity stunts, which helped them gain recognition. Operation RAW, which took place in September 1970, was a mock "Search and Destroy" mission which "cleared the road from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania."  

The enemy was "not Vietcong, of course, but ignorance."  Hubbard intended for Operation RAW to lead to war crimes hearings on US involvement in Vietnam, in imitation of English philosopher Bertrand Russell's war crimes hearings in Stockholm.  The February 1971 Winter Soldier investigations, funded in part by actress Jane Fonda ("who was in her revolutionary mode — red stars, Mao jackets, raised fists") accomplished something similar.  

Taking advantage of the publicity afforded Seymour Hirsch's recently published account of My Lai, small groups of vets testified to atrocities they'd seen or inflicted while serving in Vietnam. They also addressed a wide variety of "cultural" issues, including racism and problems facing third world countries. The high point of the group's influence was probably its Washington, D.C. protest, "Operation Dewey Canyon III," which would include recent US presidential candidate John Kerry.

Several provocative incidents brought the national spotlight onto the vets, the most well known when Vets hurled their war medals over the White House guard wire fence. Viet Cong and NLF flags were seen flying at some guerrilla theater performances and after the vets decided to defy a Washington Mall order to leave the grounds, they were joined by Ted Kennedy to share a joint and celebrate (p. 132).

However, Dewey Canyon was not just about opposition to the war. It marked the point where Nicosia's Veterans' movement became overtaken by the counter culture, whose broader goals would quickly erode the group's focus on the war. While Dewey Canyon led to John Kerry's testimony before Congress about the findings of Winter Soldier, the movement would quickly lose its focus. To be a member of VVAW was soon not just to suffer the alleged indignity of jungles of South East Asia, it was to have experienced an entire range of ostensibly related injustices, from racism to economic exploitation.  

When Hubbard was exposed on Meet the Press in April of 1971 for having lied about his rank and time of service (which infuriated the soon-to-be departing Kerry), the event seemed relatively insignificant as did, increasingly, the war itself. By 1973, former Marine John Musgrave would realize that "he was kept in VVAW mainly because they still needed a few vets around to legitimize the organization, since the membership roster was becoming top-heavy with activist woman and non-vets, most of whom were extreme leftists and professional politicos." (p. 295) Unsurprisingly, VVAW was focusing on events such as the independence struggle in Guinea-Bissau, the establishment of "free medical clinics for poor rural blacks. . .in Alabama," prison reform, and convoying on behalf of the American Indian Movement. (p. 273)  

As paradoxical as it seems, to be an anti-war veteran was less to have fought in the war (which was now increasingly understood to no longer be the root of social evils), than to struggle against the culture. The war itself now was an effect of broader social evil. One might oppose these equally effectively as a vet, non-vet, or impostor. Authenticity has less to do with the warrior, than being on the correct side of the cultural conflict.  

With several notable exceptions (the Rabelesian Jack McClosky; the driven Shad Meshad), the remaining pages of Home to War are sustained less by personalities or particular veterans groups, than by broad and often uncoordinated efforts by vets and non-vets to get Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) institutionalized in vet centers, vets to receive benefits because of PTSD, and Agent Orange identified as a cause of many vet ailments.  A chapter, aptly entitled "Invisible Wounds," focuses on the discovery of PTSD by New York anti-war psychiatrist Chaim Shatan, the organization of "rap groups" among vets to discuss the horrors of the war by energetic activist Shad Meshad, and the emergence of the most charismatic leader among the VVAW and later AVM (American Veterans Movement), Ron Kovic. All three were particularly important for broadening the experience of what it meant to be a Vietnam veteran by linking the authenticity of the experience of the jungles to a wide range of (generally unsocial) behaviors. PTSD and Agent Orange were both ways of extending the veteran's experience beyond the simple act of service. Both linked an entire range of new signs to the Vietnam experience, vastly expanding the association of the distant war with American culture.

While the causal relation between the war (whatever that might mean, as most vets never experienced combat) and Agent Orange or PTSD remained contested, a large part of American culture seemed poised to exorcise a range of actions and ailments from itself, by associating them with a war it regarded as alien to itself. Nicosia's accounts of VVAW's activities between late 1969 and 1971 are the most interesting part of the book, and give the first real impression of a veterans' movement against the war.

But at the very moment it seems to be taking shape, the narrative becomes convoluted as VVAW fractures under largely internal pressures. Following Dewey Canyon, Nicosia writes, VVAW was usually on the verge of disappearing, or being taken over by Maoists. Its leaders were continuously engaged in fierce ideological squabbling, which on occasion degenerated into physical confrontation.ⁱ There is no particular veterans' movement Nicosia can focus his story on.

Nicosia wants to argue that the torch was passed in 1974 to Ron Kovic, who founded ARM, the "American Revolutionary Movement" (it will be quickly renamed as AVM, the American Veterans Movement) as an alternative to the now sectarian (and marginal) VVAW, as a way of bringing vets of all wars together. However, Kovic was soon expelled from his own group (though not before bringing attention to the plight of vets in VA hospitals) and in the nearly 100 pages devoted to him, it is not clear what he actually stood for.ⁱⁱ The accusation brought against him by fellow ARM leader Bill Unger (and certainly not wholly unjustified), was that the charismatic Kovic had turned the veterans' movement into a cult of personality — Kovic's. He and the other leaders ordered a vote, removed Kovic, and dissolved AVM. The veterans' movement would now exceed the sum of its parts.

Nicosia writes as a passionate advocate of what he calls the Vietnam veterans' movement. And yet it is hard to determine who and what this movement actually is. Nicosia rarely gives any numerical counts of his "Vets" movements at a given time, and he makes no reference to more conservative vets groups (ie. apparently those not in danger of being taken over by Maoists) until page 445. Some of the vets Nicosia writes of (Hubbard being the most well known) were in fact not vets at all, or exaggerated their Vietnam credentials to gain status within groups such as VVAW or a hearing in the national media.

It is hard not to conclude that Nicosia's causes define the vets, rather than the other way around.

***

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Valor as "personal courage, especially that attained in combat." The definition is simple, but applying it meaningfully to people — even soldiers who have participated in combat, is not.  Quite frankly, it is quite difficult to decide when someone else's actions are courageous.

Phil Caputo's book Rumor of War was a landmark in Vietnam War literature because the war itself receded into the background of his experience in Vietnam. Combat in Caputo's tour was negligible and when it did take place, it often had little to do with courage.  Were those surviving sniper attacks valorous or were those who charged machine gun nests merely reckless? In fact, much of what might be called courageous involved activity that seems to have little in common with "combat." Was it not courageous to walk through the jungle — even if it turned out to not conceal VC? In fact, is it not possible to have been courageous as a soldier in Vietnam and never to have pulled the trigger of one's weapon?

The difficulty in determining who was courageous makes courage's reward — bestowing our epitaph valor — difficult to do appropriately.  BG Burkett's Stolen Valor runs parallel to Nicosia's account of the Vietnam veteran, but with one significant difference. Burkett assumes that the Vietnam veteran is the victim not of loss, but of excessive (and false) attention.  While Nicosia believes the losses of the veterans have to do with traumas inflicted upon them by the war, Burkett argues that the obsession with the war as "trauma" has enabled opportunists and charlatans to exaggerate and stage these traumas and miseries and thus misappropriate the valor due authentic vets.  In fact, so deeply are these stereotypes fixed in our culture that they have spawned a "valor" industry which rewards these fraudulent behaviors.

Burkett agrees with Nicosia that activism concerning the war and the war itself died down in the early seventies after Nixon began withdrawing troops from Vietnam; however, at this point "the vets faded away, [and] activists replace[d] the "vacuum" . . .with a "victim agenda." Groups such as "Vietnow and VVA (Vietnam Vets of America) portray vets as broken down, combat damaged men." Their goal, as was that of the left in general, "was to show that the Vietnam War was so immoral that it damaged the psyches of those who fought it."

The "bottom line," Burkett writes forcefully, "is money."  The VA hospitals and PTSD programs are [now] "havens for malingerers who manipulate the system. . . for their own financial ends." The left agreed to honor the veteran, but only if the veteran adopted its agenda: the vet could no longer stand for valor, but for social victim.

Burkett's attack is sweeping. Fakers have been impersonating Vietnam vets and pretending to have served in the military in Vietnam without having done so. They have laid claim to medals and the elite services.  They have infiltrated veterans organizations and written as veterans about veterans' issues.  They have taken over the representation of veterans in Hollywood films.

Burkett, using the freedom of information act, has been able to secure actual service records of all US military personal, and uses this to distinguish the real vets from the posers.  And almost everywhere he looks, he finds evidence of falsification of service or exaggeration.  Valor is a commodity in modern America and impersonators of vets are hardly going to fail to take advantage of this.

But these, evidently, include quite a few Vets as well. Many actual vets have afforded themselves medals and status that do not belong to them.  Dan Rather, for example, only briefly served in the Marines, before being discharged after four months for being "medically unfit."  Burkett is quick to cut a large number of vets who are "publicly known" (such as actor Brian Dennehy) down to size.

Where there is a discrepancy between a vet's claim about his service and the government's documents, Burkett sides with the government.  It is up to the vet to prove his valor — and he needs to do this not by combat, but by the books.ⁱⁱⁱ Burkett's book is thus less pro-Vet (as it is generally assumed to be) and is in fact two other things. First, it is a paean to Valor, though Burkett, certain of what isn't valorous, never provides a definition of what it might actually be. Second, it is a catalog of what Americans, since the war began, have been willing to pay to "reward valor."

Regarding the first point, Burkett presupposes what he needs to define — and is late to the task. American culture from at least the Vietnam period has been almost continuously at war with itself, debating which signs enable it to distinguish between the valorous and the coward, the valorous and the foolish.

Regarding the second, Burkett is upset about the way the spoils of valor have been divided. In fact he regards them as "stolen."  And yet while Burkett is clear in determining what signs do not connote valorous behavior, he never gives a particularly clear argument for which do.  This is odd, as his book purports to be a defense of authentic valor, and Burkett makes clear that the stakes are high: For the truly valorous, there is money to be had. There are two categories into which the signs of valor may be divided: some, like wounds, are visible and obvious to the eye. They are often accounted for by combat records, and so may be easily associated with a specific encounter with the enemy. Others, such as mental disorders, traumas and genetic defects are harder to relate directly to the war except with the assistance of "expert interpretation."  They are, quite simply, invisible. The former, primarily wounds, are limited in quantity: there were a limited number of troops who participated in combat with the enemy. Among those who did, fewer sustained injuries.  

Of these, even fewer sustained injuries while directly engaged with enemy troops. Of these, even fewer sustained injuries in ways which the dictionary defines as valorous. The other type of wound, the "invisible wound," not being immediately and obviously related to Vietnam, is much more difficult to substantiate. And yet it is here, according to Burkett, that the valor industry has been the most generous.  Fakers, legitimated by experts with an anti-war agenda, have stolen the valor of those who legitimately earned their wounds.  

The relation between the fakers and experts is, however, symbiotic.  In return for validating the fakers' wounds, the experts are awarded the right to define the war as they see fit. The purpose of the Valor industry was to refight the war — but to refight it not in Vietnam, but in American culture. A cultural mythology needed to be created and for this bodies were needed — lots of them. Not 50 or even 100 thousand.  This required millions.  To win in America, you need a voting majority.  Wounds could not be restricted to merely those which were visible.

The first myth of the Vietnam war was that the technology employed in Vietnam made the conflict exceptionally bloody and violent. The valor industry needed to represent the war as unique in terms of the visible wounds borne on the body, in order to more convincingly claim that the invisible injuries were believable.  It did this in two ways. First, by graphically displaying all injuries associated with the war and insisting that they were all due to "combat."  And secondly, by decoupling the limited "visible" wounds from their official sign: the Purple Heart.

The Purple Heart is what metaphorically secures the visible wound on the veteran. And yet even this is not enough, Burkett argues.  The award itself, so easy to secure through faked documents, has become part of a veritable "fleamarket" in today's valor market.  The effect is that valor becomes spread around, and is more easily bestowed.    

The second myth of the Vietnam war, related to the first, was that the violence was so extreme, and immoral, that it created "invisible wounds within." These strange "inverse wounds" inflicted apocalyptic carnage on the vet who inflicted them on the Vietnamese, their marks disappearing from the outside of the body and scarring instead his interior, his psyche.  

A most strange transformation now occurred: It was now the "anger" (or anti-social behavior) of the vet which became the equivalent of the visible wound. And yet this type of wound was bought for by the vet at a price.  While most cultures have viewed the brave defense of their land and ideals as a sign of strength and health, the legitimacy of the invisible wound required something new.  It required the ideals originally associated with the defense of South Vietnam from invasion be abandoned.  An evil war made acts of courage themselves "wounds."  To fight heroically in Vietnam was to have maimed oneself. Burkett, in attacking "invisible wounds," is at his most contentious and directs his critique at the very existence of one of the most famous legacies of the Vietnam war, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  

At the same time the media was interpreting the 1968 Tet uprising as a "communist victory," Burkett claims, "left wing psychiatrists" were inventing ways in which an "immoral war" might inflict not physical lesions, but mental lesions born in the psyche. The significance of PTSD was that it effectively separated valor from victory and permitted the translation of anti-social behavior from its imagined existence on the battlefield, into mainstream American culture.  

Vietnam was no longer a sign of bad behavior; bad behavior was a sign of Vietnam. PTSD was still not as obvious as the simple combat wound. In order to make a psychological wound visible, it required that armies of doctors and administrators verify its "existence." One of the most important parts of Burkett's book is his account of how the signs of PTSD came to be invented, classified as "pathological," and then (through insistence) imagined to have their origins in the horrors of the most brutal war. Burkett lists one such list as including "anxiety reactions, self-esteem problems, sleep disorders, nightmares and substance abuse."

In this way the wound, that original sign of valor, was replaced by an invisible lesion, and then filtered through American culture far from Vietnam. Burkett extends a similar critique to Agent Orange, arguing that the causal link between alleged Agent Orange Symptoms and the original Operation Ranch Hand are at best tenuous.

He also claims that it's hardly surprising that the same ‘effects' which often make one a victim of PTSD, also are claimed to have been brought about by agent orange. The origins of both, Burkett claims, were in the culture of America, not the jungles of South East Asia. Burkett at times gets a bit carried away with himself, and details another group of "valor signs," which, while not institutionalized as are the signs of PTSD, have become socially recognizable as "signs of the evil war." These include "wild appearance," equally "wild stories," and problems such as alcoholism, drug and spousal abuse.

While these obviously are not particular to Vietnam, they have, argues Burkett, become part of the (literally) social capital of the war's legacy. The image of the Vietnam vet in films like Rambo and Uncommon Valor recreates the veteran in the guise of the social rebel.

The final part of Burkett's book deals with how the "invisible wounds" of the Vietnam war have been exchanged for what he calls "handouts."  Burkett demonstrates how easy it is to fake "veteran's papers."  He then made bets with non-vet friends that it was so easy to "cash in" on the "signs of valor," that they could all acquire 100 percent disabled PTSD benefits by walking into a random vet center and repeating a few of the "cultural signs" of PTSD.  

Apparently Burkett won his bet.

* * * 

What both Nicosia's and Burkett's books demonstrate is the impossibility of separating "the war" from American culture. Both make clear the insignificance of the facts of the war itself when the cultural battles going within the United States transformed the very language used to speak of it from day to day.

It has been said of the American combat soldier that he could see no point to the battles in which he fought.  What both Burkett's and Nicosia's books make clear is that even if he had, it wouldn't have mattered. The country which employed him did not speak his language. And at the heart of this dispute was the very idea which distinguished him as a solider: the idea of valor.

Combat itself, far from distinguishing the valorous from the coward, was removed from the battlefield and recast in the streets of Boston or Berkeley. Whether the South Vietnamese were able to fend off the Northern invaders became of minor or even scholastic importance.^iv The linguistic war at home quickly engulfed napalm and machine guns in South East Asia, and, according to Burkett, the cultural victory of the left turned America's military defeat in Vietnam into an American cultural victory at home.

The redefinition of valor as those who had endured and suffered an "evil war," enabled cultural benefits to go not to those who had earned it by fighting, but those willing to accommodate the new ideology. The price, of course, was that they sacrifice their wounds (real or imaginary) to a cultural vision which reforged the Vietnam War as evil. If some encouragement was needed, the new allegiance provided financial benefits. . . .  

The mistake both Burkett and Nicosia make is in attempting to separate the Vietnam War from the American culture in which it was fought.  In the end, it is never quite clear what Burkett means by the term Valor.  Nicosia, on the other hand, defines the Vietnam veteran in terms of ideals which became pronounced around 1968, and for this reason, the fact that few veterans actually supported his positions is of little importance to him. The Vets are defined as such by appropriating the new values generated by American culture, and not vice versa. It is thus of less importance to Nicosia whether Al Hubbard misrepresented his record of service in Vietnam or not.  The issue is the values, stupid, not the service.

To conclude, both Burkett's and Nicosia's books underscore the fact that the Vietnam veteran remains the object of fantasy, not an object of history. And this is not always a bad thing. With every accusation directed against the vet as "committing atrocities," comes the laudatory image of the vet as superhuman warrior. And with every attempt to portray the Vietnam veteran (as Burkett describes himself in the beginning of the book) as being "just another soldier," comes the risk of marginalization from mainstream American interests (as has happened with the Korean War vets).

Today Americans are interested in Vietnam veterans, perhaps fancifully to be sure, but for reasons now increasingly obvious. The war, despite being on the other side of the globe, never left America, and despite South Vietnam's 1975 surrender, has never ceased to be fought in the combat zone always most important to Americans: the United States.

Endnotes

i.  One amusing anecdote is of Maoist inspired vets opposing the use of signs "Impeach Nixon" in their demonstrations because "this gave credibility to the bourgeois system."

ii. Kovic's autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July, is not especially political and tends to couch Kovic's later opposition to the war in personal, rather then political terms. Kovic's deep patriotism is evident. See Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (QPB: New York, 1976).

iii. There is an amusing critique of Burkett on the Amazon.com website by someone called "Padruig." The author accuses Burkett, who seems to flaunt his lack of "combat" while in Vietnam, as being part of that same administrative system which, in Vietnam "proved the third most dangerous enemy to "grunts" behind the VC and the NVA. Forcing grunts to prove their valor to a bureaucratic paper trail is what "Padruig" calls the "revenge of the Pogues," and he levels back at Burkett the same "warrior envy" charge Burkett uses effectively at others.

iv.Recent scholarship on the military aspects of the war argue persuasively that the military situation on the grouped following the battles of 1968 made military victory in the south a possibility and this seems confirmed by the relatively peaceful years of 1970 and 1971. This poses the interesting question of whether it is possible to win a war, and if no one believes it, do you really win the war?

Stolen Valor and Home to War are available on Amazon.com.

Book Reviews, The Meaning of the Vietnam Veteran, Vietnam War

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