Vietnam Veteran Quotes

Locating the village elders, he said to them, “I think that we are in for a bad time. The American Sky Soldiers are coming by helicopter and the usual things the Americans do of air strikes by fighter-bombers and by B52 large bombers is starting at Long Phuoc! I fear the worst!

One thing that became very clear during my own war service is that those who are actively taking part in war-like activities very seldom hate their former enemies. The reverse is the case with a great respect developing among the veterans, even if they happened to be on opposing sides.

This stated, “Dear Mr. Prime Minister, I am delighted by the decision of your government to provide an infantry battalion for service in South Vietnam at the request of the Government of South Vietnam” The simple fact about this was that no such request was ever received by the Australian Government.

The receiving radio operator immediately said, “Please tell Sunray Delta Six that Sunray Six is being located and informed immediately. Expect his answer very soon!” A short time later, Harry Smith was summoned to the HQ Delta Company radio. He went to it and was told, “Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Townsend is waiting to speak to you.

There was something that resonated on a deep… spiritual level… about cutting a man in half.

Look at that! The entire Australian kit dates from the 1940s and the uniforms are falling apart at the seams, the fucking boots you have issued to us are the same and everything is rotten. As for bloody weapons, we are issued with the Owen sub-machine gun. While the gun is still a very good weapon, the 9mm ammunition it uses is old WW2 stock and its propellants have deteriorated to the point where I doubt if the round will penetrate the back-pack of a fleeing Noggie!

            It was stated by an Australian Army Officer, “Phuoc Tuy offers the perfect terrain for guerrilla warfare. It has a long coastline with complex areas of mangrove swamps, isolated ranges of very rugged mountains and a large area of uninhabited jungle containing all of the most loathsome combinations of thorny bamboos, poisonous snakes, insects, malaria, dense underbrush, swamps and rugged ground conditions that the most dedicated guerrilla warfare expert could ask for.

Within the soul of each Vietnam veteran there is probably something that says “Bad war, good soldier.” Only now are Americans beginning to separate the war from the warrior.

In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.

The brave men and women, who serve their country and as a result, live constantly with the war inside them, exist in a world of chaos. But the turmoil they experience isn’t who they are; the PTSD invades their minds and bodies.

My dad once told me that his biggest challenge after returning from Vietnam had been coming to terms with his own callousness. He’d made a deal with the war and traded his humanity for a ticket home.

a world where Vietnam veterans were supposed to be invisible, the women most of all.

Apart from, of course, the fact that the world was an amazing interesting place which they both wanted to enjoy for as long as possible, there were few things that the two of them agreed on, but they did see eye to eye about some of those people who, for one reason or another, were inclined to worship the Prince of Darkness. Crowley always found them embarrassing. You couldn't actually be rude to them, but you couldn't help feeling about them the same way that, say, a Vietnam veteran would feel about someone who wears combat gear to Neighborhood Watch meetings.

What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Muammar Gaddafi; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon Russia to intervene in an American presidential election. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to solicit foreign policy advice from someone who owns shares in a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to read a foreign policy speech written by someone on the payroll of a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to appoint a national security adviser who has taken money from a Russian propaganda organ. It is not patriotic to appoint as secretary of state an oilman with Russian financial interests who is the director of a Russian-American energy company and has received the “Order of Friendship” from Putin. The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies. The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country. The

By 1989, the total number of Vietnam veterans who had died in violent accidents or by suicide after the war exceeded the total number of American soldiers who died during the war.

War is absolutely the last card any national leader should play, and only when every other alternative has been exhausted. If the hand was being played by an old soldier, a war veteran, I can assure you he would guard that war card to the bitter end and play it reluctantly and with the fear and trepidation of experience.

It struck me that such analyses had it backward. It’s the American public for whom the Iraq War is often no more real than a video game. Five years into this war, I am not always confident most Americans fully appreciate the caliber of the people fighting for them, the sacrifices they have made, and the sacrifices they continue to make. After the Vietnam War ended, the onus of shame largely fell on the veterans. This time around, if shame is to be had when the Iraq conflict ends - and all indications are there will be plenty of it - the veterans are the last people in America to deserve it. When it comes to apportioning shame my vote goes to the American people who sent them to war in a surge of emotion but quickly lost the will to either win it or end it. The young troops I profiled in Generation Kill, as well as the other men and women in uniform I’ve encountered in combat zones throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, are among the finest people of their generation. We misuse them at our own peril.

As we all know, everyone feels fear. How it’s handled is what’s different between people. You look into the eyes of anyone on board the plane and see it. It’s ever-present.

I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to a war they didn't understand and didn't want to understand. I held them responsible. By God, yes, I did. All of them - I held them personally and individually responsible - the polyestered Kiwanis boys, the merchants and the farmers, the pious churchgoers, the chatty housewives, the PTA and the Lions club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the fine outstanding gentry out at the country club. They didn't know Bao Dai from the man in the moon. They didn't know history. They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalist, or the long colonialism of the French - this was all too damn complicated, it required some reading - but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons.

In the 1980s, research on post traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans was regarded as important, noble, and useful. When the same researchers looked at the same problem in children who had been sexually abused, a tremendous controversy ensued a controversy that persists to this day. There were those who disputed the extent and severity of the sexual abuse that had been uncovered.

Tender Warrior,” Adam replied and showed John the cover. “You can read it; I’m almost done. Check this out,” he said, thumbing backward through the pages. “It was written by Stu Weber, a Vietnam veteran, Special Forces. He became a chaplain.

As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashbacks can be itself re-traumatizing; if not life-threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivor, for example, survivors of Vietnam.

This country has not seen and probably will never know the true level of sacrifice of our veterans. As a civilian I owe an unpayable debt to all our military. Going forward let’s not send our servicemen and women off to war or conflict zones unless it is overwhelmingly justifiable and on moral high ground. The men of WWII were the greatest generation, perhaps Korea the forgotten, Vietnam the trampled, Cold War unsung and Iraqi Freedom and Afghanistan vets underestimated. Every generation has proved itself to be worthy to stand up to the precedent of the greatest generation. Going back to the Revolution American soldiers have been the best in the world. Let’s all take a remembrance for all veterans who served or are serving, peace time or wartime and gone or still with us. 11/11/16 May God Bless America and All Veterans.

Our lives are a story shaped by circumstance, twisted by Fate, and ultimately judged by how we reacted.

I think war is a crime. If you don't believe me, ask the infantry, ask the dead.

Not all days in the field were unhappy ones. You had to have fun sometimes or you would go crazy.

They were not medical problems to rehabilitate. We were not medical problems. I was never going to undo the damage polio had done to my nerve cells and walk again, nor was this my goal. The disabled veterans coming home from the Vietnam War were never going to grow their limbs back or heal their spinal cords and walk again. My friends with muscular dystrophy were never going to not have been born with muscular dystrophy. Accidents, illnesses, genetic conditions, neurological disorders, and aging are facts of the human condition, just as much as race or sex.

There are two types of memory frequently experienced by individuals who have had overwhelming trauma that has been suppressed psychologically or chemically. The first is general memory, experienced as an adult, in which there is a natural recall of early events. The other is the memory that is often associated with post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS). The person suddenly smells, sees and feels as though he or she is actually living the event that took place months or years earlier. Many soldiers who survived horrifying combat experiences have PTSS. This has frequently been discussed in terms of Vietnam veterans who suddenly mentally find themselves in the jungle, hiding from the enemy or assaulting people they see as a threat. The fact that they have not been in Vietnam for decades and that they are experiencing the flashbacks in shopping malls, at home or at work does not change what they are mentally reliving. But PTSS has existed for centuries and has affected men, women and children in the midst of all wars, horrifying natural disasters and other traumatic experiences. This includes physical and sexual abuse when growing up. the PTSS Cheryl was experiencing more and more frequently, in which she found herself seeing, feeling and re-experiencing events from her childhood and adolescence had become overwhelming. She knew she needed to get help.

Vidich, Paul, 363–4, 366, 367 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 117 Vietnam War, 31 “View from the Top” lectures, 245 Vincent, James, xv, 306, 335, 360, 361, 366, 381, 385, 389–90, 459–61, 480, 481, 483 Visa, 378 VisiCalc (finance program), 77 VLSI Technology, 331 “Wade in the Water” (song),

One of the country’s least-discussed postwar problems is how frequently combat veterans bring the traumas of war back with them and are incarcerated after returning to their communities. By the mid-1980s, nearly 20 percent of the people in jails and prisons in the United States had served in the military. While the rate declined in the 1990s as the shadows cast by the Vietnam War began to recede, it has picked up again as a result of the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the pleasures of loving the Chinese man is to write him down. She may be loving him to have something to write. She has a story to tell because of having loved him. I listen to war veterans say that when they were dumb kids, they went to the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese call the American War) to find something to write about.

A severe recession in 1980 had inaugurated the era of rising homelessness. But the problem was driven and sustained by many long-brewing problems: the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans; the grossly inadequate provisions that had been made for mentally ill people since the nation began to close its psychiatric hospitals; the decline in jobs and wages for unskilled workers; the continuation of racist housing policies such as redlining and racially disproportionate evictions; the AIDS epidemic and the drug epidemics that fed it. Also the arcana of applying for Social Security disability—a process so complex that anyone who could figure out how to get assistance probably didn’t need it.

Parallels between the veteran's words and Achilles' are inescapable. During berserk rage, the friend is constantly alive; letting go of the rage lets him die.

We who have seen war, will never stop seeing it. In the silence of the night, we will always hear the screams. So this is our story, for we were soldiers once, and young

Here the veterans grapple with the question of moral luck: Can any workings of bad luck produce cruel or evil actions in a good person?

It was radicals like you and your father that hijacked your faith, hijacked a few planes, and made thousands of children orphans in a single day. You pretend my country beats you because you are poor, but you ignore that it was people of your faith that made this war. People like your father made this war. People like your father called for jihad. Well now you got it. You don’t like it? Tell the Imam that his ignorance made his people poor. You don’t understand Americans at all. We don’t beat you because you’re poor. You pissed us off. We’d beat your ass rich or poor.

There is one other wall, of course. One we never speak of. One we never see, One which separates memory from madness. In a place no one offers flowers. THE WALL WITHIN. We permit no visitors. Mine looks like any of a million nameless, brick walls— it stands in the tear-down ghetto of my soul; that part of me which reason avoids for fear of dirtying its clothes and from atop which my sorrow and my rage hurl bottles and invectives at the rolled-up windows of my passing youth. Do you know the wall I mean? —Steve Mason, U.S. Army captain (Vietnam), poet Excerpted from the poem “The Wall Within” by Steve Mason, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran considered the unofficial poet laureate of the Vietnam War. “The Wall Within” was read at the 1984 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and was entered in its entirety into the Congressional Record.

I looked at the two enemy prisoners. They were on their stomachs, face down and shaking like everything. I can only imagine the fear they must have felt in their hearts. Thank God we had air superiority on the battlefield.

in his book Achilles in Vietnam, former Veterans Affairs psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Shay warns about what happens, to both soldiers and society, when those stories are never told. “We can never fathom the soldier’s grief if we do not know the human attachment which battle nourishes and then amputates,” he says. “Failure to communalize grief can imprison a person in endless swinging between rage and emotional deadness as a permanent way of being in the world.

You have forgotten, though it is unlikely that you ever knew, why you were sent to Vietnam to fight. You have forgotten, if you ever even though about it, that Vietnam is the country of the Vietnamese , not the country of Americans.

When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago.

As products of a biblic culture, most veterans believed it is nobler to strive to be like God than to want to be human. However, all of our virtues come from not being gods: Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want; courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury; and so on. Our virtues and our dignity arise from our mortality, our humanity -- and not from any success in being God. The godlike berserk state can destroy the capacity for virtue.

Vietnam was never a threat to America or Australia, but it was a threat to their perceived interests. For those selfish interests we fought and were maimed and died. It was not for patriotism, and not to save freedom or humanity: it was to save vested interests.

I slowly dug a stand-up foxhole up to my neck using my helmet. I don’t think any of us slept that night. It was the first time in my tour when I wasn’t sure I would make it. I’m not ashamed to say I did a lot of thinking about home and a lot of praying to the man upstairs.

In late April of 1971, several thousand antiwar veterans converged on Washington, to camp out, to lobby. As one of them said, “It’s the first time in this country’s history that the men who fought a war have come to Washington to demand its halt while the war is still going on.” In the final event of the veterans’ Washington encampment, a thousand of them, many in wheelchairs or on crutches, tossed their medals over a fence that the police had built around the Capitol steps to keep them away. As they did so, one by one, they made personal statements. One of them said, “I’m not proud of these medals. I’m not proud of what I did to receive them. I was in Vietnam for a year and … we never took one prisoner alive.” An Air Force man said that what he had done was a disservice to his country. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m now serving my country.

Deep down there is the feeling that what we participated in was morally wrong, and can never be looked upon as legitimate. We can make all kinds of excuses, but it can never justify the murder, the savagery and the barbarism that was inflicted on the Vietnamese people under the guise of saving the world from communism.

I believe war should be the last result, but I do believe that when we find ourselves at war, we should unite as a people and not do anything to aid or encourage the enemy. We should stay the course and remember that the people we are defending, though they may not always be Americans, are people dependent upon us to see the conflict through to an end.

To return to my blunder in group therapy, a veteran whose voice is often heard in this book turned black with anger and, glaring at me, said, "I won my war. It's you who fucking lost!" He got up and left the room to remove himself from the opportunity to physically hurt me. Toward the end of the group session he returned and said, "What we lost in Vietnam was some good fucking kids!

But modern warfare is undeniably several steps removed from our species’s aggressive instincts. It is really not the same thing. The decision to go to war is typically made by older men in a capital based on politics, economics, and egos, while younger men are told to do the dirty work. When I look at a marching army, therefore, I don’t necessarily see the aggressive instinct at work. I rather see the herd instinct: thousands of men and women in lockstep, willing to obey orders. I can’t imagine that Napoleon’s soldiers froze to death in Siberia in an angry mood. Nor have I ever heard American Vietnam veterans say that they went over there with rage in their hearts. But alas, the incredibly complex issue of human warfare is still often reduced to that of an aggressive instinct.

I decided to ask eight Vietnam combat veterans if they would be willing to take a standard pain test while they watched scenes from a number of movies. The first clip we showed was from Oliver Stone’s graphically violent Platoon (1986), and while it ran we measured how long the veterans could keep their right hands in a bucket of ice water. We then repeated this process with a peaceful (and long-forgotten) movie clip. Seven of the eight veterans kept their hands in the painfully cold water 30 percent longer during Platoon. We then calculated that the amount of analgesia produced by watching fifteen minutes of a combat movie was equivalent to that produced by being injected with eight milligrams of morphine, about the same dose a person would receive in an emergency room for crushing chest pain.

The next morning re-supply choppers brought mail, supplies, and Christmas stockings that had been packed by young school kids. Each stocking contained lots of candy and a letter. We took turns passing the letters around. Tex’s parents had sent him a small, artificial Christmas tree. We set it up on the top of our foxhole and decorated it with white shaving cream from our sundry supplies. The shaving cream looked like snow.

The human consequences of Reagan's budget cuts went deep. For instance, Social Security disability benefits were terminated for 350,000 people. A war hero of Vietnam, Roy Benavidez, who had been presented with the Congressional Medal Of Honor by Reagan, 'Was told by Social Security officials that the shrapnel pieces in his heart, arms, and leg did not prevent him from working. Appearing before a congressional committee, he denounced Reagan.

Thoughts of suicide are common symptoms of combat PTSD. Paradoxically, they are also signs of life. If a person enters the zombielike state of indifference beyond despair, rage, suicidality, and fear, he or she simply dies. This is the testimony of concentration camp survivors and combat veterans. The ability to kill oneself is the bottom line of human freedom. Many combat veterans think daily of suicide. Knowledge that one has this freedom seems to be sustaining.

The much-discussed estimate of twenty-two vets a day committing suicide in the United States is deceptive: it was only in 2008 that - for the first time in decades- the suicide rate among veterans surpassed the civilian rate in America, and though each death is enormously tragic, the majority of those veterans were over the age of fifty. Many were Vietnam vets and, generally speaking, the more time that passes after a trauma, the less likely a suicide is to have anything to do with it.

So I saw someone with one of those "home of the free because of the brave" shirts a few days ago. I almost laughed. I tried not to because of the upcoming Veterans day… I guess. Home of the Slaves because of the cowards, I think would be more appropriate. Look at these American wars. Vietnam… Iraq… is that really the “brave” thing to do? Beating up on little countries cuz u’r trying to look brave huh? Cowards. And then they tell me to go work at Kroger? Are you insane? Don’t you know my fucking SAT score, you dumb fuck? Why don’t you go and invade Croatia or something instead. Idiots.

The overwhelming majority of combat veterans whom I have known are painfully aware of the absence of intimacy, tenderness, light playfulness, or easy mutuality in their sex lives. For many, sex is a trigger of intrusive recollection and emotion from Vietnam as the sound of explosions or the smell of a corpse. Sex and anger are intertwined that they often cannot conceive of tender, uncoerced sex that is free of rage. When successful treatment reduces their rage, they sometimes report that they have to completely relearn (or learn for the first time) the pleasures of sex with intimacy and playfulness.

America’s last step into the Vietnam quagmire came on November 22, 1963, when Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Unlike Kennedy, Johnson was no real veteran. During World War II he used his influence as a congressman to become a naval officer, and, despite an utter lack of military training, he arranged a direct commission as a lieutenant commander. Fully aware that “combat” exposure would make him more electable, the ambitious Johnson managed an appointment to an observation team that was traveling to the Pacific. Once there, he was able to get a seat on a B-26 combat mission near New Guinea. The bomber had to turn back due to mechanical problems and briefly came under attack from Japanese fighters. The pilot got the damaged plane safely back to its base and Johnson left the very next day. This nonevent, which LBJ had absolutely no active part of, turned into his war story. The engine had been “knocked out” by enemy fighters, not simply a routine malfunction; he, LBJ, had been part of a “suicide mission,” not just riding along as baggage. The fabrication grew over time, including, according to LBJ, the nickname of “Raider” Johnson given to him by the awestruck 22nd Bomber Group.

I recall canoeing with veterans along tranquil meanders of the Saco River in Maine, when one of them, who had served on riverboats in the Mekong Delta, pointed out the tan mudbank on the outside of a curve. He said that such an innocent riverbank would be riddled with tunnels and invisible machine-gun and rock-propelled-grenade positions. The cumulative effect of prolonged attacks on mental function is to undermine the soldier's trust in his own perceptions. Another veteran said: Nothing is what it seems. That mountain there--maybe it wasn't there yesterday, and won't be there tomorrow. You get to the point where you're not even sure it is a mountain.

What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It

Democratic process embodies the apparent contradiction of safe struggle. Combat veterans with unhealed PTSD have the greatest difficulty conceiving of any struggle apart from killing and dying. Passionate struggle conducted within rules of safety and fairness simply doesn't make sense to them or seems a hollow charade. For them it is psychologically impossible to win a struggle without killing or to lose without dying, and they do not want to do either. Many veterans' response is to withdraw and not participate. Democracy embodies safe struggle over the shape and implementation of a future. An unhealed combat veteran cannot think in terms of a future. Democratic political activity presupposes that the future exists and that it is meaningful. Combat taught the survivor of prolonged combat not to imagine a future or to want anything. Prior to seeing the point of one's voluntary participation in a social process, one must feel that it is safe to want something.

Forgetting combat trauma is not a legitimate goal of treatment. Veterans find it morally degrading to forget the dead. To know why this is so, we need only recall what we have seen in the earliest chapters on the existential functions of guilt and rage. The task is to remember -- rather than relive and reenact -- and to grieve. For combat veterans this means grieving not only the dead but also their own lost innocence in both its meanings, as blamelessness and as unawareness of evil. Also, many prewar relationships with parents, friends, siblings, and spouses are now gone forever. A secure sense of the goodness of the social order is irretrievably lost and must be mourned. One veteran said, You're afraid that once you start to cry you'll never stop. And once you do start, it seems like it will never stop. I cried for a whole year. We must all strive to be a trustworthy audience for victims of abuse of power. I like to think that Aristotle had something like this in mind when he made tragedy the centerpiece of education for citizens in a democracy.

Support on the home front for the soldier, regardless of ethical and political disagreements over the war itself. is essential. This is never easy in the emotionally polarized climate of a war. However, when facing individual soldiers, we must remember that all modern soldiers serve under constraint. The justice of overall war aims and of operational theories -- "strate-gic" bombing of civilians to weaken the industrial capacity to wage war is an example of such theory -- is not within the individual soldier's scope of moral choice, unless he or she is willing to face imprisonment or death by refusing to fight. I cannot hold soldiers to an ethical standard that requires martyrdom in order simply to be blameless. I am not arguing against the Nuremberg principles, which say that no person is absolved of responsibility for horrible acts by the fact that he or she was legally ordered to do them. I am speaking from the pain that I feel when I witness in our veterans the ruin of moral life by the overwhelming coercive social power of military institutions and of war itself.

Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it. Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively. I majored in finance in college because of my love for the markets and because that major had no foreign language requirement—so it allowed me to learn what I was interested in, both inside and outside class. I learned a lot about commodity futures from a very interesting classmate, a Vietnam veteran quite a bit older than me. Commodities were attractive because they could be traded with very low margin requirements, meaning I could leverage the limited amount of money I had to invest. If I could make winning decisions, which I planned to do, I could borrow more to make more. Stock, bond, and currency futures didn’t exist back then. Commodity futures were strictly real commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. So those were the markets I started to trade and learn about. My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years. As the draft expanded and the numbers of young men coming home in body bags soared, the Vietnam War split the country. There was a lottery based on birthdates to determine the order of those who would be drafted. I remember listening to the lottery on the radio while playing pool with my friends. It was estimated that the first 160 or so birthdays called would be drafted, though they read off all 366 dates. My birthday was forty-eighth.

Government By The Industry, For The Industry Vice President George Bush sat in his chair across from four Monsanto executives. They had come to the White House with an unusual request. They wanted more regulation. They were venturing into a new technology, the genetic modification of food, and they were actually asking the government to oversee their emerging industry. But this was late 1986. Ronald Reagan was president and the administration was busily deregulating business. Bush needed convincing. “We bugged him for regulation,” said Leonard Guarraia, one of the executives at the meeting. “We told him that we have to be regulated.”[1] Monsanto was about to make a multibillion-dollar gamble. With this new technology, they could engineer and patent a whole new kind of food. Later, by buying up seed companies around the world, Monsanto could replace the natural seeds with their patented engineered seeds and control a hefty portion of the food supply. But there was fear among Monsanto’s ranks—fear of consumers’ and environmentalists’ reactions. Their fear was borne of experience. Years earlier, Monsanto had assured the public that their Agent Orange, the defoliant used during the Vietnam War, was safe for humans. It wasn’t. Thousands of veterans and tens of thousand of Vietnamese who suffered a wide range of maladies, including cancer, neurological disorders, and birth defects, blame Monsanto.

Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33 Freyd: I see what you're saying but people in psychology don't have a uniform agreement on this issue of the depth of -- I guess the term that was used at the conference was -- "robust repression." TAT: Well, Pamela, there's a whole lot of evidence that people dissociate traumatic things. What's interesting to me is how the concept of "dissociation" is side-stepped in favor of "repression." I don't think it's as much about repression as it is about traumatic amnesia and dissociation. That has been documented in a variety of trauma survivors. Army psychiatrists in the Second World War, for instance, documented that following battles, many soldiers had amnesia for the battles. Often, the memories wouldn't break through until much later when they were in psychotherapy. Freyd: But I think I mentioned Dr. Loren Pankratz. He is a psychologist who was studying veterans for post-traumatic stress in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland. They found some people who were admitted to Veteran's hospitals for postrraumatic stress in Vietnam who didn't serve in Vietnam. They found at least one patient who was being treated who wasn't even a veteran. Without external validation, we just can't know -- TAT: -- Well, we have external validation in some of our cases. Freyd: In this field you're going to find people who have all levels of belief, understanding, experience with the area of repression. As I said before it's not an area in which there's any kind of uniform agreement in the field. The full notion of repression has a meaning within a psychoanalytic framework and it's got a meaning to people in everyday use and everyday language. What there is evidence for is that any kind of memory is reconstructed and reinterpreted. It has not been shown to be anything else. Memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted from fragments. Some memories are true and some memories are confabulated and some are downright false. TAT: It is certainly possible for in offender to dissociate a memory. It's possible that some of the people who call you could have done or witnessed some of the things they've been accused of -- maybe in an alcoholic black-out or in a dissociative state -- and truly not remember. I think that's very possible. Freyd: I would say that virtually anything is possible. But when the stories include murdering babies and breeding babies and some of the rather bizarre things that come up, it's mighty puzzling. TAT: I've treated adults with dissociative disorders who were both victimized and victimizers. I've seen previously repressed memories of my clients' earlier sexual offenses coming back to them in therapy. You guys seem to be saying, be skeptical if the person claims to have forgotten previously, especially if it is about something horrible. Should we be equally skeptical if someone says "I'm remembering that I perpetrated and I didn't remember before. It's been repressed for years and now it's surfacing because of therapy." I ask you, should we have the same degree of skepticism for this type of delayed-memory that you have for the other kind? Freyd: Does that happen? TAT: Oh, yes. A lot.

Veterans have described private, infinitely fragile, unspoken truces that they observed to allow the enemy to collect their dead without being fired upon, particularly after engagements with the North Vietnamese. Reciprocal gestures of respect have also been reported: One veteran described a North Vietnamese practice of marking American bodies with lime to make them visible from the air and voiced the belief that they did this only for American soldiers who had fought well. Unfortunately, such stories of mutual respect for the enemy's need to gather and mourn their dead are painfully rare, outnumbered a thousand to one by stories -- on both sides -- of the dead being used as booby traps or as bait for ambushes; of mutilation and degradation of the dead; and of cruelty and contempt for the bereaved.

The individual (as contrasted to unit) rotation policy practiced in Vietnam, which moved individual men in and out of combat units on a preordained time schedule, systematically destroyed the unit cohesion of combat groups. Very, very few Vietnam veterans went over with the unit they had trained with, fought with that unit, and returned "to the world" with it. I estimate of the three-quarters of a million Vietnam combat veterans, only a few hundred or thousand did so. By contrast, my impression is that this was the majority experience in World War II, particularly in the Pacific. Even men who went over as individual replacements in World War II spent weeks or months with their units after fighting ended and universally returned by boat. "The long trip home" is generally credited as an opportunity for mutual support and communal reworking of combat trauma.

Communal recognitions of deaths were perfunctory, delayed, and conducted by rear-echelon officers who had no emotional connection to the dead or their comrades. One veteran from an elite unit bitterly resents that nothing ceremonial marked the death of his closest comrade: They didn't even have a fucking stand-down for the fucking kid. They had a fucking stand-down for all the fucking pot-head mother-fucking dope-stuffing motherfuckers. [Stand-down] is when guys in the outfit get killed, they'd bring the whole unit back, and they'd set his rifle up and put his helmet or his boonie cap on, and plays taps and shit. Pay him fucking respect. They do this for all these mother-fucking junkie motherfuckers around here. They can't do it for a fucking kid who did every fucking thing he was asked to do. Fucking kid never complained about nothing.

What happens when the sacrifice, or the sincere willingness to sacrifice does not "work"? This is a situation experienced by many combat veterans with PTSD. In an ethical universe run by a just, loving, and all-powerful God, the "person I was willing to die for" is not supposed to die. Incomprehensibly, he does die. Mortal soldiers discover that they differ from the immortals in this heartbreaking way: They cannot save, cannot protect, cannot resurrect the comrades they have come to value ore than themselves.

After Patroklos's death, Achilles -- to use the words of our veterans -- "lost it." When a veteran says he "lost it," what did he lose? What did Achilles lose? I believe that the veterans and Homer shared similar views on this subject. I believe that the veterans' own words, they lost their humanity. Beast-god and god-beast replace human identity.

The berserker's manic obsession with revenge is not only destruction to gratify rage. At some deep cultural and psychological level, spilling enemy blood is an effort to bring the dead back to life. One veteran recalls the following interior chant to his dead friend at every kill: Every fucking one that died, I say, "____, here's one for you, baby. I'll take this motherfucker out and I'm going to cut his fucking heart out for you.

As seen from the combat soldier's perspective, the distant gods are the rear-echelon higher officers and civilian political authorities who control an army and (along with the enemy) are the soldier's de facto masters and captors. They have truly godlike power over soldiers in combat. Rear-echelon authorities were known universally among Vietnam combat veterans as REMFS (pronounced as a word, the "m" formed with the lower lip against the upper teeth, often accompanied by a curl of the upper lip), an acronym for "rear-echelon motherfuckers.

Some African-Americans have suspected that the Vietnam War contained a secret demographic agenda to kill off young black men. Many of the white Vietnam combat veterans whom I have worked with firmly believed that there was a general demographic plan to "thin" the baby-boom generation by holding a war. One white veteran said: The stocks [of the M-16] broke [in hand to hand combat]. I started feeling like the government really didn't want us to get back, that there needed to be fewer of us back home.

Kurt was crazy, who wouldn't have been?

In those early days at the VA, we labeled our veterans with all sorts of diagnoses—alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, mood disorder, even schizophrenia—and we tried every treatment in our textbooks. But for all our efforts it became clear that we were actually accomplishing very little. The powerful drugs we prescribed often left the men in such a fog that they could barely function. When we encouraged them to talk about the precise details of a traumatic event, we often inadvertently triggered a full-blown flashback, rather than helping them resolve the issue. Many of them dropped out of treatment because we were not only failing to help but also sometimes making things worse. A turning point arrived in 1980, when a group of Vietnam veterans, aided by the New York psychoanalysts Chaim Shatan and Robert J. Lifton, successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to create a new diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which described a cluster of symptoms that was common, to a greater or lesser extent, to all of our veterans. Systematically identifying the symptoms and grouping them together into a disorder finally gave a name to the suffering of people who were overwhelmed by horror and helplessness. With the conceptual framework of PTSD in place, the stage was set for a radical change in our understanding of our patients. This eventually led to an explosion of research and attempts at finding effective treatments

Loss in Vietnam radicalized a generation of veterans, pushing many into the ranks of white-supremacist groups. Ronald Reagan, as the standard bearer of an ascendant New Right, effectively tapped into this radicalization, which helped lift him to victory in his 1980 presidential campaign. Once he was in office, Reagan's re-escalation of the Cold War allowed him to contain the radicalization, preventing it from spilling over (too much) into domestic politics. Anti-communist campaigns in Central America—a region Reagan called "our southern frontier"—were especially helpful in focusing militancy outward. But Reagan's Central American wars (which comprised support for the Contras in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) generated millions of refugees, many, perhaps most, of whom fled to the United States. As they came over the border, they inflamed the same constituencies that Reagan had mobilized to wage the wars that had turned them into refugees in the first place.

A protected group or protected class is a group of people qualified for special protection by a law, policy, or similar authority. In the United States, the term is frequently used in connection with employees and employment. U.S. federal law protects individuals from discrimination or harassment based on the following nine protected classes: sex, race, age, disability, color, creed, national origin, religion, or genetic information (added in 2008). Many state laws also give certain protected groups special protection against harassment and discrimination, as do many employer policies. Although it is not required by federal law, state law and employer policies may also protect employees from harassment or discrimination based on marital status or sexual orientation. The following characteristics are "protected" by United States federal anti-discrimination law: Race – Civil Rights Act of 1964 Religion – Civil Rights Act of 1964 National origin – Civil Rights Act of 1964 Age (40 and over) – Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 Sex – Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Civil Rights Act of 1964 Sexual orientation and gender identity as of Bostock v. Clayton County – Civil Rights Act of 1964 Pregnancy – Pregnancy Discrimination Act Familial status – Civil Rights Act of 1968 Title VIII: Prohibits discrimination for having or not having children Disability status – Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 Veteran status – Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 and Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act Genetic information – Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act Individual states can and do create other classes for protection under state law.

He also began spending more time with his cousin, Miguel “Mike” Ramirez, a decorated Green Beret veteran who had fought in the Vietnam War and performed many horrific acts on his enemies, as well as raping and killing innocent women.

In 1932, only 2 percent of the people qualified to go to college actually went. In 1964 that number had jumped to 60 percent,” he tells me. This was change. The extreme growth in college enrollment was largely the work of the G.I. Bill of Rights, guaranteeing returning veterans—first from the Second World War, then Korea—a college education. And Joe realized the reason he kept coming back to the article was the wave hadn’t crested. The war in Vietnam meant the G.I. Bill was about to hit a third generation. “All these college graduates,” he says. “I just thought they might want something different to eat.

ITEM. It is conservatively estimated that 20 percent of all Vietnam veterans, and 60 percent of combat veterans, were psychiatric casualties.58

The fourth category of sources consists of recollections and interviews of veterans, including Chinese soldiers and junior officers in Shenyang Military Regional Command, NDU, PLA Logistics Academy, and China’s Academy of Armed Police Force.

Although the declassification process of the war archives in Vietnam has not yet started, a few publications have become available, including stories from retired generals, officials, and diplomats. After 2010, NVA and NLF veterans began to speak of their personal experiences in the Vietnam War and to publish their memoirs, recollections, and war stories, adding new perspectives on the subject.

Trauma has the power to reach out from the past and claim new victims,” writes addiction psychiatrist Dr. David Sack in Psychology Today. “Children of a parent struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder can sometimes develop their own PTSD, called secondary PTSD.” He reports that about 30 percent of kids with a parent who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and developed PTSD struggle with similar symptoms. “The parent’s trauma,” he says, “becomes the child’s own and [the child’s] behavioral and emotional issues can mirror those of the parent.”42 Children with a parent who was traumatized during the Cambodian genocide, for example, tend to suffer from depression and anxiety. Similarly, children of Australian Vietnam War veterans have higher rates of suicide than the general population.

The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary. This leaves psychological wounds among survivors as well as veterans. Many of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam must grapple with the realization that there was no higher purpose to the war, that the sacrifice was a waste. It is easier to believe the myth that makes such loss noble and necessary, despite the glaring contradictions.

Getting perspective on your terror and sharing it with others can reestablish the feeling that you are a member of the human race. After the Vietnam veterans I treated joined a therapy group where they could share the atrocities they had witnessed and committed, they reported beginning to open their hearts to their girlfriends.

When a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that wounded Vietnam combat veterans suffered more from PTSD than victims of rape and muggings,69 it received little publicity.

Were Beecher’s observations relevant to people with PTSD? Mark Greenberg, Roger Pitman, Scott Orr, and I decided to ask eight Vietnam combat veterans if they would be willing to take a standard pain test while they watched scenes from a number of movies. The first clip we showed was from Oliver Stone’s graphically violent Platoon (1986), and while it ran we measured how long the veterans could keep their right hands in a bucket of ice water. We then repeated this process with a peaceful (and long-forgotten) movie clip. Seven of the eight veterans kept their hands in the painfully cold water 30 percent longer during Platoon. We then calculated that the amount of analgesia produced by watching fifteen minutes of a combat movie was equivalent to that produced by being injected with eight milligrams of morphine, about the same dose a person would receive in an emergency room for crushing chest pain. We concluded that Beecher’s speculation that “strong emotions can block pain” was the result of the release of morphinelike substances manufactured in the brain. This suggested that for many traumatized people, reexposure to stress might provide a similar relief from anxiety.17 It was an interesting experiment, but it did not fully explain why Julia kept going back to her violent pimp.

When Kerry had saluted, the bitter memories had rushed in: Once again it was April 1971, and Kerry was testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. All the newspaper and television reporting about the Vietnam War flooded back too, coverage that many Vietnam veterans believe is the longest-running hoax ever perpetrated on the American public. And here was the man they believed responsible. Many in the military community suddenly realized John Kerry could be elected commander in chief.

It doesn't take care of its sick, doesn't care for its poor. Doesn't protect its children. Abandons its veterans and its elderly. America's very God is a fraud, invented by marauding settlers to justify native genocide, a savage deity blessing a savage people, forgiving the napalming of babies in Vietnam, the starvation of five hundred thousand Iraqis in our own lives. And who at this table lost five seconds even thinking about that? No, we drown that out with our positive personal affirmations. We don't even look after our own. The people who work fifteen hours a day doing our makeup, hair, and wardrobe have to invoice the studios six or seven times before they get paid. They beg while someone siphons interest off their money. And whose fucking idea was a fifteen-hour day in the first place?

caught in the teeth of the machinery of the wrong moments of our lives.

It does seem, doesn’t it, that some conversation has begun—that our silent dance around the war is at last yielding up words, speech, conversation.

…I am a storyteller. From barstools to back porches, from kitchen tables to campfires, from podiums to park benches, I have spun my yarns to audiences both big and small, both rapt and bored. I didn’t start out that way. I was just a dreamer, quietly imagining myself as something special, as someone who would “make a difference” in the world. But the fact is, I was just an ordinary person leading an ordinary life. Then, partly by design, partly by happenstance, I was thrust into a series of adventures and circumstances beyond anything I had ever dreamed. It all started when I ran away from home at eighteen and hitchhiked around the country. Then I joined the Army, became an infantry lieutenant, and went to Vietnam. After Vietnam, I tried to become a hippie, got involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and became a National Coordinator for the organization. I was subsequently indicted for conspiracy to incite a riot at the Republican Convention in 1972—the so-called Gainesville Eight case—and one of my best friends turned out to be an FBI informant who testified against me at the trial. In the early eighties, I was involved with the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, which built a memorial for Vietnam veterans in New York City and published the book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. In the late eighties, I was part of a delegation of Vietnam veterans who went to the Soviet Union to meet with Soviet veterans of their Afghanistan War. I fell in love with a woman from Russia, married her, and spent nine years living there, during which I fathered two children, then brought my family back to the U.S. and the suburban middle-class life I had left so many years before. The adventures ultimately, inevitably perhaps, ended, and like Samwise Gamgee, I returned to an ordinary life once they were over. The only thing I had left from that special time was the stories… I wrote this book for two reasons. First and foremost, I wrote it for my children. Their experience of me is as a slightly boring “soccer dad,” ordinary and unremarkable. I wanted them to know who I was and what I did before I became their dad. More importantly, I hope the book can be inspiring to the entire younger generation they represent, who will have to deal with the mess of a world that we have left them. The second reason is that when I was young, I had hoped that my actions would “make a difference,” but I’m not so sure if they amounted to “a hill of beans,” as Humphry Bogart famously intoned. If my actions did not change the world, then I dream that maybe my stories can.

Bosch experienced a sense of déjà vu as he looked through the contents. He had also read Tolkien in Vietnam. It was a popular book among combat veterans, a rich fantasy about another world that took them away from the reality of where they were and what they were doing.

He had also read Tolkien in Vietnam. It was a popular book among combat veterans, a rich fantasy about another world that took them away from the reality of where they were and what they were doing.

I didn’t lose the war, nor did the men who fought it. The high command lost the war. And after the war was over, they didn’t stand up for us. Veterans had to build their own memorial—with their own initiative, time, and money. Congress had to pass a bill so we could have this memorial; all they had to do was lift a pen to their fingers. But almost three million men and women who served in Vietnam lifted things far heavier—and carried those things every day, long after the war was over.

You remember Vietnam veterans being spat upon, incidents that were called an “urban myth” by liberals, until Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene asked in his newspaper column if any Vietnam veterans were personally spat upon when they returned to the United States. He received more than a thousand replies, sixty of which are included in his book Homecoming.51

The second factor helping to bring the dissociative disorders back into the mainstream was the Vietnam War. For sociological reasons originating outside psychology and psychiatry, the Vietnam War and the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that arose from it were not forgotten when the veterans returned home, as had been the case in the two world wars and the Korean War. The realization that real, severe trauma could have serious long-term psychopathological consequences was forced on society as a whole by Vietnam. Once this principle was accepted, it as a short leap to the conclusion that severe childhood trauma might have serious sequelae lasting into adulthood.

The combat during the war was only a part of the horror. When soldiers came home, they were faced with new challenges, new fights to be won. When the anti-war public sentiment was strong, as it was during the Vietnam war, our brave soldiers came home to expressions of disdain and revulsion instead of the respect and honor they deserved. But perhaps the ultimate betrayal for veterans, who willingly risked their lives when their government asked, was making them fight to prove their sicknesses and disabilities were caused by the war in order to receive the free medical treatment they needed, or to be compensated. These were the worst indignities of war.

The biological aftereffects of sexual abuse that Putnam and Trickett have uncovered are even more startling, indicating that prolonged sexual abuse may lead to the same kind of disturbances in the physiological response to stress that have been found in combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder. The abused girls were found to chronically excrete higher levels of catecholamines—the chemicals epinephrine, norepinephrine, and dopamine released by the brain and adrenal gland in response to stress—than the nonabused girls. An excess of these chemicals in the body causes hyperarousal and has been found in Vietnam War veterans suffering from PTSD.

veteran