> on Sun Sep 13 17:38:00 1998 at 17:38, Paul Henry Rosenberg
> <rad at gte.net> said: >James Devine wrote:
> >
> >> When Jerry presented his thesis in the L.A. TIMES, some Vietnam veteran
> >> wrote in to say that he -- the vet -- had been spat upon. I doubt the guy
> >> was lying.
> > [ . . . . ]
> >(1) There are extent records aplenty of vets who claimed such events
> >happened, but
>
> >(a) these records do not appear until significantly after the period
> >when they purported events took place -- after crucial changes in
> >public mythologoy which made the myth both compelling and believable,
> >and [ . . . . ]
>
> This could easily be explained by PTSD.
Lembcke devotes some time to critiquing PTSD, too, going back to Paul Starr's initial criticism of Robert Lifton's work, and adding onto it.
First let's consider context: While acknowledging that Lifton's motives were primarily sympathetic, the obvious result was that "bad vets" became "mad vets", and thus their political critique of the war (which in the case of VVAW was WELL to the left of the liberal wing of the anti-war movement) became "symptoms" to be diagnosed and healed, rather than digested and heeded.
This isn't to say that returning vets didn't face problems -- but those problems ALSO had a lot to do with unemployment, bureaucratic mistreatment from the VA & lack of a support system to deal with these. Psychiatric help was part of what they needed, but the social construction of PTSD skewed everything into that direction.
As for PTSD itself, Lembcke writes (p. 121):
"Starr's charge that Lifton had 'evoked' the very psychiatric conditions that he then claimed to have 'found' in the veterans is a powerful insight into an element of the 'false memory syndrome' of Vietnam veterans, namely, that the very identity of veterans, qua veterans, is a social and political construct enabled, in some caes, by the intervention of mental health professionals."
"LIfton's work was easily the single most influential work in the volumnious literature on PVS/PTSD. That the gatekeepers of America's intellectual life were willing to overlook the methodological flaws in Lifton's study suggests, again, how imperative it was that a nonpolitical interpretive framework for the Vietnam veteran experience be formulated."
Lembcke then goes on to discuss another oft-cited study, "Identity, Ideology and Crisis: The Vietnam Veteran in Transition," which had the internal title, "The Forgotten Warrior Project" -- which title appeared TWICE on the permission forms signed before vets became participants. A little bit of contamination of the results, don'tcha think?
> Most Vietnam veterans who saw combat are reported to refrain
> as much as possible from talking about their experiences.
But, in fact, Lifton's work came out of the rap groups he helped set up, probably some of THE most intensive experiences Vietnam veterans involving talking about their experiences.
What's more, I hitch-hiked across country numerous times during the late 60s and early 70s. I got picked up by vets all the time, particularly in rural areas (where most of the miles to hitch-hike are) and they certainly had plenty of stuff to talk about that people in their hometowns didn't want to hear about. All but one of the hundred or more vets that I meant this way were opposed to the war, from a variety of different perspectives, and this was clearly related to why they couldn't talk too much about their experiences, why they were hungry to talk to someone who might be willing to listen.
Of course there was self-selection in who picked me up. But there is plenty of other evidence that the homecoming vets clammed up mostly for similar reasons to the ones I meet in my admittedly un-scientific sample. Lembcke cites some of that evidence himself, of course.
> This seems to be the usual reaction for ex-soldiers. Most
> WW2 veterans haven't talked publicly about their experiences
> either. They have just kept it hidden inside, or talked to
> other veterans about it.
That's true. One point Lembcke makes is that the supposed vast gap between the Vietnam vet experience and the WWII vet experience is largley a matter of re-writen history. Before the rewriting began after WWII, though, we had the classic film, "The Best Years of Our Lives".
> Some Vietnam veterans wrote frankly about their experiences
> only in "Soldier of Fortune" magazine, because the
> public was unwilling to truly listen to them.
Lembcke doesn't deal with "Soldier of Fortune" at all, but a truly excellent related book, "Warrior Dreams" by William J. Gibson, deals at length with the evolution of paramilitary culture after Vietnam. Let's just say that I regard "Soldier of Fortune" as a hotbed of proto-fascist mythologizing, rather than a forum for frank truth-telling.
> As for the experience of being spat upon, it's not something
> that they would have wanted to talk about at that time. They
> felt ashamed and humiliated.
That's just not true. In fact, it's a false representation of veterans' feelings that's a RESULT of the spitting myth and the revisionism it embodies.
Vets were far more likely to be angry than ashamed. Most were angry at the military, though a minority certainly were angry at the anti-war protesters. The latter would have GLADLY trumpeted such stories to the press IF THEY HAD HAPPENED.
> It's a miracle they ever talked about it.
No, it's a natural consequence of the culturally-sanctioned rewriting of history.
> Why spit on soldiers but not on generals?
You're assuming facts not in evidence. Lembcke couldn't find ONE example of a spitting incident that held up to scrutiny, and you haven't produced one, either.
What's more, the anti-war movement definitely WAS focused placing blame on the civilian and military leadership AND on supporting GI resistence.
And of course, anti-war soldiers went WAY beyond spitting, they KILLED officers who insisted on making them fight. (Lembcke also refers to David Cortright's *Soldiers In Revolt*, the only booklength treatment of GI resistence to the war in combat that I'm aware of.)
Lembcke also notes that ALL of these same elements were present in Germany after WWI. The rank-and-file soldiers joined the Communist & socialist-led revolution in large numbers, they attacked their officers, and they were written out of history afterwards. At the same time, the right wing promoted a mythology of betrayal that included women spitting on veterans, and helped legitimize a whole anti-liberal, anti-civilian gestalt, COMPLETELY inverting the actual responsibility for Germany's loss in WWI -- just as happened with the US and Vietnam.
> Who thought this was a good idea?
No one, that's who!
> And how could anyone be more anti-war than soldiers, when
> they are the ones who are dying? Let's have a little more
> understanding for the plight of common soldiers.
There was TREMENDOUS understanding for the plight of common soldiers in the anti-war movement (though not always so much in passive opponents of the war).
The informal grouping which became Veterans for Peace was involved in the anti-war movement from very early on -- Lembcke cites a full-page ad in the NY Times and leadership in a march both of whice occured in November 1965. He cites the involvement of Green Beret staff sergent Donal Duncan, beginning with his role as a speaker in March 1966 at an event chaired by I.F. Stone. And then, of course there's the GI coffeehouses and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
> I think we on the Left have to get away from our tendency
> to deny our mistakes, like tacitly praising spitting on
> soldiers.
One of the biggest ways to deny our mistakes is to invent false ones. Spitting on soldiers is a classic example of this.
> Unless we are strong enough to learn from our mistakes,
> we will never succeed in our activism.
Unless we free ourselves from rightwing propaganda, we will never succede in freeing anyone else from it.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"