Brian M Downing
Over the last few decades, the image of the veteran has undergone numerous pendulum-like changes. The changes reflect the public’s unfamiliarity with military service and war. Even when positive, the mythic images are more often than not harmful, to both the soldiers and the nation.
When young soldiers went off to Vietnam in the sixties, they were the benefactors of a highly romanticized image that had been bequeathed to them by veterans of World War Two, a war which in the public imagination had been fought by young Americans who had all been noble, virtuous, and ever victorious. The usually affable Bill Mauldin learned hard lessons in Italy and tried to convey some of them to the folks back home:
Many celebrities and self-appointed authorities . . . say the American soldier is the same clean-cut young man who left his home; others say morale is sky-high at the front because everybody’s face is shining for the great Cause. They are wrong. The combat man isn’t the same clean-cut lad because you don’t fight a Kraut by Marquis of Queensbury rules: You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself. He does the same to you. He tricks you and cheats you, and if you don’t beat him at his own game you don’t live to appreciate your own nobleness. (Up Front, pp. 12-14.)
But he failed, and the image lasted decades.
The ugliness, cruelty, and length of the Vietnam war shattered the American template of war, including the veteran image – seemingly irreversibly. And veterans faced woeful homecomings. We’ve all heard the spit stories, but if it happened it was exceedingly rare. Doesn’t the idea of hippies spitting on combat veterans have . . . well, a surface implausibility? Wouldn’t the story have really been hippies being pummeled? Nonetheless, the antiwar movement, for reasons that its members can best explain, saw returning soldiers as sadistic racist killers, and were not reluctant to say so.
Returnees were neither welcomed nor spat upon. They were ignored, avoided, shunned. Avoiding the subject of Vietnam, any reminder of it – avoiding the very word – was just what Americans wanted.
Several things altered the loathsome image. When Reagan became president in 1981, he embarked on a program of restoring pride in America and refocusing national attention on facing down the Soviet Union. Important prerequisites were rebuilding the military and restoring the prestige of military service. Accordingly, countless speeches and rites aimed at honoring soldiers and veterans. Most of this was uninteresting or even alien to large portions of America, but other dynamics were at work too. Guilt over the chilly or hostile reception of Vietnam veterans gave rise to a wave of sympathy for them. Faddish, often puerile, and most of all absurdly belated – it was a bit like receiving a cheap birthday card from an anonymous sender six months late – the wave at least contributed to ending the post-Vietnam image.
By the mid eighties a new image – a caricature, really – came into being: the soldier as latter-day knight errant, whose deeds are motivated by honor, sacrifice, and patriotism. No ambiguities, no base motives, no gradations. All soldiers are heroes.
Though a welcome change from the post-Vietnam image, this caricature is in its own way harmful.
It endows the military with an unrealistic image of nobility and efficacy, which contributes to our national delusion that the problems of the world can be solved by war.
It detaches military operations from the realm of sober analysis and elevates them into a mysterious realm above comprehension – and above criticism.
It contributes to the widespread notion that our soldiers always act professionally and justly, and that averring anything to the contrary – needless force, torture, murder – is mendacious or unpatriotic or both.
Perhaps the most objectionable but least visible effect is that it adds to the dissociation and anomie that soldiers feel upon returning from war. By viewing them in mythic heroic terms, the public unwittingly widens the chasm between themselves and the war veterans. Surrounded by such well-intentioned people, veterans face more difficulty in comprehending and coming to terms with their experiences; and authentic memories and self-realizations are lost in a fog of culturally generated hokum.
Veterans deserve gratitude and help in reintegrating into American life. But being thought of simplemindedly and generically as heroes will not help. Nor will it help the public think critically of foreign policy matters and the obligations it owes soldiers.
~ ©2008 Brian M Downing
Brian M. Downing, a veteran of the Vietnam War, is a regular contributor to The Agonist and the author of several works of political and military history, including The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam.