I would ask Dr. Guindon not to get mad at me for re-arranging his fine article. I do so only because I am afraid many vets will see "Movies" and pass over what he has written. Dr. Guindon is a psychiatrist who has worked extensively with Vietnam vets at the Colmar-O’Neil VA Medical Center in Topeka, Kansas.
The following insights are worth pondering:
"It has taken 20 years for America to assimilate the Vietnam experience. In that time America has regained its stomach for war. We have grieved over our losses, mended our wounds, and worked through our guilt. (Editors note - While I believe the nation as a whole has accomplished this, most Viet Vets have not). The Vietnam experience changed America forever. We first denied the cost of Vietnam and how it was different from World War II. We then awoke to grasp the experience the Vietnam combatant and to understand the Vietnam veteran himself. Since the Greeks defeated the Spartans at Marathon, it has been recognized that armies fight most effectively defending their homeland. In Vietnam, the troops were asked to travel 12,000 miles around the world to die for an abstraction: that democracy is preferable to communism. Television combat coverage made the war very real to the people back home. The gravity of the carnage dispelled our rosy World War II idealism. In earnest, we questioned the value of our beliefs. The more real the war became, the closer we examined all of our ideals, and we found some of them to be arbitrary.
What horror was it that my father, my uncle, my brother, my son went through to cause them to be startled by the sound of a door slamming. To awake screaming from their sleep, to drink for a week on the anniversary of a battle? "As a psychiatrist, in the treatment of Vietnam combat veterans I am often struck by the fact that for some of them it has become more frightening to live than to die.
The fragile ideas by which we live our lives are destroyed in war. These ideas are what the existentialists call "essences." In the same way that perfume distill the "stuff" of herbs and spices, essences are meant to capture the "stuff" of experience. It is the meaning that is attached to words, the large sets of ideas that we inherit from our culture that imbue the world with a sense of purpose and order. And as with the fragrance of a perfume, essences can be fleeting. If these ideas are abruptly and repeatedly destroyed by traumatic reality, a cold sense of alienation and psychic numbing takes hold. This is the case in all trauma. Israeli psychiatrists, themselves working in a society under siege, contend that the essential feature of trauma is the loss of a sense of safety.
The dedication of "the Wall" in 1982 gave the nation a focal point for its grief. In losing its first war, America lost its sense of international manifest destiny and its unshakable sense of purpose and righteousness. Now America had a sacred burial ground where its people could go say goodbye to their loved ones who died in the war, to be able to touch their names carved in granite. As we know from the psychotherapy of any trauma, you have to talk about it in order to get better.
One of the veterans with whom I was working at the time was able to cry for the first time since the war during the movie "Platoon". Although there were many different experiences in Vietnam "Platoon" is generally regarded by Vietnam veterans as the most faithful reproduction of the Vietnam experience. As one of my patients put it, "It left no stone unturned, from the triple canopy jungle and the bugs, to the burning of the shit."
Albert Einstein’s lesson that we briefly considered during the Vietnam War, that "Nationalism is the measles of mankind," was long forgotten. The protagonist states, "I know the difference between dying for something and dying for nothing," as if anyone in Vietnam had been given a choice. This stands in tragic counterpoint to the "dying for nothing" that occurred on Hamburger Hill, at Khe Sahn, Con Thien and everywhere else all over Vietnam. That is the point of Vietnam cinema: that the war was for nothing. For America to make sense of that, accept it and go forward has proved to be a difficult task. But not as difficult as it has been for the individual Vietnam veteran, for whom the war was a cataclysm of loss.
In August 1990, came the war in the Persian Gulf. The public consciousness about Vietnam had become so heightened that the military and the president were quick to aver that this was would not be fought in the jungle, it was not a guerrilla war, the objectives were well defined, and the technology that had been developed for stopping the Russians on the plains of Europe would transfer nicely to the desert. Numerous public relations lessons learned in Vietnam were utilized in the Gulf War, such as keeping the press on a short leash, providing a supportable rationale, and welcoming the troops home as heroes. As the military lessons learned from Vietnam were unflinchingly applied, perhaps the Vietnam veterans can take heart that the war was "for something", and that, in part because of their efforts, many American lives were saved in Desert Storm.
War becomes a force of nature and God, like the tilting of the earth’s axis that brings the seasons. We must have a sense of acceptance of its lessons for the sake of our soul. For all is ultimately maya, illusion. And it is our karma to kill or be killed."
Thank you Dr. Guindon for this fine, insightful article. I for one appreciate the pain you yourself have suffered in hearing and absorbing the pain of our Viet Vet brothers.