In reading a book tonight, "A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century," by Ben Shephard, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (2001), I came across this interesting paragraph:
"Yet a Los Angeles Times survey of veterans in 1975 concluded that, overall, 'there is ample evidence to suggest that the vast majority of Vietnam veterans have melted back into society as successfully as any soldier from any war.' Vietnam veterans were joining the traditional veterans' organizations, using the GI Bill for education in greater numbers than any previous generation, and successfully getting off heroin. Only 2% of Vietnam veterans used narcotics in civilian life. The LA Times quoted a VA psychiatrist: 'Our society was scared by the image of the Vietnam veteran coming home and shooting up the community, of being a junkie. It was a distorted image that the veteran is still paying for.' There was, he believed, 'no evidence that Vietnam has produced a disproportionate share of people who are maladjusted to society and no evidence that the primary contributor to that maladjustment was military service.'"
I wonder if even Vietnam veterans would agree with that appraisal. It seems awfully rosy. There's a tendency when people first get back to want to fit back in, as though nothing ever happened. I wonder if they caught the respondents at that phase, before they had had significant adjustment issues. The old statistic was that it took veterans, including Vietnam veterans, 13 years to become homeless, because it took that long for safety nets of family support and employment to fail. The statistics coming back from England with more recent wars is that it's taking three years, not 13, so the pace is escalating. A survey taken in 1975 would have been within that window. It's germane to note that the PTSD diagnosis did not become part of the DSM until 1980. Prior to that, according to "A War of Nerves," one prominent psychiatrist (Chaim Shatan) "argued in 1974 that there were probably one to one and half million men suffering from 'post-combat syndrome,'" while four years later, Arthur Egendorf, Ph.D., a psychologist and Army veteran himself, "(using looser criteria)" put the number at "over two million, a figure almost ten times as great." By 1982, the book says, "another article ... declared that 500,000-700,000 veterans were 'in need of emotional help at the present time.'"
A more common experience would seem to be that of a conversation I had with a friend today. She was talking about her uncle, who she never knew, who had served in Vietnam. According to his mother, she had "two" sons: the son who went off to war, and the one who returned. Her son's platoon was wiped out; only he survived; and he came back, and never really rejoined society. From the sounds of things, he got high, and stayed high, pretty much since he got back from Vietnam. And has never been able to have a job in which people contact is a requirement. Sad tale, and not an uncommon one from the era.
