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.It was no less essential that the same displacement take place in thememory of Vietnam veterans.False memories are perhaps no more orless common for Vietnam veterans than for any other segment of thepopulation.13 Occasionally, we get dramatic reminders of this, such asthe suicide of Adm.Jeremy Boorda, the Navy s top commander, onMay 16, 1996.Boorda was being investigated for wearing ribbons withthe V device, indicating he had seen combat in Vietnam when, in fact,he had not (Weiner 1996).In another case, it was revealed that MarkFuhrman, the Los Angeles police officer accused of manipulating evi-dence in the O.J.Simpson case, had falsely claimed a record of combatservice.New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield investigated and wrote(1996) that   [Fuhrman] boasted of violent exploits as a marine inVietnam, yet the closest he got to the ground war there was aboard aship in the South China Sea. Boorda and Fuhrman are not the only men of their generationwalking around with fanciful warrior identities.Paul Solotaroff, in hisbook The House of Purple Hearts (1995, 57), about homeless Vietnamveterans says,   Check the discharge papers on all those guys tellingwar stories and you ll find that a third of them never got withintwenty klicks of a firefight and another third did their entire tour inDüsseldorf or Fort Dix.  He goes on to say that lying about the warhas become so prevalent that some therapists now view it as a distinctpathology.14 B.G.  Jug  Burkett, a Dallas businessman and Vietnamveteran has followed up on some seventeen hundred news storiesabout   troubled  Vietnam veterans.Using the Freedom of InformationAct to glean information about their backgrounds, he has been able toexpose about three-quarters of the subjects of these stories as partialor total frauds.Some of them were Vietnam veterans who falsely116 From Badness to Madnessclaimed to have seen combat; others had come nowhere near Vietnam.Oftentimes, the stories combined exaggerated combat biographieswith accounts of the mistreatment of veterans upon their return home(Weiner 1996; Whitley 1994).One of the stories Burkett investigated was that of   Steve,  whohad been the subject of a 1988 CBS documentary with Dan Rathercalled the   The Wall Within.  Steve claimed to be a Navy Seal whohad carried out some gruesome clandestine operations against civil-ians.Unbalanced by the trauma of his experiences, Steve was unableto function once back in the United States.A classic PTSD case, hebecame an alcoholic and drug addict, and attacked his mother as a  VC  (Vietcong) before fleeing to the woods of Washington State withsome other veterans.Burkett determined that Steve had never been aSeal and that the stories of the other men in the documentary con-tained fabrications and gross exaggerations, but when he brought thedetails of his research to the attention of CBS, the network was notinterested (Whitley 1994).The need felt by some Vietnam veterans to fabricate their combatrecord is understandable.War is a rite of passage in this society.Toparaphrase Nietzsche, war is to men what childbirth is to women.Thesociety demands an account of the men it sends to war.It s always thesame question: Did you see combat? And the only right answer is  yes.    No  will end the conversation.No one wants to hear aboutthe war experiences of the veteran who did not see combat.No onewants to hear the stories of the men who spent a year at war as clerk-typists, motor pool specialists, mail clerks, or cooks.Who has met theVietnam veterans who handed out the surfboards at the in-country Rand R sites, checked out books at the airbase libraries, or toured  Namin the 101st Airborne Band?What counts as   combat  is, of course, subjective.One out of everyten soldiers and one out of every seven marines are the commonlyaccepted figures for those who were in the field with a combat unit(Fleming 1985).But most studies of Vietnam veterans allow the veter-ans themselves to define whether or not they saw combat, a methodFrom Badness to Madness 117that confounds the studies of PTSD.Studying the effects of combat onpostwar marital relations, for example, Gimbel and Booth (1994) foundthat when they looked at subjects with self-reported combat experi-ence, an association between combat and marital instability emerged.However, when they employed objective measures of combat experi-ence, such as documented service in Southeast Asia, no such relation-ship was evident.Individuals, it seems, will alter accounts of the pastto create a coherent picture of the present, enlisting exaggerated mili-tary experiences to explain current failures.15The reality is that 85 percent of the men who went to Vietnam didnot see combat.What they did see, and often participated in, was day-to-day resistance to military authority and the war.But their storieswere not the stories that folks back home were ready to hear.Thatbeing the case, it is likely that for every veteran whose reluctance totalk about the war was due to the unspeakable violence of his experi-ence, there were others who quickly learned that no one wanted tohear anti-war stories.As mediated by the talented and engaging RobinWilliams, Adrian Cronauer s story as the early-morning voice of RadioVietnam played better on the screen in Good Morning, Vietnam than itever would have as a first-person story in a VFW hall.All of which is to say that Vietnam veterans felt the pressure toconform to the conventional images of what a veteran is supposed tobe.That meant telling easily digestible war stories.As the 1970s pro-gressed, however, the war itself receded in American memory and inthe place of stories about the war arose stories about the coming-homeexperiences of Vietnam veterans.By the early 1980s, a street-cornerconversation about   the war  might quickly lapse into a conversationabout what happened to   our boys  when they came home.Veteranswhose war records didn t fit the motif of war-as-hell could still claimthat coming home from war was hell.A story of having been treatedbadly, especially by anti-war people, was, in effect, a war story and astory about a wad of spit on the uniform might forestall tough-to-handle questions about the medals that weren t there, or experiencesthat weren t had.118 From Badness to MadnessThe image of the spat-upon veteran is, of course, only the ground-ing image for a larger narrative of betrayal [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]