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Vets And The Media: TV Distorts Vets Lives

By VVAW

Did you ever sit down in front of the television and watch one of these police shows and all of a sudden see a guy in a field jacket shooting up dope, or robbing a bank or doing some other such thing? Well, he's the crazy, bug-eyed Vietnam veteran who's the latest in a long series of stereotyped villains on TV. Hardly a week goes by where you can't see a show that uses a vet with some kind of problem to get through another hour of "entertainment." And if the vet isn't killing his best friend over an ounce of heroin, he night be having flashbacks to the time in Vietnam when he burned a village which supposedly accounts for the reason why he can't relate to his wife or family.

It seems about the only time that TV shows how "well-adjusted" vets are is when they are portrayed as cops, like Starsky and Hutch, two Vietnam vets who become undercover agents. Since when are cops such well adjusted people? Who hasn't witnessed some kind of police repression, whether it's as bad as seeing somebody shot down in the street for doing nothing, or getting stopped for a traffic ticket, only to see a cop looking for a hand-out.

The main reason why vets are being used as villains on TV is that the war in Vietnam was not popular here in the US. For a variety of reasons the American people wanted the war to end. When it did it was in victory for the Indochinese and defeat the US rulers. Because vets had the first hand experience of fighting in that rich man's war, they were able to come home and talk about what we were doing there; that the war wasn't being fought in the Vietnamese people's interests and it wasn't in the interests of the American people either. So the rulers of the country have to make vets look like they're crazy in order to try and make people think that vets can't seriously expose the first hand knowledge of what a rich man's war is all about. This is where TV comes into the picture. If the show portrays vets in either blatantly anti-social behavior, like taking heroin, or in more subtle ways, like having flashbacks to burning villages in Vietnam, they think they can water down the important views that vets have on rich man's wars.

It's true that some vets were addicted to heroin and that some vets do have flashbacks to Vietnam. In fact, the great majority of vets don't have these problems; even those who do are not, as TV tries to say, afflicted by a great sense of guilt. Instead, vets are striking out based on their sense of being used to fight a war for the interests of the rich and their class. Vets also took part in the massive anti-war demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and were, in fact, an important part of the anti-war movement. But you'll never see TV show that. They couldn't dare have a vet protest war, in a real way, going to the homes of millions of Americans. The Indochinese won the war and it was the system that lost the war; you'll never see that on TV either.

When vets on TV shows rob banks or sell dope to little kids or blow up buildings they are portrayed as acting against the system that they feel betrayed them. But vets don't see themselves just as individuals apart from the great majority of people or see the American people as the enemy. This is a far cry from the truth. Vets face the same conditions as most other Americans: unemployed, underpaid, living under the crunch of the system's economic crisis, and living under the threat of looming rich man's wars, in addition to facing the horrible treatment from the VA.

And, like the American people are fighting back more and more against the system, together, and not in senseless acts of individualism, vets are part of worker's strikes, picket lines, unemployment protests, etc. VVAW is a growing organization that has a proud history of fighting against the system. It's uniting veterans into a powerful fist against the rulers of this country in fighting against the shoddy treatment at the VA and against rich man's war. TV shows are incapable of portraying vets in this way, because TV is owned and operated by the businessmen whose interests are self-serving. Building a powerful veterans organization won't be on your screens in the near future, but it is the only answer to the image shown on the television.