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Vietnam Veterans And Prison

By G. David Curry with Suzanne Erfurth

"The car broke down and the bills began to pile up. For the time I had spent writing, I got four rejections. What did the desperate man do? I can tell you that I was arrested in January 1981, charged with smuggling marijuana into the country. In August 1981, I was found guilty of possession and sentenced to five years at a minimum security prison. No one is more shocked that I." (From Robert Mason's Chickenhawk)

This paragraph is tucked away at the very end of Robert Mason's powerful and revealing account of his life before, after, and during his tour as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Mason's prison experience remains unnoted by most who acknowledge his achievements and accomplishments. Since he's successfully completed parole, I will even speculate that this event, life-defining for most human beings, will be omitted from the forthcoming movie version of Chickenhawk.

Still, as I shared a table on Vietnam veterans at the Operation PUSH annual convention with an officer of the Vietnam Veterans Parade Committee, I learned that not everyone has forgotten Mason's one mark of disgrace. Without volunteering any information about my own history, I asked the parade officer why he had refused Mason's offer to raise funds for the Parade at his publisher's expense. The parade officer's first response focused on the large number of veterans who had tried to "make a buck off" the parade. When I said that that wasn't that I had understood to be the nature of Mason's offer, he confided— in that tone which sets the mood for the bottom line communication between all reasonable persons?that Mason had just released from prison. "No, no," he continued, "we don't need any part of that kind of guy. For all I know, he would have taken off which part of the gate after the parade."

Parades and monuments of the Reagan Administration have replaced the underfunded and often misdirected programs of the Carter years. Vietnam vet spoke-men —those preferred by the media— have repeatedly emphasized that most Vietnam vets are "winners," and that only a few are the psychologically disturbed and economically deprived "losers" typified by the incarcerated veteran. In this autobiographical, social scientific and political article I hope to address the situation of those Vietnam Veterans who are under the supervision of federal or state governments. I'll explore the connection between service in Vietnam and official criminal processing. From the perspective of personal observation, I'll examine the experience of some Vietnam veterans in prison settings with special focus on the ways that veterans draw personal and organizing strength from their common bonds and resources.

Bob Mason serves as a useful beginning. The psychological damage of his war experience brought him simultaneously to poverty and creativity. His ineffectiveness as a criminal brought him felony status only moments before his literary genius earned him celebrity status. As my conversation with the Parade official shows, his labeling as a criminal creates a problem for some of those who claim to want to lift our stigma as Vietnam vets.

In 1979, a Presidential Review Memorandum noted an alarming number of Vietnam veterans in various stages of legal difficulty—including 29,000 in state and federal prisons, 37,500 on paroles, 250,000 under probation supervision, and 87,000 awaiting trial. Josefina Card (Lives After Vietnams: the Personal Impact of Military Service) found that Vietnam veterans in her sample of U.S. high school class of 1963 were significantly more likely than their non- Vietnam veteran and non-veteran peers to have been in some trouble with the law in 1980. According to Joel Osler Brende and Erwin Randolph Parson (Vietnam Veterans: The Road to Recovery), "if these men (Vietnam veterans) survived the first 10 years, they were often found within the confines of police, prisons, probation officers, or parole counselors."

In his Khaki-Collar Crimes: Deviant Behavior in the Military Context, Clifton Bryant notes that "Military life is the scene of wide variety of deviant behavior ranging from excessive use of alcohol and narcotic addiction, to sex crimes, theft, and even mass murder. Much of this behavior may perhaps be attributed to the opportunity structure of the military system and the sociocultural and geographical setting in which the military normally operates, the informal pressures and strains inherent in military culture, as well as the structured subversion of organizational goals frequently component to the military enterprise." John Helmer (Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After) outlined the socially important role that alcohol and drug use played in day-to-day military life in Vietnam. Bill Shunas in him unpublished manuscript, The Poker Face describes well the ways in which the economic crimes associated with the U.S. and Vietnamese corruption and were a ubiquitous feature of daily life in the urbanized areas of Viet-nam during the war. As Bryant notes, "American troops often violate currency and exchange laws of the country involved, inasmuch as this is one of the few economic crimes of which the commission in encouraged and facilitated by their occupational circumstances." Looking at the place of crime in the whole of human history of warfare forces Bryant to propose that, "My Lai, the entire Vietnam War, and the endemic crimes against the Vietnamese civilians who were theoretically the allies of the U.S. military were all unusual occurrences of war (emphasis added)." For even the proudly conservative Bryant, the wartime experiences of the Vietnam veteran remain historically unique.

While few returning veterans of previous wars were subject to military-relates criminal charges upon returning to the U.S. from a war zone, my own research (Sunshine Patriots: Punishment and the Vietnam Offender) has shown that perhaps as many as a quarter of all those individuals who received less-than-honorable dischargers as a result of military absence offenses were Vietnam veterans who went AWOL after returning to the U.S. from completing a tour in Vietnam. For these twenty thousand plus veterans, the end of the war brought a losing brush with the military justice system. In one study (Figley and Leventman, Strangers at Home: Vietnam Veterans Since the War), Vietnam veterans were compared to the Greek veteran of the Trojan War, Odyseus, who upon returning to his homeland has his eyes clouded by Athena so that nothing that had been familiar recognizable. The comparison is even more appropriate in terms of the legal system that represented all things right during childhood, but had been turned on its head in the context of Vietnam and never quite regained its footing upon our return. The story of the government and professional psychology's coming to recognize Post-Traumatic stress disorder as an official mental ailment is described by Myra McPherson (Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation) as in part a trail of losing court battles on behalf of afflicted Vietnam veterans who in most cases went on to become convicted felons.

In his highly acclaimed Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, Wallace Terry introduced Specialist 4 Haywood T. Kirkland. The three Vietnam veterans involved in the Haywood Kirkland mail robbery each contributed $10,000 to the needy in their Washington DC community before they were arrested and began their lives as Vietnam veteran convicts. It isn't surprising, therefore, that Kirkland eventually became active on behalf of other Vietnam vets in prison. One of the founders of the Incarcerated Veterans Assistance Organization at Lorton Reformatory in Virginia, Kirkland testified before Congress and met President Jimmy Carter. Office space, donated office equipment, and VA recognition were all gained through the efforts of Kirkland and other prisoners during those years.

My own place in the history of incarcerated Vietnam veterans came through the Reagan Administration's general assault on the VA Vet Center Program. McPherson describes the planting of three undercover agents in the Alabama Veterans Services community-based organization and Alabama Vet Centers, in an effort to uncover a suspected gun-and drug-running ring of anti-war Vietnam veterans. By means of a number of lies and machinations, I was one of three vets convicted of disturbing small amounts of drugs at no profit. In fact I was convicted of conspiring, distributing, and using the phone to facilitate the distribution of 5.6 grams of cocaine. For this Judge Brevard Hand (known for his efforts to mandate the return of organized prayers in Alabama's public schools) sentenced me to 15 years for conspiracy, 15 years for distribution, and 4 years for using the phone, all to run consecutively. By sentencing me and my codefendant under federal law that required him to review the sentence after 90 days of incarceration, Judge Hand gained the best of all possible words. My supporters among the decent citizenry of Alabama "knew" that he would reduce the sentence after 90 days. The right wing in Alabama saw that the judge was tough on crime. And he sent me behind bars carrying three-month to thirty-four year sentence. For prison officials and for other inmates for those three months, I was always identified by that enormous sentence.

My first period of incarceration was at Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution in Florida. Tallahassee has gun towers and a high barbed wire in fence. The cell house where I spent my first night is reminiscent of cellblocks the world over—humanly noisy and mechanically automated. The dormitories that I called home for the next months are enormous rooms where 80 to 100 men are collectively locked down for most hours of the day. Tallahassee had its minor share of beatings, rapes, and even one attempted murder while I was there. Perhaps most importantly, there were more drugs per square foot in Tallahassee that any place that I have ever been including Vietnam.

Every other Friday night one or two outsiders would forsake the quite of their homes to enter the world of F.C.I. The most consistent of these visitors was Michael Hahn, soon to become the Advisor of Veterans' Affairs to the governor of Florida. An infantry man in Vietnam, Hahn felt and lived a special concern for the veterans behind the barbed wire at F.C.I. Even though he spent innumerable hours awaiting the remaking of his volunteer's entrance badges (it was routinely "misplaced" by officials), Hahn, by his persistence and strength of character had helped to make the F.C.I. Veterans Club one of the most viable and powerful in the federal system. In that club with sometimes as many as sixty vets present, we had hard-fought elections and created inmate politics. Nowhere in organizational activity more important for human integrity and development than in the prison system.

In March of 1986, my judge had me moved from Tallahassee at the end of my stay with 25 other prisoners from all around the country, none from Tallahassee. They were bound for Eglin Federal Prison Camp. I was bound for Santa Clara Country Jail (?). The folder that the captain of the prison bus was given said only that I had been a vet center counselor and that I was sentenced to 34 years in prison. The captain was very polite but informed me that he would have to chain me for the trip for the protection of his staff and the other prisoners. As usual, I had a very heavy box of math books which I could not carry when chained. A large inmate with a bushy beard offered to carry them for me and told me to stay close. He told me has had been a Green Beret in 'Nam and that I was obviously "getting screwed." He advised me to "make a break for it" whenever I got a chance. (I incorrectly suspected at the time that the man was a government plant.)

Judge Hand resentenced me to five years of incarceration, three years of special parole, and five years of probation to run consecutively because, as he correctly surmised, I "do not support the established norms of my society." He did let me live out my appeal bond in Chicago for fourteen months. When I lost my appeal and was sent to Elgin F.P.C., I once again met the ex-Green Beret. He was a head clerk and still helpful and kind. Eglin had no veterans' organization, but veterans seemed even more abundant in this minimum security environment than a Tallahassee. On my first inmate job as an unskilled laborer on Eglin Air Force Base, three of my five co-workers were Vietnam combat veterans. Ironically they had never talked about it to each other. Only one day when one of them made an anti-American remark and an argument followed did all three of them realized that they shared so many experiences.

Inmates are responsible for the upkeep of the grounds at Eglin. Bordering a marshland bird sanctuary, the camp is physically beautiful. There are no walls. Many of the inmates have testified against their co-defendants and anyone else that they can, in order to get assigned on a minimum security facility. Others have spent deal of well-behaved time in higher level prisoners in hopes of coming to this "country club" facility. A few have been convicted of crimes that might have merited no incarceration at all except for their "bad" attitudes such as refusing to cooperate with federal prosecutors. There are more people reporting more information to the staff than the staff can ever need. Many members of the guard staff think the inmates have it too easy and take every opportunity and take ever advantage to subject them to psychological harassment. According to the Superintendent, one out of ten inmates who are assigned to Eglin are shipped to a higher level facility for some kind of infraction during their stay there—usually insubordination or drugs in their urine. Two of the Vietnam veterans in my first job assignment would leave Eglin in chains before I did for infractions. One would stay there after I left due to an uncorrectable misstatement of fact in his presentence in investigation report. Fights are almost unheard of. Besides wanting to go home, inmates want second-most to stay at Eglin. Eglin is by rule a place where inmates keep to themselves.

Only Inmate Mason had tried to organize a Vietnam Veterans group when I arrived at Eglin. He was center of veterans' awareness in the Camp. The guard who checked me into Eglin after giving my file a first glance told me that Mason as in the Camp. The Camp administration had refused Mason the right to organize Vietnam vets because his book made him a person who made his livelihood as a Vietnam veteran. No inmate is allowed to carry on his livelihood while in federal prison, so Mason couldn't organize vets.

The staff at Eglin—as at Tallahassee—included a number of Vietnam veterans. In January 1984, with the help of two staff members, we held a meeting of Vietnam veterans at Eglin. It was a one-time evening, but crowded into the jammed room, we got to recognize one another and share common experiences. Perhaps if it had been under a previous presidential administration we could have met regularly and dealt with our mutual problems in the solidarity that organization brings. As it is, I doubt that the Vietnam veterans at Eglin have ever met again.

In conclusion, Vietnam veterans are over-represented in U.S. prisons. I feel that their being there is related to their service in Vietnam. I welcome the research that will be necessary to substantiate or refute these conclusions. Vietnam veteran inmates recognize one another and can draw strength from their common bonds, experiences and skills. Inmate veteran organizations are viable beneficial possibilities for their participants, but for their existence they remain dependent on non-inmate citizens or concerned prison staff. Prisons have gotten more crowded and restrictive since the beginning of the Reagan Administration and will probably continue to get worse.

By 1972, those of us who were still in service in Vietnam were required to produce urine under the scrutiny of a witness upon demand. When I first arrived at Eglin, inmates who failed to meet such a requirement within two hours without drinking liquid were ruled to have "refused" the test and so disciplined. This, of course, violated the Bureau of Prisons regulations and came to a slow halt with a little pain and a lot of writing. The mandatory urine samples in the two settings are brought up, to make a point. In prison, inmates constantly reassess whom they can trust as if their lives depend upon it (and they do). Social life is recreated again and again in all its power at a very individual level. As Kirkland in Bloods says, "we realized that we just had to do it ourselves....In Vietnam and in Lorton I was with men at their darkest hour.... We cried together and longed for the world together. War is a prison too."

—G. David Curry, PhD with Suzanne Erfurth