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Vietnam Syndrome

By Terry Raycraft

In 2014, in a local newspaper, a military officer wrote, "Desert Storm was the high-water point of a two-decade effort to rebuild the military after Vietnam. It worked. The enemy was routed, Kuwait was freed."

Undoubtedly, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was routed. Without further discussion, the popular version is that it worked. At the time, however, many Vietnam Veterans worried that another Vietnam was about to occur. It didn't. One reported reason referenced remnants of the "Vietnam Syndrome" lingering within the Pentagon walls.

What is the Vietnam Syndrome? To understand the concept, one must return to the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s. The student anti-war protests were growing. The military draft was in full force, while nearly a hundred US soldiers a day would be dying in the peak year of 1968. The US government would hide the My Lai massacre, where 500 defenseless women, children, and old men were slaughtered. After Hamburger Hill, perceptions of "pointless" were creeping into the minds of our soldiers. Vietnam vets returned home to join the students, providing legitimacy to the anti-war efforts. Kent State erupted on the news that Nixon was expanding the war into Cambodia. Four Kent State students lay dead, with 9 wounded, shot from over 60 rounds fired from the rifles of National Guardsmen. The protests ignited to huge proportions. The Pentagon Papers revealed the extent of government misrepresentations. The US was seething.

It ended. Over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives, with over 300,000 wounded. An estimated 4 million Vietnamese had perished.

The students who protested, the vets, many of whom joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and others who opposed the war, in an undeclared proclamation, were just not going to let another Vietnam happen.

That is the Vietnam Syndrome.

Almost thirty years later, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the war (many called it McNamara's War), admitted that it had been a mistake In his book, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," he listed specific points for our nation to analyze before committing to war, so as to prevent another Vietnam. Like history itself, this would go unheeded.

I finally visited the Vietnam Memorial. As I stared at the multitude of names, I found myself asking, "Why had they died?" I was struggling to find something to salvage, something to make sense of it all. Did they die in vain? An unexpected answer hit me. It was like loud screams from many graves, "LEARN FROM US. DON'T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN!!!"

That, too, is the Vietnam Syndrome.

Then George H.W. Bush rang the death knoll. As a part of the idea that it worked, Bush proclaimed that "...we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all...the specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula." It was 1991. That was the culmination of the new military build-up that was tested and worked. Now the US could move forward. The planning to free Iraq was on the horizon, even before the tragedy of 9/11.

But the Vietnam Syndrome did not die.

Every year, a different group of Vietnam vets journey back to the old war zones of Vietnam. Some have fallen to their knees, crying, asking for forgiveness. Today, there are Vietnam vets who help Vietnamese clear fields of unexploded ordinance, which has killed over 42,000 more civilians. Vets are also assisting with the care of Vietnamese children, 3rd and 4th generation kids, born with terrible birth defects due to Agent Orange.

In the US, Agent Orange affected not only the exposed vets, but also their children and grandchildren. New bills have been introduced in Congress requesting additional funds for medical care.

In 2003, the US invaded Iraq.

Now Vietnam vets are supporting a new group, Iraq Veterans Against the War. Like the Vietnam vets, they have protested, given back their war medals and held their own hearings to try to tell the American people the truth of that war. This has been dubbed the Gulf Wars Syndrome.

Like Vietnam, many of the Gulf War soldiers, over 8,000, went AWOL. But they weren't evading war. Rather, they had already honorably served one or more tours in Iraq, but were ordered to return. They had become disillusioned, concluding that they were not freeing the Iraqi people, or bringing democracy, or helping them at all. After all, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and there were no Iraqi links to 9/11 or Bin Laden. Troops began to question the mission, which remained unclear after George W. Bush had declared, "Mission Accomplished," early in the war.

The suicide and PTSD rates among both Vietnam and Iraq soldiers have been astronomical. Some have experienced guilt about their actions. An example is Jeff Lucy, an Iraq War veteran, who told his girlfriend that he "was nothing but a murderer." His father found him hanging from a hose in the family's basement. He had become one of the 2,300 Iraq vets who committed suicide by the end of 2011. But Jeff had also displayed the symptoms observed too often by wives, girlfriends, and parents - drinking heavily, sudden outbursts of anger, lack of sleep, crying at night, not attending family holidays such as Christmas, being too quiet, then quarrelsome, in and out of VA treatment centers, on and off medications.

Other wounds will surface, including illnesses from depleted uranium dumped by US munitions upon areas of Iraq. There are already US soldiers found to have radioactive exposure. In Fallujah, reports are citing severe deformities in as high as 50% of Iraqi births and high incidences of cancers in children. This is the Iraq War's Agent Orange, that will haunt the US for a long time.

After the invasion of Iraq, Vietnam vets knew that America was in another Vietnam. As the war unfolded, we could see through claims of success, rhetoric of winning, cover-ups, and lies. The parallels between Iraq and Vietnam were remarkably similar in too many respects. We knew there was no winning.

Our soldiers are excellently trained. They do their job when called. But Americans must decide whether they should be marched into more Vietnams, the unanalyzed wars of choice, the wars created by the powerful military-industrial-political-corporate complex. Eisenhower warned us. There are 4 million dead Vietnamese, mostly civilians, and over 2 million dead Iraqis, almost all civilians. There were trillions of dollars wasted, as well as our honorable, brave US soldiers, of whom over 6,500 died too soon in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are the nearly 100,000 who lie in beds or sit in wheelchairs, as well as those who must deal with the physical and mental wounds for the rest of their lives. There are the wives, the mothers, the children, who suffer as well and whose stories should be told. I will continue to support the Vietnam and Gulf War Syndromes.

Yes, another Vietnam happened. But did anything really work?

Terry Raycraft was a Corpsman, 1st Marine Division, in Vietnam, 1969. He has a naster's in Public Admin/Political Science J.D. Attorney for over 33 years. Lives in Montgomery, Alabama.