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Author Disagrees with Review

By Gerald Nicosia

Dear Editors:

Kurt Hilgendorf's "This History's Bunk" is the single most mean-spirited, vindictive, and dishonest review of my book "Home to War," bar none. This is highly ironic, at the least, since VVAW is an organization I have supported wholeheartedly, both with my words and my cash, since the late 1980s.

According to Mr. Hilgendorf, "Home to War" "does no justice to the history of the veterans' movement." Frankly, in over 20 years of close association with the veterans' movement, I never heard of Mr. Hilgendorf. Among my friends, I have numbered dozens of VVAW members, many of them near-founders, including Ron Kovic, Randy Barnes, Bill Crandell, Jack McCloskey, Lee Thorn, Bill Ehrhart, Bob Waddell, Steve Hassna, Scott Camil, Bill Unger, Tom Ashby, Annie Luginbill and Joel Greenberg, John Kniffin, and Wayne Beverly — among others. And the praise for "Home to War" among VVAW members has been manifold.

So who is left to establish my supposedly enormous "historical inaccuracies"? Mr. Hilgendorf trots out none other than Mike Uhl, who wrote an equally dishonest review of "Home to War" in The Nation. I responded to the welter of false charges by Mr. Uhl in a long letter to The Nation, which was published on their website. Among other dishonest shots, Mr. Uhl charged me with ignoring the important historical work "The Turning" by Andrew Hunt — when the fact is that Mr. Hunt actually came to me for help, since I was much farther along in my research than he back in the early 1990s. Mr. Uhl knew this full well, yet trumpeted my supposed ignorance of another historian in the field as one more "strike" against me. The real clincher in Mr. Uhl's duplicity was that — for whatever reason, perhaps to ingratiate himself with the Kerry campaign — he wrote an unctuously praiseful review in the Boston Globe (Jan. 18, 2004) of Douglas Brinkley's biography of Kerry, "Tour of Duty." Yet the irony is that Douglas Brinkley has acknowledged large borrowings in his book from my own book, "Home to War." So if "Home to War" is so inaccurate, how can a book that was based on it be so wonderfully accurate? Surely Mr. Uhl's inconsistency, if nothing else, is showing.

As for Mr. Hilgendorf's own duplicity, there are numerous examples. For the sake of brevity, let me just examine one in detail. Mr. Hilgendorf is outraged that I dare to print the opinion of journalist Richard Boyle, that the VVAW should have pushed harder to force a meeting with Richard Nixon at the Fontainebleau Hotel in 1972, rather than acceding to Barry Romo's order to stay briefly on the street, then retreat back to their camp in Flamingo Park. Boyle is presented by Hilgendorf as someone with "no history as an organizer." Boyle not only covered the Vietnam War as a front-lines correspondent; he was the first journalist to break the story of the mutiny of Alpha Company at Firebase Pace on the Cambodian border in 1971 — a story that shook the nation. He has been an activist and war protester all his life, and was deeply involved in the protests against U.S. military aid to the dictatorship in El Salvador and to the Contras in Nicaragua. His exploits were chronicled in Oliver Stone's movie "Salvador" — his part played by James Wood. The opinion of such a man ought to at least be heard.

But again, here's the clincher. Immediately after giving Richard Boyle's take, I print Barry Romo's challenge to Boyle's credibility (p. 243): "But Romo, who served in VVAW for decades afterward, maintains that his motivation was to keep the demonstration intact, and that it was his job as 'tactical leader' to judge 'how far we could push the situation.' In this case, he judged that more good would be achieved by remaining on the street than by falling for an obvious government ploy. 'They (Kovic and two other wheelchair vets) weren't gonna meet with Nixon. You can bet on that,' Romo asserts. 'If Boyle thinks Richard Nixon was meeting with Ron Kovic, give him something else to smoke ...'" Mr. Hilgendorf does not even mention my attempt — here as elsewhere — to give both sides of events.

In truth, I found the "bunk" in Mr. Hilgendorf's review virtually endless:

1. He says I don't show the effects of the Gainesville Trial on VVAW. I talk at length about Barry Romo's decision to support the defendants, and how the cost of the trial both bankrupted the organization's treasury and physically and emotionally exhausted most of the VVAW combatants.

2. He says I wrote only about "stars" like John Kerry and Ron Kovic — not "regular people." I wrote at length about Angel Almedina, Max Inglett, Tom Ashby, Dave Currie, Jim Hopkins, Jan Barry, Carl Rogers, Larry Rottmann, Shelley Ramsdell, Michael Ryan, Frank McCarthy, John Musgrave, Jack McCloskey, Ron Bitzer, Sam Schorr, Al Hubbard, Scott Moore, and a host of others. Aren't these "regular people"? Even more dishonestly, Mr. Hilgendorf claims I ignore the "regular people" involved in the work on PTSD. I spend pages on Jack Smith, Art Egendorf, Shad Meshad, Jack McCloskey, Sarah Haley, and many other PTSD pioneers. Again, aren't these "regular people"? As for Mr. Hilgendorf's scorn for "getting a definition (of PTSD) into a book," the fact that the definition finally got into the book (DSM-III) has led to tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans receiving the substantial monetary compensation they had been denied for over a decade.

3. Perhaps nothing makes Mr. Hilgendorf as furious as my "privileging" Ron Kovic's American Veterans Movement (AVM) by devoting several pages to it — but only a small fraction of the hundreds of pages I devote to VVAW. Whatever one may think of Ron Kovic the person, his enormous historical importance is undeniable. Forget, for a moment, even his tremendously influential, now classic autobiography "Born on the Fourth of July." The accomplishments of the short-lived AVM were stunning — not least of which, the toppling of the VA's inept administrator, Donald Johnson. Nor do I spare Kovic's egomania and excessively optimistic plans. I quote VVAW members Jack McCloskey and Lee Thorn at length about the folly of Kovic's lone wolf approach — and I also reveal the pitiful showing at Kovic's Second Bonus March — which Bob Waddell labels, and I even quote in my book: "The Second Boner March."

4. I am taken to task for criticizing VVAW's attempted replay of Dewey Canyon in 1974. Many stalwart VVAW supporters, including Danny Friedman and Gloria Emerson, have spoken to me of the disastrous results of that confrontational demonstration.

5. Finally, let me address the preposterousness of Mr. Hilgendorf's assertion that the history of a movement should be written without referring to "individuals." Does he believe that a movement is some sort of alien being that lands on earthy fully manifested of its own accord? A movement exists because of the work of many individuals, and I chronicle the work of hundreds of them in the pages of "Home to War" — including Maude De Victor, whom Mr. Hilgendorf accuses me of slighting, but whose story is there (just check the index) along with the story of another "regular person," Paul Reutershan, whose tragedy Mrs. De Victor helped to bring to public attention. And the good work of VVAW on the Agent Orange cause in the late 1970s and 1980s is fully detailed in thousands of words on pages 490-494.

In a final gratuitous insult, Mr. Hilgendorf accuses me of writing my history on the sole strength and credentials of "just a book contract." In fact, I have immersed myself in veterans' activism for more than 20 years, attended hundreds of meetings of veterans' groups, read hundreds of books on Vietnam veteran activism and the Vietnam War, and developed friendships with many activist veterans of several different wars, including Howard Zinn (World War II), John Schultz and Joe Grant (Korean), Brian Willson, Charlie Liteky, Freddy Champagne, Joe McDonald, Rose Sandecki, Ron Kovic, Scott Camil, Ron Bitzer, Randy Barnes, Lily Adams, Steve Suwalsky, Bill Ehrhart, Ted Sexauer, Mike Blecker, Bob Mulholland, and Jim Janko (Vietnam), Dan Buckman (Central America), and Dan Fahey, Paul Sullivan, and Tony Swofford (Gulf) — as well as a lot more, many, unfortunately, who have already died, like Waddell and McCloskey. Those still alive, I'm sure, would be happy to testify to my good faith and commitment.

Yours truly,

Gerald Nicosia