Vietnam vets to gather for 'welcome home': Are they ready to forgive?
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/article_b3ec8eec-5d32-11df-bb21-001cc4c03286.html
PAT SCHNEIDER
[email protected]
May 12, 2010
You've got to understand what it was like here at home during the
Vietnam War. How rapidly society was changing. How deep and broad
opposition to the war grew and how sharp the backlash was.
Soldiers returning from their time "in country" entered an altered
landscape. The "Ballad of the Green Berets" was blown away by Jimi
Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock. Madras plaid
button-downs bled into tie-dyed T-shirts. College students cut
classes for anti-war protests, leaving a waft of marijuana smoke in
their trail.
As protests spread and confrontations with police grew violent, some
returning soldiers were met with taunts, and nobody postponed the
revolution to welcome them home. Most often they were greeted with
shrugs, veterans say today.
Jim Kurtz of Middleton recalls landing at Truax Air Force Base in
Madison in 1967 when he came home from Vietnam, where he led an
infantry platoon. "There was nobody there but my parents. From other
people, it was apathy, like you had been in Chicago working or something."
On May 21-23, Wisconsin Vietnam veterans are invited to gather at
Lambeau Field in Green Bay for LZ (Landing Zone) Lambeau, what
organizers are billing as a long-delayed "welcome home." The event,
sponsored by Wisconsin Public Television and state veterans agencies
and organizations, began as a preview for a WPT documentary series on
Vietnam veterans but has ballooned into a three-day affair with big
names and big-time attractions. Packer great Bart Starr is set to
appear, the traveling version of the powerful Vietnam Veterans
Memorial Wall will be erected, and military aircraft will fly over
the staging ground.
Will the state's Vietnam veterans accept the invitation? Organizers
expect 30,000 veterans from around the state and across the country.
Traffic is building on an LZ Lambeau Facebook page, where
enthusiastic posters seek comrades in arms, but others criticize the
event as a publicity stunt. Some of the dozen veterans interviewed
for this story are eager to gather with buddies or bask in a moment
of recognition. Others are bewildered by a tribute mounted four
decades after they returned. A few are skeptical that the
extravaganza is anything more than an opportunity to make money and
to glorify the military.
But some observers say the gathering has the potential to move
veterans wounded by their homecoming toward reconciliation with those
who turned their backs, or raised their fists.
Robert Enright, a University of Wisconsin-Madison pioneer in the
study of forgiveness, says even if the skeptics are correct, the
event still can be meaningful. "Maybe we can find a strand in this
that is good in the sense of being truly for the emotionally wounded
and physically wounded let's work that strand hard," he says.
It was while collecting stories for an earlier documentary on World
War II veterans that the idea for a series on Vietnam vets emerged,
says Mik Derks, who produced the new three-hour documentary,
"Wisconsin Vietnam War Stories."
"We saw what a powerful format it was to tell the story of a war
entirely through the memories of the veterans," Derks says.
After documentaries on World War II and Korean War veterans were
aired, work on the Vietnam project began. Eventually, interviews were
conducted with 110 veterans, selected in part to recount the changing
story of the war over its long course. While unique in their details,
the stories told by Vietnam veterans of combat and brotherhood and
loss were similar to those told by veterans of earlier wars, says Derks.
But Vietnam veterans also talked about something the others did not:
the welcome home that never happened.
Raised on stories and images of the jubilation that welcomed home the
conquering heroes of World War II, the soldiers who went to Vietnam
found their own homecoming starkly different. They returned not in
units greeted with cheers, but one by one on commercial airliners to
a public who sometimes jeered them. They ducked out of the uniforms
as soon as they could. Once home, some recalled, they hid the fact
that they were veterans, because it made it hard to get a job, tough
to get a date. Those were the stories told again and again, Derks
recalls, by men he had been cautioned would not open up to tell their
stories. "They've reached a period where they don't have the strength
to keep the memories at bay anymore," he says.
The numbers and the tide of events tell part of the story of the war,
but it is the stories of the people who lived it that give its true measure.
Nearly 2.6 million U.S. troops served in South Vietnam between 1965
and 1973, 165,400 of them from Wisconsin. The average age of those
who served in Vietnam was 19.
Chuck Goranson saw many of his fellow Vietnam veterans struggle to
reconnect after they landed back home into the turmoil of the time.
He helped them navigate the complex system of educational benefits
for veterans as part of an organization called Vets for Vets at
UW-Madison, from which he retired a couple of years ago. Too many
Vietnam veterans isolated themselves when they arrived home
watching TV, sitting in bars, killing time, he recalls. "They were
very much on their own, and that's a special problem for someone who
has just gotten out of service." A lot of them became politicized
after returning home.
"You could see the news of what was going on in Vietnam on CBS a
whole lot easier than you could looking out over a rice paddy," Goranson says.
Veterans joined the anti-war protests, or ignored them. Either way,
they didn't go around advertising their status as veterans. "If
people were aware you were a veteran, you had to defend the war,"
something no one had the stomach for back then. "Even if you believed
in the war, no one wanted to defend it."
"You really couldn't wear your uniform. People looked down on you,"
recalls Rick Steinhauer, a retired Dane County sheriff's deputy who
flew a helicopter in Vietnam and returned to Madison in 1971.
Steinhauer, who wears a pin in the shape of Vietnam with the words
"We were winning when I left" on it, says a quagmire of politics
dragged out the war and prevented the military from winning.
Meanwhile, the people at home unless they had someone in Vietnam
were not called on to make sacrifices as they were in earlier wars.
No rationing, no shortages. All people knew about the war was what
they saw on the news, he says, and no one seemed to care much about
the people in those news clips once they came home. "We absolutely
didn't get any recognition for anything we did," says Steinhauer.
"Most Vietnam veterans still feel left out. I don't think it will
ever go away."
Still, he bought tickets for LZ Lambeau for family and friends last
fall when he first heard about the event. Steinhauer says he's
looking forward to camaraderie with "people who were over there.
After all these years, we're not going to get a welcome home from
anybody but them."
In February 1971, on pages blazoned with headlines from the trial of
Lt. William Calley for the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai
and congressional wrangling over the withdrawal of troops form
Indochina, The Capital Times published a series of articles looking
at how Vietnam veterans in Madison were coping. Central to the report
was a new study by psychiatrists at the Veterans Administration
Hospital in Madison that declared them to be alienated and aimless,
turning to drugs, alcohol and sex to soothe their paranoia and shaken manhood.
Mike Brenz of Madison was among a group of veterans forming a
controversial VFW "Peace Post," interviewed then about their changing
views on the war.
Today, Brenz, 62, recalls that his "gung-ho" perspective on the war
gradually changed in Vietnam. He tells the story of a horrifying
reconnaissance mission where he was sent in to find the source of
gunfire coming from a stand of trees where his unit had "blown away"
the surrounding ground. "We pulled out a girl, couldn't have been
more than 15 or 16 with an AK, and a 10-year-old kid with his leg
hanging by skin and tendon. I remember thinking, 'Geez, my brother is
this age.'"
His initial experience back stateside, in dress uniform at the Los
Angeles airport, was friendly if unexpected. "Some guy came up to me
and said 'Welcome home,' and shook my hand. I didn't even know who he was."
It was after he was back in Madison that Brenz's problems started. "I
didn't know who I was, I didn't fit in anywhere," he says. Soon
long-haired and bearded, Brenz found that other people tried to cast
him in their ideas of what his role should be. One girl used to call
him a "drug-crazed Vietnam vet" as a joke. Older people called him a
"commie," he recalls.
Brenz adopted the war protesters' objections to how the war was being
waged, but he didn't really fit in with them either. And older vets
in the Veterans of Foreign Wars disparaged Vietnam veterans for their
role in a conflict that had not been officially declared a war. He
found company among like-minded veterans at the Peace Post in a
ramshackle house on Verona Road at what was then the city's edge,
until the VFW pulled their charter.
Brenz bounced around for awhile, struggled with drugs and alcohol and
worked his way through a couple of marriages. Married now, he credits
his wife with helping him get to where he is today: settled, with a
job as a project manager at a local flooring supplier where he's
worked for nearly 20 years.
"Today I'm not as liberal as I used to be. I'm proud of what I did.
I'm proud I served," Brenz says. As for LZ Lambeau, "I don't
understand why it's happening 40 years later."
Mike Woodards came home from war twice: in 1970 from Vietnam, and two
decades later from Desert Storm in the Middle East. His homecomings
were poles apart. "The attitude of the people (after Desert Storm)
was totally different. I think people learned, even if they disagreed
with the war, not to take it out on the troops." A lot of Vietnam
veterans are bitter toward the country and the veterans
organizations that did not welcome them when they returned.
"It's tough when people say you've done something illegal and you are
just doing what you were ordered to do," he says.
And there's another reason for veterans to be angry, Woodards says.
Look how long it took for the government to acknowledge that they had
been injured by the Agent Orange defoliant used to clear jungles in
Vietnam. "These feelings are hard to deal with, but with age comes
wisdom." Woodards is active with a local chapter of Wisconsin Vietnam
Veterans, where he says anger has evolved into determination to make
sure troops coming home never meet the animosity and indifference
that greeted veterans then. "I hope we never again have a period in
American history when veterans have to go through what they did in
Vietnam," says Woodards.
And those who didn't go to Vietnam? Some of them hope the time may be
right to move toward reconciliation between veterans and a public
that turned its back on them, or marched over their ideals. Enright,
the UW-Madison professor, sees distinct possibilities for healing. He
has worked with children in Northern Ireland, where research shows
that introducing them to a path to forgiveness has helped to heal the
wounds of violence and tragedy. Enright says he's ready to try the
technique with veterans but has had difficulty getting such proposals
even considered for funding.
Giving veterans a framework for forgiveness would not mean forgetting
or condoning past wrongs. It would not even require reaching a
consensus on the rightness of U.S. policies of the time, he says. "If
we would just take each person one at a time and care for them
enough to listen to their story of injustice, and help them forgive
in that particular context, without pointing fingers in any large way
a lot of emotional and relational healing could take place,"
Enright says. "This should be part of a welcome home if we want to do
this in a rich, subtle and multifaceted way."
When it comes to Vietnam, it may be that mutual forgiveness is
needed. And the possibilities for that are genuine, he says. Someone
who fought against the war, and believed that the soldiers were
immoral for going to war, can forgive the soldiers. And the soldiers,
who know they were doing their duty and went when others would not
go, can forgive the protesters. "Both can walk the walk of
forgiveness, both can be healed, and then I'd be surprised if they
wouldn't be willing to sit down with one another and get to know each
other better," Enright says. "They may not end up agreeing, but they
may end up finding common ground that will startle them. Forgiveness
has a way of startling us."
Author David Maraniss has thought a lot about how the war changed the
lives of the many veterans and anti-war protesters he came to know
while writing "They Marched into Sunlight." The book chronicles the
events of several days in October 1967, when an Army battalion
marched into an ambush in Vietnam as UW students staged a campus
protest against recruiters for Dow Chemical, which made napalm and
Agent Orange. The protest, which turned violent, became a turning
point in the war at home.
Many of those who went to Vietnam never got a homecoming, "and a
psychological hole will be in their souls for as long as they are
around," Maraniss says. He is cautious about speculating on the
possibilities of reconciliation, given the complexity of feeling
among veterans. "Some have forgiven, and say the protests helped end
the war. Some think the protesters were treasonists." But strip away
the politics and talking about healing gets easier, he says. "These
are people who are feeling their own mortality. They are thinking in
a different way than they did 10 or 20 years ago, but we shouldn't be
naïve about that. Some feelings are so ingrained they will take them
to their graves."
Paul Soglin, a leader of the anti-war protests at UW-Madison who
later became mayor of the city, got to experience the possibilities
of reconciliation a few years ago when he was invited to attend a
reunion of the survivors of the ambush detailed in Maraniss' book.
Soglin had struck up an e-mail correspondence with one of the men,
and he recalls that he cautiously accepted the invitation to join the
group in Las Vegas. Not all of the veterans were ready to accept him.
One stayed away; a few ignored him. But the others talked, openly.
"It felt really good that a number of them didn't harbor any ill will
towards me, despite my very active role in opposing the war," Soglin
says. The men were drawing distinctions that night between protesting
U.S. policy and protesting its servicemen and servicewomen. He let
them know, Soglin says, that he holds the soldier who served in
Vietnam to be just as noble as a soldier in World War II. "We learned
honestly and truthfully what one another was thinking. It was a
marvelous experience. I'm very grateful."
Other former protesters have moved further toward reconciliation.
Kurtz, who has volunteered to record oral histories of veterans for
the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, was quoted in a recent magazine
article about the project. When he returned from a recent vacation,
there was a letter in the pile of mail from a woman he didn't know.
"She said she was a protester and she wanted to offer her apology to
just one Vietnam veteran. Just out of the blue. It means an awful lot
to me," says Kurtz, the Vietnam veteran who returned to Madison in 1967.
Some veterans regret their involvement in the Vietnam War and would
like to close the book on it. "I think what's needed is an apology to
all the people that went," says Paul McMahon, a member of Madison
Veterans for Peace, a local chapter founded in 2003 of a national
group dedicated to raising awareness about the costs of militarism
and war. "Nothing good came out of that war," he says. Its veterans
were left with physical and psychological wounds that remain unhealed
yet seldom spoken of, says McMahon, who retired from a career with
the state Department of Administration. Rather than mounting a
thank-you for a war that should never have happened, McMahon wants a
focus on those being mobilized repeatedly for war today. "The people
who have just gone and gone and gone to Afghanistan and Iraq that's
just wrong," he says.
Other Veterans for Peace say the planned displays of aircraft and
equipment at LZ Lambeau will glorify war, and they are suspicious
about the money to be made from concessions at the event and the sale
of documentary DVDs and a companion book. They are angered by the
refusal of organizers to include at LZ Lambeau the Memorial Mile, the
display of grave markers symbolizing soldiers killed in the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars for which the local Veterans for Peace are best known.
Will Williams says authorities refused to issue a permit for the
roadside installation because they want to keep out an anti-war
message. "I think it's gotten to the point that it's a glorification
of war," says Williams of LZ Lambeau. "That's the gut feeling I have now."
Williams recalls that he re-upped for a second tour in Vietnam
because he was so "pissed off" by anti-war protesters he encountered
in 1967 in San Francisco. "I was in Haight-Ashbury in uniform and I
decided to go back because I didn't understand their message." It
took years, including a period after coming home for good when
Williams says undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder made him
"mean," for his attitude about Vietnam and the military to evolve. "A
lot of vets keep themselves trapped in a lot of hate and don't allow
themselves to move forward. I was the same way," Williams says. "Once
a vet reaches the point where they accept the idea that they were
duped into war, they can forgive. They have to get to the point of
accepting that they were fighting for something that shouldn't have been."
Odean Dorr won't be going to LZ Lambeau, although he thinks it's a
great idea. His doctor says he shouldn't. A former "tunnel rat" who
went down into the winding underground chambers where the enemy hid
or stashed ammunition or medical supplies, Dorr developed a creeping
claustrophobia in his final days in Vietnam. In the years since, his
PTSD has metastasized into a phobia of crowds, a fear of the dark
that stalks his everyday life. "I can't go into an elevator,
sometimes I can't go into a room unless the light is on," he says.
Dorr is one of several men at a recent meeting of Wisconsin Vietnam
Veterans at an east-side VFW hall who hesitates just a moment before
telling his story to a visitor. The call for oral histories
engendered by the public television project seems to have opened a
floodgate. After years of keeping it in, Dorr says, he finds it
easier to tell his story each time. "I'm trying to get it out," he says.
.
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