Soldier's Home : Vietnam

From LIFE Photo Archive: Soldiers in Action Through the Decades

David Botti — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:41:48 GMT

Recently Google announced it had digitized and uploaded images from the LIFE magazine photo archive, many of which have never been published before. At present Google says only 20 percent of LIFE's archive is online, but the end goal is to have 10 million images available. To do your own searches visit here.

New Footage of McCain's POW Release Emerges

David Botti — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:24:57 GMT

While conducting research for a book about his experiences covering Vietnam, former Swedish broadcaster Erik Eriksson stumbled upon film footage taken in Hanoi on March 14, 1973. The subject: a group of American POW's in transit from North Vietnamese holding facilities to the welcoming salute of a U.S. military officer waiting to take them home. Among them is 37-year-old John McCain quietly standing in formation with the others, and surveying the scene around him. He walks with a slight limp and does not speak. Eriksson told the Associated Press he'd contracted a local North Vietnamese photographer to film the prisoner release. From the AP:

"This summer when I was preparing the release of my book we were putting together a DVD with some of my reports from Vietnam and then I thought, 'I wonder if we have McCain here?'" Eriksson said...
...Eriksson said he covered the Vietnam War for SVT as well as U.S. television networks CBS and NBC. He explained that in February 1973, he was in Hanoi filming the release of the first American pilot prisoners, but had to return home to edit the film "because it was the first release that was sensational."
"However, we knew that more prisoners would probably be released shortly, so we left a camera and lots of film with a North Vietnamese photographer and asked him to film all the releases of U.S. prisoners," Eriksson said.

VIEW AN ASSOCIATED PRESS EDITED VERSION OF THE VIDEO HERE.

Veteran Vs. Veteran: A Visit to Washington

David Botti — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:03:59 GMT

Thirty-seven years after John Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) descended upon Washington, D.C. to protest against U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, a new generation of veterans will do the same later this week. The group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) is heading to the Capital as part of an event called Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan, named after the similar VVAW event four decades ago. As IVAW puts it:

The four-day event will bring together veterans from across the country to testify about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan - and present video and photographic evidence. In addition, there will be panels of scholars, veterans, journalists, and other specialists to give context to the testimony. These panels will cover everything from the history of the GI resistance movement to the fight for veterans' health benefits and support.

There hasn't been much U.S. press coverage on the event, but the UK's Sunday Times, using the headline of "Patriot Missiles," had a lengthy magazine story on the subject:

The veterans are not against the military and seek not to indict it – instead they seek to shine a light on the bigger picture: that the Abu Ghraib prison regime and the Haditha massacre of innocent Iraqis are not isolated incidents perpetrated by “bad seeds” as the military suggests, but evidence of an endemic problem. They will say they were tasked to do terrible things and point the finger up the chain of command, which ignores, diminishes or covers up routine abuse and atrocities.

Other veterans, and vet bloggers, aren't thrilled with this event. A group called "Stop the Slander," described as a "coalition of concerned veterans, family members, and friends," has even published a guide for reporter's covering IVAW. The guide warns journalists that claims made by IVAW may be untrue. The guide even provides an acronym to follow of questions to ask:

D: Date(s) – When did the incident occur?
U: Unit(s) – What military units were involved?
P: Personnel – What are the names of the participants and witnesses?
E: Event(s) – What exactly happened exactly where?
S: Signature(s) – Was this reported at the time or later and were reports, affidavits or depositions signed, or will they now be signed?

Veterans For Freedom blogger, Mark Seavey, took his own critical look at the IVAW's preparations for the Winter Soldier event, but in the end wrote that both sides of the debate should be heard -- without unnecessary contest or debate:

I think it speaks well of IVAW that they expect all testimony to be true and verifiable. And there will plenty of eyes there to ensure that. Hopefully we can all say our piece, discuss our views and then go home with no violence on anyone’s part.

The term "Winter Soldier" is derived from Thomas Paine's passage intended to motivate George Washington's troops suffering at Valley Forge:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

This is generating a huge amount of debate within the vocal veterans community. What's interesting to note is that perhaps the only demographic who can debate IVAW, without being called-out on their lack of service, is other veterans. The issues goes above someone's service record, and shows how the fabled, and perhaps cliched, military bond can only go so far in such times of controversy. Or, is it still there, above all the ruckus? We'll soon find out.

What Veterans Think of McCain

David Botti — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:20:55 GMT

As the only combat veteran among the remaining presidential candidates, John McCain has a unique relationship to the current generation of vets cycling home from the fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. What do veterans think of McCain? Are they inclined to hold him in higher respect, or follow his candidacy with a more critical eye? Can he count on their vote, or does he need to work twice as hard to assure them his plan for Iraq is the right one?

VoteVets.org (which lists Gen. Wesley Clark on its board of advisers) has a prominent feature linked off the homepage titled "Senator McCain's Real Record on the War in Iraq." The gist of their bullet-pointed argument is that Sen. McCain's policy toward the Iraq war is too closely aligned with President Bush. Among other points, VoteVets.org maintains:

McCain echoed Bush and Cheney’s talking points that the U.S. would only be in Iraq for a short time.

McCain said winning the war would be “easy.”

Senator McCain has constantly moved the goal posts of progress for the war – repeatedly saying it would be over soon.

Senator McCain opposed efforts to end the overextension of the military that is having a devastating impact on our troops.

In January VoteVets.org chairman Jon Soltz addressed the issue of Sen. McCain's military service:

John McCain is a true war hero, and we all respect his service. I don't doubt for a second that he cares for our troops. But, every time he opens his mouth, I'm less and less convinced that he realizes how dangerous his off the cuff words would imperil our men and women in harm's way, and our national security, if he said them as President.

Earlier this month the San Jose Mercury News took a look at a group of veterans gathering at a California American Legion hall to cheer on Sen. McCain. Doug McNea, a 60-year-old Navy veteran, told the paper he admires the connection Sen. McCain can make with veterans of all wars:

Having spent time in the military gives you a better appreciation and more respect for people serving in the military," said Doug McNea, a 60-year-old Navy veteran about McCain, who would ultimately win the California primary. "It gives you a better understanding of the sacrifices that veterans make and the long periods of family separation.

Stories of veterans connecting with McCain are all over the local papers as they poll vets at VFW and American Legion halls across the country. Mark Hemingway of the National Review Online took a look at McCain's relationship with veterans on the even of the Michigan primary. Hemingway argued that as a historically tough voting bloc to pin down, veterans may prove useful to McCain. Citing the traditional blocs of female, minority, and evangelical voters, Hemingway looks to see how veterans fit in to the vote-gathering scheme. McCain spoke frankly to Hemingway on this issue:

“I think longtime observers will probably tell you that it’s hard to mobilize the veteran voting bloc. I think it might be different this time because of the obvious difficulties with the Veterans Administration health-care system. In all my elections, I’ve had strong support from veterans, but the percentage of their voter turnout has been on par with the rest of the population,” McCain said. “Today, I think veterans are more motivated because of the wars we’re in and the strains on the veterans system. I see more engagement, and frankly, from a selfish point of view, I hope that means we see greater veteran turnout.”

Air America interviewed IAVA Executive Director Paul Rieckhoff last week on McCain's recent vote against extended Army interrogation standards to the FBI and CIA. His words show that despite tremendous respect most people have for McCain, he is not infallible in veterans' eye:

John McCain voted against it. And I think that’s a critical vote. If he is against torture and I was hoping we were going to have two candidates who were against torture across the board, this was a vote that may come back to hunt him; this is a really troubling vote. I mean, I’ve been talking with some veterans in the last couple of hours and I can’t tell you how disappointed they were to see that McCain voted in this direction.

For a great look at how McCain's military service has shaped his career, take a look at NEWSWEEK's recent cover story.

The Image of a Veteran

David Botti — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:18:35 GMT

The current series in the New York Times on veterans who've committed murder has spurred tremendous debate over the way vets are portrayed by the media. To understand origins of the prevailing portrayals of our current veterans, it's a good idea to take a step back and view the issue in a historical perspective.

Jerry Lembcke is a Vietnam veteran and professor of sociology at Holly Cross college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Lembcke's book "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam," looked in part at how the news media and pop-culture cultivated narrow portrayals of Vietnam vets. He has also written op-eds for the Boston Globe, Newsday, and the San Francisco Chronicle among others. In 1968 Lembcke was drafted into the Army, serving as chaplain's assistant before returning home and joining the anti-war movement.

I talked to Lembcke about how the Vietnam-era vets experience impacts that of those men and women coming home from war today -- and how he thinks the media is handling its coverage of veterans and issues associated with them.

SOLDIER'S HOME: You've written that a veteran's behavior can be influenced more from how past vets were portrayed in pop-culture, as opposed to personal experiences he/she might have had. How specifically does this happen?

LEMBCKE: The post-Vietnam popular culture representations of veterans was so powerful and so long lasting, and it so overwhelmed the war itself in popular culture, that as people began to come home during the Gulf War in the 1990’s, and present these same symptoms as Vietnam veterans coming back, I thought there’s a connection here. I think I used the phrase “learned experience,” and it occurred to me that this was a generation of veterans who’d grown up immersed in this popular culture of what it looks like to be a war veteran coming home.

This was very different than the culture Vietnam vets grew up in. Looking at representations of WWII veterans for example, which was not nearly as powerful in film for example. We got more war films about WWII, but not so many films about veterans coming home.

What is being portrayed in these kinds of movies that can influence veterans?

In the Vietnam war movies it was the dysfunctional, deranged, and even dangerous vet. I looked at about 100 films that portrayed Vietnam vets in them, and there wasn’t a single film that portrayed a healthy, functional veteran. So, what we see among other things is a lot of violence, the war brought home in a psychological sense, and even sometimes Hollywood portrayed guys coming home with their hand grenades and weapons and used those on the street.

Now we’re seeing one of the main representations of Iraq war veterans coming home is in the press with the violent crimes they’re committing. A lot of stories read to me like a lot of press reports and fictional representations of Vietnam vets that guys can’t leave the war behind them. They come home and they act out these war scenarios on the streets.

Is there a way the press can report on crimes committed by returning veterans without having such representations be the result?

Look at the current series the New York Times is running. The first in the series reported that one third of the violence is against spouses, girlfriends, and children. What this shows is a problem of masculinity and sense of worth as a man that perhaps the war has affected. These kinds of acts of violence against women and children are ways of acting out on that. Those are the kinds of stories that should be reported rather than this kind of pedestrian-type story of people coming home scared, and they’ve been trained up to act on their fears militarily

So it’s an issue of the press making the issue too black and white, and not attending to the gray areas?

The press is asking the wrong questions. They’re asking what is it about the military experience that causes these guys to act out like this, rather than asking what it is about the military culture (and even the culture of America) that requires men’s self esteem to somehow be related to their war experience.

You’ve said that it’s possible the behavior of Iraq veterans is influenced by past portrayals of Vietnam veterans. Is it possible reporters are also influenced by these pop culture images of Vietnam vets?

That exactly right. What we need to ask is, why did this story sound true to the reporter? What is the reporter herself bringing into this situation of reporting that leads her to think that this story is true when she hears it. These people live in the same culture you and I live in. They go to the same movies, they read the same books, they hear the same kinds of stories. Their sense of what is right is based on the same cultural references as the rest of us.

You’ve done some research on the origin of the term “PTSD.” There are some who say that the term is overused in talking about Iraq veterans. How was it used when it first came out?

I went back and looked at how PTSD came into being in the first place as a diagnostic category. I think it was attractive to the press at the time because it served a cultural and political function. It was inviting because it displaced from public view the fact that a lot of people were returning from Vietnam opposed to the war. The attractiveness of PTSD was that it re-spun the coming home story. It might have been attractive to journalists for reasons of basic liberal humanitarianism or even guilt that they didn’t go to the war. They were finding some way to speak sympathetically to the experience of people coming home from war. That may be what’s happening again. These stories [in the today’s press] are written very good heartedly. They’re not attempts to slander Iraq war veterans, as some critics seem to suggest they do. But, going back to Vietnam vets there was a stigma surrounding them. That’s the hidden danger that if indeed journalists are writing these stories because they are sympathetic, and they want to do something good for Iraq war veterans, in the long run they might be doing some damage.

What about how we use the term “PTSD” today?

PTSD had prominence in the press so quickly because that’s where the Vietnam-era story leaves off. That was sort of the easy tag line for them. Lots and lots of analogies. These stories are written with phrases such as: “it’s like with Vietnam-era veterans.” These stories are full of those kinds of tag lines. And they’re apparently written like that as a way of engaging the reader at the level that the writer assumes the reader is at. They assume correctly that the readers are coming out of a historical period in which they’ve been immersed in these images of PTSD and war veterans.

The American public remembers what happened to Vietnam vets when they came home much more then they remember the war itself. The war in Vietnam has really faded in American memory, but people have these very sharp images of the spitting incidents and PTSD. Because those are the images that have hung on in popular culture, and I think it’s almost certain that will happen with the war in Iraq--that the coming home narrative is going to displace the history of the war itself. And that could happen quite quickly.

Identifying the Missing: It Happens All The Time

David Botti — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:48:42 GMT

Every so often the Department of Defense issues press releases announcing the identification of remains from U.S. troops missing in action. Usually found in Korea or Vietnam, these releases remind us there's a number of U.S. military personnel still missing—and that there's an active effort underway to find them. Those responsible for the effort are known as the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).

So far, December has seen six such announcements from the DoD. Appearing in-between notifications of War on Terror fatalities and officer promotions, it's easy to overlook the return home of veterans from long ago wars. Excerpts from the DoD press releases for the past month:

Staff Sgt. Maurice H. Moore, U.S. Army, Vietnam War

On May 12, 1968, North Vietnamese forces overran the Kham Duc Special Forces camp and its surrounding observation posts in Quang Nam-Da Nang Province (formerly Quang Tin Province), South Vietnam. Moore was one of the 17 U.S. servicemen unaccounted-for after the survivors evacuated the camp. Search and recovery efforts at the site in 1970 succeeded in recovering remains of five of the 17 men. A sixth man was returned alive during Operation Homecoming in 1973 after having been held prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese.

Between 1993 and 2006, joint U.S./Vietnam teams, led by JPAC, conducted eight investigations and four excavations in the vicinity of the camp site. The team interviewed former North Vietnamese officers and soldiers who participated in the battle. Some recalled seeing the bodies of U.S. servicemen near one of the observation posts, and U.S. eyewitness accounts placed Moore near the post.

1st Lieutenant Dixie S. Parker, U.S. Army, Korean War

Parker was assigned to Battery B, 8^th Field Artillery Battalion, 25^th Infantry Division then occupying a defensive position overlooking the Kuryong River in P’yongan-Pukto Province, North Korea. On Nov. 27, 1950, Parker was killed in his foxhole while serving as a forward artillery observer. His body was not recovered.

In 2000, a joint U.S./Democratic People’s Republic of Korea team, led by JPAC, excavated a site overlooking the Kuryong River in P’yongan-Pukto Province where U.S. soldiers were believed to be buried. The team recovered human remains and non-biological evidence including Parker’s identification tags and first lieutenant rank insignia.

PFC Donald M. Walter, U.S. Marine Corps, Korean War

Walker was assigned to the Service Company, 1^st Service Battalion, of the 1^st Marine Division deployed near the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea. On Nov. 27, 1950, three Communist Chinese divisions launched an attack on the Marine positions. Over the next several days, U.S. forces staged a fighting withdrawal to the south, first to Hagaru-ri, then Koto-ri, and eventually to defensive positions at Hungnam. Walker died on Dec. 7, 1950, as a result of enemy action near Koto-ri. He was buried by fellow Marines in a temporary United Nations military cemetery in Hungnam, which fell to the North Koreans in December 1950. His identity was later verified from a fingerprint taken at the time of the burial.

During Operation Glory in 1954, the North Korean government repatriated the remains of 2,944 U.S. soldiers and Marines. Included in this repatriation were remains associated with Walker’s burial. The staff at the U.S. Army Mortuary in Kokura, Japan, however, cited suspected discrepancies between the biological profile from the remains and Walker’s physical characteristics. The remains were among 416 from Operation Glory subsequently buried as “unknowns” in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (The Punchbowl) in Hawaii.

In April 2007, the JPAC exhumed remains from The Punchbowl believed to be those of Walker. Although the remains did not yield usable DNA data, a reevaluation of the skeletal and dental remains led to Walker’s identification.

Col. Douglas H. Hatfield and Capt. Richard H. Simpson, U.S. Air Force, Korean War

On April 12, 1951, Hatfield and Simpson were two of eleven crewmembers on a B-29 Superfortress that left Kadena Air Base, Japan, to bomb targets in the area of Sinuiju, North Korea. Enemy MiG-15 fighters attacked the B-29, but before it crashed, three crewmembers were able to bail out. They were captured and two of them were later released in 1954 to U.S. military control during Operation “Big Switch.” The third crewmember died in captivity. He and the eight remaining crewmembers were not recovered... [In 2000, a team] excavated an infantry fighting position in Kujang County where they recovered remains which included those of Hatfield and Simpson.