An essay about fake vets, politics, and popular culture, from the perspective of an activist who has worked with antiwar vets for decades.
Until the construction of the Vietnam Memorial Wall in D.C., and the onslaught of right-wing-produced "Welcome Home" parades it spawned, you could barely find a Vietnam vet willing to speak publicly about his or her combat experience. Of course, those were the days when the majority of Vietnam veterans were anti-war (or at least anti-the-Vietnam-War), and a full order of magnitude more Vietnam vets belonged to the far-left organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and the left-liberal Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) than to their infinitely more conservative counterparts the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
For over 20 years I worked with antiwar Vietnam veterans, edited and published their writing, hosted them at conferences and at my home, and had the honor of calling many of them both colleagues and friends. Along with them, I experienced the anguish of America's renewed embrace of military solutions, first in Central America and the Caribbean, and then in the Middle East. I watched as the resurgence of the right began to erase their existence, even in the midst of their continued organizing and protesting, and as romanticized images of the war in film and on TV replaced the grinding horror that they had experienced. Despite its oft-verified status as an urban myth, the "spat upon veteran" became a cultural staple, along with regularly invoked images of exploding children who were created to convince audiences that in Vietnam "the enemy was everywhere," and to excuse the atrocities that veterans like Ron Ridenour tried to expose in My Lai, and that 100 VVAW members publicly testified to witnessing and committing in the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigations (and thousands more contributed to documenting).
These men, and the few women veterans who also took part in the movement (yes, the veterans antiwar movement was as sexist as the rest of the Sixties left), are still my heroes. And I remember their shock and amazement, expressed over the course of many conversations spanning several years, when civilians began to get caught pretending they were Vietnam vets. None of the vets I knew actually wanted to be vets, and they were horrified at the sudden eruption of impostors.
Actually, the very first fake vets we ran across were homeless guys, out begging in the streets along with the real, broke, homeless Vietnam vets who had been suffering since the war. There was a strong sense of community and mutual recognition among antiwar vets, and they'd often stop to talk to — and help — a brother in the streets. By the mid-Eighties, though, they started to get wary and cynical -- joking that now they asked guys who claimed to be homeless vets to show them a DD-214 (service record) to prove it. The begging impostors, though, were men with serious problems -- I did a lot of interviews with them in those early years, and though they may not have been Vietnam vets, they often had histories of physical and sexual abuse that gave them the same symptoms of PTSD from which many vets suffered. (One day I'll post the long and sordid history of the politics behind the PTSD diagnosis, but I want to keep my eye on the vets today.) It's telling that these sad and damaged homeless guys felt like claiming veteran status would give them a social boost -- but it was an indication the winds were shifting and the revision of the Vietnam war and the veteran's image were well underway.
I was going to write a piece on the recent revelations that both Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Mark Kirk lied about being "combat vets" (Blumenthal about Vietnam and Kirk about the first Iraq War), but Nicolaus Mills beat me to Blumenthal with an excellent article in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education and I don't have enough research material on Kirk yet to do a good job, so instead I'm going to address general trends in false claims to be a veteran, on both the left and the right.
The Kirk revelations hadn't broken when Mills wrote his piece, and so it does shake Mills' thesis a bit, since he was comparing the apparent need of liberals to fabricate military histories, in contrast to the way that conservatives (like Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the Shrub) are so seemingly comfortable with having avoided combat. Mills claims the liberal fakes are motivated by "old-fashioned 1960s egalitarianism" — using as his text James Fallow's exquisitely self-flagellating essay in the 1975 Washington Monthly, "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?" As we all know, the college kids got the deferments, and the working class kids went to war, but the Democrats, Mills argues, had the decency to feel bad about it. (Not Bill Clinton, though, which might say something about his liberalism. Or his good sense.)
Strangely, Mills uses Christopher Buckley's much later (1983) Esquire essay, "Viet Guilt" to bolster his argument about liberal fakes. A conservative, Buckley also took a deferment, but I think it's hard to class him with Fallows. Mills mentions as semi-explanation for the comparison that Buckley later defected from mainline conservatism to vote for Obama, but that was hardly his position in the early 1980s. Buckley's essay was written right at the moment that the Memorial Wall was being installed as a cultural icon and he romanticizes the war and veterans in a way that Fallows did not, and in a way that turned the stomach of just about every antiwar vet I knew.
Dierdre English's Mother Jones Essay, "Why Are We Still in Vietnam?" (November, 1983), described antiwar veteran Ron Kovic's response to Buckley's article. English quite correctly lambasted Buckley and non-veteran columnist Bob Greene (yes, the same Bob Greene who promoted the myth of the spat-upon vet) for their spasms of self-absorbed "masculine angst", and reminded the public that veterans were still attempting to make the horror of the Vietnam war clear to the American public. She connected the urge to purge those right-wing slacker guilt feelings with the escalation of the Contra wars, naming it as a "sociopathic repetition-compulsion of tragic portent." But her voice, along with all of the voices of all of the Vietnam veterans who had been working to end war, was drowned out by the cresting wave of Reaganism and its army of revisionists working full time to popularize the image that liberal civilian cowards lost the war by tying the military's arm behind its back. Buckley's piece starts the cascade that ends with Republican pretenders to veteranhood like Mark Kirk.
I could (and probably will, eventually) describe the systematic way that the history of the Vietnam war was rewritten by right-wing pseudo-scholarly hacks bought and paid for by well-funded pseudo-academic "think tanks" in those years of the Culture Wars. I could (and probably will, eventually) describe the "conferences" those think tanks sponsored, and the crazy people who took the stage and ranted while actual historians (and I mean people trained as historians -- many of them antiwar Vietnam veterans) stood on the sidelines stunned while the field was hijacked and they were recast as personae non grata, disqualified for "bias" in the same way that the radical right claims that climate scientists are "biased" about global warming. But that's not the story I'm telling now. I'm talking about the fake vets.
Do you remember when the Vietnam war became the "Vietnam Experience?" You should, since Time-Life issued a whole 25-volume series about it between 1980 and 1988. The corporate sponsored mass media produced a Vietnam war that was accessible to everyone, and substituted iconic imagery for critical analysis. Michael Herr said it best, "Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there." We haven't been there, of course, but we were conditioned to think we'd been there, in our imaginations if not in fact. Even Blumenthal bought enough of the conservative revision to have added a claim that he was spat upon to his veteran fantasy. And since conservatives live in an imaginary universe anyway, it was probably not that hard for Kirk to make the leap from a Vietnam "experience" to claiming veteran credentials.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the crowd of vets (and "vets") who hung out around the Wall veered further and further to the right. (I blame the representational statue by Frederick Hart, but that's still another digression for another time.) I was down there doing interviews a lot, and after a while I started to find that the fakes were outnumbering the real Vietnam vets at the same time they were getting younger and younger, and that they all told the same stories over and over and over -- stories they'd absorbed through the same pop culture representations we'd all been exposed to, plus endless viewing of The War Channel (oops, I mean the History Channel) and the loathsome slick Vietnam war magazines that had started to spring up like poisonous mushrooms. The POW-MIA movement nutjobs colonized the Memorial site and literally drove out anyone with a liberal t-shirt, promoting and then reinforcing the idea that we went to war in Vietnam to get our POWs back. (A lot of those guys in POW t-shirts were fakes too.) But I don't have to write about the POW movement since Bruce Franklin did it for me in his wonderful MIA: Mythmaking in America.
So in my estimation Kirk is just another wingnut whose "war experience" jumped clear off his TV and into his head. Sure, he knew he was lying, but I'll bet he also kinda sorta convinced himself that he was telling the truth, or might as well be telling the truth, because, for Republicans, lies aren't that far from the truth anyway, when they further your agenda and improve your image of yourself. (Look for a future diary to come about Republicans and lying.) Besides, they've all learned that if you repeat a lie long enough and loud enough, and spend enough money to promote it, it sort of is the truth, or might as well be, since the truth just doesn't have the funding to compete with the lie.
But whether you're lying out of guilt, or you're lying out of opportunism, you're still a bag of shit, especially if you aren't out there crusading for the things that are important to real Vietnam vets, like... peace. So I'd like us to take a moment and remember the antiwar vets who are gone. They worked hard to prevent us from getting into the wars we're in now. They didn't succeed, but only because we let them down.
We let the right scare us into believing that protesting the first war in Iraq meant failing to support the troops, but I marched in those DC antiwar demonstrations, and, as usual, it was Vietnam veterans at the front, thousands strong. They didn't want those stupid yellow ribbons -- they wanted us to make sure that our troops didn't have to go to war and Iraqi civilians didn't have to die. They kept the faith and kept on marching and protesting and writing against war even as illness and weariness slowed a lot of them down, and death took some of them out of the game. And they kept going, and those who are left are still working to end war, and they will be until they drop in their tracks.
VVAW keeps plugging away, and so do Veterans for Peace, Citizen Soldier, and a lot of other smaller groups and thousands of individuals who are still out there. They did a lot to help younger vets stand up to the system, and they are the bedrock on which the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans peace and rights organizations are built. They know that the government and the public treat soldiers like disposable people -- that vets fill the homeless centers and the unemployment lines, and that the more hype there is about wartime heroism, the harder it is for real vets to make ends meet. They know that war is the gift that keeps on giving, and that not only soldiers, but their families and children, suffer from military service.
So, in their honor, and in the wake of Memorial a day, make a donation to an antiwar veterans organization. And keep it up, until the wars are over.