Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans, Neither Victims nor Executioners

Abstract

The reissuing of Robert Jay Lifton's moving and important 1973 study of Vietnam veterans can serve as a timely reminder of how easily and how much we forget. Lifton's study, furthermore, raises the of what we as a society have learned from the pain, guilt, and rage of these men, and from our own unease over a small, undeclared war that we lost. Lifton's work is based on two years5 intensive participation in weekly groups55 with veterans that met in the New York office of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. This program, which he initiated in 1970, was part of an effort by participants to make sense of their experience, and to deal with the numbing55 response that so many had adopted as a defense against acceptance of guilt. Lifton takes care to point out that the 400 men involved in his rap sessions and interviews were in no sense representative of all Vietnam veterans; most had seen active duty, and most came to articulate a clear antiwar position on their return. Similarly, Lifton himself is neither a dispassionate phantom researcher,55 nor the remote psychiatrist in the traditional doctor-patient relationship. (He indeed argues against both stances.) His purpose is instead that of raising the important question of the significance of an important change undergone by a relatively small group of men for a larger change in human consciousness55 (p. 21). Thus, the study must be read at three intertwined levels: for what it tells us about the troubled veterans who are still with us, for what it tells us about the war and its implications for the larger society, and (most impor tant) for what it tells us about psychological insight, transformation, and growth. Indeed, the difficulty in reading and absorbing what Lifton has to say stems from the complex interplay of these three themes. The study is dense, sometimes repetitious, and difficult to follow in a linear way. Recent statistics on Vietnam veterans present an alarming picture. We already knew, at war's end, about the 57,692 casualties and the 300,000 wounded. We now are confronted with an estimated 40 percent unem ployment rate among this group, as well as a figure of 41 percent who have either served or are serving time in jail. Estimates on suicides, on problems from Agent Orange, and on alcoholism are equally stark. Lifton5s extensive quotations and analysis help to show why this is so, and why such statistics only hint at the debilitating psychological burden