Payback

Five Marines After Vietnam

Joe Klein

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781451683639
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

From the author of Primary Colors, "a remarkably sensitive story of a generation" ( The New York Times Book Review ): The critically acclaimed true story of five Marines who fought together in a bloody battle during the Vietnam War, barely escaping with their lives, and of what happened when they came home. In 1981, while the country was celebrating the end of the Iran hostage crisis, an unemployed Vietnam veteran named Gary Cooper went berserk with a gun, angry over the jubilant welcome the hostages received in contrast to his own homecoming from Vietnam, and was killed in a fight with police. In what has been called "the most eloquent work of nonfiction to emerge from Vietnam since Michael Herr's Dispatches " ( The New York Times ), Joe Klein tells Cooper's story, as well as the stories of four of the other vets in Cooper's platoon.The story begins with an ambush and a grisly battle in the Que Son Valley in 1967, but Payback is less about remembering the war and more about examining its long-term effects on the grunts who fought it. Klein fills in the next fifteen years of these Marines' lives after they return home, with "the sort of fine and private detail one ordinarily finds only in fiction" ( People ). The experiences of these five men capture the struggles of a whole generation of Vietnam veterans and their families. Klein's "near-hypnotic" account ( Daily News, New York) is, to this day, both a remarkable piece of reporting and "some of the most vivid, harrowing, and emotionally honest writing to come out of Vietnam" ( The Washington Post Book World ).

ENTER THE DRAGON

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I mean I’d like to be able to think there’s a way out of this thing. That you can just somehow or other fight your way out of it . . . It would be great if this thing . . . you know, the war, the state of things in the world—I wish it were one big dragon . . . If it were one big dragon I’d just do what I could do. You know, if it ate me up well okay . . . it’s a simple solution . . . sort of a do or die thing. But it’s never that way.

—A VIETNAM VETERAN, QUOTED BY ROBERT JAY LIFTON IN HOME FROM THE WAR

1

Gary Cooper’s death was news, but not big news. It was consigned to the inside pages of newspapers across the country—“Viet Vet Goes Berserk over Hostage Welcome”—a curious footnote to the larger story, a brief shadow flickering across the glow of the first truly national celebration of heroism since John Glenn’s ticker-tape parade in 1962.

There were other such shadows. On the day Cooper died, a paraplegic Vietnam veteran named Ron Kovic—the author of a powerful postwar autobiography called Born on the Fourth of July—held a press conference in Los Angeles to complain about all the parades and hoopla of the past few weeks. The former hostages had been merely captives, he said, not heroes . . . unlike the 55,000 Americans who had died in Vietnam and their millions of comrades who had returned home to be reviled and ignored.

The next day, three hundred Vietnam veterans and their families staged a two-mile march in Indianapolis to protest the “Hostage Welcome.” Another group of veterans in Evansville, Indiana, held a press conference to deliver the same message.

There were other such protests and press conferences, followed by television programs and news stories airing the veterans’ grievances. The return of the fifty-two American hostages from Teheran was proving a catalyst. There was a growing sense among the small group of people who had devoted their lives to the problems of Vietnam veterans that a corner was being turned: for the first time, significant numbers of veterans were speaking up, gathering together, expressing pride in their accomplishments and sacrifices, and anger over the treatment they’d received. There also was a sense that the country might—finally—be willing to examine the consequences of its first defeat in a foreign war, to acknowledge finally the special problems of those who had fought and lost, and welcome them back into the fold.

It had been a long haul. As early as 1969, Senator Alan Cranston of California had held congressional hearings on the readjustment problems of returning veterans; after days of emotional testimony, Cranston proposed that the government sponsor a network of storefront counseling centers specifically for Vietnam veterans. There wasn’t much interest in the program. The military insisted the rate of battle-related mental disorders was much lower in Vietnam than in previous wars, the result of more sophisticated psychiatric treatment. The established veterans groups—the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars—were decidedly cool as well. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) lobbied for the program, but was dismissed as a radical splinter group; most Vietnam veterans seemed determined to fade back into society and forget about the whole business. Cranston’s proposal languished.

In 1970, VVAW began holding “rap groups” in New York for returning veterans, supervised by therapists. “In the group raps,” one of the therapists, Professor Chaim Shatan, wrote in 1971, “certain commonly shared concerns have emerged. Since they do not fit any standard diagnostic label, we refer to them loosely as the post-Vietnam syndrome.”

Another VVAW group leader, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, described the rap sessions in depth in Home from the War, published in 1973.

The psychiatric establishment scorned the idea that there might be such a thing as the post-Vietnam syndrome. Lifton and Shatan were seen as antiwar radicals, troublemakers. Their diagnosis—the amorphous commingling of anxiety, alienation, depression, rage and blunted emotions—wasn’t very precise. If such a thing existed, why hadn’t it shown up in other wars? Why hadn’t it been spotted before?

The answer was: it had been. In a paper published late in 1973, Drs. Timothy Van Putten and Warden H. Emory speculated that the post-Vietnam syndrome was another version of the “traumatic neuroses” diagnosed in World War I soldiers, concentration camp victims and survivors of natural disasters. In fact, in 1952 the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-I) had acknowledged the existence of traumatic neuroses as a distinct affliction. The diagnosis was dropped from the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-II) in 1968. “It would appear,” Drs. Van Putten and Emory concluded, “that much that has been learned about traumatic neurosis in World Wars I and II has been forgotten and needs to be relearned.”

But the psychiatric establishment—like most other Americans in the mid-1970s, including the veterans themselves—seemed more intent on forgetting than relearning. The Veterans Administration continued to attribute the complaints of Vietnam veterans to “long-standing characterological difficulties and to unresolved family and marital problems,” instead of a delayed reaction to the stress of combat.^I

In 1975, several mental health professionals organized the Vietnam Veterans Working Group. Their purpose was to convince the American Psychiatric Association to restore traumatic neurosis to the next edition of its diagnostic manual. They began to collect case histories of post-Vietnam syndrome from around the country.

Such histories were not hard to find. A young professor at Cleveland State University named John P. Wilson conducted interviews with sixty returned veterans on campus and found a persistent pattern of the same sorts of problems encountered earlier by Shatan, Lifton and the others. “I had been a conscientious objector during the war,” Wilson said, “and I began to notice that friends of mine who had gone to Vietnam were coming back . . . different. There was something so compelling and sad about the men I interviewed; I just became obsessed by it. I’d go to parties and start talking about Vietnam and wouldn’t be able to stop. But people didn’t want to hear about it. They wanted to forget about the war. I tried to get funding for a larger study. I wrote proposals, and every one was turned down. I approached the veterans organizations; they weren’t interested either. Finally, the Disabled American Veterans gave me $45,000 to begin what became the Forgotten Warrior Project.”

Wilson’s study was published in 1978, and the Disabled American Veterans responded by opening “Outreach Centers” for Vietnam veterans in several cities (one of them opened in Erie, Pennsylvania, and was staffed by Dale Szuminski’s old Marine buddy Don Rogers). Also in 1978, the Vietnam Veterans Working Group finally convinced the American Psychiatric Association to include post-Vietnam syndrome—it was now called post-traumatic stress disorder—in its revised diagnostic manual (DSM-III), to be published in 1980.

There were changes, too, at the Veterans Administration, where Max Cleland—a Vietnam veteran who was a triple amputee—had taken charge. Cleland had testified at Alan Cranston’s first hearings on post-Vietnam syndrome in 1969, and now he began to lobby for passage of Cranston’s Vet Center bill . . . which had been introduced and approved in the Senate four times in the past decade, only to be ignored by the House of Representatives. “It wasn’t that there was opposition in the House,” said Bill Brew of Cranston’s staff. “If you’re looking for a villain, you won’t find one . . . but you won’t find any heroes either. The bill needed an advocate, and no one in the House was willing to play that role. The sad truth is, for most of the 1970s, Vietnam veterans weren’t sufficiently organized to convince anyone the role needed playing.”

In March 1979, Jimmy Carter held a conference on Vietnam veterans at the White House and announced his support for the Vet Center program. Cranston’s bill finally was passed by the House two months later. By early 1980, government-sponsored storefront Vet Centers were opening in cities across the country. At about the same time, the Veterans Administration announced that it now accepted post-traumatic stress disorder as a service-related ailment.

The government had acted, but the vast majority of Vietnam veterans remained in hibernation. In a way, the Vet Centers only served to reinforce the public image: service in Vietnam had come to be regarded as an affliction, certainly nothing to be proud of. The media concentrated on the horror stories. Vietnam veterans went berserk with abysmal regularity on prime-time television. It seemed the country was not yet willing to acknowledge that it was possible to have served honorably in a lost cause.

It remained for the veterans themselves to change that. Bobby Muller, a paraplegic former Marine lieutenant, had been trying since 1978—without much success—to build an organization like the American Legion for Vietnam veterans. “But everything changed for our group—Vietnam Veterans of America—when the hostages came home,” Muller would recall. “That’s what broke us loose as an organization. I remember sitting in our office the day of the tickertape parade in New York for the hostages . . . and suddenly the phone started ringing off the hook. People wanted to join up, help out, give money. Guys started coming out of the woodwork. Part of it was that the public had been given the emotional opportunity to deal with Vietnam for the first time: they were waving flags, singing ‘God Bless America.’ It was okay to be patriotic again. But it was also that the guys—the veterans—finally woke up and began to demand the respect and attention they’d been denied.”

There was a surge of interest in the Vet Centers, where, according to Time magazine, “business . . . dramatically increased” after the hostages came home. “The vets’ anger,” Time reported, “has a new force. It contains a certain aggressive pride, almost for the first time.”

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It was during this time of reawakened pride and anger that I first called Bill Taylor, John Steiner, Dale Szuminski, John Wakefield and the others.

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I. The VA’s unwillingness to acknowledge post-Vietnam syndrome led some of the psychologists working with Vietnam veterans to overreact in the opposite direction; that is, to deny that “long-standing characterological difficulties” had anything at all to do with the depressed, hostile behavior of many veterans.

2

In the beginning, I labored under the standard journalistic delusion that I might insinuate myself into the lives of Cooper’s buddies without changing them. I would visit their homes, they would tell me their stories and life would go on as before. The author would remain unseen, an objective observer.

That conceit was shattered when I visited John and Elizabeth Wakefield on Sunday evening, September 13, 1981.

I had called a week earlier. Unlike the other members of the 2nd Platoon, who had been excited, curious, eager to tell stories and ask questions, Wakefield was subdued, distant, tentative.

“How’d you get my number?” he asked.

“John Steiner remembered you. He said he was in your squad, and that you were one of the guys who really knew how to handle themselves out there. Do you remember him?”

“Uh . . . yup.”

“Do you remember Operation Cochise?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, listen, I’m planning to visit Bill Taylor in Chicago next week and Indianapolis is along the way,” I said. “Would you mind if I stopped by? Would that be okay?”

“I guess so.”

The Wakefields lived in a small white frame house on a cul-de-sac near the Indianapolis Speedway, indistinguishable from the others in the neighborhood except for a sign, hand-written in Magic Marker on a shingle, warning salesmen and peddlers to keep away.

John answered the door. He looked a mess, unshaven, wearing an old undershirt; his eyes were bleary and distant behind a new pair of trifocals. He offered me a Pepsi, then led me into the chaotic clutter of the new room, where Elizabeth was sitting in the Barcalounger, crocheting and trying to ignore the football game on television. She looked up at me, said a cool hello and then asked, “Why are you doing this?”

As I began to explain, John sat down and lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking.

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said quietly. “I’m leery about going back and reliving this thing. I think the thing that scares me most is that I’ve never dealt with it yet. I’ve never forced myself to deal with it. Maybe that’s right, maybe it’s wrong.”

“I knew there was something he was holding back,” Elizabeth said, her skepticism dissolving—it seemed to me—with surprising speed. “I could kick myself for not figuring out it was Vietnam. My feeling is, he should talk about it. That’s the only way you ever get over these things.”

“I’m scared of it,” Wakefield said. “Hell, I’m not scared—I’m terrified. I haven’t slept very good since you called. I’ve been withdrawn, which is just totally opposite from me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel rotten about this.”

“Don’t,” he said. “You’re not the only cause of it. Something strange happened at work a few weeks ago. We build the engines for helicopters. I do quality control. And a few weeks ago, they brought in this guy—a North Vietnamese helicopter pilot who defected—and it was all I could do just to be around the guy. I mean, he was the right age. He might have been trying to kill me . . . so I was upset about that too. Then you called. I asked my neighbor what to do and he said the same thing I was thinking: that it’s probably a story that...