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. The continuation cov-ered an entire page and was accompanied by a photograph showinga lone soldier sitting head-in-hand, slumped over a chair at the Oak-land, California, army terminal.The caption described him as weary From Badness to Madness 103and then continued: One psychiatrist associated with the V.A.Hos-pital in Minneapolis says that 50 per cent of the soldiers returningfrom Vietnam need professional help to readjust. With no explana-tion of what was meant by professional help or what it meant in thecontext of the times to readjust, the association of psychiatry withVietnam veterans left the impression that the reader should thinkabout Vietnam veterans within a mental health framework.The association between mental illness and Vietnam veterans wasdeepened in the text of the story, which was peppered with suchphrases as serious readjustment problems, emotional stability, shattering experience, psychiatric casualty, mental health disas-ter, social problem, emotionally disturbed, men with damagedbrains, emotional disorders, emotional illness, mental break-downs, and severe depression. Even in its attempt to appear dis-criminating in its characterizations, the story managed to cast a pallover veterans: The men who suffer post-Vietnam syndrome are notdramatically ill.They do not go berserk or totally withdraw.Insteadthey are bewildered, disillusioned, unable to cope. Readers who managed to get beyond the labels found little supportfor the story s basic claim that significant numbers of Vietnam veteranswere suffering from an ailment called post-Vietnam syndrome (PVS).Indeed, deep into the story, the reader learned that there was littlehard research on which to base conclusions about the mental health ofVietnam veterans, a fact, however, that did not stop the writer fromreferring to countless troubled veterans a few sentences later.The Times story was clearly not a news story in the usual senseof the word.There was little news in the story and even less of whatcould be called facts.Certainly, there was nothing in the content ofthe story that dictated its being run on August 21.The story reportednothing, for example, that had occurred on the days leading up to itspublication.It was the kind of story that could have been run on thenewspaper s science page the following week or month, or in its Sun-day magazine at almost any time as a human interest story.Nothing, 104 From Badness to Madnessexcept for the fact that anti-war GIs were in the streets to protest thestart of the Republican national convention on that day, could explainthe timing, placement, and content of this story.Its purpose was not to convey news at all but rather to providereaders with an interpretive framework for understanding those newsstories that the Times and other news sources would be running duringthe week of the convention and to stigmatize the veterans.The realnews stories reported on the veterans in the streets; this story toldreaders how to interpret the fact that veterans were in the street: thebehavior of these veterans, the reader should understand, was a men-tal health problem.What s more, this was a mental health problemthat resulted less from the war itself than from the homecoming ex-perience of the veterans.The writer noted that the Vietnam War hadproduced the lowest psychiatric casualty rate in the history of modernAmerican warfare; according to him, the emotional disorders in menwho had served in Vietnam showed up only after their return to theUnited States.3Post-Vietnam syndrome was attributed, in fine print, to both thetrauma of the wartime events themselves as well as the silencing andisolation of veterans upon their homecoming.This elasticity allowedPVS and its sequel, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to functionin two ways in conjuring up the good veteran image.To the extentthat the reported symptoms could be attributed to the trauma of war,the image of these damaged veterans squared with the conventionalunderstanding that war is hell and that the war they fought was a real war.These veterans, as much as those of any other war, hadbeen through hell.They had not been anti-war GIs and they were notpeacenik veterans.They were good veterans.On the other hand, if theobserved maladies were due to the trauma of coming home from thewar, didn t that also confirm that these were good veterans ? Thereason why the homecoming experience might have been so traumaticwas only hinted at by the Times story, but the hint was politicallyloaded: Vietnam veterans had been made to feel guilty by those whothought the war was immoral and had felt hostility from their peers From Badness to Madness 105who had not done military service.The inference that it was theirpeers who were responsible for the guilt-tripping of veterans was, ofcourse, a thinly veiled accusation aimed at the anti-war movement.Why else would the anti-war movement have been anti-veteran if theywere not good pro-war veterans?The PsychiatristsIn September 1969, just after the story of the atrocities at My Lai wasbroken by the U.S.press, a social worker named Sarah Halay inter-viewed a Vietnam veteran at the Boston Veterans Administration (VA)Hospital.The veteran told her that his company had killed womenand children at a village called My Lai, and he described how he wasnow unable to sleep, had nightmares, and was easily terrified.He wasparticularly fearful that some of his buddies might kill him becausehe had witnessed the killing but not participated in it.When Haley reported her interview with the patient at a staff meet-ing, she was surprised to learn that the Diagnostic and Statistical Man-ual, published by the American Psychiatric Association and used bymental health professionals to classify mental conditions, had recentlybeen revised and that the new version, DSM-II, issued in 1968, haddropped gross stress reaction as a type of war neurosis.DSM-IIcontained no diagnostic nomenclature to cover a case like that of theveteran she had seen.As a result, her colleagues dismissed the sol-dier s story as a delusion and classified him as paranoid schizophrenic.A short time later, Haley would join forces with psychiatrists ChaimShatan and Robert Lifton, opponents of the war, in a campaign torestore war neurosis as a bona fide diagnostic category.That campaignwould end when post-traumatic stress disorder was included inDSM-III, issued in 1980 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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. The continuation cov-ered an entire page and was accompanied by a photograph showinga lone soldier sitting head-in-hand, slumped over a chair at the Oak-land, California, army terminal.The caption described him as weary From Badness to Madness 103and then continued: One psychiatrist associated with the V.A.Hos-pital in Minneapolis says that 50 per cent of the soldiers returningfrom Vietnam need professional help to readjust. With no explana-tion of what was meant by professional help or what it meant in thecontext of the times to readjust, the association of psychiatry withVietnam veterans left the impression that the reader should thinkabout Vietnam veterans within a mental health framework.The association between mental illness and Vietnam veterans wasdeepened in the text of the story, which was peppered with suchphrases as serious readjustment problems, emotional stability, shattering experience, psychiatric casualty, mental health disas-ter, social problem, emotionally disturbed, men with damagedbrains, emotional disorders, emotional illness, mental break-downs, and severe depression. Even in its attempt to appear dis-criminating in its characterizations, the story managed to cast a pallover veterans: The men who suffer post-Vietnam syndrome are notdramatically ill.They do not go berserk or totally withdraw.Insteadthey are bewildered, disillusioned, unable to cope. Readers who managed to get beyond the labels found little supportfor the story s basic claim that significant numbers of Vietnam veteranswere suffering from an ailment called post-Vietnam syndrome (PVS).Indeed, deep into the story, the reader learned that there was littlehard research on which to base conclusions about the mental health ofVietnam veterans, a fact, however, that did not stop the writer fromreferring to countless troubled veterans a few sentences later.The Times story was clearly not a news story in the usual senseof the word.There was little news in the story and even less of whatcould be called facts.Certainly, there was nothing in the content ofthe story that dictated its being run on August 21.The story reportednothing, for example, that had occurred on the days leading up to itspublication.It was the kind of story that could have been run on thenewspaper s science page the following week or month, or in its Sun-day magazine at almost any time as a human interest story.Nothing, 104 From Badness to Madnessexcept for the fact that anti-war GIs were in the streets to protest thestart of the Republican national convention on that day, could explainthe timing, placement, and content of this story.Its purpose was not to convey news at all but rather to providereaders with an interpretive framework for understanding those newsstories that the Times and other news sources would be running duringthe week of the convention and to stigmatize the veterans.The realnews stories reported on the veterans in the streets; this story toldreaders how to interpret the fact that veterans were in the street: thebehavior of these veterans, the reader should understand, was a men-tal health problem.What s more, this was a mental health problemthat resulted less from the war itself than from the homecoming ex-perience of the veterans.The writer noted that the Vietnam War hadproduced the lowest psychiatric casualty rate in the history of modernAmerican warfare; according to him, the emotional disorders in menwho had served in Vietnam showed up only after their return to theUnited States.3Post-Vietnam syndrome was attributed, in fine print, to both thetrauma of the wartime events themselves as well as the silencing andisolation of veterans upon their homecoming.This elasticity allowedPVS and its sequel, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to functionin two ways in conjuring up the good veteran image.To the extentthat the reported symptoms could be attributed to the trauma of war,the image of these damaged veterans squared with the conventionalunderstanding that war is hell and that the war they fought was a real war.These veterans, as much as those of any other war, hadbeen through hell.They had not been anti-war GIs and they were notpeacenik veterans.They were good veterans.On the other hand, if theobserved maladies were due to the trauma of coming home from thewar, didn t that also confirm that these were good veterans ? Thereason why the homecoming experience might have been so traumaticwas only hinted at by the Times story, but the hint was politicallyloaded: Vietnam veterans had been made to feel guilty by those whothought the war was immoral and had felt hostility from their peers From Badness to Madness 105who had not done military service.The inference that it was theirpeers who were responsible for the guilt-tripping of veterans was, ofcourse, a thinly veiled accusation aimed at the anti-war movement.Why else would the anti-war movement have been anti-veteran if theywere not good pro-war veterans?The PsychiatristsIn September 1969, just after the story of the atrocities at My Lai wasbroken by the U.S.press, a social worker named Sarah Halay inter-viewed a Vietnam veteran at the Boston Veterans Administration (VA)Hospital.The veteran told her that his company had killed womenand children at a village called My Lai, and he described how he wasnow unable to sleep, had nightmares, and was easily terrified.He wasparticularly fearful that some of his buddies might kill him becausehe had witnessed the killing but not participated in it.When Haley reported her interview with the patient at a staff meet-ing, she was surprised to learn that the Diagnostic and Statistical Man-ual, published by the American Psychiatric Association and used bymental health professionals to classify mental conditions, had recentlybeen revised and that the new version, DSM-II, issued in 1968, haddropped gross stress reaction as a type of war neurosis.DSM-IIcontained no diagnostic nomenclature to cover a case like that of theveteran she had seen.As a result, her colleagues dismissed the sol-dier s story as a delusion and classified him as paranoid schizophrenic.A short time later, Haley would join forces with psychiatrists ChaimShatan and Robert Lifton, opponents of the war, in a campaign torestore war neurosis as a bona fide diagnostic category.That campaignwould end when post-traumatic stress disorder was included inDSM-III, issued in 1980 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]