It isn`t surprising that many, perhaps the majority, of the Vietnam vets tried to stop thinking about the war. They packed away their memories with their photographs and uniforms.
”The fashionable thing to do since the war finally ended has been to pretend it never happened,” says Joe Yount, a psychologist at the VA`s West Side Medical Center. ”That pretense has been damaging not only to the veteran but to all of us.”
Some of the more insidious wounds that have resulted from the war have been drug and alcohol abuse, high rates of divorce, chronic unemployment, loneliness and depression. The VA only in recent years has attempted to reach out to vets through special neighborhood counseling centers, such as the one where Phil Meyer works.
Despite the unhappy experiences of coming home, the alienation so many veterans seem to feel may be based more on illusion than fact. The same Harris poll in 1972 that branded Vietnam vets as ”suckers” also indicated that 95 percent of all Americans thought the Vietnam veterans deserved respect for having served in the armed forces during the war. When confronted with the statement that ”the real heroes of the Vietnam War are the boys who refused induction and faced the consequences, and not those who served . . . ,” 83 percent of those polled disagreed.
The survey concluded that the most striking disclosure of the poll was the ”deeply seated guilt feelings on the part of the American public regarding the way veterans of this war are being treated.”
”The relatively quiet, hidden suffering these guys have been going through all these years may well be based on a couple of false assumptions,” says Yount, the VA psychologist. ”A nonveteran can always assume that vets don`t want to talk about the war. On the other hand, it is easy for vets to assume that civilians don`t want to talk about it.
”The natural tendency is to shut up and wait. But an event like the war can`t tolerate that kind of silence. That defense has to break down because whether we`re veterans or civilians, we still have this growing sense of irritation that this thing will not die. When you`ve been through a major trauma–and the war was certainly that for everybody in this country–it will simply continue to come back until it is treated.”
The silence that surrounded Vietnam began to break down in 1982, and it began to break down through the efforts of the veterans themselves. That was the year that the Vietnam monument, now known almost universally simply as
”The Wall,” was unveiled in Washington, D.C. Its design was commissioned by a group of concerned veterans, who collected the money for its
construction. The money came chiefly from other veterans, including donations of more than $1 million from the American Legion, which by then had become far more open to the plight of Vietnam vets.
The unveiling of The Wall in November, 1982, attended by 150,000 marching veterans, provoked a national outpouring of sympathy and tapped a reservoir of grief for the 58,000 whose names are on it. A similar ceremony in 1984 dedicating a statue near The Wall depicting three exhausted combat soldiers in Vietnam had the same effect. In May, 1985, New York City, at the unveiling of its own Vietnam memorial, held a ticker-tape parade down Broadway for 27,000 veterans.
Three of the marchers in the New York parade were Chicagoans Tom Stack, Roger McGill and Julio Gonzalez. Stack knew McGill, 43, a middle-level executive at Illinois Bell Telephone Co., and Gonzalez, 38, a janitor for General Motors Corp., from an organization of vets suffering from effects of Agent Orange. All three were moved by the outpouring of good will from the bystanders along Broadway. Stack revived his dream of doing something in Chicago.
Two days after the New York parade Stack was in Mayor Harold Washington`s office, asking to see the mayor or one of his top aides. His idea for a parade sparked some cautious interest among some of the mayor`s aides, as it did with aides to Ald. Bernard Stone, chairman of the City Council`s special events committee. Stack and his friends were encouraged enough to start planning.
”From the start,” Stack says, ”we wanted the parade to be something organized by veterans for veterans. We needed backing from the city, of course, and help from others. But we didn`t want a hint of politics in the parade or anything that hinted of jingoism or the idea of `hooray for war.` We wanted to put together something memorable, something that would show veterans in a different light, something with a healing spirit to it.”
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Through the summer of 1985 the veterans met frequently at one another`s houses. As word traveled through the grapevine, veterans whom Stack and the others didn`t know joined them. Phil Meyer came in, as did Angelo Terrell, assistant Illinois director of the U.S. Department of Labor, and Larry Langowski, another Illinois Bell executive. So did Connie Edwards, a former nurse who served in Vietnam, and John Wright, an ex-helicopter pilot who runs his own media-consulting business in Oak Park. Ken Plummer, another Oak Parker and a retired Army colonel who had served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, came in with a wealth of knowledge on organizing special events.
In fact, when the group announced its first organizational meeting at City Hall last September, they reserved a room seating 50, but 500 veterans showed up, eager to help out. There were some surprising encounters at the meetings. Men who worked in the same large corporations and banks and knew each other professionally were shocked to find out they were fellow veterans. A lot of the men, because of the stigma surrounding Vietnam vets, had found it convenient professionally not bring up their service histories unless asked.
Two vets who are executives with Jefferies and Co. Inc., a brokerage firm at 55 W. Monroe St., called and offered a vacant suite in their offices. Thus, without any money, the committee acquired a posh office with four telephones at a toney address. Early on the committee members thought they could do the whole show for $1.5 million. They hoped to attract large corporate donations but never raised more than $300,000. The city promised $75,000 in seed money to get them started but dragged its feet until March, 1986, before releasing the first $25,000. ”We were just an ad hoc committee with no track record whatsoever,” says Langowski. ”We didn`t have any credibility with the business community, and in a way I can`t blame them. They had no idea who we were, whether we were trying to stage something to bolster some left-wing or right-wing cause. We had this image problem (characteristic) of all Vietnam vets, of being pictured as a group of ponytails and fatigue jackets.”
Most corporate donors they solicited were polite but unresponsive. The committee`s lack of credibility hurt them with military organizations as well. Bands from the various services at first begged off appearing in the parade, claiming they were already booked. Similarly the VA said it would be impossible to bring busloads of hospitalized vets to ride in the parade.
But letters with $5 and $10 donations enclosed began to come in from veterans and nonveterans who had heard about the parade. Neighborhood bars began throwing benefit nights in support of the parade that raised $200, $500 or $1,000 at a time.
Even so, in January of this year, the committee was barely paying for the postage. Starting with a mailing list of 2,500 veterans organizations and individuals around the country, it sent them notices of the parade and asked them to spread the word. The list grew to 12,400 names. Positive responses began to pour in. ”We were sure all along,” Stack says, ”because Chicago is in the Midwest and is such a transportation hub that we would have no trouble getting more veterans to march here than in New York. We were thinking of 35,000 to 50,000, and I was beginning to think maybe even 100,000.”
”We didn`t want just veterans,” Stack says, ”we wanted them to bring their families, too, so we wrapped four days of activities around our parade, hoping people would make a mini-vacation out of it.”
Mindful that few blacks had turned out for the Washington and New York events, the committee drew black vets into the group at the outset and held many of their organizational meetings in the city`s black neighborhoods. As an added draw for out-of-town vets the committee arranged four-day reunions of the various national divisional associations in downtown hotels. The associations are made up of men who have served in divisional units such as the Americal or 101st Airborne divisions in the Army or the 3d Division in the Marines.
More than two dozen associations held reunions on parade weekend, including a group of Australians who had fought in the war and came to Chicago for the parade. Some of the divisional reunions attracted several thousand men in their own right.
The committee also brought in the half-sized traveling replica of The Wall in Washington, D.C. They placed it in Grant Park a week early to stir interest in the parade all week long.
By appealing to veterans of America`s earlier wars to join the parade, the committee was trying to make a point, too. ”We thought the parade should be a unifying influence in all ways,” says Ken Plummer. ”The idea was,
`Let`s close the gap between Vietnam veterans and vets of other eras and get over the estrangement.` That`s why we brought in 80 Medal of Honor winners from four wars, to symbolize the continuity of service and valor.”
But the parade was, ultimately, for the Vietnam vets. The organizers built the theme of the parade around problems growing out of the war that continue to confront Vietnam veterans: Agent Orange, soldiers missing in action, prisoners of war, an unemployment rate of 24 percent among black veterans.
Two weeks before the parade the committee knew their meticulous planning was paying off. From responses they were getting by mail and telephone, it predicted that 100,000 veterans would march, even though most of the local news media and city officials rolled their eyes in skepticism.
The last four days before the parade the four phones at the parade headquarters never stopped ringing.
”A lot of those phone calls in the last few days were really touching,” Ken Plummer recalls. ”A lot of them were from wives who were anxious for their men to march and get their feelings out in the open, wanting to know how to convince them to come. Were they too late? they wanted to know. Did they have to wear their uniforms?
” `No. No,` we`d tell them. `Just come. Wear an old patch if you want to or a whole uniform. It doesn`t matter. What`s his old unit?` Sometimes you`d hear her muffled voice, asking somebody about his old unit. The guy must have been standing right there and was too nervous to call himself.” The fact that 200,000 veterans turned out on the morning of the parade is testament to how badly they wanted to come.
Tom Lewis, 39, a Chicago security guard supervisor was 19 in 1967 when he fought with Company A, 1st Battalion of the 1st Cavalry Regiment in the 1st Cavalry Division. He saw heavy action. Afterwards he was never comfortable with memories of the war, so, he says, he decided not to march. ”The night before, though, I started rethinking it. I got two brothers in California who were there (in Vietnam), too, and they got Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts. I figured somebody should represent the family. The next morning I went to Navy Pier and found the 1st Cav unit, and I started feeling more comfortable with the whole idea.”
Once the parade started, Lewis says, he looked over and saw another 1st Cav vet, and a look of recognition spread over their faces. It was Jim Bowen, the veteran who had been harassed by antiwar protesters on his return from Vietnam and then in college. They had served together in the same company.
Before the weekend was over, Lewis and Bowen found two other men from the company, including their old captain. They learned from the captain that on the basis of a fierce battle they had fought on March 21, 1967, their entire company had been awarded a Presidential Unit Citation. The citation is a distinction rarely bestowed on a company-sized unit and was awarded so many years after the fact that only a few members of Lewis and Bowen`s company were tracked down and informed of the honor. They found out, too, that their medic had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions that day. ”I can`t tell you how glad I was that I went to that parade,” Lewis says. ”To see these guys and to find out what we had done, I can`t express the pride I feel now. To see people on both sides of the street cheering us, well, it made me feel good, but it was good for the country to feel it, too.”
Jim Hennigan, a 40-year-old Chicago policeman who had been a military policeman running convoys around the Saigon area in 1968, hadn`t planned to march until the day before the parade: ”I think I was like a lot of other guys, worried that the parade would end up being some big political statement one way or the other, expressing something I didn`t believe in.”
But the day before the parade his 18-year-old nephew, who had read every letter Hennigan had written home to his mother and father during the war, asked if he would march so that the nephew could march with him. The night before the parade Hennigan pulled out an old shoebox and sorted through pictures of buddies and Vietnamese friends from the war. In the morning, before he and his nephew left home for the Loop, he stuck several of the photos in his shirt pocket over his heart.
”These are the ones who won`t be here to march,” he told his nephew.
”At least I can share it with them this way.”
Hennigan says he was staggered by his own reaction to the parade. ”I wasn`t prepared for all the things that happened back then to start unfolding again now. That was the surprise–the emotional release on all sides. If you`ve never been cheered by half a million people before, you`d like to do it every Friday.”
David King, 37, a house painter in Cornucopia, Wis., says he rejected the idea of the parade when he heard about it earlier this year. ”My feelings were that it was much too late to attempt something like this,” he says. ”At least 15 years too late.”
Vice commander of his local Vietnam Veterans of America chapter, King says he and the chapter commander had argued about the merits of coming down to Chicago. Both have had serious problems adjusting since the war, he says. The commander wanted to go but couldn`t afford to; King could afford to but didn`t want to. But at midnight before the parade he changed his mind, called his buddy, picked him up, lent him $100 and set off for Chicago.
They drove all night, 500 miles, stopping only for gas and coffee. They arrived after the parade had started. King parked his camper on the south side of the Loop, and the two men raced down the parade route, looking for their units. Breathless, King came on his, the 1st Cavalry, in time to march past the reviewing stand. ”Seeing all those guys,” he says, ”it was like I was back in 1970, coming home looking ragged and tired. I was higher than a kite from pure emotion. It brought me down to earth and took me up at the same time. It`s the first time in a long time that I lost that angry attitude I`ve had since the war.
”I spent the next three days wandering all over the city, looking at faces, trying to find somebody I knew back then. I didn`t find anybody I knew, but I spent a lot of time at The Wall because my best friend is on there. Our tours were up about the same time, and we were taking care of each other over there so we could go home together. He went out on a survey detail a week before I left and got blown up. I don`t know, it just felt nice to be by the wall, to know that somebody who knew him was there during this thing.”
Though many men were wary of marching in the parade, nothing could keep Tim Sheehe, 40, a steelworker from Newark, N.Y., from coming to Chicago. He had been to the Washington and New York parades, and he says the spiritual lift that he gets from being with other veterans has turned his life around.
”The thing for me,” he says, ”is to find guys from my own unit. You didn`t use name tags when you were in combat, so you didn`t know guys` real names unless you asked. For me, I didn`t ask. I knew most guys by the nicknames they used. `Ski` if he was Polish. `Detroit` if he was from Detroit and so on. I didn`t want to get real close with no one in case something happened. But I didn`t realize until later that these were the best friends I ever would have, and it was too late to track them down. The thing is, if you run into these guys now that you knew back then and they`re healthy and their kids are healthy, you can`t describe the lift it gives you.”
Sheehe joined a 1st Cavalry company as a replacement in March, 1968, as the ”FNG.” FNG is a GI acronym that when spelled out is partly unprintable but was used to describe the new guys coming into the unit. As an FNG Sheehe was assigned to a black squad leader from Chicago who had to break him into the reality of combat. The squad leader gave Sheehe a rough time for a few weeks. He gave him the dirtiest details until he was satisfied that Sheehe was made of the right stuff. Then they became good friends.
”I never got to know his real name,” Sheehe says of the squad leader,
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”but I never forgot him. We got to be real tight over there. We were together just before Christmas, and he was just a few days short. He didn`t know where he was hit, but we both knew it was bad, and they pulled him out. It was like the lights went out of the world.”
Once in Chicago Sheehe spent much of his time circulating throught the 1st Cav contingent looking at faces, looking for somebody, anybody who seemed familiar. He finally came across a black face
that he was sure he knew.
”You carried the radio for the lieutenant,” were the black`s first words.
”That`s right,” Sheehe replied. ”You were the squad leader.”
They had found each other again. Jim Walker, 39, a CTA bus driver for the last 16 years, had been wondering since 1968 about Sheehe but didn`t know Sheehe`s full name. The day before he was wounded, Walker says, he attended a mass at which the chaplain spoke about death and how to know, if you were hit, whether you were dead or alive. ”Just blink your eyes,” the chaplain had said. ”Death is like night and day, and you`ll know if you`re still alive.” ”When I got hit the next day, I blinked my eyes,” Walker says, ”and I thought, `Hey, I`m going back to the world.` I got back and just put it all behind me, got a steady job, a lovely wife and two beautiful kids and got on with my life.
”You wanted to stick your chest out, being a veteran and all, but it just wasn`t that way for us guys.
”That`s why I went to the parade, and it made me feel real good. But to look over and see a guy you knew, that was something special. When Tim came into my squad, I gave him a bad time, hauling ammo. You had to, just to see what a guy was made of, to see if he was into drugs or something so you could stay away from him. Those guys could get you hurt.
”But Tim, I saw he was one tough dude right away. He was a natural. He`s white, and I`m black, but you didn`t see that there. If you were a man, you did your job, you were a friend. I didn`t find a better one there than Tim. That`s what the parade did for me; it found Tim Sheehe for me. I`m blessed to find him. I know I am.”
Once the parade and the weekend were over, members of the parade committee closed their office, satisfied that they had produced a once-in-a-lifetime event. ”We needed to do it once,” Stack says, ”but now it`s time to get on with other things. I hope we`ve heightened consciousness about Vietnam veterans and the issues that still concern them. There won`t be another parade, but a lot of us who worked on it are going to continue to work together in some capacity, particularly in veterans` employment, Agent Orange and the POW-MIA issues.”
Other cities, including Los Angeles and Houston, now are planning their own welcome parades. But Chicago`s, because of its location and its organization, probably will never be duplicated. It pulled so many veterans from every corner of the country. Even the Australian airborne contingent went home determined that their country, too, will have a parade.
”A parade is nothing more than a symbol, but symbols can change a lot of minds, and I think our parade did that,” says Phil Meyer. ”Most of the vets I`ve talked with who marched in it have said they can`t remember walking down La Salle Street. They only remember this dreamlike thing, the clouds of white coming down on them, their hearts jumping out of their mouths, their crying. It`s what should have happened. It`s what a grateful country does.”