How many people turned out to honor the veterans is difficult to pin down. The official estimate is 300,000, though it could have been more, given that it was a normal working day and so many Loop workers rushed back and forth from their jobs to see the parade in bits and pieces. It is even more difficult to establish why the parade provoked the emotional response that it did. If there were in fact 200,000 marchers and 300,000 observers, it must have been the most intimate gathering of half a million individuals in the history of the city.
To watch it on television was not enough. The four local stations that covered the parade live had set up their cameras as though it would be a conventional march, using lots of wide-angle shots to capture the panoply of crowds, bands and floats. The essence of the spectacle, however, was much narrower in focus. It was as if half a million individuals were caught up in singular private reveries and spontaneous one-on-one displays of emotion.
”There was such a spontaneity about the event,” says Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University, ”such an all-pervasive feeling of friendliness, good will and unity. The only thing I can think of that ever happened before in this country that had the spirit of that day was Woodstock (the music festival).
”That might sound strange, given the tenor of the times when Woodstock was the ultimate happening, with all its antiwar undercurrents. But I`m beginning to think of the Chicago parade as a sort of Woodstock for Vietnam veterans, the ultimate event to symbolically begin to close the real and imagined rifts between them and the rest of their countrymen. It`s a pity that none of the networks or the national news magazines paid much attention to the parade because I don`t think there`ll ever be another one quite the same as this one.”
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A woman interviewed by The Tribune shortly after the parade ended perhaps best explained what was going on that day:
”I didn`t want to leave while some of them hadn`t come yet. I kept looking for the end, but the line went back forever. But it was more than that. You just couldn`t leave. I don`t know. It was those times. I guess there was more bottled up inside me from those times than I was aware of.”
The idea that it isn`t just the Vietnam vets who have bottled up some dark memories for the last 15 years was one of the reasons that Tom Stack says he thought the parade was necessary.
”The whole country still has some healing to do,” he says, ”not just the veterans. This parade turned out to be the biggest group therapy session I`ve ever seen.”
In 1972, a year when American troops still were in combat in Vietnam, a nationwide Louis Harris poll indicated that 61 percent of all Americans thought Vietnam was a war ”we could never win.” The same poll indicated that 49 percent of all Americans thought Vietnam veterans ”were made suckers, having to risk their lives in the wrong war at the wrong time.” A follow-up poll by the Harris organization in 1979 indicated that the number of Americans who thought the veterans were ”suckers” had grown to 64 percent.
”Sucker.” That is a hard word. Vietnam is a small country, and the American war there will never be considered a big one. Because of that, and because the three presidents during the war tried to minimize the scope of our involvement there, it is easy to forget what a big war it was. Lasting from 1961 to 1973, it was longer than the Civil War and our years in World Wars I and II combined. World War II was our biggest war, during which 15 million Americans were in uniform. Through the years in Vietnam 9 million Americans served in the military, 3 million in the war zone. That is a lot of people for two-thirds of all Americans to regard as suckers.
”There were 27 million men who came of age during the Vietnam era,”
says Phil Meyer, a combat veteran and a parade organizer who works as a counselor at the Veterans Center at 547 W. Roosevelt Rd., ”and only 9 million of them went into the military. Two-thirds of their own generation had deferments and were excused from the war. One of the big problems among the men who come here for counseling is the notion that they were duped.
”No one wants to live with that rage. `Why was I so dumb? Why didn`t I see it?` It is a false notion, but a lot of veterans have gone through a long period of shutting themselves off from such feelings, of not recognizing them and examining them.”
Of those who went to Vietnam, a remarkable number went out of a sense of idealism. In World War II the majority of men were drafted. In Vietnam 80 percent who served there volunteered. And after arriving in the war zone, the soldiers in Vietnam had a lower combat-desertion rate than Americans in any other war.
But war is war, and idealism does not wear well in combat. For the soldier in battle, war is reduced to a desperate contest to survive. The classic studies of combat have confirmed that the overwhelming impetus for the average soldier in battle is to protect his buddies in his immediate unit–and thus himself–from harm. Soldiers in Vietnam, as in every war, forged bonds in battle that in many ways are stronger than those between brothers.
To believe that comrades who were killed in battle next to you died for nothing, that they, like you, were duped into serving, has been a bitter pill for Vietnam veterans to swallow. Yet it is a bitterness that many veterans have chosen to chew on alone, in solitude, because of the way they were sent to and brought back from the war.
In World War II most men who saw combat were trained in battalions in the U.S., sent overseas intact as a unit and fought together for the duration of the war. When they came home, they came home as a unit, generally on a long ride in a slow-moving ship. And once they were home, though most did not have a homecoming parade, they were welcomed universally. The people who had remained back home supported the war and the reasons for fighting it. Indeed, they themselves had suffered during that war from, if nothing else, strict government rationing of such necessities as food and gasoline.
But in the case of Vietnam most soldiers were sent into the war under a one-year rotation system. After receiving combat training in the U.S., they were sent to Vietnam individually rather than in units, obligated to serve for one year from the day of their arrival. Once they were ”in country” in Vietnam, each was assigned to a unit that needed a new body to replace one that had been killed, wounded or rotated home. If they survived their year intact, they were plucked from the field one day by a helicopter, shuttled to an airbase and put on a plane for America.
The average age of the Vietnam combat veteran was 19, compared to 27 in World War II. The speed with which they could be moved from combat back to the U.S., and the anonymous nature by which it was done, allowed them no time to decompress from the battle zone. Nor did they have time to talk out their experiences with someone they could trust to understand them.
”Never in the history of this country was a veteran taken out of battle in the field to the living room of his home in the U.S. within 36 hours,”
says Vietnam vet counselor Meyer. ”One day you had a gun in your hand, grenades hanging around your neck and the balance of peoples` lives in your hands. The next day you were home among people who often were fed up with the war. They didn`t want to understand what you had been through, and, in fact, they felt some hostility towards you, blaming you for fighting, for the war itself.”
One of the most painful aspects of the Vietnam War was the way it divided an entire generation of Americans–the young people who went to war and those who didn`t. ”Our harshest critics as veterans,” says Meyer, ”were our own people, our own generation.”
It wasn`t hard to stay out of the military during the war. The government was liberal with college- and graduate-school deferments. And it wasn`t long before a preponderance of men going to war came from lower-class and lower-middle-class families. As American involvement expanded in Vietnam, the antiwar movement and political radicalism exploded on campuses at home. By 1968 the nation was as riveted by the fighting on campuses–by full-scale riots, seizures of buildings and bombings–as it was by the war itself. The radical politics of the antiwar movement soon spilled into other areas of American life. It fueled and radicalized older existing issues such as Black Power, the feminist movement, gay rights, the American Indian movement.
And the war, if it did not in fact give birth to it, at least was midwife to the phenomenon called the ”counterculture.” The young men and women who scorned the war showed their scorn for the system that allowed it to happen. They became what 20 years later seems an almost quaint term: ”hippies.” They rejected the values of their parents` generation by adopting long hair and beards, outlandish clothing, drugs and promiscuity. In many ways the allure of the counterculture was as seductive to the GIs in Vietnam as it was to their counterparts back home. But the more searing reality of their experience in the war served also to cut them off from the counterculture, whose disciples often regarded returning veterans as enemies.
When the veterans flew home from Vietnam, usually eager to find their niche in the topsy-turvy world that America had become, they were often violently turned away. Jim Bowen was barely 20 years old when he came home from Vietnam just before Christmas in 1967 from a year of heavy combat with the 1st Cavalry Division. The 1st Cav had taken heavy casualties that year, many of them Bowen`s friends. He was on a plane with 250 men he didn`t know, all of them rotating home. The plane landed in Tacoma, Wash., where the men were loaded on buses and driven to Ft. Lewis Army base to receive their pay, new uniforms, a handshake and a ticket to their hometowns. In Bowen`s case, it was Chicago. ”I couldn`t wait to get home,” says Bowen, 39, now a stockbroker in California. ”I wanted to get into college and get back into life. We`d been reading in Nam about all the stuff going on Stateside, and some of it sounded real good. Like the sexual revolution. If there was one of those, I wanted to join it right away.
”When the plane landed in Tacoma, everybody on it was going nuts. I think we all got on our hands and knees and kissed the ground. When we got on the bus, it had bars all over the window, and I couldn`t figure out why. Then when we got to Lewis, there were pickets outside throwing eggs and stuff and screaming that we were baby killers and war criminals. They were young kids like us. Then I thought the barred windows were to protect us, not the other way around. Boy, the guys were mad. If we had gotten out, we would have taken their heads off. Nobody was going to tell me that my friends died for nothing. ”At Lewis I got my pay and new uniform with a combat infantryman`s badge. I was real proud of it and wore it to the Seattle airport on my way home to Chicago. If you had a patch showing you were in combat, you were something special. There were more protesters at the airport, and as soon as they saw my uniform, they started yelling at me. When I got home, I wouldn`t wear it at all. My mother wanted me to wear it to midnight mass because it was Christmastime. No way. I didn`t want to be yelled at anymore.”
Bowen enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire in 1968 using GI Bill benefits: ”You try going to college in 1968 as a 21-year-old freshman and a combat veteran when practically the whole school is mobilized against the war. The students, they`re hating your guts, thinking you`re a killer, afraid of you. There was a vets club there, and I joined it. There were about 100 of us guys, and we helped each other through. Otherwise I wouldn`t have made it.
”One time, after the students were killed at Kent State, we heard that the (antiwar) movement people were going to pull the main flag on campus down to half-staff in their memory. That got our guys real mad. Nobody had pulled it down to half-staff to honor our friends when they got killed. So we slept around the pole that night, all 100 of us. The next morning there were about 5,000 of them and 100 of us, but they didn`t get to the flag. There were some fistfights, but they were afraid of us, thank God. I kept arguing with those people that they shouldn`t do anything to hurt the guys who were still over there (in Vietnam).”
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In the late 1960s and early `70s the Vietnam veterans started appearing at the threshholds of more traditional veterans organizations, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. More often than not they received a chilly reception. Those organizations were dominated from the national level down to the smallest local posts by older generations of men from World Wars I and II and the Korean War.
The Vietnam vets, understandably, were attempting to adapt to the lifestyle and appearance of their own generation, which meant beads, bellbottoms and beards. That was anathema to older veterans, proud of their own service in the ”big” wars, proud they had won their wars and angered by the turmoil and destruction of traditional values that were represented by the Vietnam generation. As a result, very few Vietnam vets initially joined their organizations.
Both the VFW and the Legion have since actively recruited 600,000 and 700,000 Vietnam-era veterans respectively. But many Vietnam vets have a hard time to this day forgiving the earlier rejection and have instead formed their own, burgeoning organizations, such as Vietnam Veterans of America and Viet NOW.
The federal government wasn`t prepared to handle the men and women who served in Vietnam, either. In the case of World War II only 45 percent of the discharged veterans had high school degrees. But after using the GI Bill, they were 46-percent more likely to have received a college diploma than their nonveteran contemporaries. In the Vietnam War 79 percent of the discharged veterans had high school diplomas. But the GI Bill offered them only one-third the comparable benefits given to World War II veterans. As of 1978, according to a Veterans Administration study, Vietnam veterans were 45-percent less likely to have gotten a college diploma than their nonveteran contemporaries. In the 1970s Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant dropped over thousands of square miles of combat areas in Vietnam, was linked to frightening health problems among veterans exposed to it. The problems include birth defects in the babies of veterans and an unusually high rate of cancer among the veterans themselves. Rep. David Bonior (D., Mich.), in a 1984 book, ”The Vietnam Veteran: A History of Neglect,” charges the Veterans Administration and Congress itself with ignoring the plight of Agent Orange victims. He documents a long history of neglect and obstructionist measures by Congress and the VA that forestalled compensation and help for those affected.
When the wounded began arriving from Vietnam, the VA had trouble accommodating them. The giant national network of hospitals it operates were staffed and equipped mainly to treat geriatric patients and chronic problems of older veterans. The VA`s efforts to cope with the influx of Vietnam casualties sometimes resulted in disgrace. Photographs appeared in national magazines of rats running underneath hospital beds occupied by Vietnam amputees assigned to hallway quarters in overcrowded hospitals.