One of the worst cliches from 40 + years ago (perpetrated by the media) was that the typical Vietnam veteran was a terminally traumatized, baby killing, drug addicted, alcoholic, homeless psychopath. The fact that only a handful of the 2.5 million American military personnel (Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy ) who passed through Vietnam would even come close to fitting that description was irrelevant to Hollywood. Now with the Robert Bales incident we are being inundated again with the same slanderous cliches.
by John Podhoretz
Two repugnant clichés are finding new life in the wake of the monstrous and apparently systematic murders in Afghanistan that claimed 16 lives — allegedly by a career soldier named Robert Bales. Call them “the deranged veteran cliché” and the “William Calley cliché.”
These cliches are designed, consciously or not, to limit Bales’ responsibility for the acts he committed and to lay the blame instead on the US military and the supposed injustice of the wars in which Bales has been fighting for nearly a decade.
Bales was, we’ve read and heard, a decent guy who enlisted after 9/11 and served three tours in Iraq without complaint. He wasn’t promoted as he wished, and he and his wife sank into debt. He was arrested once and went through an anger-management class.
The only seeming explanations for his actions are that he suffered an injury to his foot and a traumatic brain injury — which was evidently deemed mild and didn’t hamper his being redeployed. He also saw a friend profoundly wounded in the week before the massacre, and had been drinking.
Thus the first cliché, that Bales is an active-duty 2012 version of that bogeyman of the 1970s and 1980s, the crazed Vietnam veteran. You might not be old enough to recall this one: Tormented by things he’d done and seen, the crazed vet descends into alcoholism or drug abuse, erupts in rages against his family, maybe even goes on a rampage.
In an era in which celebrations of the valor and courage of America’s military members are universal, it is difficult to capture just how dominating an image this was in the years following the ignominious end of the Vietnam conflict in 1975.
Not until the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1983 and the cultural transformation it helped bring about in the image of the Americans who served with such little recognition in that long and painful conflict did the shamefulness of the crazed-vet meme become a national scandal.
It has reemerged a bit through the Iraq and Afghan wars, trumpeted by experts in the vague condition known as “post-traumatic stress disorder.”
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If nearly everyone returning from Iraq and Afghanistan can be said to suffer from PTSD, then the term suggests the very fact of being a veteran is itself a chronic psychiatric condition.
Those who wish to spread the blame for Bales’ actions to America’s war efforts are suggesting that any and every man and woman in uniform could, at a moment’s notice, become Bales.
The second cliché, the William Calley cliché, is designed to exculpate the generator of a war crime by suggesting the crime was an inexorable outgrowth of the inhuman wars in which the soldier has been compelled to serve.
In 1969, after he personally slaughtered more than 100 people at My Lai, Lt. William Calley was defended by fashionable types who argued he was just doing on a small scale what the United States had been doing in Vietnam on a grand scale.
In yesterday’s New York Times, Stephen Xenakis, a retired brigadier general and psychiatrist who has made a second career out of making grand assertions about the psychological conditions of America’s veterans, asserted that the Bales massacre “is equivalent to what My Lai did to reveal all the problems with the conduct of the Vietnam War. The Army will want to say that soldiers who commit crimes are rogues, that they are individual, isolated cases. But they are not.”
Oh, yes, they are. More than half a million Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. If PTSD were a major source of destructive behavior after their tours of duty, the consequences would appear in emergency-room stats detailing drug overdoses and domestic-abuse cases, or in spikes in crime, or in increases in the divorce rate.
There are no such indications because, as was true of Vietnam vets, the overwhelming majority of America’s war veterans are what the political pietists say they are: brave, tough, self-sacrificing and rightly full of pride for their efforts on behalf of their country.
Everyone now in uniform has chosen to be in uniform (that was not true of Vietnam) and soldiers like Bales voluntarily re-up time and again. As Max Boot points out, “There are 51,270 soldiers, active duty, reserve and retired, who, like Bales, have four or more deployments.” How many have committed massacres in Iraq or Afghanistan?
One.
Thus does the effort to find an explanation for Bales’ monstrous crime turn with remarkable speed into a slander of every American soldier, sailor, airman and Marine — in the guise of offering a patronizing defense. And a slander of this country as well.
Tags: John Podhoretz
