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Posted Friday, February 01, 2008 4:18 PM

The Image of a Veteran

David Botti
The current series in the New York Times on veterans who've committed murder has spurred tremendous debate over the way vets are portrayed by the media. To understand origins of the prevailing portrayals of our current veterans, it's a good idea to take a step back and view the issue in a historical perspective.

Jerry Lembcke is a Vietnam veteran and professor of sociology at Holly Cross college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Lembcke's book "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam," looked in part at how the news media and pop-culture cultivated narrow portrayals of Vietnam vets. He has also written op-eds for the Boston Globe, Newsday, and the San Francisco Chronicle among others. In 1968 Lembcke was drafted into the Army, serving as chaplain's assistant before returning home and joining the anti-war movement.  

I talked to Lembcke about how the Vietnam-era vets experience impacts that of those men and women coming home from war today -- and how he thinks the media is handling its coverage of veterans and issues associated with them.


SOLDIER'S HOME: You've written that a veteran's behavior can be influenced more from how past vets were portrayed in pop-culture, as opposed to personal experiences he/she might have had.  How specifically does this happen?

LEMBCKE: The post-Vietnam popular culture representations of veterans was so powerful and so long lasting, and it so overwhelmed the war itself in popular culture, that as people began to come home during the Gulf War in the 1990’s, and present these same symptoms as Vietnam veterans coming back, I thought there’s a connection here. I think I used the phrase “learned experience,” and it occurred to me that this was a generation of veterans who’d grown up immersed in this popular culture of what it looks like to be a war veteran coming home.

This was very different than the culture Vietnam vets grew up in. Looking at representations of WWII veterans for example, which was not nearly as powerful in film for example. We got more war films about WWII, but not so many films about veterans coming home.


What is being portrayed in these kinds of movies that can influence veterans?

In the Vietnam war movies it was the dysfunctional, deranged, and even dangerous vet.  I looked at about 100 films that portrayed Vietnam vets in them, and there wasn’t a single film that portrayed a healthy, functional veteran.   So, what we see among other things is a lot of violence, the war brought home in a psychological sense, and even sometimes Hollywood portrayed guys coming home with their hand grenades and weapons and used those on the street.

Now we’re seeing one of the main representations of Iraq war veterans coming home is in the press with the violent crimes they’re committing.  A lot of stories read to me like a lot of press reports and fictional representations of Vietnam vets that guys can’t leave the war behind them.  They come home and they act out these war scenarios on the streets.


Is there a way the press can report on crimes committed by returning veterans without having such representations be the result?

Look at the current series the New York Times is running. The first in the series reported that one third of the violence is against spouses, girlfriends, and children. What this shows is a problem of masculinity and sense of worth as a man that perhaps the war has affected. These kinds of acts of violence against women and children are ways of acting out on that. Those are the kinds of stories that should be reported rather than this kind of pedestrian-type story of people coming home scared, and they’ve been trained up to act on their fears militarily


So it’s an issue of the press making the issue too black and white, and not attending to the gray areas?

The press is asking the wrong questions. They’re asking what is it about the military experience that causes these guys to act out like this, rather than asking what it is about the military culture (and even the culture of America) that requires men’s self esteem to somehow be related to their war experience.


You’ve said that it’s possible the behavior of Iraq veterans is influenced by past portrayals of Vietnam veterans. Is it possible reporters are also influenced by these pop culture images of Vietnam vets?

That exactly right. What we need to ask is, why did this story sound true to the reporter? What is the reporter herself bringing into this situation of reporting that leads her to think that this story is true when she hears it. These people live in the same culture you and I live in. They go to the same movies, they read the same books, they hear the same kinds of stories. Their sense of what is right is based on the same cultural references as the rest of us.


You’ve done some research on the origin of the term “PTSD.” There are some who say that the term is overused in talking about Iraq veterans. How was it used when it first came out?

I went back and looked at how PTSD came into being in the first place as a diagnostic category.  I think it was attractive to the press at the time because it served a cultural and political function.  It was inviting because it displaced from public view the fact that a lot of people were returning from Vietnam opposed to the war.  The attractiveness of PTSD was that it re-spun the coming home story.  It might have been attractive to journalists for reasons of basic liberal humanitarianism or even guilt that they didn’t go to the war.  They were finding some way to speak sympathetically to the experience of people coming home from war.  That may be what’s happening again.  These stories [in the today’s press] are written very good heartedly.  They’re not attempts to slander Iraq war veterans, as some critics seem to suggest they do.  But, going back to Vietnam vets there was a stigma surrounding them.  That’s the hidden danger that if indeed journalists are writing these stories because they are sympathetic, and they want to do something good for Iraq war veterans, in the long run they might be doing some damage.


What about how we use the term “PTSD” today?

PTSD had prominence in the press so quickly because that’s where the Vietnam-era story leaves off.  That was sort of the easy tag line for them. Lots and lots of analogies. These stories are written with phrases such as: “it’s like with Vietnam-era veterans.” These stories are full of those kinds of tag lines. And they’re apparently written like that as a way of engaging the reader at the level that the writer assumes the reader is at. They assume correctly that the readers are coming out of a historical period in which they’ve been immersed in these images of PTSD and war veterans.

The American public remembers what happened to Vietnam vets when they came home much more then they remember the war itself. The war in Vietnam has really faded in American memory, but people have these very sharp images of the spitting incidents and PTSD.  Because those are the images that have hung on in popular culture, and I think it’s almost certain that will happen with the war in Iraq--that the coming home narrative is going to displace the history of the war itself.  And that could happen quite quickly.

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