Hello everyone, and welcome to SNAFUBAR, a show about American war and American myth. Today’s episode explores the history of “Vietnam Syndrome,” a phrase you probably have heard of. Several generations of American citizens were, and still are, deeply affected by the Vietnam War (1964-1973), in which “Vietnam Syndrome” comes from. For some, “Vietnam Syndrome” harks back to the 1980s, to the era of Ronald Reagan. Reagan used the term to describe the reluctance of the American public to support U.S. military operations overseas. This not only applied to the reluctance of the American public, but to large scale military mobilization more broadly. Thus “Vietnam Syndrome” became a term to describe the crisis in confidence surrounding US foreign military interventions.
But here at SNAFUBAR, we had some questions, so we did some digging. It turns out, some of the earliest documented instances of this term appeared in news articles describing mental health afflictions and daily struggles of Vietnam Veterans returning home from war. Today, the terms PTSD or moral injury would be something closer to what is considered the original usage of “Post-Vietnam Syndrome.” But the question is, how the heck did we get here? A term originally applied to the mental health struggles of Vietnam veterans is co-opted and warped to reignite America’s martial character? Find out on this episode of SNAFUBAR.
SNAFUBAR is hosted by Jeff Crane who is an Environmental Historian and Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt, and Sara Hart, Chair of the Department of Applied Humanities at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Research and writing for the show by Liam Salcuni and Roman Sotomayor. SNAFUBAR is produced by Abigail Smithson and brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Music by Silverman Studios
Further Readings:
Chaim F. Shatam, “Post Vietnam Syndrome,” The New York Times, May 6th, 1972.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution 1964
History is a Weapon Digital Database
National Archives Vietnam War Records
Ralph Blumenthal, ‘“Syndrome Found in Returning G.I.’s,” The New York Times, June 7th, 1971.
♪♪
>> Dwight Eisenhower (Archival Audio): You are about to embark upon the great crusade.
>> JFK (Archival Audio): The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.
>>Douglas MacArthur (Archival Audio): Only the dead have seen the end of war.
>> Dwight Eisenhower (Archival Audio): We will accept nothing less than full victory.
♪♪
>>Sara Hart: You're listening to SNAFUBAR at Cal Poly Humboldt. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the SNAFUBAR, a show about American war and American myth. Today, we're going to talk about the Vietnam Syndrome.
>>Jeff Crane: And you've been wanting to talk about this for a while, and we've been talking about it for quite a while. It's not a lightweight topic. Vietnam Syndrome is a phrase that, listeners, many of you will be familiar with, and it's a phrase that carries a pretty substantial emotional weight with it. Am I right? At least for a particular generation or two.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, you're right. And here's the thing. For Americans today, this phrase means mostly one thing. Vietnam Syndrome in a nutshell, folks. I'd describe it as the post-war sense of malaise and defeat that followed the end of the nation's involvement in Vietnam. It describes an American cultural reluctance to go to war. There was a strong sense in the 1980s and the 1990s, which, you know, had been growing through the 70s and has continued in some complicated ways into the 21st century, a strong sense that nobody wanted to enter into any kind of conflict that could be construed as another Vietnam. And as a result, the US public became wary of intervening in foreign affairs. The Vietnam Syndrome, as it is now popularly known, is this wariness.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, there was a broad cultural sense of "never again" with regards to Vietnam. I mean, here's the harsh reality. We entered a war we never should have entered and were soundly defeated. Public opinion toward the war shifted rapidly in its later years. The Paris Peace Accords that ended American involvement in the war were signed at the end of January 1973.
>>Sara Hart: Woah, woah. And, yes, we will get there, but we have just a little bit of groundwork to lay first. I really do want to dive headfirst into the Vietnam Syndrome to talk about when it was first identified and how it then transformed as a concept over time. But to do that, I think we're going to need to start with the briefest of historical outlines on how America entered the Vietnam War itself. After which this distinctly American syndrome was named.
>>Jeff Crane: Okay, so the briefest of historical outlines on one of the United States most complicated wars. So this is going to be a real strain for us.
>>Sara Hart: I know, I know. We're going to see a lot of rabbit holes we could easily fall into. We're going to have to pass them right by just for today. And really, I'm looking at you, Jeff.
>>Jeff Crane: [CHUCKLE]
>>Sara Hart: Uh huh. We'll flag some things to come back to, and that will ease a little bit the historian's pain of passing by compelling and problematic stones without turning them over.
>>Jeff Crane: Well, you go into that rabbit hole. It might turn into a Vietcong tunnel system.
>>Sara Hart: No, Jeff, you're already doing it.
>>Jeff Crane: Okay, I can't help myself. I need to turn over all the stones, but I am going to endeavor to do better today.
>>Sara Hart: That's right. I know you will. I believe in you. I'll start you off with an easy one. When did the Vietnam War start?
>>Jeff Crane: Not easy! And you know that. Listeners, this is a setup, a booby trap, if you will. I'm going to do my best to get through this. But first, I'm Jeff Crane, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt. My father was a veteran who fought in Vietnam on carrier decks, working on A-6s and A-6Bs. And aside from being a historian and someone who's taught the Vietnam War, I'm also a peacetime veteran of the Cold War era. I've long been interested in American military action and in the American cultural civilian support for and responses to military action.
>>Sara Hart: And I'm Sarah Hart. I'm the chair of the Applied Humanities Department, also here at Cal Poly Humboldt. And I am the daughter of a Marine combat veteran from Vietnam. So the Vietnam Syndrome, today's topic, it's a topic that I grew up with. Thanks to you all for joining us here today in the SNAFUBAR, a show about the American military, militarization, and cultural beliefs. So, Jeff, to that "easy question" that we're starting off with here. How did the Vietnam War begin? How did America get involved? What started it?
>>Jeff Crane: You're killing me here. This quickness that you're asking for, it's a lot. We can't begin at the beginning without knowing how we got there. So just a little table setting listeners, please understand that we are skipping through so much nuance here, so much detail, but I'm going to try.
>>Sara Hart: That's all we can ask.
>>Jeff Crane: So 1858...
>>Sara Hart: What?! Jeff, 20th century. We're talking about 20th century today.
>>Jeff Crane: Roll with me here, 1858, France, a colonial power attacks Da Nang invading Vietnam. For the next couple of decades, it sets up a colonial presence in the country. By 1885, France has established protectorates. In 1887, imposes a political and administrative body that it calls French Indochina, which combines Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos into a single colonial federation that the French rule over. This colonial federation is maintained by force under a classically oppressive colonial empire model of the sort that we see globally at the time. And that holds until 1954.
>>Sara Hart: Okay, you did it. You got us more than halfway through the 20th century.
>>Jeff Crane: Not so fast. You have to go back a bit because World War II disrupted a lot of colonial powers for the French and for a lot of the rest of the world. That war created the conditions that led to French Indochina's collapse. But one piece of this story in particular stands out. During World War II, Japan occupied Vietnam. They began their occupation in 1940, and they successfully used Vietnam as a Japanese military base during World War II. While allowing the French to continue running Vietnam civil government. These two nations are on opposite sides in World War II, but this is the Vichy regime -
>>Sara Hart: Yeah...
>>Jeff Crane: - right in France. So, of course, the French were busy on other fronts and that contributed to their acceptance of this arrangement. In 1945, Japan was worried the French might assist the allies and sabotage the military operations that they were running out of Vietnam. So they gave France an ultimatum, surrender completely and immediately to Japanese control or else. French officers refused, and Japanese forces attacked. This was March 9, 1945. Fighting was brutal, over 4,000 French military personnel and civilians were killed. Another 15,000 were imprisoned, and Japanese forces took control the entire colonial administration of Vietnam. This all happened in a matter of days. French historians often refer to it as the quote "Japanese coup de force in Indochina. "
>>Sara Hart: All right. Okay, so that's March 1945. That's a lot. We're not going to segue here into World War II. I know that, but I do know that 1945 marks the end of that war. So this situation must not have lasted very long. Things must have changed pretty quickly.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, well, that's some good historical background knowledge, and we can't assume everyone knows these things. The arrangement did not last long. Five months later, the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. On Monday, August 6th, the US dropped a uranium-235 bomb from the B-29 named Enola Gay onto the city of Hiroshima, instantly killing approximately 80,000 people and ultimately killing many more. Three days later on Thursday, August 9th, which was recording on August 10th. So yesterday would be that anniversary, right? The US dropped a second atomic bomb. This time, a plutonium implosion bomb from a B-29 onto the city of Nagasaki and instantly killing over 40,000 people, and again, ultimately killing many more.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. Yeah, and week later, Emperor Hirohito announces Japan's surrender. And on September 2nd, that surrender is formalized. I just want you to know that I'm fighting it right now, the urge to linger on historically important points of interest, such as exploring the decision to drop the bombs and only three days apart.
>>Jeff Crane: It is a... It's a tricky subject. I'm sure we'll find a way to talk about it, right?
>>Sara Hart: Mm-hmm.
>>Jeff Crane: But, yeah, we are kind of rushing through some unbelievably complex historical moments to get to the real point of our story today.
>>Sara Hart: Right, which is not that.
>>Jeff Crane: As soon as the emperor announced Japan's surrender, that was August 15th, the Vietnamese began fighting for their independence. The Việt Minh, which is a shortened name for the League for the Independence of Vietnam, was a communist-led independence movement founded by Hồ Chí Minh and others in 1941.
>>Sara Hart: Right. And Hồ Chí Minh was a nationalist and anti-colonialist fighting for Vietnamese independence long before that, since he was a teenager. He traveled to the US and to Europe, living briefly in each place. He attended the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I and tried there to present a petition for Vietnamese independence.
>>Jeff Crane: Remember when I first read that and learned that.
>>Sara Hart: That's incredible, right?
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. And a waiter, wasn't he?
>>Sara Hart: He was a waiter, yeah. He didn't realize that Woodrow Wilson's sort of really bold rhetoric about national self-determination wasn't applying or wasn't being applied to countries like Vietnam. You know, he was a little optimistic, I think. That's 1919. He didn't get very far on that one, but he really was focused on that independence and on organizing. He was a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920 and of the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1930. The Communist Party of Vietnam is the organization that led to the Việt Minh.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. In the context of Japan's 1945 surrender to the Allied powers, the Việt Minh carried out what's known as the August Revolution over the last two weeks of August and into the very beginning of September, they took over control of major cities. Hồ Chí Minh declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2nd, just hours before the Japanese formally signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri, which was anchored in Tokyo Bay.
>>Sara Hart: So much history going on all at the same time. Okay, so I'm with you now. I've caught up. I can see why this is some important background. When Hồ Chí Minh declared Vietnamese independence, he quoted directly and intentionally from the United States' Declaration of Independence. He opened his speech with the words, "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
>>Jeff Crane: And this was intentional, of course. He even had an OSS officer proofread the speech for translation accuracy, Hồ Chí Minh was well informed about the balance of global power. He knew where America stood in that balance. In that speech, he also nodded to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. His hope was that Vietnam's former colonial oppressor, France, together with the newly ascended global superpower of the United States, would support Vietnamese independence and self rule.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, they did not.
>>Jeff Crane: No, they did not.
>>Sara Hart: President Truman didn't even respond to Hồ Chí Minh's very public and very publicized speech.
>>Jeff Crane: Hồ Chí Minh tried several times to contact President Truman and a few other members of his administration directly. And there's no historical evidence that Truman or anyone else responded at all.
>>Sara Hart: Hm.
>>Jeff Crane: Whole administration just sort of pretended they didn't see or hear it happen. Many of these letters and telegrams are still in the National Archive. And if you're interested listeners, you can find about a dozen of them on the really rich repository of historical documents. It's called the website, History Is A Weapon. In these letters, you can see how much Hồ Chí Minh was lobbying for and hoping for American support.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, and in some of those letters, he's really begging for it, right?
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. Well, you know, you hear the rhetoric, right? You hear the rhetoric of American foreign policy and all that, and... You know, he's being aspirational, I guess, is what you might say. So it's painfully ironic in so many ways. During World War II, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which is the precursor to the CIA, had worked with the Việt Minh, supporting them against the Japanese. American officers had trained Việt Minh guerilla fighters. So insurgency warfare, which we'll be seeing that a lot when we get to the Vietnam War. Those OSS officers wrote a memo advising support of Hồ Chí Minh in the future due to his military and leadership skills. Unfortunately, that memo was forgotten about because of the purges of the East Asia experts from the State Department and CIA during the Red Scare. I learned about that reading Marilyn Young's book about Vietnam.
>>Sara Hart: Okay. On the Vietnam War. Yeah, and we've heard about that one before, folks. We're recommending it, Marilyn Young.
>>Jeff Crane: They purged those experts, and they brought in Europeanists.
>>Sara Hart: Oh, and that was really helpful looking at, you know, Asia. Yeah, we would learn the hard way, it turns out. And we're folks, we were in 1945.
>>Jeff Crane: Isn't that kind of an American tradition. Let's...
>>Sara Hart: America. We learn the hard way.
[LAUGHTER]
>>Sara Hart: Beef. It's what's for dinner. Okay, so in 1945, 1946, we got to remember Hồ Chí Minh's Việt Minh forces are not at this point, enemies of the American people. The Vietcong, which would become enemy combatants, that insurgent group did not yet exist. The Vietcong insurgency grew out of the Việt Minh Revolutionary Army, but it didn't come into being until, like, 15 years later and after a lot of 15 years worth of different influences. The Việt Minh had fought the French and the Japanese, and at the end of World War II, they declared their independence. They're asking for American support. Okay, so what happened then? How do we get to the war that Americans know as the Vietnam War?
>>Jeff Crane: Well, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union had been meeting over the summer of 1945 in Potsdam, what's called the Potsdam Conference there. They set out to define what a post-war global order would look like. And I think, you know, this started with FDR, right?
>>Sara Hart: Yep.
>>Jeff Crane: And spheres of influence and divvying up the world, basically. Yeah, and so these guys are drawing the maps, right? They're deciding the fates of how many people? [SARDONIC CHUCKLE] So many people. So many people of color are having their fates decided by these three governments at the end of World War II. And this, of course, includes the Vietnamese. And what Great Britain, and the United States, and the Soviet Union decides -- without asking the Vietnamese a single solitary question about what they thought. You know why they say now "nothing about us without us."
>>Sara Hart: Yeah.
>>Jeff Crane: So we should have been saying, Hey, nothing about us without us.
>>Sara Hart: Right, was everything about us without us going on here.
>>Jeff Crane: What they decided at the Potsdam Conference was that Vietnam, we divided at the 16th parallel into a northern and southern zone. This was not intended to be political. How could it not be? It was all about expediency. It was about which of the world powers could most easily accept the surrender of the Japanese forces that were in Vietnam and would be there still when World War II ended, which turned out to be just weeks later. But also, too, about, you know, Soviet Union wanting to have its influence in Southeast Asia and us retaining our influence, right?
>>Sara Hart: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes, this division of the country and allocation of control, not supposed to be political, we've said. Which nations were chosen to occupy those areas of Vietnam to accept the surrender of the Japanese?
>>Jeff Crane: The Chinese nationalist forces of Kuomintang took the North and the British took the South. The British let the French return to their former colony, but the Chinese did not. So Hồ Chí Minh and his party retreated to the north away from the French, their long time and once again, colonial rulers, which, by the way, the French could not have done that without our support.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, yeah.
>>Jeff Crane: Where they set up government offices and tried to work with the Chinese occupiers to negotiate with the French and to convince America to back their independence movement.
>>Sara Hart: Hồ Chí Minh and his party are still working towards independence, and of all the occupying powers, the British left first, right? Right.
>>Jeff Crane: They did. They arrived in Sigon in September 1945. They left in March 1946. Of course, they had their own colonial challenges to deal with in Greece, India, Iran, and other [INAUDIBLE] much to do.
>>Sara Hart: And they handed it all over to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam?
>>Jeff Crane: Well, golly gee willikers one would hope, but nooo.
>>Sara Hart: No, they didn't.
>>Jeff Crane: They handed over colonial authority to the French.
>>Sara Hart: Okay.
>>Jeff Crane: Who eventually made a deal with the Chinese in the North to take back full colonial control of Vietnam. But Vietnam had meanwhile declared its independence, and so began the first Indochina War, which lasted from the end of 1946 to the middle of 1954. In that war, the precursor to America's war in Vietnam, the Communist-led Việt Minh movement under Hồ Chí Minh fought against the French, who were looking to re-establish and maintain their colonial control over Vietnam.
>>Sara Hart: Woah.
>>Jeff Crane: And then, of course, at this point, China, you know, who they're negotiating with and everything, that's still under Kuomintang that's pre Mao Zedong.
>>Sara Hart: Mh-hmm.
>>Jeff Crane: So then in 1949, Mao Zedong's Communist Party took over control of China, driving the Kuomintang nationalists out to Taiwan. And this is huge. And we've talked on this show before about how the United States, during this era was driven by a policy meant to counter the worldwide spread of communism.
>>Sara Hart: Yes, and this is one more example of, folks, the domino theory. And because China was its close neighbor, Vietnam was seen as especially liable to fall. And if Vietnam fell, well, then the dominoes, you know, they just keep falling.
>>Jeff Crane: So yeah, the great fear is that with this domino theory, the whole world's going to turn, you know, quote-unquote "red," right? It's a simplistic way of understanding systems and history, but there you go.
>>Sara Hart: Simplistic it was and America was super worried by it. They started pumping money into Vietnam in support of the French forces. This is all done in secret and is eventually exposed during the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. And Americans were totally outraged, by the way, when they found out. But in 1954, the Vietnamese forces won, and the French surrendered. The Geneva Accords were signed, and this is right before President Eisenhower publicly articulated the domino theory.
>>Jeff Crane: Well, there it is. And see, what did he say? He said, quote, "You have a row of dominos set up. You knock over the first one and what will happen to the last one is a certainty that it will go over very quickly. " Unquote. That's, God. That's Eisenhower on April 7th, 1954, speaking to the press from the executive office building and answering a journalist who asked him to quote "comment on the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world," unquote.
>>Sara Hart: Mh-hmm.
>>Jeff Crane: Eisenhower was so concerned about Vietnam and support of the French, he briefly considered using quote-unquote "Small nuclear weapons to relieve the siege of the French by the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu, which is where the French finally lost completely, right?
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, well, I'm glad he didn't do that. You know, every once in a while we make the better choice.
>>Jeff Crane: Once in a while.
>>Sara Hart: Okay, well, in that simplistic metaphor of the dominoes, he makes explicit what would quickly come to be known as the domino theory. And he does it in response directly to a question about Vietnam about Indochina, right? So by this point in time, 7.5 years into the first Indochina War, America was covering something like 80% of France's war costs, all in the hopes of keeping those dominoes standing up. I mean, I don't know. It sounds a little proxy war-ish.
>>Jeff Crane: It's definitely a proxy war. And we've talked about proxy wars a lot on this show, but, you know, we have other people fight our conflicts for us and avoid hot wars of our own.
>>Sara Hart: Mm-hm.
>>Jeff Crane: This proxy war did not last long. The French surrendered in May 1954, and the Geneva Accords were signed in July 1954. The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam again this time at the 17th parallel into North Vietnam and South Vietnam and promised national elections.
>>Sara Hart: How did those go? They were awesome, right?
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. They didn't happen, as it turns out, when France left Vietnam, America shifted its support, both monetary and advisory to the emerging leader Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam because Diệm was fervently anti-communist, also a Catholic, and a nationalist. President Eisenhower wrote to Diệm in October 1954, telling him that quote, "The purpose of America's offer is to assist the government of Vietnam in developing and maintaining a strong viable state capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means," unquote. American support to Vietnam in the form of money and advisors continued for a decade from 1955 to 1964.
>>Sara Hart: Whoa. So support for Diệm as a leader did not continue for quite that long. No. Massive protests in South Vietnam and by 1963, convinced President Kennedy and his administration that Diệm, who had become increasingly authoritarian, was a liability. And Kennedy withdrew American support for Diệm's government. On November 2nd, 1963, Diệm and his brother were assassinated.
>>Jeff Crane: His brother was a general commander of the forces or something.
>>Sara Hart: And the government and his government was overthrown in a military coup that okay, at a minimum, was tacitly approved and allowed to go forward by the Kennedy administration, may have been managed and encouraged by the CIA.
>>Jeff Crane: [Sarcastically] Not that the CIA did many things like this-
[OVERLAPPING]
>>Jeff Crane: if you listen to our other episodes.
>>Sara Hart: [Sarcastically] So out of character. Yeah. Some suggestive documentation is, you know, present for this.
>>Jeff Crane: There are former CIA operatives who have said openly that Kennedy used the CIA to assassinate Diệm, right? Yeah. Okay.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, so we're not making this up. This is a solid likely possibility. Regardless, whatever happened, massive instability followed the assassination of Diệm and his brother. The National Liberation Front or the NLF, more broadly known in America as the Vietcong, though that is not what they call themselves, was founded in December 1960, and they expanded their power after Diệm's assassination. Over the course of 1964, the South Vietnamese government collapsed.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. It's a period of what historians sometimes call revolving door coups. And just a few weeks after Diệm and his brother are assassinated in Vietnam, President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas. Newly sworn in President Lyndon B. Johnson, what we might call LBJ, increased support for South Vietnam, sending over $500 million to the military regime run by General Nguyễn Khánh in 1964. This is the beginning of the major escalation.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. And so look at this a little bit. Johnson, LBJ did not want to lose South Vietnam. Eisenhower and Kennedy had both believed in this effort, maybe responsibility to stop communism in its tracks in Indochina. And Johnson, remember, was sworn in on an airplane next to the blood soaked widow of an extremely popular assassinated president.
>>Jeff Crane: And he was an outsider in that administration.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. So it was-
>>Jeff Crane: Very marginalized.
>>Sara Hart: It was a tricky situation for him to be in. And we know from White House recordings that Johnson was also very conflicted about America's role in Vietnam and expressed his frustration and un-surety many, many times. In one instance to Senator Richard Russell, he said quote, "We're in the quicksands up to our neck, and I just don't know what the hell to do about it." He made many comments like that. Support for South Vietnam was not a clear or easy choice for President Johnson. He felt obligated, at least partially due to the overthrow of Diệm and the promises to the military that American administrations before him had made.
>>Jeff Crane: You know, LBJ is in a tough position, right? But he decides to not only not abandon Vietnam, but to dramatically escalate our commitment. So he may have agonized, right, but he also moved fast. He drafted a resolution, asked Congress to pass it at the first opportunity. The opportunity presented itself with one actual and one fabricated naval confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin. A whole nother topic.
>>Sara Hart: I know, I know.
>>Jeff Crane: But we're gonna skip right over that. Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution August 7th, 1964, with an overwhelming majority, unanimous in the House, 88-2 in the Senate. This incident could be its own episode because, in fact, we did our government did exaggerate, at a bare minimum, what happened in Gulf of Tonkin.
>>Sara Hart: Yes, and many would argue that they lied, but not today. Today we hurdle forward. The resolution, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution gave Johnson very expansive authority to escalate American military involvement in Vietnam without a congressional declaration of war.
>>Jeff Crane: But also here, we're hearing, you know, some precedent for our 21st century AUMFs or Authorizations for the Use of Military Force.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, definitely some echoes. This is how we don't declare war in the 21st century. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorized Johnson to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." He used it right away to send American combat troops to Vietnam and to launch Operation Rolling Thunder, an intensive aerial bombing campaign that lasted for the war's first 3.5 years.
>>Jeff Crane: So we're talking roughly 1965, '68, right?
>>Sara Hart: Yes.
>>Jeff Crane: Operation Rolling Thunder. And the effects of which remain now 60 years later in the form of unexploded ordinance. This is a horrific operation and its effects on humans and on the environment. And over 300,000 individual combat missions, US dropped nearly 900,000 tons of missiles and bombs on Vietnam. To this day, approximately 18% of Vietnam's landmass remains actively contaminated with unexploded ordinance, cleanup efforts continue. And this is dramatically more than we dropped on Europe and Japan combined in World War II.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. So Americans had played an economic and advisory role since 1955, but beginning in 1965, America sustained an active combat presence that began with very intensive aerial campaigns, and then that ended eight years later with the Paris Peace Accords, which we mentioned at the start of the hour.
>>Jeff Crane: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the SNAFU Bar, a show about American military history, culture, and catastrophes. If you're just joining us, we're talking today about the Vietnam Syndrome. I'm Jeff Crane, and I'm here with Sara Hart. And, Sarah, We haven't gotten to the Vietnam Syndrome yet. Are we getting there? Are we close?
>>Sara Hart: Well, we're getting there. We just heard about a lot. Okay? We heard about the lead up to what we know as the Vietnam War. We heard about the near century of French colonial rule of Vietnam that was interrupted by World War II, the Japanese occupation of Vietnam during World War II, the Việt Minh Declaration of Independence, the French colonial return, and the first Indochina War between the Việt Minh and the French, America's support of the French in order to fend off communism, the French defeat and America's subsequent support of the South Vietnamese nationalists.
>>Jeff Crane: I feel like I need to take a nap.
>>Sara Hart: And the Tomkin Gulf resolution, I know, that led to the direct American combat operations, which began in March 1965 and ended with the Paris Peace Accords in early 1973.
>>Jeff Crane: In case someone's sticking their finger up in the air and saying, actually out there on radio land, yes, we had advisors prior to March 1965, but direct combat operations, right?
>>Sara Hart: Yes.
>>Jeff Crane: And yes, those advisors were involved in combat operations as they always are.
>>Sara Hart: Yes.
>>Jeff Crane: So that's a lot. In fact, a little overwhelming, isn't it?
>>Sara Hart: It's a little overwhelming. It was pretty complicated what got us into the Vietnam War, as it turns out.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. It's complicated getting out, too, isn't it?
>>Sara Hart: Yeah
>>Jeff Crane: It is. Yeah, it turns out. So with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords at the end of January '73, America pulled its remaining combat troops out of Vietnam. It took about two months to get everyone out. The last ones left at the end of March 1973.
>>Sara Hart: And 1970s America is the setting for the central part of our story today.
>>Jeff Crane: Okay, so we're actually going to skip the entirety of America's actual war in Vietnam, '65 to '73. We're just leaving that alone now.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, we're totally gonna do that. We are. And I have no doubt we will return to those years, in many future episodes, and that each of those episodes will themselves be over full. There's a lot of material to cover during that time, a lot of things to talk about in terms of American actions in the Vietnam War.
>>Jeff Crane: I just want you to know I died a little bit on working on the script, because I so wanted to say.
>>Sara Hart: I know.
>>Jeff Crane: But, you know, we could spend how many episodes in Vietnam?
>>Sara Hart: I mean, this could be a whole-- we could do a whole show with SNAFU Bar.
>>Jeff Crane: We have three episodes just on Tet.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So anyway, so now we know how America got into the war and when American forces left. We've made it to the 70s, when hundreds of thousands of combat troops are returning to America as veterans.
>>Jeff Crane: Alright, so we're moving away from the war and turning to the beginning of what we call the Vietnam Syndrome.
>>Sara Hart: That's right. The psychiatric infrastructure required to respond meaningfully and positively to the needs of the hundreds of thousands of combat veterans returning to America, did not exist. And these returning combat veterans were entering a civilian world in which the Vietnam War was politically unpopular.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, incredibly unpopular. Its unpopularity had an impact on the reception that these newly returned veterans received from their communities and from the surrounding culture and the media, policy, communities, families everywhere. A majority of Americans had given up on the notion that the war could be won, and according to a 1973 Gallup poll, 60% of Americans at that time, believed that sending troops to Vietnam had been a mistake. That percentage had more than doubled since the war began in 1965, when probably most Americans didn't even know what Vietnam was, when Gallup had reported that 24% of Americans thought it was a mistake.
>>Sara Hart: So a majority of Americans in 1973 thought the war was a mistake to begin with, and that number had grown really quickly. The loss of American lives had a huge effect on this, the official number of American lives lost in Vietnam during the war was 58,220. By 1973, when the Paris Peace Accords were signed, that number stood right around 58,000. So a majority, a vast majority of American casualties had already been incurred, and American cultural perceptions of the war were also impacted by widespread news coverage of atrocities that had been committed by Americans in the war.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, there are a lot of atrocities, probably best known as the My Lai massacre took place in March of 1968. It was reported on November of 1969 by Seymour Hirsh, the same person who broke open the Abu Ghraib story from Iraq 30 something years later. I remember--.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah.
>>Jeff Crane: The story broke, and I saw the name. I was like, Wait, wait.
>>Sara Hart: I know that name.
>>Jeff Crane: That guy did My Lai, right? So My Lai was the most notorious prosecution of US troops for war crimes, but it wasn't the only publicly reported example, there were hundreds of others. This is one especially terrible reminder that while the US lost over 58,000 lives in Vietnam, the Vietnamese population suffered a much greater loss of life. The estimates here vary widely, and American estimates differ from those given by the Vietnamese government. American estimates range from 950,000 to over 1.3 million Vietnamese lives lost. According to the Vietnamese, close to 3 million. Vietnamese people died in the war, and by the time of the Paris Peace Accords. And then when we consider the expansion of the conflict in the Laos and Cambodia, these numbers increased dramatically, and I feel like I say something about My Lai too, which is where this is an area where there had been a lot of attacks on American troops, where the Vietcong were using the villages to hide out an attack, and they went into this village and killed roughly 500 civilians. It was 350 to 500 civilians raped, executed. It was absolutely brutal.
>>Sara Hart: It could be its own episode. And really, it points to some of the difficulties around counterinsurgency warfare, where your troops are going in to fight insurgents. Insurgents are embedded in the population, that leads to troops thinking the entire population is a danger. And that's part of what popped off here in ways that none of that defense the actions of My Lai or the, you know, this was-- this was horrific, but--
>>Jeff Crane: It does speak to the need to think more carefully before you go into war, right? Because you put troops in a position where they will
>>Sara Hart: be coarsened and do horrific things,
>>Jeff Crane: particularly when they have a hard time telling who the enemy is, and where there is not a steered clear strategic mission, which was the case in Vietnam and a few other places.
>>Sara Hart: So, for now, overwhelming loss of life, some soul crushing atrocities, much of it publicly visible in the papers and on television, on the evening news. Americans were seeing the human cost of war on their television sets. Vietnam really was the first, you know, war in your living room.
>>Jeff Crane: So Americans were seeing the war's effects in the populations. The military at the time, maintained the practice of individual rotational deployments. Americans who were conscripted to fight in the war spent 12 months in active combat deployment to Vietnam, 13 months for Marines just 'cause, you know, they're marines. Though the total military obligation was two years. So, in addition to the time in combat, there was a training before combat, which is at least eight weeks, you know, basic training, boot camp, sometimes more depending on your specialty. And then the time following a person's 12 or 13 month combat tour spent typically in military assignments outside the combat zone. In order to complete those two years, your commitment.
>>Sara Hart: Mm hmm. Yeah. And key to this is that they would follow this calendar, not as units, but as individuals. Correct. Individual rotational deployment, right? So, if I'm drafted in, I can expect to spend two years away from my family, my home, my life. Not as a group. That's key. Everybody's on a different calendar. Individuals returning one at a time, isolated from the larger unit, from the experiences of those around them. Like, militarily speaking, these men were untethered when they returned.
>>Jeff Crane: Exactly.
>>Sara Hart: American support for the war itself was at an all time low by the early 70s. There was a strong partisan divide, widespread disillusionment, and intense anti war protests.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, and the anti war movement had already peaked. That really happened in '69, and had begun to fragment, but one significant contingent within it was made up of anti war veterans. Yeah. I have known some of these folks, Vietnam veterans against the war, founded when a small group of Vietnam veterans met at a peace march in New York City in 1967. It grew rapidly, and by 1973, had over 3,000 members. We could definitely spend a whole show on this group--.
>>Sara Hart: Yep.
>>Jeff Crane: --on their development, their work, their continuing work--.
>>Sara Hart: Yep. and
>>Jeff Crane: their relationships with other anti war groups.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, but for now, we're going to focus on one thread here. Vietnam veterans against the War began holding formal "rap groups", what they called rap groups in New York City in 1970. These meetings were often held in VVAW offices or church basements or other community spaces that could be found, sometimes in people's living rooms. They were put together by veterans for veterans. There were places where candid conversations could be held between veterans who felt like they couldn't talk to their friends or family who hadn't been there. Who felt alienated from their communities who were struggling. The VA was not providing help.
>>Jeff Crane: Surprise!
>>Sara Hart: Surprise. There was a commonly, though not universally, shared distrust among these guys of the institutions. They weren't taking themselves to hospitals or to doctors.
>>Jeff Crane: And they were looking for people to talk to, understood where they were coming from, who could relate. But they did end up turning to some psychiatrists.
>>Sara Hart: They did, yeah, and that led to a pretty remarkable set of circumstances. The veterans were meeting and talking really informally. This was the early stages of the VVAW's rap groups, and some of them realized that while those meetings were crucial, they were lifesaving. They also needed help. They needed tools that they could use to develop solutions for the problems that they shared.
>>Jeff Crane: So how did they find
>>Sara Hart: these psychiatrists that they worked with? Well, some VVAW members attended a public talk at NYU, given by psychiatrists Chaim Shatan and Robert J. Lifton. This was following the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State University shootings in May 1970, like, it's right after that. Jan Barry, who was then Jan Crumb, was one of the co founders of the VVAW and was one of the veterans at that talk by Shatan and Lifton. Barry reached out to the speakers after that talk, and it was Barry who brought Shatan and Lifton into collaboration with the VVAW.
>>Jeff Crane: It didn't stop right there, right? Shatan worked with a close team, including Lifton and psychiatric social worker Sarah Hailey, to put together a network of psychiatrists, social workers, and other mental health professionals who were sympathetic to the needs of the Vietnam veterans who are looking for help. And these mental health practitioners, worked with those veterans as collaborators, not as authorities, through the 1970s.
>>Sara Hart: And that was huge. The stance and their approach to this. They were not bringing veterans into their offices to diagnose them, to tell them what was wrong, try to fix it.
>>Jeff Crane: No, not at all. First, the psychiatrists did this work on a voluntary basis. They were not coming in as a representative for one or another institution, including the VA, Veterans Affairs, just in case people don't know. And maybe more importantly, they came to the existing veterans groups. Veterans did not come to their offices. So they're going out into the population, making it more comfortable for the veterans. And this dynamic had a strong effect on everyone involved.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. Okay, so they're meeting in these groups as early as 1970. The Vietnam War is ongoing at this point, though nearly 2 million veterans have completed their tours of duty and returned home, by the end of that year. The psychiatrists working with these group in the early 70s, what were they noticing?
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, so in May '72, Shatan published a New York Times op ed called "Post Vietnam Syndrome."
>>Sara Hart: Post Vietnam Syndrome okay. This is the first time we see the phrase, post Vietnam Syndrome?
>>Jeff Crane: Oh, yes and no. Some variation on "Vietnam Syndrome" or "post Vietnam Syndrome," had been used before, and it's really hard to pin down the absolute first usage.
>>Sara Hart: Right, beginnings are notoriously difficult to get precise about. So we were seeing the syndrome appear in some form in other places before this time or about the same time.
>>Jeff Crane: Yes. So Ralph Blumenthal had used the phrase in an earlier article also in the New York Times titled "Syndrome Found in Returned GIs," Blumenthal was reporting from Fort Benning in Georgia, -- that's where I went to Jump School, Fort Benning. Where recently returned veterans were finishing up their two year terms. He says that some officers there said there were veterans that were "afflicted by what they called, for want of a better term, Vietnam Syndrome."
>>Sara Hart: Okay, so this is 1971, Blumenthal is reporting on officers who are using this phrase to describe the enlisted men, back from Vietnam, but still in the service.
>>Jeff Crane: That's right. And Blumenthal describes what it looks like. He writes, "The symptoms are the men feel bored. They resent the fact that after surviving a dangerous year in Vietnam, they still have to put in some months of Mickey Mouse duty in the States. There's alienation of being separated from wartime buddies, and resentment over the indifferent welcome accorded them by their countrymen. For all these reasons, there is a vague longing to return to Vietnam." And in that article, veterans of Fort Benning themselves, "flashbacks and bad dreams." And Army chaplain, Major David Hoh is credited by Blumenthal with coining the term Vietnam Syndrome a year earlier.
>>Sara Hart: Which would have been 1970.
>>Jeff Crane: Right, Blumenthal mentions him, but doesn't say anything else about it. Major Hoh, it turns out, was one of a whole network of chaplains who advocated for psychologically injured Vietnam veterans. He had served in the 82nd Airborne during Korea. The 82nd Air War did not deploy to Korea, so he's not in combat in that role. After which, he entered the ministry and returned to duty as an army chaplain. He deployed to Vietnam as a chaplain, where he received three bronze stars and two air medals, and retired from the chaplaincy in 1991.
>>Sara Hart: So he had a lot of direct personal experience to draw from in trying to understand and to advocate for Vietnam veterans and the syndrome he identified.
>>Jeff Crane: He did. And he continued to do that work until he retired from within the VA. So his early work is happening at the same time as the Vietnam veterans against the war, developing their work with civilian psychiatrists like Shatan whose 1972 article,
>>Sara Hart: the one titled Post Vietnam Syndrome.
>>Jeff Crane: Correct. So that isn't the first documented public use of the phrase, though it is a very early one. And as he writes in that article, it was a phrase that was already being used in these rap groups that he and other psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers had been invited to attend. He writes that quote, "In the group raps, certain commonly shared concerns have emerged since they do not fit any standard diagnostic label. We refer to them loosely as the post Vietnam Syndrome", unquote.
>>Sara Hart: So a set of regularly emerging, "commonly shared concerns." That's how he initially describes the post Vietnam Syndrome. And what are some of these concerns?
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, it's a long list, Sarah. As I know you know. And here's what we're going to see. The list of concerns that Shatan describes. The list is going to overlap a lot with the list of symptoms we now associate with post traumatic stress, PTSD, and moral injury.
>>Sara Hart: Neither of those phrases were used at the time. Neither of those were understood as conditions with discernible symptoms. That's right.
>>Jeff Crane: So here are some of the symptoms Shatan listed in the '72 article. Guilt feelings for those who killed and maimed on both sides and preoccupation with the fate of friends still overseas. Many vets feel victimized. They feel deceived, so moral injury, right? Deceived,used, and betrayed, rage follows naturally from the awareness of being duped and manipulated. In addition, counterinsurgency training.
>>Sara Hart: Which counterinsurgency training, folks, this is training the troops to counter embedded insurgencies or to defend and fight against local populations who are not dressed in military uniform, not associated directly with official military organizations, local populations that were themselves arming and fighting against the South Vietnamese and against the Americans who were supporting them.
>>Jeff Crane: Oftentimes known in a more vernacular way as guerilla warfare.
>>Sara Hart: Yep, right. So that's right.
>>Jeff Crane: So this counterinsurgency training back to Shatan unleashes violent impulses against indiscriminate targets. Once home, veterans have a great difficulty mastering these impulses in the face of the ambivalent civilian reception. The most poignant feature is an agonizing doubt about their continued ability to love others and to accept affection. And basically, maybe they feel unworthy of love.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. And Shatan isn't the only one recognizing and describing symptoms from a psychiatric perspective. John Nordheimer is another. He writes an article also published in the New York Times in 1972 titled Postwar Shock Besets Veterans of Vietnam. And in it, he talks about what he calls "a ailment that has been called the post Vietnam Syndrome or PVS." So he gives it an acronym. It's gaining traction as an idea. Nordheimer is not a psychiatrist. He is not working with the VVAW rap groups, but he is following the veterans experience and trying to describe that experience for the civilian population. He describes the veterans he's talked to as "bewildered, disillusioned, unable to cope", end quote. And he speaks to the relatively undefined nature of all this, which points again to the fact that this is all emerging from different circles at about the same time. He writes, "Just what Vietnam service does to a young man emotionally is difficult to define, but it is related to the shattering experience of war itself with the added ingredient that this war, unlike others, does not give many of the men who wage it feelings of patriotism or even purpose", end quote.
>>Jeff Crane: So American cultural attitudes to returning Vietnam veterans and society's reception of those veterans was conflicted at best and often coldly antagonistic and sometimes directly confrontational, right? A 1978 Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs survey showed 72% of the public agreeing with the statement, "The Vietnam War was more than a mistake. It was fundamentally wrong and immoral." That proportion was unchanged in the follow up 1982 survey. So imagine how you feel if you're someone who served in that conflict, and then also imagine the kind of things you saw if you served in that conflict.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. I mean, it can be really difficult for people who have no combat frame of reference to separate the war from the warrior.
>>Jeff Crane: It's absolutely difficult, if not impossible, right? It's also unjust not to make that separation, especially in the context of a draft. Yeah. And the kind of folks that got drafted and a society that had changed its mind pretty quickly about the whole affair. It's a kind of unthinking association, the war with the warrior that serves to increase the suffering and the lifelong toll that combat experience takes on the individual who serves. But at the same time, there are a lot of people and groups working with veterans across the country to try to understand and help those who had served with their suffering and with their reintegration into the lives and communities that they had been pulled from, often against their will, again, the draft. And the psychiatrists working with the VVAW were at the forefront of this.
>>Sara Hart: Right. Chaim Shatan and Robert J. Lifton, back to them, together with Sarah Hailey and others founded the Vietnam Veterans Working Group in 1974. That group was an independent network of clinicians and researchers, all of them directly involved with combat veterans who did the work to get PTSD entered into the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM three. That happened in 1980.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, and we talked about this in another episode, the One on Moral Injury, but that inclusion of PTSD in the DSM was huge. It allowed for many of the symptoms that had been loosely described as the Vietnam Syndrome or the post Vietnam Syndrome to be cataloged, recognized, and treated with clinical consistency, and it allowed treatment to be billed to insurance, including within the VA, having at least some of these symptoms identified as a condition made it far easier for veterans suffering from them to seek and receive treatment.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, you say some of the symptoms, and I guess we should flag here, something we've mentioned a little bit before, the early understandings of the Vietnam Syndrome or the post Vietnam Syndrome included a lot of the symptoms that are not covered by the PTSD diagnosis. Some of these were listed earlier in the quotes from both Blumenthal and Shatan: persistent guilt, shame, a sense of profound betrayal, loss of trust and difficulty with love. Those symptoms and others, they're not forgotten by these folks or set aside even though they're not included within the PTSD category.
>>Jeff Crane: That's right. And those are symptoms that we see another group of psychiatrists working on throughout the 1980s. Jonathan Shea, Edward Tick, and others will continue working with veterans on those issues, which will come to be understood under the umbrella of moral injury. That gets included in the appendix to the DSM in 2025. So work is ongoing.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, and if you want to hear more on that, really, check out our episode on Moral Injury. You can find it excited. Good. It was a good one at KHSU.org, or if you search SNAFUBAR on any of your streaming platforms.
>>Jeff Crane: So what was originally known as the post Vietnam Syndrome, or the Vietnam Syndrome included a range of symptoms that are now broken up into two categories, PTSD and moral injury.
>>Sara Hart: Okay, remember, listeners that we said at the outset what the phrase Vietnam Syndrome most commonly refers to.
>>Jeff Crane: I believe we described it as the post war sense of malaise and defeat that follow the end of the nation's involvement in Vietnam, leading to an American reluctance to go to war.
>>Sara Hart: And so, here's the question. How did we get there? How did we move from a Vietnam Syndrome referring to the suffering of veterans to a Vietnam Syndrome, referring to a national cultural reluctance to go to war? Like, what kind of dark and cynical alchemy is this that moves America's understanding of this syndrome from the experience of individuals to national martial reluctance?
>>Jeff Crane: Well, let's find out. Hello, listeners and welcome back to the Snafubar. I'm Jeff Crane, and I'm here with Sarah Hart. Today, we're talking about the Vietnam Syndrome. We started today with some historical context, giving a really quick timeline of how America got into Vietnam in the first place and its impacts. And then we explored the Vietnam Syndrome, both at how it applies to veterans but also to American culture.
>>Sara Hart: That's right. And we talked a little bit about the reasons for entering Vietnam, didn't we?
>>Jeff Crane: We did. They just don't hold. The Casus Belli or reason for fighting was compromised. It was never clear, not to the American public and also not to the American forces who did the fighting. And that lack of clarity about the reasons for fighting contributed to service members psychological and moral suffering for years afterwards.
>>Sara Hart: And we saw this represented in the work done by veterans and psychiatrists who first named the Vietnam Syndrome, sometimes called the post Vietnam Syndrome in the early 70s. That work culminated in the inclusion of PTSD into the DSM, and it continues through work being done on moral injury. Right.
>>Jeff Crane: But the Vietnam Syndrome did not go away for the United States. It was not ameliorated through identification, renaming, and care, nor through community conscious cooperative reintegration efforts for veterans. No. What did you say earlier "Transmute"? Yes, it was transmuted through a dark and cynical alchemy into a national reluctance to send more and more young people to war.
>>Sara Hart: That's right. And to be clear, a cultural reluctance to go to war could very much be a good thing. What makes it dark and cynical here, as far as I'm naming it, is that the phrase was used to indicate that the reluctance itself was a bad thing. In the media and political speeches, as we'll see, Vietnam Syndrome was presented as a bad thing, a thing that should be cured.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, boy, and I disagree with that. So but anyway, we're supposed to kick the Vietnam Syndrome.
>>Sara Hart: Right. That's how they were putting it. It was a societal problem all of a sudden and not a set of symptoms that Vietnam veterans were living with. Picking up the phrase in this way, changing its meaning in this way erased the veterans experience. It just skipped right over it. And I'm not the only person to recognize this shift in the problems that it points to. In a 2008 article titled Post Vietnam Syndrome, National Identity, War and the Politics of Humiliation, Myra Mendable writes about this adoption of the phrase to describe societal reluctance rather than individual suffering, which again, it had meant. She says, "The term Vietnam Syndrome aspires to a kind of quasi-psychological legitimacy, but actually reflects a semantic sleight of hand".
>>Jeff Crane: Oh, that's great. Dark alchemy and semantic sleights of hand definitely signs of a healthy and functional society. Yeah. So I guess the first question for us here is, when did Vietnam Syndrome first get used to describe the nation's reluctance to go to war and not the veterans post war suffering?
>>Sara Hart: The best answer we've got to that to who was earliest, it puts us in 1978. History professor, Navy veteran and Vietnam scholar George Haring writes about this in a chapter he wrote called The Vietnam Syndrome in the Columbia history of the Vietnam War.
>>Jeff Crane: He also wrote America's longest war in the United States in Vietnam, one of the definitive histories of this conflict.
>>Sara Hart: That was a pretty good that one. So in the Vietnam Syndrome, he tells this story about Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat from Georgia. You remember Sam Nunn. Yeah. Okay. So according to Herring, Senator Sam Nunn, "Proposed legislation permitting the president to mobilize 50,000 reserves for 90 days without requiring a declaration of national emergency." The Cold War was reheating. Such legislation was needed. Nunn insisted to counter a post Vietnam Syndrome that might otherwise paralyze Congress in times of crisis. Okay, so that was Haring writing. And it wasn't, by the way, 50,000 reserves for, like, a particular thing.
>>Jeff Crane: It was a ready reserve for future contingencies, conflicts that hadn't arisen, but were anticipated. This is an effort, then to move us away from the Vietnam Syndrome.
>>Sara Hart: This is the first time. This is right. So what Haring is noting here is with Sam Nunn saying, "we got to get away. We're countering a post Vietnam Syndrome." That's the first time we see it being used to describe a societal reluctance to go to war. And it's used in this context where conflicts- he wants a ready reserve for conflicts that hadn't arisen. So on this model, you're either on the model of Sam Nunn, you're either actively preparing for war or you're backing up from a fight all cowardly, like, there's just no other option, no third space where War might not be imminent, right? You have to be on an active war footing. Not readying for nonexistent conflicts indicated to Sam Nunn, an outright unwillingness to defend the nation in war, which Nunn described, that unwillingness he described as "post Vietnam Syndrome."
>>Jeff Crane: Okay, so he uses it, but Senator Sam Nunn did not popularize that phrase Reagan did. Oh, boy. in a campaign speech to the VFW Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 1980. It's a little over two months until the election. He's about to become president. He starts his speech by going after Carter's VA budget and the lack of support that the veterans are getting under the Carter administration.
>>Sara Hart: "Where has the money denied our deserving veterans
>>Jeff Crane: gone?" That's a rough start trying to imitate Reagan.
>>Sara Hart: You can't laugh in the middle of it.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah. "Well, surely not to our national defense, which is in shambles", unquote. Yeah, you know, mimicry is not my greatest skill set. There's the turn, the sleight of hand. The lack of support for veterans now leads to a need for more weapons of war.
>>Sara Hart: Right, and it's got nothing to do with the work being done in discussion groups by chaplains, all that. Reagan talks about the lack of support for America's veterans, and it doesn't have anything to do with the experience of veterans at the time.
>>Jeff Crane: So he's warning his audience about Soviets in Afghanistan and about Soviets everywhere, and he's evoking World War II and the friendship of allies and the nation's heritage, and he says, and I won't do Reagan now, "For too long, we have lived with the Vietnam Syndrome," unquote. And he sort of blames the syndrome on "North Vietnamese aggressors who now threaten the peaceful people of Thailand," unquote. Suffering associated with the syndrome no longer has anything to do with American veterans. It is now the peaceful people of Thailand who are being harmed by America's reluctance to see itself as honorable in war and to seek war to prove its honor and to support freedom loving people everywhere is the kind of thing he might have said.
>>Sara Hart: Right. I think he might have I think he might have actually said that. And, you know, and then a few years later, after he's elected president, It's the American citizens stuck in Grenada, Yeah. And that's the Vietnam Syndrome comes back there. It's anyone who might be harmed by Cubans or the Soviets training in Granada, planning to use their airport to launch attacks at a small fundraising dinner with Republican senators in September 1983, Reagan said, "We're ending the Vietnam Syndrome that had broken the will of the American people." And then a couple of days later, a month later, on October 25th, the US invaded Grenada in operation Urgent Fury.
>>Sara Hart: Thank you. It could definitely be its own episode. What we can say here is that the operation was far from universally supported. On November 2nd, the United Nations General Assembly voted 108 to 9 in favor of calling it, quote, "a flagrant violation of international law." So...
>>Jeff Crane: That seems significant.
>>Sara Hart: It's significant. So 19 Americans, 24 Cubans, and over 40 Grenadians were killed over the course of this nine-day operation. It's very short. All happens very fast. And then in December 1983, in an address to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society in Manhattan, President Reagan said, quote, "Our days of weakness are over. Our military forces are back on their feet, and they are standing tall. So whether America's 1983 invasion of Grenada was about the Cubans or the Soviets or the American citizens on the island, whether or how much it was about any of that, it was definitely about ending the Vietnam Syndrome, at least for Reagan.
>>Jeff Crane: I kind of think, like when they're trying to set up someone to become a heavyweight champion, you start them off with, like, the Palookas the easy fights, right? So they can build some confidence.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, Grenada was a place to build confidence, kick the Vietnam Syndrome.
>>Jeff Crane: It wasn't just Reagan who felt this way. Former President Richard Milhous Nixon, in his 1985 book called "I'm Still Relevant." No, it's actually "No More Vietnams" This one's a little doozy, by the way. He writes, quote, "We must purge ourselves so the paralyzing sickness of the Vietnam Syndrome," unquote. So this is 1985, which, by the year, that's the year I joined the army, when the book hits the shelves immediately following the anniversary of the fall of Saigon. So that's ten years.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. And on purpose, like, it was a couple of days after.
>>Jeff Crane: And then Reagan's successor, George Herbert Walker Bush
>>Sara Hart: used US forces to push Iraq out of Kuwait,
>>Jeff Crane: partially invade Iraq before changing his mind. In Operation Desert Storm, American and coalition forces bombed the country for 38 days straight, flying well over 100,000 combat missions, and then ground forces entered and defeated the Iraqi army in under 100 hours. This all ended on February 28th, 1991. On March 1, in a speech to the American Legislative Exchange Council in Washington, DC, President Bush said, quote, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all," unquote. And then the next day in a radio address to armed forces in the Persian Gulf, he said, quote "The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever, in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula, " unquote. Wow.
>>Sara Hart: Wow, right?
>>Jeff Crane: Wow.
>>Sara Hart: I mean, the specters continue to haunt us, I think. Their burial grounds have been disturbed, but we're going to end our story here at that point in the timeline. Listeners, we will get to those other conflicts another day. Today, we're following the phrase "the Vietnam Syndrome." And of course, this story continues to resonate into the present, but really what we're trying to look at today are the beginnings, the beginnings of the Vietnam War, and the beginnings of the Vietnam Syndrome.
>>Jeff Crane: I think we're suggesting those two things are related, that the one influences the other in ways that we can see. The relationships are more like a web and less like a set of straight lines, but they're there and the experiences of everyone connected in one way or another to one of these syndromes and these conflicts.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah, it really does come down to that, to the experience of people. All this history and theory and policy, the point is the people. When I think about the Vietnam Syndrome, I think about it in terms of its impact on Vietnam veterans. When Ronald Reagan hammered the electorate with the need to kick the Vietnam Syndrome, and he invaded Grenada to prove to us all that we should and could kick it, I was 5 years old, and my dad was struggling to keep steady employment. Yeah, and I knew about Vietnam because the word was on my dad's trucker hat on most of his tee shirts. That's how my 5-year-old self knew about Vietnam. So the Vietnam Syndrome came to my consciousness, not as a syndrome because, you know, I didn't have that word, but I knew there was a Vietnam Syndrome. I was living with it.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, that's a really good point. That Vietnam Syndrome was not the Vietnam Syndrome that Nunn and Reagan and Bush were talking about. At that time, late 70s, early to mid 80s, and the early 90s, They described and pretended to treat something else, something in society at large. They described that cultural resistance to war, that reluctance to commit the nation to the sort of events that caused the suffering that you were seeing in your father, and they're really against it.
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. And that's I guess this is what we're getting at here. The Vietnam Syndrome was transferred from the veterans --like as a phrase, as a concept, the way we use these words put together-- transferred from the veterans whose combat related ailment it initially described to the society whose combat reluctance it came to describe.
>>Jeff Crane: And for Reagan, the only answer to that national humiliation was a rewriting of history that dismissed a lot of the traumatic experience, that denied the causes and conditions for that traumatic experience. We can recall the point that Nordheimer made, that the symptoms recently returned Vietnam veterans were experiencing were, quote, "related to the shattering experience of war itself with the added ingredient that this war, unlike others, does not give many of the men who waged feelings of patriotism or even purpose," unquote.
>>Sara Hart: And so Reagan really tried to backfill that patriotism and purpose.
>>Jeff Crane: He did. Back to that campaign speech to the VFW, he says, quote, "It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause. A small country newly free from colonial rule sought our help in establishing self rule and the means of self defense against a totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest," unquote. So we just told you about the beginnings of the Vietnam War, about the causes, about the Việt Minh's 1945 Declaration of Vietnamese independence from colonial rule, and about their unanswered pleas for American support.
>>Sara Hart: And, I mean, it really just doesn't square. And this is speech.
>>Jeff Crane: It's a nonsense line.
>>Sara Hart: This is the speech where the Vietnam Syndrome really starts being used, is popularized as something other than the suffering of veterans. And it's just nonsense.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah, it's nonsense. He takes it further, tying support for veterans directly and exclusively to an acceptance of the noble cause story about heroic war against colonial rule, saying, quote, "We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful and we have been shabby in our treatment of those who returned," unquote. So, he's trying to make that heroic and he's trying to fold that back into the triumph narrative, right?
>>Sara Hart: Yeah. Yep. And, and his answer to the shabby treatment--
>>Jeff Crane: It's all this really bad history.
>>Sara Hart: It's bad history. That's our point here. It's like, if you're going to do it, Reagan, you got to, like, shore up your history a little bit. I mean, his answer to the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans, and he does promise increased support for the VA and for the health benefits that come along with that. But his main answer is A, bad history and B, the increased buildup of arms. It's not any kind of an acknowledgment of the symptoms associated in the 1970s with the Vietnam Syndrome and what was called that.
>>Jeff Crane: Oh, just tell me we're not going to give Reagan the last word on this, please.
>>Sara Hart: Oh, no, we bent over backwards not to. Not really. There was an easy out. I'd really like not to. Let's close with poet John C. Gilmore, who published a series of poems in the Obsidian in 1982, all about Vietnam and his experience of return. Two poems, "Post Vietnam Stress Syndrome" and "Vietnam Syndrome (Back in The World)" are printed on the same page. Both are short. We don't have time to read them in their entirety here, but we can give them just a minute.
>>Jeff Crane: Excellent. Let's take a look at these. "Post Vietnam Stress Syndrome" is 16 unrhymed lines that reads like an intensely first person list of symptoms. It opens with, quote, "It is a set of personal symptoms," unquote. And it goes on to describe fears, flashbacks, frustrations, and guilt, intermixed with physiological symptoms like hypertension and insomnia. The poem ends when the catalog of agonies that he lists, quote, "conjures up this bitterness at having somehow lost our war," unquote.
>>Sara Hart: Wow. And "somehow," folks, that's in parentheses.
>>Jeff Crane: Yeah.
>>Sara Hart: "The bitterness at having (somehow) lost our war."
>>Jeff Crane: Because, of course, there was never going to be a winning of that war, fricking ever. So it's powerful. There's no separating the suffering he's going through from the broader cultural understanding of the war and that broader culture's reception of him returning from it.
>>Sara Hart: There's a real pull at the end in, quote, "our war." He opened it with, "It is a set of personal symptoms." So whose war is it then? Who's contained in that "our"?
>>Jeff Crane: Right, right. The second poem on the same page, "Vietnam Syndrome (Back in The World)" turns all its attention to the broader cultural reception. It opens, quote, "No one cried or carried-on for us. No one waved flags," unquote. It was all he tells us, quote, "business as usual, still dog eat dog," unquote. It ends with a line that's equal parts lament and indictment. Quote, "no where is any hand I see raised as if in welcome," unquote.
>>Sara Hart: It's hard to open ourselves to this as readers of poetry or as citizens of a militaristic nation. Hard to receive that lament, with its pain in the indictment, with its implicit judgment, it's call to change.
>>Jeff Crane: You're going to say something like "therein lies the key," aren't you?
>>Sara Hart: I am, yeah. There is a call to change here. There is an invitation. It's a call and an invitation that's presented every day in each of our nation's veterans, Vietnam or otherwise, in each of the indications of our nation's engagement in wars around the world to recognize that America's wars are our wars, that we are all contained in that personal possessive pronoun. "Our" We will each of us choose how to possess the wars, or we will be possessed by them. And the veterans will continue to bear the war's greatest cost, but we will all be affected by the syndromes.
>>Jeff Crane: Okay, so on that note, listeners, we say goodbye for now. Thank you all for joining us here in this SNAFUBAR. We'll see you next time.
>>Sara Hart: Until then. You've been listening to SNAFUBAR a Cal Poly Humboldt production brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Our team includes me.
>>Jeff Crane: And me.
>>Abigail Smithson: Abigail Smithson, producer.
>>Liam Salcuni: Liam Salcuni, writer and researcher,
>>Roman Sotomayor: Roman Sotomayor, writer, researcher.
>>Abigail Smithson: You can find more information about SNAFUBAR on khsu.org.
Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
