A Homecoming at Last

By KURT ANDERSEN

Viet Nam veterans converge on Washington in quest of catharsis and respect

One man knelt, cried for a minute and left behind his campaign medals: Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit. Another, like many of the veterans in olive drab, added his name to an ad hoc battalion sheet someone had staked in the ground; he stood back, saluted, saw his reflection in the polished black stone, then let out a kind of agonized whimper before two buddies led him away. An Illinois mother ran her fingers once, twice across the name JERRY DANAY, who was killed by a rocket. "It makes me feel closer," Helen Danay said as she remembered her son.

They came like pilgrims, bigger crowds each day, to Washington's newest and most unorthodox monument: the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial. Its long walls, inscribed with the names of 57,939 killed or missing in America's last war, are simple, elegant and dignified, everything the Viet Nam War was not. By the end of last week the adjacent ground was a fringe of private memorial icons: messages in ink and gold glitter, photographs, candles, tiny flags and hundreds of flowers. Virginian Larry Cox, one of four survivors from a 27-man platoon, found the black granite chilling. Still, he said, "it's a first step to remind America of what we did."

Cox was one of 15,000 veterans who made their way to the capital last week for the National Salute to Viet Nam Veterans, an event organized by the ex-soldiers for themselves. The gathering sometimes seemed conventional: patriotic eulogies, American Legion caps, martial music and maudlin, affectionate reunions of old platoon chums. But the convocation had an edge, a sense of catharsis, mainly because it was large and public. In the end, with a splendidly ragtag march down Constitution Avenue and the dedication of the Veterans Memorial, the spectacle seemed like the national homecoming the country had never offered.

Until recently, acknowledging Viet Nam veterans in such showy fashion would have connoted approval of the nightmarish war. However, "within the soul of each Viet Nam veteran," says Max Cleland, who lost both legs and a forearm in the war and headed the Veterans Administration under Jimmy Carter, "there is probably something that says, 'Bad war, good soldier.' " Their fellow Americans are only now coming to appreciate that distinction and, as Cleland says, "separate the war from the warrior." Mike Mullings of Bethany, Okla., a medic in Viet Nam, agrees that "things are changing. It might sound corny, but people have become a little more caring. It feels pretty good."

The last time so many people converged on Washington, all with Viet Nam on their minds, was to condemn the war and the U.S. Government. Then, as now, many of the visitors wore blue jeans, beards and long hair. Thirteen years ago this month at the antiwar March Against Death, the demonstrators invented a perfect piece of moral theater by reciting, one at a time, the names of 40,000 Americans who had been killed up to then. Last Wednesday morning, in a chapel at Washington's National Cathedral, the bleak recitation began again, and it seemed all the more powerful. There was now a final tally; most of the 230 readers had friends or kin among the dead, and a complicated sadness had replaced the agitprop bitterness of November 1969. David DeChant, 35, a former Marine Corps sergeant who spent 31 months in Viet Nam, started with the A's: "David Aasen, Jose Abara, Richard Abbate . . ." The spare eulogy took the better part of three days, 1,000 names an hour, with only a few hours respite each morning. One reader was Caroline Baum, 26, a Quaker from Syracuse, N.Y. Said she after her 25 minutes at the altar: "Whether you believe in war or not, you should honor the dead who fought in it."

For 20 minutes, from Burd to Burris, Ronald and Nancy Reagan sat in the chapel. To the dismay of some veterans, it was the President's only participation in the week's salute, and on his way out of the chapel, he could not resist putting an ideological point on the proceedings: "We are beginning to appreciate that they were fighting for a just cause."

Indeed, for all the deliberate notes of reconciliation, politicized discord swirled around the centerpiece of the week's events: the Veterans Memorial. Three years ago, Labor Department Bureaucrat Jan Scruggs, a former Army corporal, decided that he and his fellow Viet Nam veterans needed palpable, permanent recognition in Washington, their own monument in the city of monuments. His Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Fund (V.V.M.F.) persuaded Congress to assign them two acres on the Mall, got 500,000 donors to give $7 million and managed to attract 1,421 entries to a professionally judged design competition. V.V.M.F. wanted a "reflective and contemplative" memorial with an "emphasis ... on those who died"--including a display of their names--and "without political or military content." Maya Ying Lin, then a Yale architecture student, won the competition with her subtle, somber design, which looks like manicured stone ramparts: two angled walls, each 250 ft. long, sloping down into the ground from a height of 10 ft. at their junction. The carved names of the dead begin and end at the apex, arranged in the order of their deaths from 1959 to 1975.

Not everyone likes the memorial. For more than a year, some have snarled that its blackness and abstract unorthodoxy make it a humiliating antiwar mockery. "Too bad it wasn't a simple war," says Scruggs wearily. "Then we could put up a heroic statue of a couple of Marines and leave it at that." (Indeed, next year, to satisfy the critics, a flag and statue of three Viet Nam foot soldiers will be implanted nearby.) Virginia Veteran Jim Borland saw the memorial on Veterans Day and found it "full of ambivalence," like the country's attitude toward the war.

Most who visited the quasi-underground memorial last week had simpler, visceral reactions. Said former Marine David Zien of Medford, Wis.: "My chest was hollow, and I was a bit limp. It just overwhelms you." Friends and kin looked for names, aided by roving guides carrying alphabetized directories. Minera Peyton said she had come from Elsah, Ill. to "honor my son," dead for twelve years She visited National Cathedral on Friday at 3 a.m. to hear William Peyton's name and she liked the severe granite memorial. "It's not ostentatious," she said. Nearly everyone ran their hands over the carved letters of familiar names.

V.V.M.F. Chairman Jack Wheeler, a West Point graduate and Yale-educated lawyer, thinks the memorial, discomforting or not, marks a turning point. Says he: "It exposes, and thereby ends, the denial that has characterized the country's reaction to the war. It is probably," he ventures, "the single most important step in the process of healing and redemption."

But the week in Washington was not all gravely introspective. In Georgetown restaurants and funky taverns, the war's survivors celebrated that survival. The lobby of the Sheraton Washington Hotel, for instance, was turned into a sort of nonstop cash-bar bivouac. Hundreds of vets, mainly Army, swarmed and shouted ("Airborne? Whoa!") with drinks in hand.

One room upstairs at the Sheraton was close and smoky, the emotional tone jangly. Here was a weeper, there a grinning josher, and everywhere beer bottles and nervous wives. For the two dozen former Special Forces men jammed into the hotel suite for their reunion, many dressed in fatigues, there had clearly never been a Veterans Day quite like this. "How are the Green Berets different?" piped up former Sergeant Mark Atchison. Tougher? Smarter? No. "We believed it. We tried to win their hearts and minds. We never called 'em 'gooks.' " An instant later at the bar an argument about a shoulder patch turned into an abortive brawl. "A lot of people here," suggested Russ Lindley, a long-haired ex-paratrooper, "are letting it out for the first time."

There was a curious pastiche of a show at Constitution Hall, almost as confused as the war. Jimmy Stewart read a letter from the fatherless son of a Viet Nam casualty, Carol Lawrence recited The Story of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and erstwhile Starlet Chris Noel recreated the Armed Forces Radio show she had broadcast to U.S. servicemen in Indochina during the 1960s. During intermission, retired General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam from 1964 to 1968, signed autographs. The hardest working star was Wayne Newton, who flew in from Las Vegas and performed gratis. For 90 minutes, he played the banjo and trumpet, sang soul songs and Danke Schoen, danced and winked. Said one Wisconsin vet: "I wouldn't have picked Wayne Newton. But I don't know why we're here either."

Saturday's three-hour parade down Constitution Avenue, led by Westmoreland, was the vets' own show. The 15,000 in uniforms and civvies, walked among floats, bands and baton twirlers. The flag-waving crowds even cheered.

Around the country, in fact, Viet Nam veterans sense a growing acceptance, an accommodation that owes more to plain human respect and less and less to pity. Washington's is not the only monument. Last week in downtown Chicago a commemorative fountain was dedicated, and in Vermont, Interstate 89 last month became Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Highway. On the courthouse lawn in Glasgow, Ky. (pop. 13,000), the brand new black granite marker is still awaiting the names of Barren County's two dozen Viet Nam dead.

"Viet Nam veterans," says Stan Horton, a former Marine pilot, "used to be like cops--no one was comfortable around us. People are now more willing to listen." Horton is director of the Houston chapter of the Viet Nam Veterans Leadership Program (V.V.L.P.), which was founded with a modest Government grant last year to foster self-helping voluntarism among the vets. The main goals: to get one another jobs and burnish their collective reputation. "There's a degree of enlightenment now on the part of employers," says Stewart Roth, supervisor of veterans' job programs for California. 'They're coming around." Only a small fraction of the war's veterans, after all, came home with serious emotional problems, even though for a decade the Viet Nam veteran has been portrayed in films and on TV as a doped-up maniac itching to mow down strangers. More and more, says Horton, the public is "seeing vets not as baby killers but, at worst, as dupes--and, at best, as people who did heir patriotic duty." Yet the veterans remain wary. "The shift in America's mood is a subtle one," says Steve Bailey, a Houston doctor and volunteer counselor of Viet Nam veterans. "The vets I talk to are waiting to see if the feeling endures past Armistice Day."

For many veterans, sheer good will is not good enough. Larry Hill, an unemployed former Marine from the Watts district of Los Angeles, derides last week's affair in Washington as "a pacification tactic." In New York City's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, itself a combat zone, Larry Smith is equally acid: "We don't need that statue. We need some jobs." He lost his left leg in Viet Nam, and he believes he was contaminated by the defoliant Agent Orange.

A tiny minority of Viet Nam veterans were exposed to Agent Orange. Yet the Veterans Administration's handling of the issue has ranged from indifferent to slipshod, and serves for the veterans as a vivid example of Government callousness. Dioxin, the toxic ingredient in Agent Orange, has been linked with skin diseases, birth defects and cancer. Yet, according to reports last month by both the General Accounting Office and the Office of Technology Assessment, the VA has been inexcusably reluctant to study the effects of Agent Orange and has provided only cursory, inadequate medical exams for the 95,000 men who have asked to be tested. The VA has also refused to pay any disability benefits on grounds of Agent Orange exposure.

The Reagan Administration this year proposed cutting $328 million from Viet Nam veterans' benefit programs, including all money for Operation Outreach, under which more than 100 storefront centers have been opened to provide counseling for troubled vets. "Americans may be changing their feelings about vets," concedes Tom Liddell, a Houston attorney and former Air Force captain, "but the change in mood is not going to affect the vets until people put money where their mouths are."

Fifty years ago last summer, the "Bonus Army" of World War I veterans gathered in Washington during the Depression and vainly demanded a lump-sum payment 13 years before it was due. Like the Bonus Army, the men (and 8,000 women) who served in Viet Nam want certain concrete considerations from their Government, particularly a full Agent Orange inquiry. They also want a far more diffuse and difficult kind of recognition: national respect. If the war they were sent to fight makes it almost impossible for Viet Nam veterans to be hailed as heroes, they are at least no longer made to feel like pariahs. One of them, DeChant, is hopeful, if not jubilant. "It's like any traumatic event," he says. "In order to really deal with it, the nation had to have some distance. Now, I think, it has got it."

--By Kurt Andersen.

Reported by Jay Branegan/Washington

With reporting by Jay Branegan

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