Myths of the Vietnam War, Part 4: 'crazy Vietnam vets' a Hollywood invention

April 23, 3:39 PMConservative Politics ExaminerKathy Shaidle

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If you’re anything like me, you grew up surrounded by media images of “damaged” Vietnam vets.

“Everybody knew” they were mostly violent drug addicts, losers and criminals. After all, you heard about them going on killing sprees on the nightly news. And when you went to the movies, you saw award-winning, critically acclaimed films that reinforced the stereotype: Rambo, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Jacob’s Ladder, and minor cult favorites like Mr. Majestyk, Cannibal Apocalypse and Deathdream. Since the 1960s, the “violent Vietnam vet” has been a standard villain in too many movies and tv shows to count.

In previous installments in this series, we’ve looked at the tireless work of Vietnam veteran B.G. Burkett, who has almost single-handedly tried to debunk the many myths about the Vietnam war and its forgotten soldiers. He too was troubled by the media portrayal of Vietnam vets like himself:

“...the popular perception of Vietnam veterans as victims tortured by memories - drug-abusers, criminals, homeless bums or psychotic losers about to go berserk in a post office with an AK-47 - did not fit me or anybody I knew who had served in Vietnam, even those who had been horribly wounded or captured and tortured by the enemy. Certainly their lives were not always perfect, but their problems could not be attributed to their experiences in Vietnam. I brushed off the negative caricatures thinking, ‘That's not reality.’”

But when Burkett tried to fund raise for a Texas memorial to Vietnam vets, he learned that that the media’s brainwashing campaign had preceded him: few were willing to donate to such a memorial, having heard nothing but horror stories regarding veterans of the Vietnam War.

“By the Eighties, more than two decades after the fighting ended, there were reputedly hundreds of thousands of homeless Vietnam vets, most suffering from PTSD. On top of that, they suffered physical disabilities brought on by poisoning from the defoliant Agent Orange. The common refrain: More men had died by their own hand -- victims of suicide -- than had been killed during the decade of the War.”

Burkett’s own research contradicted most of the negative stereotypes. He discovered that Vietnam vets had the lowest unemployment rates in the country, as well as some of the lowest rates of suicide.

Widespread Vietnam Veteran homelessness is another myth.

“Back, around the late 70's Teddy Kennedy had a $10 million government grant to have a building in Boston for all the homeless Vietnam veterans,” says Burkett. “Several of guys gave testimonies about how they ended up on the street after Vietnam, but I got the military records of those individuals and virtually none of them were Vietnam veterans.”

Another myth he dispelled was the incarceration rate of Vietnam veterans.

“I went to the bureau of prisons and got the statistics, the demographics,” Burkett told one reporter. “At the time there were 1 million men in prison. 55% of those in prison are black, only 10.5% Vietnam Veterans are black. 80% of the incarcerated do not have a high school degree. As I mentioned 90% of Vietnam Veterans do have a high school degree. You can't get in the military with a felony conviction and 80% of the incarcerated have a felony conviction as a youth offender. About 75% came from broken homes, but about 80% of Vietnam Veterans came from a 2-parent home.”

Like Burkett, two other Vietnam veterans turned filmmakers were dismayed by these stereotypes. Brothers Christel and Calvin Crane decided to make a four-part series called The Long Way Home, in their attempt to counter all the negative imagery.

However, even after their films won major awards, they had trouble getting them show more widely.

They were told their films weren’t “balanced” enough and featured too much “flag waving.

Next time someone insists that the media isn’t biased, keep that in mind.

And if all this sounds a bit familiar, it should: as Diana West points out in a recent column, the new DHS report warning law enforcement about the alleged threats posed by "returning veterans" seems based upon decades of Hollywood propaganda rather than sound real world data.