Home to War : A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement

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Summary: A Must Read for Vietnam Veterans
Review: As a Vietnam Veteran (U.S. ARMY)I suffered the neglect, indifference and prejudice that all Veteran's did. I heard of other Vets who were making noise about it, and was curious enough to go see for myself what was going on at the Westwood VA, but I didn't participate. I was sprayed with Agent Orange when I was in Phan Thiet in 1969, and I got the wrong answers from the VA when (in 1979) I complained about symptoms of Agent Orange. I also had been told that my Medical Records were lost. Many of my experiences, I must confess I didn't understand, this book explains what was happening and Why! If you want to find the truth about your experiences, or are the family of a Vet who wants to understand, you need!!! to read this book. It's long and hard reading, but it will give you the truth, it will make you angry, nervous, and disgusted, but it will make you cry too for the Veterans who died after the War, At Home, Fighting the VA, Government and Chemical Companies.

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Summary: We Came Home and the War Never Stopped!
Review: As one of the participants in many of the demonstrations so eloquently described in Home to War, Gerry Nicosia has accurately portrayed historic events in a powerful movement that continues today. People of all ages and backgrounds will benefit from reading this book that recounts the Vietnam Veteran's "battles" at home, battles often worse than those they encountered on the field of war. Home to War describes the struggle that Vietnam Veterans went through on their own to obtain help in healing with herbicide exposure (Agent Orange)and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Gerry's description of some key players in this movement, such as Jack McCloskey, Ron Kovic and Ron Bitzer is right on target and helps the reader to better understand the struggle and the motivations behind the Vietnam Veteran's movement.

Senator Bob Kerry's recent disclosure of his participation in atrocities in Vietnam underscores the anguish and scars that Vietnam Veterans still live with more than 30 years after the end of the war.

While much has been written and portrayed in films about this unpopular war, this book is the most comprehensive in detailing the positive actions taken by returning veterans in what seemed to be an unending struggle to heal, in what can be called the greatest "self-help" movement of all time.

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Summary: Terrific Description Of The Vietnam Veteran's Movement!
Review: For those of us who came of age during the Vietnam era, this book vividly recalls the heady temper of the times, as well as the manifest ways in which the gruesome everyday reality of the war in Vietnam affected everyone in the society. It is difficult today to try to explain to younger readers how deeply the issue of the war divided the country internally, or how it acted to continually tighten the vise of political differences around the neck of the majority of our citizens. In this sense, it is hard to overestimate the impact the war had on everyone living in the United States during the sixties and early seventies, and the narrative in this book emphasizes just how profound the action of a number of Vietnam veterans was in framing that impact.

Unlike those of us ex-servicemen who were already involved in the anti-war movement in our new identity as college undergraduate students, the organized Vietnam veteran movement against the war didn't really gain impetus until the very late sixties, and then only as a result of the frustration the vets experienced regarding the senseless continuation of obvious failed policies even after anyone with an intact brain could see it was leading us nowhere. The veterans only became involved as it became obvious something new had to be injected into the ongoing national debate regarding the progress of the war. Of course, once they did become seriously involved, the whole tenor of the debate changed profoundly. No one could counter the reality they alone had experienced, and the degree of authenticity they brought to the national forefront was undeniable.

Still, it took a number of years and ceaseless efforts and endless head-bashes at the hands of police, national guardsmen, and reactionary hardhats to accomplish the final result of ending the war, and even then the war it was executed by the Nixon administration left agonizing doubts regarding the fate of hundreds of POWS and MIAs rumored to have been left behind. Moreover, the national government has never fully addressed the bevy of important related issues raised with such urgency by the Vietnam veterans groups. It took more than a decade to get any concessions regarding the consequences of Agent Orange and the government's responsibility for them, or to get any action at all to improve care even minimally in the warren of rat-holes otherwise referred to as the Veteran's Administration (VA) hospitals. Even today, some thirty years later, the medical care proffered in the VA hospitals is often substandard and inadequate, and in no ways meets the demonstrated needs of the vets. In this sense, it continues, in my opinion, to be a national disgrace.

This book represents a brilliant attempt to re-acquaint the reader with the events and personalities of the times, and does a wonderful job in detailing the specifics of the ways ion which the issues rose, of how the strategies and techniques of effectively demonstrating the evidence of what was happening in Vietnam as well as what the social, economic, and political consequences of our involvement were. The author has opened up a virtual can of worms that illustrate how vulnerable and insubstantial the neo-conservative interpretations of the Vietnam war and the events of the sixties are, by offering a plethora of proof that flatly contradicts all these neat, tidy, and sanitized versions depicting our wretched involvement in Vietnam as some trumped-up moral crusade for democracy, with some authors like Michael Lind going so far as to refer to as it being the "necessary war". Unlike that sad solipsistic effort, this is a terrific book, and one I can highly recommend. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: First rate
Review: I am one of the Vietnam veterans referred to on page 217, the ones that didn't agree with anything the VVAW had to say.Someone wrote in their revue " the myth of civilian disrespect to the soldiers during this period of time", I would have to say it felt quite real to me. The only reason I checked this book out of my local library was to confirm a couple of things about John Kerry and the VVAW. All my questions were answered either by the book or by a recent interview with Gerald Nicosia. The first was that the other members of VVAW felt that John Kerry was just using the organization to gain public notoriety to help him with his political career. The second was that he was at the november 1971 meeting. This is when the anti war VVAW considered assassination of pro war Senators. Simply amazing!

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Summary: My kind of crazy
Review: I used to write letters to Daniel Ellsberg, telling him why he was the greatest psychiatric case of the Vietnam war, but I shouldn't have been so sure until I had read this book. This is the kind of book that makes me feel my own personal reactions the most. The other big books on veterans, LONG TIME PASSING and UNWINDING THE VIETNAM WAR, were more about personal recovery. I consider NAM by Mark Baker a small book, more about the nature of the war than about who was there. As Mark Baker tells it, "I only understand Vietnam as though it were a story. It's not like it happened to me." This book, HOME TO WAR, is about real people who found themselves back in the United States. One of them in the Prologue, Phil Gioia, mayor of Corte Madera, has a weird dream. "In the dream, I realize, `Wait a minute. Those guys are all dead. They died a long time ago.' And that's when I wake up." (p. 12). This book jumps right into the politics of the situation.

Politically, the guys that this book is about weren't accomplishing much on their own, so they tried to support Senator Eugene McCarthy in his run for president early in 1968. At least McCarthy wanted an end to the war in Vietnam, and that's what they wanted. "On March 12, McCarthy stunned the nation by winning 20 of New Hampshire's 24 convention delegates." (p. 30). That month, Larry Rottmann, who had been wounded in the Tet offensive, was discharged from the Army. Then he spent a week in Wisconsin working for McCarthy. When they went to Indiana, "Rottman was in charge of a group of vets that followed Kennedy around in order to wave their McCarthy placards in his face every time he spoke to the media." (p. 30). Robert Kennedy was then a Senator from New York, formerly Attorney General of the United States and popular enough to get "42 percent of the vote in Indiana, compared to McCarthy's 27 percent. Rottmann took his group of vets to the airport in Lincoln, Nebraska, to await Kennedy's arrival for the primary there. Exasperated to see the same guys in his face once again, Kennedy confronted Rottmann and demanded, `Why are you working against me?' Rottmann replied that they weren't . . ." (p. 30). They were just trying to remind him that some people "simply found McCarthy `more down-to-earth and more sincere, both in his politics and in his lifestyle.' Kennedy evidently failed to appreciate Rottmann's point of view; he restated his dismay that Vietnam veterans weren't campaigning on his behalf instead of McCarthy's." (p. 30). It can be embarrassing to try to tell a frontrunner what the multitude of radicals really think, when the idea that they all think gets this fuzzy. Elections are too important to let the candidates who are best politically, with their illusion that they agree with everybody, think that anyone really cares about them. Another President Kennedy might have been able to end the Vietnam war at that time by letting the Pope tell him how, and a lot of people thought that he would, until "... Sirhan Sirhan aimed a pistol at his head, taking him out of politics forever and enshrining him as one more dead American hero." (p. 31). I'm not sure that the bullet in Robert Kennedy's head came from Sirhan Sirhan, since a security guard was behind Kennedy and a lot more shots were fired than Sirhan Sirhan's pistol could manage, but this book is more about perceptions than about what was actually going on, and the police in Los Angeles, California, typically take a pretty simple view of what was going on, as well as taking as much of the evidence as they could get their hands on. HOME TO WAR isn't supposed to be about a war in the United States between the police and people who are politically active, but pages 33 on to 36, about "what a battlefield Chicago was destined to become that August," show how much it helped veterans realize "that lying on a big scale had become the American way of life, and it was just such lying that had kept the war going, and going nowhere, for so many years."

Finally, on page 59, "VVAW was just beginning to initiate the `rap groups,' which were groups of veterans sitting around in a room and confiding to one another the most troubling aspects of both their military service and their experiences in coming home from the war. Toward the end of 1970, Al Hubbard would bring in two psychiatrists, Chaim Shatan and Robert Jay Lifton, to guide the discussions." (p. 59). It isn't too surprising that, with all this introspection, the political situation came to reflect a deeper shudder, with the participation of guys who had served in graves registration, who "naturally gravitated toward the crazies." (p. 120). I believe in the reality of this kind of book.

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Summary: My Lais, My Lais, My Lais!
Review: Just finished all 626 pages of Gerald Nicosia's scrupulously-researched tome, Home to War. While I at first thought that it might be dense and difficult to read, I found that I couldn't put it down. And while I was reasonably certain that I was already familiar with the Big Picture, I discovered in Home to War a wealth of illuminating detail about how our government operates to suppress unpleasant and uncomfortable truths, as well as the people who put their very lives on the line to try to tell those truths...

I certainly can't swear that every statement on every page of Nicosia's book is true down to the minutest detail. Given human fallability, I would be extremely surprised if it was. At the same time, one does not need a PhD in American History, but only a modicum of life experience, to know how often and how predictably the American government and its "free-market" culture exploits its citizens' youth and strength in its service - sucking the very marrow from their bones in the process - and then hangs them out to dry, casting them on the scrapheap of discarded humanity when they become an inconvenience, a "burden" on society. We are not, of course, the only country in the world to do this, but the hypocrisy of it in light of our professed national ideals makes it doubly shameful.

My own experience in this regard arose not as a Viet Nam or "Operation Desert Storm" vet but as a disabled firefighter, yet it's exactly the same phenomenon. The importance of Nicosia's book is to make us aware of the recurring patterns of official government denial, mendacity, hypocrisy, and abandonment of its own citizens, not to "prove" whether or not certain dikes were bombed in a specified location in Viet Nam. Sure, Nicosia has a point of view - in this case an empathy with the disabled veterans - but what author doesn't? And would the book be a fraction as good if it had been written without passion?

In his essential purpose of writing Home to War as a chronicle of the Viet Nam vets' struggle with the very government to which they gave their unstinting service and their very lives, Nicosia succeeds exquisitely. My recommendation: Read Home to War, hug a veteran (even the ones who didn't like Nicosia's book), and inform yourself in as many ways as possible about the true nature of the society in which you live.

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing book despite some notable flaws
Review: Nicosia provides a history of the Vietnam war veterans movements, particularly those concerned with ending the War. The reviewer who was surprised by the "leftward" tilt either didn't read the book cover, any of the published reviews or the book, itself.

The book has several significant flaws, which I'll get out of the way first. Like seemingly most contemporary nonfiction, it could have used assertive editing. The chronology of events in the book gets confusing particularly during the last third of the book, where one lurches back and forth in time and it's easy to lose track of where various people fit and how their actions are linked across time. A better organized text probably could have been a bit shorter. Another significant problem is that Nicosia's funding by the Vietnam Veterans of America is buried in the acknowledgments, although he appears to freely criticize the actions of that organization and its past leadership. Finally, Nicosia relies on secondary sources for his data on medical, social and psychiatric problems among Vietnam era veterans and it is unclear whether his interviews with relevant people like psychiatrist Arthur Blank would have helped in interpreting these data. As it is, correlation seems to get confused with causation and some of the data simply seem inconsistent or include studies which were well known to be "outliers". It's been said that journalists don't like numbers, unfortunately, concepts simple enough to teach in an introductory social science course seem to get by them.

Although I was too young to serve in Vietnam, I knew many who did, including some who died there. Some of them (including the dead) opposed the war but went into the military, anyway, for a variety of reasons. In my later life, I knew people who had been active in the antiwar movement. I also briefly worked in the VA system and with Vietnam vets in the Department of Defense, and later went to Vietnam as a tourist and as a consultant (under the supervision of a US Army veteran of the Vietnam War). As it happens, I've also crossed paths with a couple minor figures in the book, who played significant roles in the veterans peace movement (although I hadn't known about that part of their lives). So, despite my age and lack of service, the book deals with a world that is very real to me. I can recall the skepticism of claims about PTSD by VA clinicans (ditto the skepticism about Gulf War syndrome) and can easily identify with many of the controversies here. Despite my own work, my visits to Vietnam and my extensive past reading on the subject, I was moved anew by the stories of returning vets, what they had seen in Vietnam, and what they experienced in the US.

On a less personal and more journalistic/historical level, the book vividly describes the political schisms in the antiwar movement: veteran-related and otherwise. Despite Nicosia's obvious passsions, he recognizes shortcomings and destructive actions of many in the movement. For those of us who recall the stereotype of the "crazed" Vietnam Vet, he vividly describes how this evolved from slow emergence of PTSD and the various public faces of stressed and strung out veterans, as well as the grassroots efforts to address Veterans' needs. Nicosia also describes the courage and tenacity of veterans who worked tirelssly as advocates and as service providers to their peers. He points out the legislative contributions of Vietnam Vets such as Tom Daschle and John Kerry as well as the showboating of supposed friends of veterans such as Alan Cranston and Sonny Montgomery. There are poignant parallels to our own time as Nixon cut veteran's benefits to help pay for the war. Nicosia chronicles the tensions with traditional veterans' organizations and the ways in which organizations dominated by WWII and Korean War veterans fought against efforts to address Vietnam War veterans' needs, in part to protect their own entitlements. He also describes how veterans of the different wars began to come together over time and how one-time protesters like Kerry built bridges to more conservative politicans for the benefit of Vietnam vets. The book, thankfully, does not get bogged down in subjects that have been extensively treated elsewhere like Watergate's Vietnam-related events (e.g., the Ellsberg burglary) and the drama surrounding the Vietnam War memorial. OTOH, people unfamiliar with SDS, Another Mother for Peace (an organization where tv mom and ex-Republican Donna Reed, played a role) the Weathermen, etc. would benefit from a little more description of these organizations. One activist who plays an interesting role here is Jane Fonda, who seemed to take a genuine interest in the veterans concerns. Perhaps it was a penance for her reign as "Hanoi Jane" or maybe something else. I hadn't been aware of that side of her and the book contains enough little surprises like this to interest even the well read reader and overcome the shortcomings of the book.

Rating:
Summary: First rate
Review: Nicosia's book is an excellent piece of research, and provides insight into an historically importatnt time.

Maybe in his next edition, he will include some of the findings from the extensive files the FBI kept on VVAW, and lay to rest some of the urban legends being spread even by at least one reviewer here.

For instance, the VVAW "meeting" in Kansas City was actually a series of meetings over a four day period. Neither the participants nor the FBI files show Kerry present at any meeting where "assassinations" were discussed in any form. In fact, the FBI informants do not mention any such discussion at all, much less a vote. By all accounts of those there, one individual stood up and started riffing, and once people realized he wasn't joking, he was shouted down. As Nicosia points out time and again, nonviolence was an underlying principle of VVAW.

Even the FBI concluded that Kerry was in no way associated with any sort of violent activity or discussion, ever.

Nicosia is a myth-buster. He has his hands full in this election year.

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Summary: Lies, more lies, and even more lies
Review: This one example should say it all. I quote from page 224. "The North Vietnamese claimed that the Americans had begun to bomb civilian targets, including hospitals and their extensive network of dikes, which kept seawater out of thousands of rice farmers' fields. At Nuremburg, after World War II, similar actions by the Nazis against the dikes in Holland were deemed to be war crimes worthy of punishment by death."

This book was published in 2001, so Mr. Nicosia knows, or certainly should know, that we did not bomb the dike system. The claim by North Vietnam that we were doing so was a lie, as was much of what they reported about our actions during the war. Mr. Nicosia's ilk would rather believe Communists than their own countrymen.

A careful reading of the two quoted sentences will reveal that Mr. Nicosia tells the absolute truth. He makes no claim that we actually bombed the dikes, he only reports that the North Vietnames "claimed" we did. He then appends the sentence about Nazi actions in World War II, making a very clear comparison between America and Nazis Germany. This is intellectualy dishonest and malignantly biased. If what you want is over 600 pages of this sort of biased, slanted "American is awful" stuff, then this book is just right for you.

One more point, if all the stories of atrocities reported by Mr. Nicosia in this book actually happened, every officer and enlisted man who served in Vietnam is complicit in the most enormous cover up in history. They are not. I served my thirteen months (USMC) in Vietnam during 1968 and 1969 at Quang Tri, Dong Ha, and LZ Vandegrift (Stud). My experience is that the more guys talk about their "war experience" the less likely it is that they were actually there.

This book purports to be helping Vietnam vets, when in fact it is viciously libelous, making Vietnam veterans out to be helpless pawns in the hands of a lawless military leadership, when in fact we were well trained and well informed about how to treat both indigenous Vietnamese and prisoners of war. We knew what we were doing and had choices. The vast majority of those of us who actually served there, served honorably.

Also, it is a canard that Vietnam vets have higher suicide rate, mental problems, unemployment, and a host of other social ailments. These lies have been foisted on us by people with agendas of their own, agendas not in any way in the best interest of veterans themselves.

The truth is that Vietnam vets have fewer mental problems than vets from World War I, World War II, and Korea. We are not losers, drug addicts and wife beaters. The only people who depict us so are those who desparetely need to justify their opposition to the war, a war that staved off the Communist takeover of South Vietnam for ten years. Once the Communists did take over they immediately set about making Vietnam one of the poorest and most totalitarian nations in the world.

This book is simply another in a long line of books desparately trying to justify the mistakes of the antiwar crowd. Well, I and my fellow Marines didn't buy it then and we still don't.

Rating:
Summary: At Times We Veterans Were Our Own Worst Enemy
Review: Well researched and documented book regarding the struggles and victories, mostly minor very few major, experienced by Viet Nam Veterans as they returned and attempted assimilation into the greater society. Describes in detail the politics that confronted them, the sham that was or may still be the Veterans Administration and other government agencies who all seemed to be operating in denial during the era. Must reading for all Viet Nam Era Veterans to understand and gain an appreciation for those who continued to fight for us on the home front not only to end the war but to be properly compensated by a government and politicians who would not accept responsibility for their actions of sending us to war.