I noticed that a lot of media and publications talk about Vietnam War veterans suffering from PTSD and other psychological/mental health issues.
What was so devastating in this specific war comparing to other wars (i.e. WW1 and WW2) that caused so many vets’ trauma?
Or is it a matter of fact that during previous wars mental health care was less developed?
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There are probably a bunch of ways to answer this question, but this would be my contribution.
The Vietnam war was part of a very turbulent moment of history, an important piece of the generally socially and politically turbulent 60s and 70s, and it’s important to note that the war involved significant conscription, particularly among the working and oppressed sections of society, meaning very few except the higher-ups (officers, leutenants etc) had generally chosen to be there – especially by the final years. The number of people willingly signing up dwindled very quickly once the realities of the war became widely known. Of course that was true for other major wars too, but like i said there are many perculiarities about this period in history and culture and particularly brutal aspects to the war.
The US side of the Vietnam war, by the end, had one of the lowest/worst morales of any war in modern history, atleast partly because by the end of it, alot of the official so-called justifications for the war were seen by many to be lies. By the time the US pulled out, the Gi revolt was extremely widespread; many officers had absolutely no authority or power over their soldiers, who simply refused to continue fighting. Partly this was because of how absolutely brutal the war was, without adequate justification to convince the majority of soldiers they were actually doing a moral act by continuing the war. In many people’s eyes, the Viet Cong had proven itself to be a mass, popularly supported movement against colonial/imperialist subjugation; meaning the US weren’t intervening to protect the freedom of the Vietnamese, but actually to prevent that freedom.
Adding to all this, the US’s official strategy in Vietnam was to wage a war of attrition. Meaning to try and force surrender by basically decimating and devastating the entire population and all civilian infrastructure. That’s why they carpet-bombed and used chemical weapons. It was well understood among GIs that it was not only permissible to kill innocent civilians but pretty much a daily event, as any man, woman or child dead were often counted as part of the ‘quotas’ of dead Viet Cong. Officers were under extreme pressure to meet these quotas and tried to transfer that pressure to their units. This is all well documented by countless personal accounts from the war, as well as official US documents.
One common method that was used to count ‘quotas’ was to get GIs to slice off victims ears to prove they had made a kill, and all the ears were counted at the end of the day. Civilians were being killed all over the place and they were passed off to be Vietcong, to make it seem like ‘progress’ was being made in the war.
The most infamous case of the US forces slaughtering civilians was the Mai Lai massacre, which was one of the turning points that spurned on the GI revolt and the anti-war movement abroad. Many of the soldiers involved in massacres like Mai Lai understandably suffered significant trauma.
If you watch the documentary ‘Sir no Sir’ that interviews former GIs, it help paints a picture of how widely hated this war was by many. This is not a left wing, ‘biased’ take on events – it’s the reality of what happened. The sentiments that became widespread were anti-war in feeling, not just among latte-drinking students in the US but among the soldiers themselves. The GI revolt was one of the 3 main reasons why the US eventually had to pull out. The other two reasons was popular discontent/unrest at home, and the fact that the war was becoming more and more economically unviable.
The Vietnam war was a HUGE failure and embarrassment for the US in the end. Not only because they did not achieve the desired result, but because it backfired on them in so many ways, and became proof that you can’t necessarily just throw hundreds of thousands of people into a war they have no lot in, and expect them to blindly follow what they are told. Sometimes it might work, often times it doesn’t, because people have their own agency and tend to be more ethically concerned than the people in power, as they have no stake in the outcome of such a war. The Viet Cong didn’t actually threaten American lives in their own country. Many of the people conscripted were poor working class Americans, many were black workers and students who faced brutal racial oppression in their own country. What stake did they have in killing innocent Vietnamese people in another country who were just trying to fight for better conditions of life? The civil rights movement had a huge political influence on the GI revolt and the anti-war movement too. All of the different political and social strands of upheaval interacted with eachother in this time.
Really recommend the documentary I mentioned called ‘Sir no Sir’, and the well-cited book ‘a people’s history of the Vietnam war’ by Jonathan Neale which gets its information from first hand accounts from GI’s and higher-ups alike, from both supporters and opposers of the war, as well as from official US strategy documents.
I’d summarise my point by saying, the war was (I would guess) particularly traumatising for many soldiers, because they didn’t believe in it/ weren’t convinced of a compelling moral obligation to fight that may help other former soldiers deal with their PTSD. For many soldiers in Vietnam, it all turned out to be senseless violence for no good reason.
Compare that to US soldiers in WW2 who, from what I understand, generally had decent morale because they felt they were fighting a morally upstanding war against fascism. Their PTSD may still be extremely severe, but perhaps a little easier to handle?
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