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Being there (Continued)

BY MICHAEL BRONSKI

WATCHING THE war in Iraq on television, I am reminded often of Jim and Derrick. And all the " support the troops " rhetoric reminds me, particularly, of how much support Jim and Derrick needed after the war, but didn’t get. (Of course the real " support " they needed was a swift end to the war.) It is now common knowledge that after the homecoming parades were over, America treated Vietnam veterans like the country’s dirty little secret. They were a political and cultural embarrassment. What we never really talk about here is that, aside from the benefits given to returning soldiers after World War II, the US has always treated its returning veterans horribly. (And even many World War II vets suffered horrendous abuses: many lesbian and gay soldiers were dishonorably discharged at the end of the war, a common ploy to avoid giving them costly benefits. African-American soldiers, while covered under the GI Bill, were routinely denied many of its benefits due to discriminatory banking and housing polices.)

Let’s review a few of the major wars. Men returning from the American Revolution found they had lost their farms and homes to debt. (A situation remedied, to some degree, by Daniel Shays’s Rebellion in 1780.) Veterans of the Civil War, who were meagerly compensated to begin with, left the service only to be trapped in the economic crises of the Gilded Age, during which government policy rewarded bankers and industrialists (many of whom were war profiteers), and attacked the newly forming labor unions joined by many former soldiers. After World War I, the plight of veterans was so bad that, in 1932, 20,000 veterans — the " Bonus Army " — marched on Washington, DC, to demand relief from destitution and joblessness by insisting the government make good on the " bonus certificates " it had issued after World War I. They camped out in Washington with their wives and children because they had nowhere else to go. While the House passed a bill to pay the bonuses, the Senate did not. President Herbert Hoover decided this was lawless behavior, and called on the Army to clear the men out. General Douglas MacArthur and his aide Major Dwight D. Eisenhower (along with the future general George Patton in an important position) led this " shock and awe " operation and the US Army burned the temporary homes of the homeless veterans and tear-gassed them. Several thousand veterans were injured by the gas; two were killed. And we know that thousands and thousands of veterans are suffering from mysterious illnesses they contracted during the Gulf War — illnesses the US government, for the most part, claims do not exist (shades, of course, of Vietnam’s Agent Orange). Now, as we enter the ill-conceived, illegal war on Iraq, the Republican-controlled Congress is proposing massive cuts to veterans’ benefits, among other things, to support the sky-high cost of this war (along with Bush’s tax cuts).

Again and again, America has valorized war — sometimes with justification, sometimes not — and each time, US citizens are told it is their duty to support the troops. Yet America, far more often than not, has betrayed these men and women when they come back home. Indeed, " support the troops " is, for the most part, empty rhetoric born of fear, anger, and an inability to really consider the needs and realities of people’s lives. I watch American families on television holding back their tears because their loved ones are in Iraq — possibly dead, actually dead, or missing — and I think about holding Jim while he cried in my arms about what happened in Vietnam. I think about Derrick’s inarticulate anger. I think about how they suffered in Vietnam — and caused the suffering and deaths of others. And I think about how little support they had when they came home. I can’t help but think it’s happening all over again as I watch the war on TV today.

Michael Bronski’s latest book is Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). He can be reached at mbronski@aol.com.

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Issue Date: April 3 - 10, 2003
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