The Evil Hours

by David J. Morris

  The women’s movement of the 1970s not only helped give form to a growing veterans movement, it also began to tackle the great invisible problem that had plagued society since the dawn of history: rape. In 1971, the first rape crisis center opened its doors in Oakland. After her fifteen-year-old foster daughter was raped, Oleta Kirk Adams took her to the hospital. “She was treated like a piece of meat,” another daughter remembered. “There was no compassion, nothing that helped her deal with the emotion” of the experience. Livid over her treatment, Adams, along with two other women, founded the nonprofit organization Bay Area Women Against Rape. It was all part of a vast national phenomenon. The Civil Rights Movement of the fifties and sixties had opened the door to a grassroots movement, but it wasn’t until the seventies that the women’s liberation movement took to the national stage. Confronting reported cases of rape, which had seen a 121 percent increase over the course of the sixties, was one of the movement’s first priorities. “Rape is only a slightly forbidden fruit,” feminists charged in 1971.

  Around the same time, Ann Burgess and Lynda Holmstrom, researchers at Boston College, began studying the psychological effects of rape. There were hundreds of studies about rape as a crime, but they noticed that no one had ever spoken to the victims. The two made an arrangement with a local hospital to be on call day or night in order to interview any rape victim admitted to the emergency room. They noticed almost immediately that, with few exceptions, the victims they spoke with looked at being raped as a life-threatening event. After a year, they had interviewed 92 women and 37 children. Looking over their interviews, they noticed a pattern of postrape symptoms: sleeplessness, paranoia, an exaggerated startle response, nightmares, and a host of phobias related to the circumstances of their attack. Deciding to call this phenomenon “rape trauma syndrome,” they noted that the same symptoms they had observed had been described thirty years before in survivors of war.

  The rap groups, which had begun as an explosion of feeling, evolved into a more exploratory forum for vets to synthesize their feelings in an open, nonjudgmental environment, something that was not available at the VA. As Egendorf described it, “One vet would usually begin the conversation by talking about a problem he was having. Before long, another guy would respond, then a few more would take turns, almost like a jam session. There was nothing you were supposed to say, except that everybody shared a few common ideas: The war was a horror, and it’s good to talk it out . . . the inquiry would frequently unfold as men recalled an event, then realized that although they were detached when it first happened, they were much closer to it looking back. Suddenly emotions would come, often pain, anger, or sorrow, as the men ceased feeling removed and let what happened touch them, as if reflecting on the moment at some later time allowed for a more intimate reinterpretation.”

  One problem that emerged early on was Lifton’s compulsive note taking. When one veteran complained that Lifton couldn’t be an equal member of the group and write about it at the same time, he put his notepad away. Still, despite their wide-ranging backgrounds and experiences, the group began to bond. A large measure of this was simply due to the novelty of the group: from a veterans’ standpoint, nothing like it had ever happened before. Veterans in American history have often held to an unspoken code of silence. This phenomenon is most easily seen in the World War II generation, where veterans, in part because they grew up in the Great Depression, believed that dwelling on one’s personal struggles was unseemly. Not so with this generation and with the VVAW, which viewed the war as a moral catastrophe that had brought their lives into crisis and changed everything. It had to be stopped. Suddenly, everything was on the table. Their inner lives, the morality of the war, questions about what it meant to be a man, feelings that they didn’t even know the names of. Topics that had never been addressed before were right in front of them now. The normal divisions, where the questions stopped, were gone. No one knew where it would all go. Egendorf, reflecting on the feelings of the time, remarked that there was an almost utopian impulse at work, to “make it new right here and now.”

  One person who was very concerned about where such newness might lead was Richard Nixon. Like Hunter S. Thompson, Nixon was keenly aware of the political leverage that an organization like the VVAW had, and as the group continued to garner public attention, he launched a broad campaign to blunt its impact. In particular, Nixon was concerned about the group’s public statements about the war’s atrocities and the havoc it wreaked on the minds of veterans, which fit into a larger trend of media reports suggesting that the Vietnam War was creating a “different breed” of veteran, as the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, reported in February 1971. One statement from a VA psychologist in the Capital Times article, which was forwarded to Chuck Colson, Nixon’s point man on the VVAW, was particularly damning. “Vietnam combat veterans tend to see their experience as an exercise in survival rather than a defense of national values. The majority, given the opportunity in [the] company of their peers, express both intense anger and much guilt.” The article, which reads almost like an advertisement for the rap groups, went on to describe a host of other symptoms that VA doctors were beginning to see in Vietnam veterans, including a general paranoia and “uptightness,” “shaky masculine identity,” and of greatest concern, a “hostility toward authoritarian figures and institutions.”

  The man who forwarded the article to Colson was Donald E. Johnson, director of the VA under President Nixon. Along with the article, Johnson included a note that read, in part, “Attached is a news story from Madison, Wisconsin, which explains in some detail the problems we in the Veterans Administration are encountering . . . As a country, and particularly the Government, we have failed to adequately inform these young men that their service has indeed been a defense of national values. We in the VA have noted a profound difference between the dischargee of 1967 and the dischargee of 1970.” Tellingly, the dates Johnson listed roughly correlate to the ruinous Tet Offensive of 1968, after which American attitudes toward the war, both stateside and in-theater, began to shift dramatically.

  Two months later, soon after the VVAW’s highly publicized “Dewey Canyon III” protest in Washington, which saw hundreds of veterans throwing their medals onto the steps of the Capitol, Nixon ordered Colson to look into having the IRS revoke the group’s tax-exempt status. Colson, who later went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, also took a number of steps to try to publicly discredit the VVAW, encouraging leaders of the “Big Four” veterans organizations (the American Legion, the Disabled American Veterans, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars) to speak out against them. At Colson’s request, Herbert Rainwater, head of the VFW, held a press conference in Washington, where he charged that groups like the VVAW were communist inspired.

  The effort to undermine the group went well beyond these overt steps and in time would come to include the FBI’s infamous “Counter-Intelligence Program,” or COINTELPRO, which infiltrated and surveilled a number of left-wing organizations. At one point, certain parts of the organization were filled with so many informers and agents provocateurs that they actually outnumbered the bona fide members. Soon after Chaim Shatan began working with the VVAW, he noticed that his mail was being tampered with. In an article in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, describing what he called the “grief of soldiers,” he appended a “note of caution” to other clinicians interested in working with veterans, explaining how his mail from veterans’ organizations and Lifton was being opened and then resealed with sticky paper and stamped DAMAGED IN HANDLING AT U.S. POST OFFICE. (Lifton reported this irregularity as well.) Shatan later described an incident where a VVAW member had dropped by their New York office on a Sunday afternoon and found a man he didn’t recognize riffling through their files. The man had flashed an FBI badge and made a hasty exit.

  Despite Nixon’s attempts to disrupt the VVAW, veterans kept showing up to the New York rap group. Eventually, the gr
oup got so big they ran out of room, forcing it to split in two, with Lifton staying with the original Fifth Avenue cohort. By Lifton’s count, around 115 veterans eventually cycled through the group during his tenure, including a number of the VVAW’s leaders, who were frequently crisscrossing the country, spreading the word about the group in the course of their organizing against the war.

  The veterans movement was building, slowly, incrementally, working openly to end the war while at the same time trying to make sense of the violence in-theater that they’d been a part of, but what really lit a fire under it was the violence at home. On April 30, 1971, Dwight Johnson, a recently discharged army Medal of Honor winner, was shot and killed while trying to rob a Detroit liquor store. Unemployed and angry at the army, Johnson had been diagnosed by VA doctors as suffering from “depression caused by post-Vietnam adjustment problems.” Ordinarily, a death like this wouldn’t have attracted much notice, but because Johnson had been awarded the Medal of Honor by the president in a White House ceremony, the story of his postwar struggle was soon on the front page of the New York Times. Shatan, reading of Johnson’s death, was deeply moved, and he quickly wrote an op-ed for the Times and prepared a longer scholarly article for publication. The Times, for a variety of reasons, waffled on Shatan’s op-ed, with the opinion editor saying he had reservations about it.

  Nevertheless, a year later, on May 6, 1972, the Times published the piece, titled “Post-Vietnam Syndrome.” In it, Shatan described the work of the rap groups, opening with the story of “Steve,” a Marine veteran of Vietnam, who after being discharged from the Corps for psychiatric reasons still suffered from “unpredictable episodes of terror and disorientation.” Shatan also described the emotional numbing many vets experienced, how they felt alienated “from their feelings and from other human beings: after systematically numbing their humane responses, veterans find it difficult and painful to experience compassion for others.” The trauma of Vietnam finally had a human face.

  According to Shatan, once the op-ed hit newsstands, “the telephone started jumping off the wall.”

  In April 1973, just as the Watergate scandal was picking up steam, Shatan, Lifton, and a grab bag of veterans’ advocates held a summit in St. Louis hosted by the Lutheran Synod of Missouri. The brainchild of Mark Hanson, a Presbyterian minister and friend of Arthur Egendorf, the conference included ninety vets, sixty shrinks, thirty chaplains, and a handful of VA staffers who, according to Shatan, jumped on at the last minute. Impressed by Egendorf and the work of the New York group, Hanson, who worked at the National Council of Churches building in upper Manhattan (known at the time as the “God Box”), had launched a one-man offensive, setting up rap groups across the country. Also in St. Louis were Shad Meshad and Ron Kovic from Los Angeles, a former military chaplain from San Diego named Bill Mahedy, and Jack McCloskey and Chester Adams from San Francisco, who had started a group called Twice Born Men that ministered to a group of veterans recently released from prison.

  Participants spent much of the three-day conference describing the various methods they used in dealing with veterans’ issues. Shatan and the New York cohort held workshops on the rap groups, emphasizing the need to let veterans “take charge of their own lives as part of the treatment.” They also established a coordinating committee composed of vets and shrinks whose mission it was to mobilize the various rap groups for political action and to designate experts to testify before Congress or in the media. By all accounts, the St. Louis summit was a huge success. In Shatan’s words, there emerged an ethos of “no leader and no followers—we were all peers on an equal footing.” Meshad, who would go on to found a number of influential veterans organizations, called it “the pivotal turn in American history for mental health on PTSD.”

  The lone exception to this was the contingent of VA people, led by Charlie Stenger, a World War II veteran and former POW, and Dr. Jerome Jaffe, then chief of medicine for the VA, the man who Nixon had claimed the year before would “solve” the heroin problem in America. According to Shatan, “The VA guys wanted to pooh-pooh the whole thing; and even if it was so [that the war caused some stress disorders] hardly anybody was suffering.” While they were in St. Louis, Lifton and Shatan gave an interview to a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, where they argued that 20 percent of Vietnam veterans were afflicted with some form of delayed stress caused by the war. The same reporter spoke to Jaffe, who claimed that at most 5 percent of veterans were mentally ill, and that clearly Lifton and Shatan were obsessed with the war. Moreover, he added, it was what the two were saying to the veterans that was the real problem, not the war itself, stating that their work was “an insult to brave men.”

  Despite these official objections, which were unsurprising to the rap group crowd, St. Louis was a big step forward. A consensus of a sort had been reached, a network had been formed, and tellingly, a line in the sand had been drawn. On one side were the rap group insurgents with their bad war and their new ideas, while on the other side were largely members of what would later be called the “Greatest Generation” with their “good” war and wholly different ideas about how trauma should be borne. Speaking of the event years later, Jack Smith, a Marine veteran from the New York rap groups, said,

  There were many friendships that were formed that exist to this day which came out of that conference . . . [But] it was a knockdown, dragout battle at that. I remember very vividly . . . Charlie Stegner getting up and saying, you know, “I’m a World War II POW and I really understand what’s going on and I’m one of your brothers.” And I got up and launched into a tirade about how . . . everything he had written indicated he didn’t have the foggiest notion of what was going on with us and how the hell could he call himself a brother? It was the beginning of a long and hostile relationship.

  As the conference drew to a close, the attendees created an organization to carry on the work. Called the National Veterans Resource Project (NVRP), they elected twelve of the St. Louis participants to a board, which a few weeks later chose Jack Smith as their president.

  Around the same time, a number of rap group–inspired bodies began sprouting up around the country. In Detroit, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, Emmanuel Tanay, began working with vets at nearby Macomb College. Soon, another Holocaust survivor, Henry Krystal, was collaborating with Tanay. Back in New York, Al Singerman, a VVAW member and the son of Holocaust survivors, started organizing rap groups for Holocaust survivors and their families. All of this opened up Shatan’s eyes to the “commonality” among all traumatic survivors, a connection that would become a tenet of modern trauma research.

  While the movement had achieved a measure of success—they had some therapeutic ideas and a bare bones organization—what they seemed to lack now was money and a clear direction for their clinical agenda. With passage of the Case-Church Amendment in Congress two months after the St. Louis conference, which ended all U.S. aid to and involvement with Vietnam, the war was clearly and finally over, at least from an American standpoint. While certainly a boon for the VVAW, the war’s end diminished the overall sense of urgency. The war was over, so what was the point of the organization anymore?

  It would be years before the members of the VVAW would learn of the effect they had had on the White House, and in the meantime, there remained the burning question of what in the press had become known as “Post-Vietnam Syndrome,” after Shatan’s New York Times op-ed. Because of its still-speculative nature, Post-Vietnam Syndrome became something of a media catchall, a junk drawer for fears about returning veterans. Ever since the early 1970s, there had been stories in the press about homeless, drug-addicted, violent, and in some cases suicidal vets, but as fears over this new breed of veteran continued to mount and fuse with the public’s more general paranoia about hippies and the drug culture, it began to resemble something like an epidemic in the public mind. “Vietnam Veterans Called Time Bombs” read one Baltimore Sun headline of the time. Lifton, Shatan, and the VVAW had done historic work brin
ging attention to the readjustment problems of veterans, but the illness, whatever it was, remained largely undefined.

  In a way, what had happened thus far was just a repeat of shell shock and the high drama of Craiglockhart. You had a few conscientious veterans who had found their way into the public consciousness (a harder task than it might seem at first, because the public tends to see the military as a faceless mob) and there was a new name for war-made madness that the press liked, in this case a neat little acronym that fit easily in a newspaper column: PVS. With the war winding down and Nixon on his way out, it all could have stopped right there, with PVS frozen in the amber of history along with the rap groups, an intriguing footnote to a deeply unpopular war. The NVRP’s efforts in the beginning were scattered and ineffective, the interest in the cause waning.

  In moments like these, on both the micro and macro levels, the tendency is toward a kind of amnesia, driven by powerful forces within the culture whose greatest desire is to achieve a sort of status quo antebellum. This deep-seated need of nations to forget, to simply “move on,” is universal and understandable and, coincidentally, one of the major drivers of combat-related post-traumatic stress. It is, perhaps, the fatal flaw of humankind, this failure to learn from conflict, and even after history’s greatest catastrophes, as in the Soviet Union after World War II, there is evidence of this drive toward willful ignorance. Randy Floyd, a former Marine attack pilot who flew fifty-five missions over North Vietnam, was interviewed in 1973 and said, “I think Americans have tried, we’ve all tried very hard to escape what we’ve learned in Vietnam, to not come to the logical conclusions of what’s happened there.” Needless to say, the historical deck was stacked against the NVRP.