At a Memorial Day parade in Milford, Conn., three years ago, Richard Blumenthal re called his return from the war in Vietnam: “We had to endure taunts and insults, and no one said, ‘Welcome home,’ ” the Connecticut attorney general told crowd, which included relatives of a soldier killed in Iraq. “I say, ‘Welcome home.’ ”
As we now know, Blumenthal never went to Vietnam. Indeed, he actually got five military deferments and then got a spot in the Marine Reserve, which pretty much guaranteed that he wouldn’t see combat.
When that news broke, Blumenthal (who’s also a Senate candidate) moved into full damage-control mode, insisting that he’d simply used “a few misplaced words.”
Yet these words do more than misrepresent Blumenthal’s personal biography. They also distort our collective history, reinforcing a well-worn set of myths about military veterans — especially those who fought in Vietnam.
The myths start with the disillusioned soldier, wounded physically and psychologically by the war, who faces yet more hostility when he gets home.
Almost every reported Blumenthal comment about his fictitious role in Vietnam echoed this theme. “I remember the taunts, the insults, sometimes even physical abuse,” he asserted at a veterans’ ceremony in 2008. All the more reason, he added, that present-day vets should receive a warmer welcome. “When we returned, we saw nothing like this,” he told a 2003 rally for military families. “Let us do better by this generation of men and women.”
But the Vietnam comparison rests on a set of falsehoods. Despite what you might have read, Americans who served in Vietnam did not come disproportionately from poor or minority communities; most did not report abuse or alienation upon their return — and they have not suffered abnormal rates of mental illness, addiction, incarceration or homelessness since then.
Sadly, Americans continue to think otherwise: The Vietnam vets are hurting, and the rest of us need to feel their pain. One way to do that is to say you’re a veteran yourself, even if you aren’t.
Real Vietnam vets call these people “wannabes,” and they’re more common than you might guess. Back in the ’80s, New York Rep. Bruce Caputo had to drop out of a Senate race after falsely claiming he was drafted for the war. Likewise, Toronto Blue Jays manager Tim Johnson was fired when it was discovered that he’d lied about fighting in Vietnam.
Most recently, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis had to take an unpaid leave after telling his students that he served in the war. Ellis also told them that he had once scored the winning touchdown for his high-school football team, although it turns out that Ellis wasn’t even on the team.
The last detail bears another parallel to Richard Blumenthal, who was described as the captain of his college swim team in several news profiles. Blumenthal says he didn’t give that information to reporters, but he also didn’t try to correct it. He wasn’t on the team, either.
But the sports and war stories fit nicely together, confirming the overall myth of sacrifice and suffering: These were all-American kids, scoring touchdowns and swimming to victory, but they returned to misery and hostility.
Only they didn’t.
That’s the biggest irony of all: Even as the misrepresentations by Ellis and Blumenthal feed the myths of Vietnam, their real lives are more truly reflective of veterans’ experience.
Nearly a million Vietnam vets are still alive today, and most of them are doing just fine. They’re more likely to have graduated high school and college than their peers. They’re doctors and lawyers, teachers and social workers — and yes, historians and US senators. In each of the last two presidential elections, remember, a Vietnam vet was a major-party nominee for president: John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008.
Nor are all veterans of our current wars basket cases, as you might guess from the news. Yes, 20 percent of returning Iraq and Afghanistan vets report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, according to a 2008 Rand Corporation study. But returning veterans overwhelmingly make a successful transition home, building strong families and careers.
Of course, we should do more to assist our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, as Richard Blumenthal has rightly argued. But we won’t help their cause by distorting the real history of the war in Vietnam. Instead of simply flaying Blumenthal for his personal myth-making, perhaps we can use this Memorial Day to retire the larger national myths surrounding Vietnam.
That would be a good way to honor everyone who served, then as well as now.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”