I

t
is the images of the people at home that I have the hardest
time watching on television. The mothers, children, brothers,
sisters, aunts, and uncles of soldiers who’ve been wounded,
killed, or taken prisoner in the war against Iraq. Of course,
this is the soft side of news, the personal stories that “put
a face on the war” and touch us in ways that pyrotechnic
images of the intense bombardment of Baghdad can’t. There
is nothing sentimental about these images, nothing false, nothing
insincere: they are immediate, real, and true. But they also
illustrate and epitomize the idea that we must “support
our troops.” 

It is such a stupid, banal statement: Presumably, very few people
in America want to see them hurt or killed. Yet when I hear
the phase “support our troops”—whether it be
from Bill O’Reilly, Larry King, or the resolution passed
by Congress last week that was an “official” support
of the troops—I begin to go crazy. The phrase “support
our troops,” as it’s currently used, is nothing more
than not-very-veiled code for supporting the war and the administration’s
ill-considered policy in Iraq. In my most cynical moments, “support
our troops” sounds like “shut up.” 

Of course, it’s more complicated than that. As are my own
feelings about U.S. foreign policy, the military, and the soldiers—both
past and present, living and dead. I spent most of the 1980s
being emotionally and sexually involved with two men who were
Vietnam veterans. Both are now dead of AIDS. But during that
time I saw, repeatedly and vividly, the effects of the war on
them. How they continued to suffer, how they were emotionally
damaged, how they lived in pain, and how the mantra “support
our troops”—even more ubiquitous during the late 1960s
and the 1970s than it is now—was a pathetic lie in terms
of its application to soldiers’ lives after the war. When
I see grieving family members on TV desperately struggling to
make sense of their losses in Iraq in a world-spun-out-of-control,
I think of my lovers Jim and Derrick desperately grappling to
make sense of their time in Vietnam and their deeply conflicted
feelings of being American in a country that had all but deserted
them. 

I am an unrepentent child of the 1960s and its counterculture.
I was going on civil rights marches as early as 1964, when I
was 15 years old. My politics were fueled by the liberal Catholicism
taught in my working class, all-boys parochial high school.
By my last years in high school, I was speaking out and writing
articles against the Vietnam War. I was an unabashed hippie
and by 1967 I had come out as gay. I spent college protesting
the war in Vietnam and as a member of Students for a Democratic
Society I worked with social-change groups in neighborhoods
close to my inner-city college. When I was called for my draft
physical, I proudly told the induction physician that I was
a homosexual—I even verified it with a letter from my therapist—and
so successfully rebelled against the draft. Far from wanting
to serve, I was convinced the war was illegal and immoral and
I was determined to resist it any way I could. As far as I’m
concerned, my resistance was a display of fierce patriotism.
I wanted to support the troops—as the bumper stickers said—but
I wanted to do it by bringing them home. 

Far from alienating either Jim or Derrick, who did not know
each other during their time in Vietnam, my anti-war, anti-establishment
history attracted them to me. In each of these relationships—the
first, with Jim, lasted from 1979 to 1984; I was involved with
Derrick from 1984 to 1987—my past was not the issue; theirs
was. For both of them, their time “in country” was
a nightmare. How they survived the stresses of jungle warfare
while living as closeted gay men is unimaginable. Both men hated
the military. Each had been drafted because neither could find
a way to dodge it. Jim was a just-out-of-med-school Marine.
Derrick was a college dropout who had no other options. Both
men hated what they did in Vietnam. They hated the policies
they had been sent there to enforce. They had, pretty much across
the board, almost no respect left for the U.S. government after
what they saw—and did—there. These feelings were unthinkable
for them, since both had been raised devout, conservative Catholics
who, before Vietnam, saw themselves as intensely law-abiding
and deeply patriotic. 

When
I began dating Jim, I had absolutely no idea of the intensity
of his feelings about the war. On one of our first dates, we
were at his apartment. I asked him about Vietnam and as he began
talking he started to cry. At first I thought some specific
memory had been triggered, but it soon became clear that he
was overwhelmed with anger. He could barely talk, although he
began telling a few stories—disconnected, but filled with
vivid images of wounded or dead soldiers upon whom he had operated.
His grief was overwhelming, not only for him, but also for me.
I had no illusions about the war, but I had never come this
close to the pain it caused. Over the next five years, Jim—especially
if he were drunk or stoned—would describe, or rather try
to describe, his feelings about the war. Sometimes he would
try to tell ironic or funny stories. Sometimes he would talk
about the sex he had had with the mostly heterosexual soldiers.
Sometimes he would tell gruesome tales about medical procedures
practiced in the jungle brush. But whenever and however he talked
about Vietnam, he would invariably be consumed with rage. 

Once he asked me if I thought of him as a murderer because of
his actions in Vietnam. I said I didn’t—what was I
going to say? But there was an unspoken chasm between us: he
knew that I considered the policies and actions of the U.S.
government murderous, and he had implemented them. I later realized
that, in many ways, he considered himself a murderer and was
looking to me for some kind of validation. It was true; during
the war there were times when I did think of “our”
troops as the murderers of innocent Vietnamese or of people
who were defending their homeland. 

After we broke up, I began dating Derrick and discovered that
he was a Vietnam vet as well. I avoided the topic as much as
possible. But it was, of course, unavoidable. Derrick was far
less troubled than Jim about his time in Vietnam. He didn’t
experience the trauma of being a doctor who couldn’t heal
the wounded and dying. He saw his time there as something to
get through. But there was damage. He would often describe his
wartime experiences in caustic, funny terms that would turn
bitter and rancorous. On some level, for him the entire experience
was one of betrayal—both of his ideals and of his own sense
of well-being. It became clear to me that sex for him was often
some strange, disturbing playing out of the erotic and emotional
stresses he had experienced in Vietnam. I asked him about this
once and he became furious. He told me I had no idea what he
had been through. He said that he respected my actions during
the war and wished he had done the same—or even fled to
Canada, which at the time didn’t feel like an option. He
said I really had no way of even beginning to understand what
he had experienced. His time in the war rose between us like
a vaporous cloud that silenced his pain and obscured my ability
to understand it. 

The pain Jim and Derrick carried with them—as do many Vietnam
veterans—was central to their lives. It was a formative
spectral presence that never completely manifested itself, but
also never disappeared. They didn’t speak to their families
about it. They showed me their anger because there was no one
else to give it to at the time. My anti-war history made me
a safe harbor, not an enemy. But there was another reason these
men could turn to me. So much of their experience in Vietnam
was wrapped up with their sexuality: they were—by dire
necessity—closeted in Vietnam. The anxiety surrounding
their hidden sexuality was completely entangled with having
to control and manage the death, the pain, the ripped-open,
bleeding bodies they encountered. The men they were attracted
to, close to, even emotionally dependent on, were men who were
dying in their arms, on the operating table, at their sides,
or a few steps behind them, decimated by exploding landmines. 

In
many ways I was smug in my politics. I knew I was right—and
still do—but I was unprepared to deal with the hurt and
pain caused by the war. Especially in men I loved and cared
about. I could hold them and comfort them and have sex with
them when they were upset. I could be a whole body that replaced
their haunting mental images of dismemberment and ripped-apart
flesh, but it was complicated, hard, and distressing. After
Jim died his sister and her husband —also a former Marine,
from a military family—insisted that he be given a military
funeral. They were both proud of the fact that he had served
in Vietnam. There was a five gun salute and an American flag
draped his casket. I was sickened by it, as well as the fact
that his sister and her husband asked Jim’s new lover and
his gay friends to stand apart from the family. AIDS was never
mentioned and it was only on my way home after the service that
the hatefullness of this charade finally hit me: in the two
years Jim was dying his sister never came to visit him. So much
for familial, as well as national, support. 

Watching the war in Iraq on television these past weeks, I am
reminded of Jim and Derrick. All the “support the troops”
rhetoric reminds me, particularly, of how much support Jim and
Derrick needed after the war, but didn’t get. It is common
knowledge now that America treated Vietnam veterans—after
their homecoming parades were over—like the country’s
dirty little secret. They were a political and cultural embarrassment.
What we never really talk about in America is that—except
for the benefits given to returning soldiers after World War
II—the U.S. has always treated its returning veterans horribly.
Even after World War II there were 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.  

• 
  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 them out with a “shock
and awe” type operation—the U.S. army burned the temporary
homes of the homeless veterans and tear-gassed them. Several
thousand veterans were injured by the gas; two were killed.
 

We know that there are thousands and thousands of veterans who
are suffering from mysterious illnesses they contracted during
the Gulf War—illnesses the U.S. government, for the most
part, claims do not exist (shades of Vietnam’s Agent Orange).
Now, as we engage in 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, the U.S. has valorized war and each time, citizens
are told it is their duty to support the troops. Yet the U.S.,
far more often than not, has betrayed these men and women when
they come back home from war. 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 families on the television holding back their
tears because their loved ones are in Iraq—possibly dead,
actually dead, or missing—and I think about Jim crying
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. 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. 

Michael
Bronski’s latest book is the recently released



Pulp
Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps.