My predicament was far less complicated than being in a war zone. I had fought the military’s decision to order me to active duty following their refusal to discharge me from the Reserves on medical grounds. I had never been enthusiastic about approaching the issue of being discharged from a mental health point of view. My lawyer insisted upon that course of action, and since he had tried many cases like mine I went along with his decision. I had long objected to the Vietnam War on moral grounds, but had always been told that pursuing conscientious objector’s status, both before and after entering the military, was a losing battle.
To begin a successful appeal to the military’s order to report for active duty I would have to consult with a psychiatrist who would substantiate my claim that I was not fit for military service. Following that decision, problems began immediately. First I was referred to an intern in the psychiatrist’s office who took unremarkable issues from my childhood and blew them up into problems of gargantuan proportions. Simple adjustments from childhood became serious debilitating conditions. To make matters worse, the psychiatrist was well known to the government since he had earned the reputation of providing letters on behalf of young men to the Selective Service to enable them to successfully procure deferments from the draft.
At the time of my appeal I did not realize that the military could use psychological issues as a double-edged sword against me. If I was found unfit for military service on psychological grounds, I could be discharged with “bad paper,” meaning a less than honorable discharge. So, if I beat the military I still lost. The simple fact that the psychologist evaluating me found unremarkable issues in my past as earthshaking problems meant that the government had the nail on which to hang the hat of unsuitability for military service. This would necessarily have meant that I needed to have raised those issues long, perhaps years, before being ordered to active duty.
When I arrived at Fort Dix, New Jersey in shackles in the early 1970s, I ran the very real risk of being ordered to the stockade where multiple cases of torture of soldiers had been substantiated years earlier (“When Torture Was Practiced on U.S. Soil.” ZNet July 26, 2008). Activist soldiers, and those who resisted the Vietnam War, had been subjected to brutal treatment in the past. Only the presence and intervention of my lawyer spared me from that very real and imminent risk as he successfully argued my case with the company commander.
The downside of my “success” in staying out of the stockade was that the commander ordered me to be evaluated by a base psychiatrist. So, while I was kept out of the stockade, I was forced to wait weeks behind the locked doors of a detention barracks while I waited. In effect, what I waited for was the certification of an Army psychiatrist that I was unfit for military service, a fact that I had established long before.
While waiting for an appointment with the psychiatrist, I decided to request that I be accompanied to the medical clinic and appealed directly to the physician to meet with me earlier than the scheduled appointment. Given how arbitrary the military is, I needed to have known better. During my visit to the clinic I witnessed the psychiatrist with whom I was scheduled to meet come out into the outer office screaming and yelling that he would “fix” my chances of getting any discharge if I didn’t leave the area immediately. When I was finally “evaluated,” the psychiatrist agreed with almost every point that the civilian psychologist-intern had noted in his evaluation. In other words, all the Army psychiatrist had done was to essentially copy the intern’s findings. I was discharged with “bad paper” just as I would have been without the intervention of a physician.
When dealing with any medical issues within the military, it must be noted that physicians who are in uniform have as their single objective the return of the soldier to duty. The latter is especially significant in a battle zone with a limited number of available personnel to fight a war. This can lead to a cataclysm when issues of post-traumatic stress disorder are added to other issues of service in a military such as repeated tours of duty. As was witnessed in the first several years of the Iraq War, medical facilities were woefully inadequate to treat the emotional and physical injuries of soldiers, as was the treatment received through the Veterans Administration upon a soldier’s separation from active duty. The military is the enforcement mechanism of empire. It is not in the business of providing psychotherapy. The only adjustment that it seeks to bring about is adjustment to its mission. Although tangential to this discussion, the plight of civilians in war zones is always present, but never factored into the human toll of battle. One can only begin to imagine the impact of war on civilians, and especially the most vulnerable among that population such as children.
I appealed to the Army Discharge Review Board as soon as I was able, and my petition to receive an honorable discharge based on the facts of my case was summarily denied by the government. It was only when President Jimmy Carter instituted an amnesty program for war resisters that my case was reviewed favorably by the same military board and I was granted a discharge under honorable conditions. Only a few thousand men out of the tens of thousands who had resisted the military from within during the Vietnam War were granted such relief, and it took months of careful preparation of my case and volumes of supporting documents to get this small measure of justice from the government. So the government could maintain what they considered the high moral ground on the issue of the war, Congress passed legislation making it impossible to receive any benefits as a veteran after going through the process of appealing a discharge. Congress granted the Veterans Administration the authority to judge each case on its subjective merits, thus making the final outcome of the amnesty program a paltry means of addressing the grave injustices of the Vietnam era.
Curiously, I was labeled as suffering from Vietnam Syndrome by the discharge board. Vietnam Syndrome has come to be known as a reluctance of a majority of people in the U.S. to support war following the disastrous experience in Vietnam. Ronald Reagan was able to erase any remnant of this positive thrust in U.S. history soon after taking office. How both a nation and an individual can suffer from the same antiwar “malady” remains a mystery to me? What is remarkable, however, is that the military could label me in this manner and get away with providing me with absolutely no compensation.
Again, as with the murders at the mental health clinic in Iraq, the cauldron created by war has stirred up a beehive of injustice resulting in the suffering and death of innocent people.
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He can be reached at [email protected].
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