Roanoke Times Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: TUESDAY, May 24, 1994 TAG: 9405240097 SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: NEW RIVER SOURCE: Associated Press DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The scent of diesel and the rumble of vegetable-filled trucks leaving his loading dock before dawn sometimes trigger memories of Army convoys picking their way down dangerous, dusty roads to resupply troopers clinging to beleaguered outposts along the Cambodian border.
``Life is good,'' declares Barnes, 52, owner of a wholesale produce company in Kansas City, Mo. ``But I'll always be a Vietnam vet, and I'll never forget it. ... I think `haunted' is a good word.''
The recent suicide of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lewis Puller Jr. underscores the agony gnawing at those who served in America's longest war.
Many say that despite the severity of Puller's wounds - hands mangled, legs severed at the hips in an explosion - his case dramatizes the dual life often led by successful veterans: outward signs of achievement and prosperity combined with an inner pain that never seems to go away.
``Most of the guys I served with in country, no matter how successful they are ... when you get to know them, you find some mean desert they crossed emotionally or some wound they don't talk about,'' said lawyer-businessman John Wheeler, an Army captain during the war and former chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.
``You don't see it in the guys wearing suits and ties, but it's there,'' said Wheeler, now a consultant on a team working on the turnaround of bankrupt R.H. Macy & Co.
For all the trauma veterans share, however, there has been remarkable success in business, government, the arts and, unsurprisingly, the military. The reality is often in sharp contrast to the threadbare stereotype of the hollow-eyed outcast in tattered fatigues, shambling aimlessly down America's back streets.
``For the most part, the Vietnam veteran was a pretty strong individual,'' said writer Al Santoli, who served in the 25th Infantry and is author of the Vietnam oral history, ``Everything We Had.''
``Some people were not able to break with the past,'' he acknowledged. ``For those of us who've learned to live in the present and plan for the future, I think we've done pretty well.''
Vietnam veterans have scaled the heights in corporate America. Highly decorated Marine Frederick Smith is the founder and chief executive officer of Federal Express Corp. Former airborne Ranger Jim Kimsey established America Online, the interactive computer service.
The war produced a bumper crop of artists - among them, writers Larry Heinemann, Robert Olen Butler and Tim O'Brien, playwright David Rabe, and director Oliver Stone, whose movie ``Platoon'' was a semiautobiographical tale of his tour in Vietnam.
Operation Desert Storm was planned and directed by Vietnam veterans - Gen. Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
And America's political landscape is dotted with veterans of the Southeast Asian conflict, starting with Vice President Al Gore and including Sens. John McCain (who was a prisoner of war), Bob Kerrey, John Kerry and Charles Robb. Then, there's Oliver North, the ex-Marine who wants Robb's job.
``There are three times as many Viet vets in the U.S. Senate as their numbers in the general population would suggest,'' wrote Terry Anderson, a former Associated Press reporter taken hostage in Lebanon and a veteran himself, in an op-ed article in The Washington Post after Puller's death. ``They are not victims. They are men who fought in a terrible war, then went on with their lives, taking out of their experience what they could use and build on.''
Bill Richards, a New York investment banker who was an infantry lieutenant in Vietnam, believes his wartime service contributed to his accomplishments in civilian society.
``It was a defining positive moment of my life,'' he said. ``There's no doubt in my mind that a lot of success in the business world comes from what I learned in Vietnam ... in terms of judgment and decision-making.''
``You tend to look at life through a slightly different prism,'' said America Online's Kimsey, who designed and built an orphanage during his Vietnam tour. ``You tend to take more chances and do more bold things.''
And yet few, if any, veterans minimize the lingering emotional scars.
The most comprehensive study of veterans' postwar adjustment, conducted in 1988 by the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, found about 15 percent of men and 9 percent of women who served in Vietnam had post-traumatic stress disorder 15 years or more after returning to civilian life.
That amounts to about 480,000 of the nearly 3.2 million veterans, according to the study. Among men, blacks and Hispanics had higher levels of the disorder than did whites. That was partly attributed to a greater prevalence of minorities in combat.
``The overwhelming finding was not that a significant number of men and women were still having problems, but the vast majority were not,'' said Dave Grady, a Philadelphia psychologist, disabled vet and post-traumatic stress expert who worked on the study. ``I always felt most Vietnam veterans moved on in life and most people never noticed.''
Government statistics show some age groups of Vietnam-era veterans actually have lower jobless rates than those who did not serve. But other findings suggest stereotypes contribute to economic and employment problems.
A 1988 Massachusetts study showed that Vietnam veterans earned less than their non-veteran peers, were less apt to be promoted and had higher job turnover, said Kevin Bowen, director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
``Part of it is institutional,'' Bowen said. ``Part of it is a very subtle discrimination.
''People have a lot of unresolved feelings about the war. A lot of those feelings get projected on the vets.''
``A lot of folks with masters and Ph.D.s, they won't let us in the door. We're [considered] those loony-toony guys,'' said J. Thomas Burch Jr., an Army veteran and Washington, D.C., lawyer.
Stereotypes aren't the only problem. Thousands have to cope, every day, with physical disabilities.
No one knows that struggle better than Max Cleland, Georgia's secretary of state who headed the Veterans Administration under President Carter. He lost both legs and his right forearm in the fight to lift the siege of Khe Sanh in 1968.
``It is part of my life every day,'' he said of the war. ``I'm not obsessed with it, but as I go through the normal ups and downs, I have to work pretty hard to keep my morale up.''
But readjustment is not limited to the disabled. Some of today's respected business and community leaders say it took years to get their lives on track.
Ralph Timperi, assistant health commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, battled the bottle after coming home in 1968.
``The most difficult thing for me to overcome was a feeling of guilt,'' said Timperi, a former platoon leader in the 25th Infantry Division. ``The guilt goes away, but not the sadness and the pain.''
by CNB