Why do so many Americans believe Vietnam veterans are bums and losers? B.G. Burkett discovers that this shameful stereotype not only dishonors a generation of warriors, but it also wastes millions of tax payers dollars.
Stolen Valor
Last June, Dallas financial adviser B.G. “Jug” Burkett was reading a story in Time when he experienced a familiar feeling: outrage. A Time/CNN piece by Peter Arnett and April Oliver alleged that American Soldiers taking part in a secret operation called “Tailwind” during the Vietnam way had committed war crimes — using banned nerve gas to kill civilians and enemy soldiers and tracking down and murdering America deserters. Here we go again, Burkett remembers thinking, another sensational story pieced together to fit what the reporters already believe — that American troops routinely committed atrocities in Vietnam.
In other words, “Tailwind” was just the sort of story that the 54-year-old Burkett had been battling for more than 12 years. Stories filled with images of Vietnam veterans still suffering from the effects of their participation in a shameful and immoral war: traumatized, homeless, suicidal, violent, addicted to drugs and alcohol, an army of walking wounded. For Burkett, who served as an Army officer in Vietnam, these images bear no resemblance to most veterans he knows, even those who were horribly wounded or were captured by the enemy. “The media created a myth they can’t let go of, even after 30 years,” he says. And so, Burkett found a measure of vindication when CNN and Time were forced publicly to acknowledge their errors in “Tailwind,” CNN fired its producers, and both issued mea culpas. “For once, the journalists got caught in a lie and were forced to recant.”
A one-man truth squad, Burkett has dedicated himself to countering the myths and lies that demean and disgrace the 3.3 million men and women who served in Vietnam, and to exposing the frauds who have capitalized on the image of the damaged Vietnam veteran. Since beginning his crusade in 1986, he has filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain the military records of some 1,700 individuals, unmasking countless phonies who had fooled the media and even their families with exaggerations and horror stories. Determined to set the record straight, Burkett also dug into numerous other records of the war, including the Defense Department’s computerized killed-in-action records, surveys of veterans, and statistics from medical, psychiatric, and demographic studies, uncovering an immense public falsehood completely overlooked by the media and other experts on the Vietnam experience: the post-traumatic stress-disorder industry that continues to perpetuate the image of permanently traumatized veterans and costs American taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
Still, Burkett found many journalists uninterested in his proof that they had been hoodwinked. And when he decided to publish his findings, he ran into another roadblock: publishers who either didn’t believe his research or felt that no one would buy a book about the Vietnam War that didn’t reflect accepted beliefs. Undaunted, he formed a company called Verity Press to publish himself. Last September he released Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History, a massive study that turns conventional wisdom about Vietnam veterans on its head — and challenges journalists to examine their own culpability in reinforcing negative stereotypes of those who fought in America’s most unpopular war. Stolen Valor also forces veterans of World War II, who fathered the Vietnam generation but were among its toughest critics, to re-examine their own beliefs about the two conflicts.
Here are some of the many myths and stereotypes exposed in Stolen Valor:
Myth: Vietnam was fought primarily by youths barely old enough to shave, while World War II was fought by men.
Reality: The average age of American men killed in Vietnam was 22.8, or almost 23 years old. More American 52- year-olds (22) died in Vietnam than youths of 17 (12). Almost 11 percent of those killed in action (K.I.A.’s) were 30 or older. The oldest American serviceman killed was 62. Available evidence suggests the average age of men in combat in the two wars was about the same.
Myth: Enlisted men fought the war while officers stayed behind the lines in Saigon.
Reality: Though they represented 12.5 percent of the troop strength in Vietnam, officers accounted for 13.5 percent of those killed. Twelve generals died. The Army lost a higher percentage of its officer corps in Vietnam than in World War II; twice as many company commanders (captains) died as did second-lieutenant platoon leaders.
Myth: Draftees bore the brunt of Vietnam service.
Reality: About one third of Vietnam era troops entered the military through the draft, compared to two thirds in World War II. Volunteers accounted for 77 percent of the K.I.A.’s in Vietnam. Only 101 18-year-old draftees died in Vietnam, less than one percent of the K.I.A.’s. (When asked by Burkett, most people guess that “thousands” of 18-year-old black draftees died in Vietnam. In reality, only seven of the K.I.A.’s fit that category.)
Myth: The best and the brightest didn’t serve in Vietnam, only the poorly educated who had few options in life.
Reality: Our military force in Vietnam was the best educated in the nation’s history. Nearly 80 percent had high school diplomas; throughout the U.S. the figure was 65 percent. (In World War II only 45 percent of our armed forces had high school diplomas.) The median education level of the Vietnam War enlisted man was about 13 years. Proportionately three times as many college graduates served in Vietnam as in World War II.
Myth: The death toll of the Vietnam War fell disproportionately on minorities and the working class.
Reality: About five percent of those who died were Hispanic and 12.5 percent were black — in both cases slightly under their percentage of draft-age males in the general U.S. population. (Six years after Burkett began his research, a 1992 M.I.T study determined that 30 percent of the K. I. A.’s came from the lowest third of the income range — but 26 percent of the combat deaths were men from families earning in the highest third. It found scant association between death rates and family income.)
Myth: Troops in Vietnam smoked pot and shot up with heroin to dull the horrors of combat.
Reality: Except for the last couple of years of the war, drug usage among American troops in Vietnam was lower than for those stationed anywhere else in the world, including the United States. By 1971 and 1972, when the Paris accord led to troop withdrawals and decreasing levels of combat, drug usage had started to rise. But by then almost 90 percent of the men who would serve in Vietnam had already come and gone.
Myth: According to veterans advocates, five to 12 percent of the prison population at any given time are Vietnam vets, with up to 300,000 in the criminal-justice system.
Reality: Such figures are based on self-reporting by inmates, with no checking by the prisons. A 1988 federal Centers for Disease Control study of Vietnam veterans, which meticulously checked military records, found the incidence of incarceration extremely low — about the same as for non-theater veterans. Stolen Valor points out that in every major study of Vietnam vets in which military records were pulled and the veterans then located for interviews, an insignificant number have been found in prisons.
Myth: Vietnam veterans suffer high unemployment.
Reality: Department of Labor statistics indicate that Vietnam veterans have a lower unemployment rate than those who didn’t serve. Figures from 1994 show that the unemployment rate for U.S. males 18 and over was six percent. The unemployment rate for all male veterans was 4.9 percent. Among Vietnam era veterans who did not serve in the war, it was five percent. For Vietnam veterans, the rate was 3.9 percent.
Myth: Advocates for the homeless claim that between 200,000 and 400,000 Vietnam veterans — eight to ten percent of those who served — are homeless at any given time.
Reality: Virtually all such estimates rely on notoriously unreliable self-reporting. In an attempt to actually count the number of homeless Vietnam veterans, the state of Missouri convened a panel in 1993 to investigate the problem within its borders. The panel concluded that Missouri’s number of homeless Vietnam vets was too small to warrant a special agency. Other studies using military records show the percentage of Vietnam veterans among the homeless to be very small.
Myth: More Vietnam veterans have died by their own hand than died in combat.
Reality: The largest study of suicide among Vietnam veterans, reported in the May 1988 Journal of Occupational Medicine, compared records of 24,235 U.S. Army and Marine Corps Vietnam veterans with those of 26, 685 non-Vietnam veterans. What it found was that Vietnam veterans had a seven percent lower risk of suicide than those who served elsewhere during the war.
Surrounded by overflowing boxes of files and bookshelves stuffed with books about Vietnam, Burkett sits in the small office of his North Dallas home, sifting through pictures and letters he sent to his sister while he was in Vietnam. Now silver-haired, Burkett laughs at the photos of the young first lieutenant who packed a golf wedge in his duffel bag, determined to cling to something familiar in a strange land. “That club was my last and only connection to home,” he says.
The son of a career Air Force officer, Burkett grew up on Air Force bases all over North America. Though he was an outstanding athlete, his boyhood heroes weren’t sports stars; they were the World War 11 pilots who had blown the Japanese and the Luftwaffe out of the sky. “I knew more about Pappy Boyington and Dick Bong,” he says, naming two aces, “than I did about Babe Ruth.”
In 1962, when Burkett enrolled at Vanderbilt University, the Vietnam conflict was little more than a blip on the radar screen. He had no fear of the draft; Burkett planned to enlist after earning his bachelor’s degree. “I always knew I would serve in the military,” he says. “Not because it was expected, but because I wanted to.” But in a surprise move for an Air Force brat, Burkett enlisted in the Army, which required only a three-year commitment instead of four. “I wanted a career in the business world,” he says, “not in the military.”
In June 1968, a few months after the Tet Offensive, 24-year-old First Lieutenant B. G. Burkett arrived in Vietnam. He served for 11 months as an ordnance officer with the 199th Light Infantry, based at Camp Frenzell-Jones, near Bien Hoa, 20 miles north of Saigon. The last line of defense for Saigon on that city’s northern perimeter, his brigade was nicknamed “The Palace Guard.” During its four years in Vietnam, from 1966 to 1970, the 199th Light Infantry lost almost 1,000 men.
Burkett returned to the States with a Bronze Star for merit, proud of his service. But on the flight home, in uniform, he was heckled by a civilian across the aisle. More than anger at the heckler, he felt irritation that no one came to his defense. “If that had happened in World War II, someone would have slugged the guy,” Burkett says.
That was only the first of the many times over the years Burkett would encounter the negative attitudes toward Vietnam veterans held by many of his countrymen. At the University of Tennessee, where he enrolled in the M.B.A. program, several professors made it plain that the Vietnam veterans in the class were not to mention where they’d been. “The teachers found it hard to believe these ’killers’ were among their students,” Burkett says.
In 1972, nearing the end of his graduate studies, he began going out on job interviews, only to encounter The Vietnam Question yet again. At an Atlanta bank an executive scanned Burkett’s resume, then stopped reading. “I’m not hiring any Vietnam vets,” he said. “Get the hell out of here. I’m going to get a cup of coffee, and I don’t want you here when I get back.”
Burkett refused to remove from his resume his Vietnam duty. “I was proud of my service,” Burkett says, “and I didn’t want to work for anyone who didn’t understand that.” Upon getting his M.B.A. he moved to Dallas, where his parents had retired. Soon after the move, Burkett landed a job as a stock-broker and quickly became a success.
By 1976 he had become a junior partner in his firm and began dating a woman who worked as a legislative aide in Austin, the state capital. After a yearlong commuter romance they were married, but the marriage ended after several months, succumbing, Burkett says, not to any war trauma but to the difficulty of day-to-day wedlock. Meanwhile, books and movies about the Vietnam experience had begun to appear, but Burkett paid little attention to them. For him, films like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter were little more than surrealistic exercises in excess, bearing little relation to the war’s reality.
Then, in the mid eighties, the war reclaimed Burkett’s life with a vengeance.
In 1986 a Dallas businessman named Paul Russell called Burkett and asked him to assist in an effort to build the Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Russell, who’d served in Vietnam as a military adviser to the South Vietnamese, knew Burkett from Vanderbilt, 20 years earlier. The memorial project needed to raise $2 million, and Russell thought Burkett’s financial expertise could come in handy.
Begun in the early eighties, the memorial project had bogged down owing to lukewarm support from the business community and veterans groups. Initially confident that it would take only nine months to raise the funds, Burkett was stunned by the reaction he got from potential donors, even from corporations that had made millions of dollars off the Vietnam War. “Everybody knew” most soldiers who fought in Vietnam were reluctant draftees, poor minorities, or dumb cannon fodder not smart enough to avoid military service. Over and over he got the same answer: No, no, and hell no.
“I began to understand that, to the typical American, the drugged-out loser in the sloppy fatigues was the ’real’ Vietnam veteran, not me in my suit or Al Gore,” Burkett says. “If I was going to raise the money, I had to counter the image. I had to equate the men who died with winners, not bums, to show that they were men worthy of recognition.”
To counter the negatives, Burkett needed hard statistics — who went, who died, who came back, and what happened to them after the war. He understood that a certain percentage of the 3.3 million men and women who had served in Vietnam or in surrounding waters were likely to have become alcoholic, drug addicted, homeless, criminal, or suicidal. But exactly how many? And were Vietnam veterans, because of their experience, more likely to suffer problems than their peers who didn’t serve there?
In every category for which Burkett could find statistics, Vietnam vets were as successful as or more successful than men their age who did not go to Vietnam. In 1980, Louis Harris and Associates released Myths and Realities: A Study of Attitudes Toward Vietnam Era Veterans, which showed Vietnam vets were more likely to have post-high-school education than men the same age who did not serve in the military; much more likely than non-Vietnam vets to have incomes above $30,000; less likely to have incomes under $20,000; more likely to own homes.
The 1988 Vietnam Experience Study, conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, was an even broader examination of how Vietnam vets had fared after the war. The C.D.C. study compared 9,324 Vietnam veterans with 8,989 non-Vietnam veterans, chosen from more than 18,000 randomly selected veterans who had joined the U.S. Army between 1965 and 1971. The survey showed that more than 90 percent of both groups were employed, and more than 90 percent of both Vietnam and non-Vietnam veterans felt satisfied with their current personal relationships. At the time of the research, few in either group were in jail, institutionalized, or mentally or physically incapacitated.
For Burkett, the evidence was overwhelming: “The Vietnam vet is the most successful veteran in America’s history.”
Armed with information kits containing studies and statistics, Burkett began to make headway. Still, the memorial project dragged on. “I had drastically underestimated the time it would take,” Burkett says. Not long after joining the effort, he’d remarried — to a woman 13 years his junior who didn’t really understand his desire to right the wrong done to Vietnam vets. He could only promise that someday the memorial would be completed.
By the fall of 1989, Burkett’s team had, against great odds, raised $2 million. On Veterans Day, November 11, 1989, President George Bush dedicated the Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But on the news that night, one reporter ended his story about the dedication by interviewing “Joe,” a scraggly “Vietnam veteran” wearing a boonie hat adorned with unit patches. “Joe, how do you feel about today?” the reporter asked. “Do you feel good?” “This is long overdue,” Joe said. “I’ve had post-traumatic stress for seven years and nobody gave a damn.” Burkett wanted to scream. For the American public, men like Joe, haunted by memories of the war, typified the Vietnam veteran. Worse, Burkett would have bet any amount of money that despite his fatigues and unit patches, Joe had never served in Vietnam.
It wasn’t just a hunch. From the onset of the memorial effort, Burkett had been frustrated by the scruffy brigade of Vietnam vets who inevitably appeared at his fundraising events. Many were good volunteers, but they inevitably reinforced the negative stereotypes. One, Jesse Duckworth, wore fatigues and a green beret and often bragged that he’d been awarded the Silver Star. But Duckworth, slovenly, stinking of alcohol, did not look like any Green Beret Burkett had ever known. “Damn, Jug,” Paul Russell asked Burkett after seeing Duckworth at a veterans’ event in 1989, “did you ever know people like that in Vietnam?”
Burkett had a brainstorm. While doing his research he’d learned that an individual’s military records could be obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act. Impulsively, he filed an F.O.I.A. request for the publicly releasable portion of Duckworth’s military record.
The record revealed that Duckworth had never been a Green Beret, had never served in Vietnam. An Army private first class, J. W. Duckworth’s only overseas duty was in Germany in the early 1960s. Duckworth’s charade infuriated Burkett. “Here was a bum claiming to be one of America’s finest, and everyone believed him,” Burkett says. He slipped the records to a TV reporter. After a story appeared revealing the facts, Duckworth disappeared from the local scene.
A few months later Burkett spoke at a symposium on the Vietnam War held in the Dallas area. Another speaker was Joseph Testa, Jr., president of the Dallas chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America. Testa, who often wore fatigues with sergeant’s stripes, claimed he’d served 18 months with an infantry division based west of Saigon. When local reporters wrote about Vietnam veterans, they would invariably turn to Testa, who irritated Burkett by constantly reinforcing the idea of Vietnam vets as victims.
His curiosity piqued, Burkett filed an F.O.I.A. request for Tesla’s record, and got a shock. Though an Army veteran, Testa had received no valorous decorations, had been discharged under conditions “other than honorable” — and, again, had not served in Vietnam. Burkett gave the records to a reporter, and Testa dropped out of sight.
A dismayed Burkett realized that frauds like Duckworth and Testa reinforced the image of the traumatized Vietnam vet held by most Americans. Burkett had succeeded in raising the money for the Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but his victory felt hollow. He decided to write a book that would take on the myths about the war and its veterans one at a time — forcing not only the press, academia, and the veterans activists to confront what they were doing in perpetrating the lies, but serving as a challenge to future generations looking back at the war. Burkett wanted to do nothing less than rewrite history as America knew it.
As he began work on Stolen Valor he quickly realized that the image of the Vietnam veteran as a walking time bomb had become ingrained in the American psyche thanks in large measure to a lazy and gullible media. “That single issue — that Vietnam veterans carry a deadly seed of trauma in our brains that could explode at any moment. regardless of how outwardly calm and rational we seem — had distorted the image of men in Vietnam more than anything,” Burkett says.
Particularly galling was “The Wall Within,” an hourlong CBS documentary about post-traumatic stress disorder that aired in 1987. Hosted by Dan Rather, the award-winning documentary was so acclaimed that it was later included as part of a CBS video series on the Vietnam War. Dignified by a formal introduction by Walter Cronkite, the series sold for $150 and was marketed to schools and other institutions as “official” history.
In reality, Rather and the vaunted CBS news team had been snookered by phonies like “Steve,” who was described in “The Wall Within” as a veteran who fought behind enemy lines as a Navy SEAL for almost two years. “I think I was one of the highest trained, underpaid, 18-cent-an-hour assassins ever put together by a team of people who knew exactly what they were looking for, who was used to the maximum, and then dumped back on society to take care of,” said Steve somberly.
Burkett later learned that Steve’s last name was Southards, and filed an F.O.I.A. request for his record. Southards had not been a SEAL or a covert “assassin.” He had served in Vietnam as an “internal communications repairman” assigned to rear-area bases, and had no combat decorations.
In fact military records obtained by Burkett revealed that all but one of the six veterans featured on “The Wall Within” had exaggerated or made up their stories about trauma. “The irony was inescapable,” Burkett says. “I, a rank amateur, had been able to verify with several phone calls and F.O.I.A. requests that the descriptions these men had given of their military service and their tales of atrocities were fraudulent. Apparently, CBS, while preparing its documentary for over a year, had made no effort to independently obtain the records.”
By 1989 Burkett was working on the book during all his spare time, reading everything about the war and its veterans he could get his hands on, even obscure academic magazines and studies in medical journals. He hired a clipping service to gather stories about Vietnam vets, then filed requests for the vets’ records. Slowly Burkett built up a network of sources across the country who alerted him when they ran across a “Vietnam vet” story.
In 1995 one of those sources brought to Burkett’s attention a newspaper article about Kenley Barker, 48, a patient in the P.T.S.D. program at the West Haven VA. Medical Center in New Haven, Connecticut. On April 14, 1995, after telling a neighbor that he was depressed over killing 100 men as a Marine during the Vietnam War, Barker barricaded himself in his basement apartment in the working-class neighborhood of Stratford, Connecticut. He called his VA. psychiatrist and told him he had a gun and threatened to shoot any officer who came near. All morning, police officers and the psychiatrist negotiated with Barker by phone as a SWAT team trained its weapons on his home.
It was not the first time Barker had created a standoff situation. He was awaiting a court appearance from an incident that had occurred on Christmas Day 1994, when the same VA psychiatrist called the police and told them he was worried about two of his patients. Officers were dispatched to a North Haven apartment where Barker had holed up with another Vietnam veteran, Joe Coyle; both were apparently very inebriated. Barker, armed with a rifle and a knife, threatened to kill the officers, then commit suicide. Both men had been taken into custody and committed to the VA. Medical Center.
The 1995 standoff finally ended after three anxious hours, when police negotiators persuaded Barker to give up. “The impression left by the story in the New Haven Register was that yet another Vietnam veteran, tormented by the faces of those he had killed, had gone berserk,” says Burkett, who discovered Barker and Coyle were long-term patients in the P.T.S.D. program.
The psychiatrists at the VA. Center clearly believed that the two men were deeply troubled Vietnam veterans. But according to military records, Kenley Barker of Easton, Connecticut, had joined the Navy (not the Marines) on September 30, 1965, and had been discharged after serving less than a year. He had been stationed at the U.S. Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, the U.S. Naval Base in Charleston, South Carolina, and the U.S. Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. Not Vietnam.
“Barker certainly has mental problems,” Burkett says, “but they are completely unrelated to the Vietnam War.” He found that Coyle was not a Vietnam veteran either. He’d served in the Army as an electrical repairman from February 26, 1962, to February 25, 1965, all in the United States.
How had Barker received his P.T.S.D. diagnosis if he hadn’t fought in Vietnam? Burkett looked hard at the peculiar nexus of the antiwar movement, the burgeoning counseling industry, and the guilt of a nation — and uncovered an immense public fraud completely overlooked by the press and historians and other experts on the· Vietnam War: the growing P.T.S.D. industry. Not only does it continue to perpetuate the image of traumatized Vietnam vets, it costs taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
Stress reactions to combat have been cited for centuries. In the American Civil War it was called “soldier’s heart”; in World War I, “shell shock.” In World War II psychiatrists called it “combat fatigue.” As Burkett discovered, however, the image of the disturbed veteran had not stuck as tenaciously to veterans of other wars as it did to Vietnam veterans. Prominent among those responsible for that circumstance was Robert Jay Lifton, a Yale psychiatry professor and former Air Force psychiatrist in Korea who became a zealous antiwar activist in the mid sixties.
In 1973 Lifton had published a book called Home From the War, which chronicled the horrors described by patients in “rap groups” he led with members of the New York chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Lifton would later admit that his was not a random sampling of Vietnam vets. “Almost all of them belong[ed] to the minority of Vietnam veterans who emerge with an articulate antiwar position,” he wrote. “I made no attempt to gather data from a ’representative’ group of veterans.”
In Burkett’s opinion, Lifton was stacking the deck, using the men as a means to advance his own agenda. Indeed, even before most Vietnam veterans had returned home, Lifton had apparently concluded that they would be plagued by mental afflictions. Burkett points to an article that appeared in The Washington Post in which Lifton is quoted saying that the unpopularity of the war was making it difficult for returning servicemen to justify their participation with a “minimum of guilt.”
“Why would Vietnam vets suffer from inner guilt for serving their country when no veterans of other wars suffered from inner guilt?” Burkett asks. “Lifton created a framework, then put anyone in it who was willing to say the ’right’ things.”
Burkett cites early research that contradicted Litton’s thesis. In 1974, Dr. Jonathan F. Barus, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, reported results of a study showing that Vietnam War combat veterans had no more adjustment problems than veterans who had not served in Vietnam.
While working with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C., Barus examined the military records of 577 Vietnam veterans and 172 servicemen who served elsewhere. His study indicated that 23 percent of Vietnam veterans had adjustment problems in their first seven months back in the United States. But 26.2 percent of veterans who didn’t go to Vietnam had adjustment problems as well. According to Barus, his findings challenged the “assumptions that the Vietnam experience or the reentry transition itself are debilitating stresses for the majority of returning veterans.”
But sensational nationwide anecdotal evidence pushed out a more scientific approach, and by the mid-seventies the image of the disturbed Vietnam vet began to gain ascendance. In 1979 Congress ordered the V.A. to establish Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Counseling Centers apart from the existing V.A . medical-center system. These storefronts and community clinics were called Vet Centers. “Thanks to Lifton and his cohorts,” Burkett says, “P.T.S.D. was spread on all Vietnam veterans like paint on a house.”
In 1980, largely because of lobbying by Lifton and his followers, P.T.S.D. became a separate classification in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III, the bible of the psychiatric field. Even more important, the V.A. recognized P.T.S.D. as a service-connected disorder. As a result, veterans with a P.T.S.D. disability rating of 100 percent now can net more than $3,000 a month tax-free, plus other government benefits.
Without quarrel, the V.A. has a mandate to help veterans, and its officials were responding to a perceived need. But, says Burkett, P.T.S.D. filled another need: Faced with a shrinking pool of veterans, with ever fewer victims of war wounds, V.A. doctors and therapists needed patients. What better than veterans so traumatized they may need therapy the rest of their lives? “Monetary incentives were now firmly in place on both the supply and the demand side,” Burkett says, “with the diagnosis of 100-percent-service-connected disability the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
As described in 1980 in the D.S.M.-III, post-traumatic stress syndrome is caused by a traumatic event “persistently re-experienced” in dreams, nightmares, or flashbacks, and may be triggered by symbolic events, like the anniversary of a battle. To be diagnosed as suffering from P.T.S.D. , a person should also have at least two symptoms (not present before the trauma), such as insomnia, irritability, difficulty concentrating, hypervigilance, or exaggerated startle response.
In practice, Burkett says, therapists began telling Vietnam vets that they might not know they had P.T.S.D., and broadened the list of “common” symptoms of the disorder to include psychic numbing, feelings of helplessness, depression, aggressiveness, fear of crowds, anxiety and panic attacks, anxiety-related headaches or backaches, and intrusive thoughts. “That covers just about everybody,” Burkett says.
As the belief that vast numbers of Vietnam vets were emotionally disturbed grew ever more pervasive, Congress in 1983 mandated the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina to undertake a study 9f P.T.S.D. When the National Vietnam Veteran Readjustment Study was released in 1988, Senator Alan Cranston, then chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, called the findings “nothing short of shocking.”
According to the study, 15.2 percent of male Vietnam-theater veterans, or about 479,000, suffered from P.T.S.D. An additional 11 percent were then suffering “partial” P.T.S.D. That brought the number who suffered from “partial” or full P.T.S.D. at the time of the study to 830, 000, or about 26 percent of all Vietnam vets. Even more amazing was the estimation of the “lifetime” prevalence of P.T.S.D. in Vietnam veterans — that 30.9 percent of males and 26.9 percent of females had P.T.S.D. sometime in their lives.
“These findings mean that over the course of their lives, more than half [53.4 percent] of male theater veterans and nearly half [ 48.1 percent] of female veterans have experienced clinically significant stress-reaction symptoms,” the study concludes. “This represents about 1.7 million veterans of the Vietnam War.” Not only that, but “about one half of the men and one third of the women who have ever had P.T.S.D. still have it today,” the report said.
The truth, Burkett says, is “the results were shocking because they were so wrong. A gullible Congress bought into a myth created by advocates looking for taxpayers’ money.”
As he points out in Stolen Valor, a survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and released the same year found much different results. The C.D.C. study concluded that perhaps 15 percent of Vietnam veterans experienced some symptoms of combat-related P.T.S.D. at some time during or after military service. But only 2.2 percent exhibited enough of the disorder to warrant the diagnosis — not more than 50 percent, as indicated by the N.V.V.R.S.
The N.V.V.R.S., which examined only 1,600 Vietnam veterans and 750 non-Vietnam vets, was fatally flawed from the beginning, Burkett contends, because unlike the C.D.C. study, it didn’t verify the subjects’ stories against their military records. Nor did the N.V.V.R.S. researchers obtain the records of veterans in the control group of already diagnosed P.T.S.D. patients. “Unbelievably, at least 40 percent of those in the control group did not report enough symptoms to qualify for the [classification] in the D.S.M.-III” Burkett says. “To compensate, the researchers simply changed the definition of P.T.S.D.”
When the results of the N.V.V.R.S. were announced, the V.A. and veterans’ advocates exuberantly claimed the research “proved” the need for more Vet Centers, more funding, more jobs. During annual hearings of the House and Senate Committees on Veterans’ Affairs, the N.V.V.R.S. research invariably is raised as justification for expansion of P.T.S.D. programs. The C.D.C. study, which involved eight times as many veterans and stuck to the O.S.M.- III definition of P.T.S.D , is dismissed as irrelevant.
By 1994 the cost of administering P.T.S.D. programs through the V.A. medical facilities had grown to more than$47 million a year. Add that to the Vet Center program, which has 201 centers and now costs $58 million a year. What’s more, P.T.S.D. programs are not shrinking, they are growing, as they find more “victims.” The National Center for P.T.S.D. has now established a women’s division, targeting not only female veterans but spouses of veterans. As of July 1998 there were 105,471 veterans with various service-connected P.T.S.D. ratings. Of those, 25,271 have 100-percent ratings. Based on what we know about current levels of compensation, the best estimate of the cost to taxpayers of just those with 100-percent ratings — which includes V.A. and Social Security benefits — is $1 billion to $1.5 billion.
Meanwhile, thousands of frauds and fakers are lining up to get their share of the P.T.S.D. goodie pie. From interviews with therapists inside the V.A., Burkett has discovered that beyond verification of eligibility for services, patients’ military experiences are rarely verified because therapists believe they can tell when patients are lying. Unfortunately, few V.A. officials want to take on the task of getting rid of the pretenders. “Challenging a patient is not part of the process,” Burkett says. “Everything is accepted as fact. No one wants to make a stink, because it could cost him his job.”
Indeed, a real disincentive exists for anyone at the V.A. to doubt the authenticity of patients’ wartime experiences. “The V.A. system needs a body count to justify its existence,” says Burkett. “What better affliction to rally around than P.T.S.D., something that is very subjective? The World War II generation is dying off, and no one in the V.A. is going to exclude patients, even if it means accepting fraud.”
Upon its publication last September, Stolen Valor received numerous critical kudos. It also instantly generated controversy, sending a man back to prison and embarrassing Mike Wallace of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” the Boston Globe, and former Massachusetts Governor William Weld.
The cause of the controversy was one of the stories that had shocked Burkett the most.
On a June night in 1972, Joe Yandle and Eddie Fielding pulled in at Mystic Liquors in Boston looking for quick drug money. The two men had worked half a dozen stickups already that day. Yandle, a Vietnam veteran frantic for his next heroin fix, sat in the car as getaway driver while Fielding went inside. A few minutes later Fielding came running out and jumped into the car. Inside the store the proprietor, Joseph Reppucci, a 65-year-old man with two teenage sons, lay dead on the floor. Fielding subsequently claimed Reppucci had lunged for the weapon and the gun had gone off.
Fielding and Yandle were convicted of murder. Though Fielding pulled the trigger, both men received the same sentence: life in prison without possibility of parole. For years, it seemed Yandle would spend the rest of his life in custody. But that was before the Vietnam Veterans of America jumped in and the “Free Joe Yandle” movement gathered momentum. Stories about Yandle’s ordeal in Vietnam — what he’d endured and had been forced to do — began to appear in the press.
Yandle claimed his two tours in Vietnam had been so traumatic, particularly during the infamous siege of Khe Sanh in 1968, that he turned to heroin to dull the horrors of combat. With two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for valor, he came home to the States, where heroin was the only thing that could help him cope with the flashbacks.
Boston Globe reporter Kevin Cullen wrote a series of stories about Yandle’s crime and punishment, always referring to Yandle as a “decorated Vietnam veteran.” In February 1994, “60 Minutes” reporter Mike Wallace broadcast a segment called “The Getaway Drivers,” comparing the cases of Joe Yandle, Vietnam veteran-turned-criminal, and Katherine Ann Power, antiwar protester-turned-criminal. Power had finally surfaced after years underground to face criminal charges in the murder of a Boston policeman during a 1970 bank robbery; she had driven the getaway car in a crime committed to raise money to further the antiwar effort. While Yandle, a two-tour “war hero,” was condemned to spend the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison, Power was given only five years, a virtual slap on the wrist. “The irony was inescapable,” Burkett says.
With the help of the Boston Globe and “60 Minutes,” veterans advocates began pressing Governor Weld to commute Yandle’s sentence. But no one but Burkett had bothered to independently check Yandle’s military records, which revealed that he had been a supply clerk assigned to the 9th Marine Amphibious Brigade in Okinawa — a Japanese island far from the war zone. He never served in Vietnam. Yandle had submitted forged documents to the parole board.
After discovering Yandle’s lie, Burkett called an aide to Weld, who promised to look into the matter. Apparently no one did. Weld commuted Yandle’s sentence in 1995, and Yandle walked out of prison a free man. Burkett was outraged, and vented his outrage by including the story in his book as an example of just how easy it is to fool not only America’s most distinguished investigative reporters, but the legal system as well.
Prior to the publication of Stolen Valor, Burkett offered the Yandle material to “60 Minutes,” but Wallace declined to correct the mistake. Burkett then went to ABC’s “20/20,” where producer Michael Bicks did his own independent investigation verifying Burkett’s information. A day after Yandle was exposed on “20/20,” new Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci ordered Yandle returned to prison. (Wallace eventually did a short segment on Yandle, but only after hearing that Yandle had admitted to “20/20” that he had lied.)
“Jug” Burkett is not about to rest on his laurels. Now acknowledged as an expert in military records by the National Archives, and much in demand as a lecturer and on news shows, he intends to continue his efforts to restore the honor of a generation of soldiers that is among the finest America ever produced. “True Vietnam veterans answered the call during a most difficult time in America’s history,” he says. “They served gallantly, they served well, and to this day they are proud of their service to America. America should be proud of them.”
