Post Vietnam War Activities
By 1973, US combat involvement in Vietnam ended, and VVAW changed its emphasis to include advocating amnesty for draft resisters and dissenters. President Jimmy Carter eventually granted an amnesty in 1980.
There were two significant battles fought simultaneously by VVAW after the fighting in Vietnam ended in 1975, that of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Agent Orange.
As VVAW gained members in the late 1960s, they realized that many veterans were having readjustment problems. As early as 1970, VVAW initiated "rap groups" in which veterans could discuss the troubling aspects of the war, their disillusionment with it, and their experiences on arriving home. They enlisted the aid of two prominent psychiatrists, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton and Dr. Chaim F. Shatan to direct and add focus to their sessions. Their continued pressure and activism caused what had been known as "Post-Vietnam Syndrome" to be recognized in 1980 as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The VVAW "rap group" treatment methods are the basis for treating PTSD today.
In 1978 Chicago Veterans Administration caseworker Maude de Victor noticed a pattern in cancers and other illnesses suffered by Vietnam veterans and linked those illnesses with exposure to herbicides like Agent Orange, and its dioxin contaminants. VVAW led veterans organizations in the struggle to force the government to test, treat and compensate the victims of those poisons. Congress mandated a study of Agent Orange in 1979. Veterans sued the herbicide manufacturers, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, in 1982. Two years later the companies settled the suit for $180 million to compensate what at that time was over 200,000 claimants.
These were lonely campaigns since the "main stream" veterans groups regarded Vietnam veterans as "crybabies and losers" in general, and VVAW in particular was seen as being unpatriotic and anti-American. A natural ally, Vietnam Veterans of America, was not founded by VVAW member Robert Muller until 1978. It was not until 1990 that the American Legion and VVA filed suit against the government for failing to conduct the study ordered by Congress in 1979.
Several members moved on to prominent positions in society. In 1978 former VVAW member Bobby Muller co-founded the Vietnam Veterans of America. Former member John Kerry became Lt. Governor of Massachusetts in 1982, and won a United States Senate seat in 1984. Ron Kovic went on to write Born on the Fourth of July, an autobiography which became an Academy Award winning movie in 1989.
Every five years, members and former members attend regular reunions, with the 1992 event attracting hundreds of veterans to commemorate the founding of the organization twenty five years earlier. VVAW continues to organize programs and fundraising events in support of veterans, peace, and social justice. ”
Read more about this topic: Vietnam Veterans Against The War
Famous quotes containing the words post, vietnam, war and/or activities:
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, “Boy, where’s the post office?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, where might the drugstore be?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about a good cheap hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?”
“No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.””
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“I told them I’m not going to let Vietnam go the way of China. I told them to go back and tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word, but by God, I want something for my money. I want ‘em to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists. And then I want ‘em to leave me alone, because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The dead have been awakened—shall I sleep?
The world’s at war with tyrants—shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe—and shall I pause to reap?
I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch;
Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear,
Its echo in my heart.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)