Monday, March 7, 1983
Daily Nebraskan
1
li cysmig to separate war fro Bin wan'ows
Jt wilj be another spring of disappointment for a lot
of Vietnam war veterans. The good feeling of last
November's dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
in Washington partly has been dispersed by a Veterans
Administration that refuses to admit the existence of the
Agent Orange problem and by many who think, as Rod
Davis ironically put it in last month's Progressive
t
;
Eric
Peterson
magazine, that "what we have lea is a rather large
contingent of exquisitely honed gladiators who mill
around with their unseemly problems amid the amber
waves of grain and purple mountain majesty."
Yet the memorial remains something tangible for
Vietnam veterans, a sign that the country is ready to
commit itself to that war's troubled veterans and
survivors, or at least to admit they are there.
"The monument was the best thing that happened to
Vietnam veterans since the end of the war," said post
Vietnam era veteran John Koopman, president of the
UNL Student Veterans. "They got the sense that 'Now
we got something.' That means a lot."
The veterans' monument itself has become a kind of
political battleground. It is a stark black granite wedge
engraved with the names of the 57,939 American soldiers
who were killed in Vietnam. At the time of the
monument's dedication near the end of November,
there was a national salute to Vietnam veterans in which
more than 15,000 of them participated.
Conservative supporters and liberal critics of the war
could not hold back from ideological comment on the
proceedings. President Reagan made his famous statement,
about the noble intentions that he thought began the
war.: "We are beginning to appreciate that they were
fighting for a just cause."
And many veterans who thought the starkness of the
Vietnam monument was a sign of shame about the
enterprise (and who shared Reagan's view of the war)
secured the support of Interior Secretary James Watt
for a couple of additions to the monument: a flagpole
and a realistic sculpture of three soldiers, which will
come later.
But Reagan's defense of the Vietnam War does not
necessarily mean taking responsibility for all of its effects,
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either m Southeast Asia or at home. "I think the Reagan
administration's policies have indirectly hurt veterans
because of cutting down the size of government,"
Koopman pointed out.
Particularly reprehensible is the Veterans
Administration's negligence regarding Agent Orange -a
defoliant extensively used in Vietnam, named for the
orange-striped containers the stuff came in. Agent Orange
contained dioxin, a poison that has caused blindness in
some veterans and birth defects in the children of others.
Koopman said the VA does not admit responsibility for
Agent Orange infections beyond an occasional 5 percent
disability payment for skin problems resulting from it.
(Veterans' disability payments are made on a percentage
basis of a fixed amount according to the extent of
disability.)
Koopman said letters from the VA will begin with
assurances of concern and involvement in the Agent
Orange issue and end with the flat statement that there
is no proof that the issue actually exists.
"They need more vocal people - they need to be
pushed," Koopman said.
A larger and more persistent difficulty is what former
VA administrator Max Cleland called trying to "separate
the war from the warrior." Reagan looks at the Vietnam
veterans as a good soldier who was prevented from doing
his job by near-traitorous protesters at home, while a
few people on the other side think of veterans as
' monstrous baby killers.
These ideological considerations are irrelevant to most
Vietnam veterans, Koopman said. "They would see the
war as Happening, tic said, "and disagree with it. and
yet go out of duty and commitment, not so much to
America as to your friends and the people you knew who
were going."
The monument in Washington may help separate the
war from the warrior. As Koopman said, "Whether
Vietnam was right or wrong, we were really wrong to
blame the veterans."
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