Word: viets
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...reminiscent of the '60s, or of the old days of the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. But the exercises have been a bit forlorn. Last March, an ex-Marine named James Hopkins crashed his Jeep into the lobby of a West Los Angeles Veterans Hospital and blasted away at the walls with a pistol and rifle, screaming that he was losing his mind because of Agent Orange. Two months later, he was found dead with a jug of whisky and an empty pill bottle beside him. A former artillery sergeant, Steve Androff, 33, went on last week with...
...snail darters or baby seals. But the vets' anger, emerging now less encumbered by the old shame of the loser, less haunted by the guilt of the war's uniquely vivid violence, has a new force. It contains a certain aggressive pride, expressed almost for the first time. The Viet Nam veterans may have been knocked off the tracks of their careers by two or three years; they may not have caught up yet with their peers, but they now insist that they are a resource for the nation, not an embarrassment. They are taking on positions of influence?many...
Indeed, the new attention to the problems of the Viet Nam vet really does amount to something deeper than fad. The dimensions of the change are practical, symbolic and, in the widest sense, spiritual. Congress recently has been showing itself remarkably responsive to the veteran's needs, even in these days of Reagan's almost-everything-must-go budget cuts. Congressmen are sensitive to public sentiments. Besides, there are 31 Viet Nam-era vets sitting in Congress now. The Administration's plans to cut $131 million out of veterans' counseling, employment and education programs detonated real indignation among Congressmen...
...sort of legislation can only make a dent in the Viet Nam vet's profound sense of exclusion, his bruised conviction that America ?a nation that cherishes almost an ideology of its own fairness?has done him deeply wrong. The vet's first port of call, the Veterans Administration, seems to him abundant evidence that the nation he risked his skin for cares very little in return. The VA is, they say, a $23 billion-a-year bureaucracy devoted mainly to older vets (the World War II generation), a social service agency dispensing health care not to the wounded...
...women who served in Viet Nam make a case against the VA as well. Their chief organizer in Washington is Lynda Van Devanter, 34, a nurse lieutenant who labored in an evacuation hospital in Pleiku in 1969-70. "Women veterans are the last minority," she says...