Bringing It All Back Home (22 page)

In 1981, Mayor Koch appointed twenty-seven citizens to begin planning a memorial that would acknowledge the service of those New Yorkers who served in the Vietnam War. This group gravitated toward two ideas: a physical memorial to New York City's Vietnam veterans and a “living memorial” to assist those veterans who had needs that were not being met by agencies of the government. In 1982, the twenty-seven were transformed into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, which had a hundred members, the inner core of whom were Vietnam veterans. This group built the memorial, created the assistance program, and gave shape to a powerful restatement of the Vietnam experience.

Bernard Edelman was among the veterans subsequently appointed by the mayor to the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission. He explains how he got involved:

My ten-month tour of duty [in Vietnam] in 1970 shaped me, for better or for worse. I was a broadcast specialist/correspondent, assigned to the United States Army Vietnam–Information Office. While I was not caught up in combat, I saw my share of its aftermath. I lost friends; I made lifelong friends there, too. Vietnam became, and remains, an integral facet of my frame of reference, as it is, I believe, for most veterans who served in a combat zone.

Four months after I was released from active duty, I went to Washington as a participant/chronicler of Operation Dewey Canyon III, the first major demonstration by veterans since the Bonus March some forty years before. Some of my photographs were part of the first art show, in St. Paul, Minnesota, of the works of Vietnam veterans. And one year after that, on Veterans Day 1981, we brought an expanded version of this show to New York City, to the old birdhouse in the Central Park Zoo. Some 1,500 people—veterans, their families, friends—came to opening night; some 650 people a day viewed the show during its monthlong run. Then Vietnam came back into my life full force. I was named by Mayor Koch as one of a hundred citizens who would comprise the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission.

A central goal of the art show Edelman curated, and of the New York City memorial, was to allow men and women to develop pride in their status as veterans.

There are a lot of people who—they just put their veteran-ness, their veteran's identity, in their pocket someplace, or in a closet someplace, and there it stays. When we did the Vietnam art show, Jerry Balcom was a court officer; he's in private business now. And I used something of his, and it was only later that he told me he'd been a Marine, very proud of it, but he said he only literally came out of the closet around like 1979, 1980, because this wasn't something you necessarily put on your résumé. If you were a veteran, particularly if you were a combat veteran, there was this assumption that you were somehow fucked-up.

As a member of the commission, he, like the others, worked to recast the meaning of service in Vietnam.

As the commission defined its mission, it decided to create a monument that celebrated the lives of those who had died but also of those who had survived. The members wanted to “acknowledge the service and sacrifice of all veterans from New York City who did their individual and collective best under trying and unusual circumstances,” to “evoke reconciliation and an awareness of the enduring human values reflected in the conflicting experiences,” and finally to show “the contradictory yet universally shared experiences of war and peace, danger and relief, weakness and strength, isolation and comradeship.” The veterans on the commission demanded a “living memorial,” a project that would help needy Vietnam veterans make the transition to successful civilian careers.

The monument's design was selected in a juried competition, as had been the Vietnam wall in Washington, D.C. A panel composed of veterans and architectural experts judged approximately 572 entries from forty-six countries. The architects William Fellows and Peter Wormser, together with the Vietnam veteran Joseph Ferrandino, submitted the winning design, and their plans became the basis for the memorial.
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The memorial's centerpiece, a wall, is set back from the street itself by approximately a hundred yards. It is sixteen feet high and sixty-six feet long, and there are two door-sized passages through it. At chest height, there are two silver shelves, on which people can leave photographs, flowers, and other mementos; the idea was derived from the practice of leaving items at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Ferrandino, who came up with the original conception of the memorial, described it as “a window through which to view the Vietnam experience. The experience must be provided by the people whose lives were touched by Vietnam … We are not looking for great literature, flowery prose or correct grammar. We are looking for the truth from many different points of view.”
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For that reason, many of the written texts inscribed into the wall were drawn from the more than three thousand pieces of correspondence sent to the commission in response to a call for letters. In 2001, the names of the 1,741 New York City dead were installed on a walkway leading from the street to the wall itself.

The parade was important, too, and the commission understood it would be so. The veterans' parade poster said: “If you are a Vietnam veteran, you're invited to take part in a very special parade. It will mark the 10th anniversary of the end of the war … We urge you not to miss this special celebration. After all, it's being held in your honor.”

The multiday celebration of the new memorial began May 6 with the dedication of the wall at an event on the USS
Intrepid
, a World War II aircraft carrier anchored in the Hudson River, where Donald Trump handed the commission a check for $1 million. The celebration concluded with a ceremony at the wall attended by an estimated twelve thousand people and a display of fireworks over the East River.

On May 7, 1975, President Ford had issued a proclamation declaring that day “the last day of the Vietnam era,” and so the seventh was chosen as the date of the “Welcome Home” Parade. John Hamill, the medic and Brooklyn-born brother of the New York
Daily News
columnist Denis Hamill, remarks:

For me the most special part of that day … was when we passed Pace University. And from the windows appeared all these secretaries, and students, women 10 and 15 years younger than us, a generation removed, who waved and blew us kisses. That moved me. Unlike a lot of places around the country, in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn I never saw anyone spit on Vietnam vets when they came home. In our neighborhood there was a lot of individual support. But this was the first time strangers had embraced us as a group. It meant a lot. Twenty years later, it still does.
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The themes of reconnection and mutual acknowledgment echoed throughout the festivities. As one veteran quoted in
The New York Times
said, “Anybody who's been in 'Nam is automatically accepted by anybody else who's been in 'Nam.”
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As the effort to build the Water Street structure gathered steam, the commission began to consider the other central component of its mission. In order to create a successful “living memorial,” the commission needed to understand the problems veterans faced.

Professor Robert Laufer of Brooklyn College prepared a study for the commission that found that Vietnam veterans were more densely concentrated in low-paying jobs than Vietnam-era counterparts. He also found that Vietnam veterans appeared to experience more difficulty in holding on to prestigious, high-paying jobs than did other members of their age cohort; that 25 percent of heavy-combat veterans had some PTSD symptoms; that 43 percent of heavy-combat veterans reported drinking regularly, weekly, for at least four months in the last year; that heavy-combat veterans were significantly more likely to smoke marijuana; and that the proportion of veterans using hard drugs was very low.

At this point, the commission's efforts connected with the work of other entities operating veterans' initiatives in the city and nationally. A number of Wall Street employees had joined together as the New York Vietnam Veterans Group in 1981, at least in part because of their view that the returning Iranian hostages received better treatment than Vietnam veterans had. According to one Wall Streeter, Eugene Gitelson, “Those of us who were successful hadn't had anything to do with our vet identity for almost 15 years. We decided it was time we did something with our expertise to help those who weren't as fortunate.”
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Gitelson himself had been a rifle platoon leader in Vietnam. After the war he worked in marketing research for the Seagram Company and directed a drug prevention program in the South Bronx. Later he earned an MBA from New York University, worked at Chase Manhattan Bank, and then became a corporate consultant.

In 1981, Thomas Pauken, the director of ACTION, a federal umbrella agency for volunteer activities, created a program designed to tap the leadership potential of Vietnam-era servicemen and servicewomen. The idea was that veterans could provide various kinds of mentoring and assistance to their peers who were doing less well. President Ronald Reagan provided a commitment of federal funds for the program, called the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program (VVLP). Edward Timberlake, at one time a national director of the VVLP, described his task this way: “Our job was really twofold. We had to address the problems of underemployment and unemployment among Vietnam Veterans and also the problem of a false stereotype of the Vietnam veteran as victim and loser. We really couldn't impact on the former without also working on the latter … I came on board the leadership program because I wanted to do everything I could to change the image.” The program engaged in a campaign to combat stereotypes in the media. For example, the VVLP reported that in some locations it “made direct contact with key local media personnel to insure that any news event potentially damaging to the image of Vietnam veterans is also analyzed with the intent of objectively seeking rational explanations for the behavior involved.” It also organized “recognition events,” including “parades and proclamations designating Vietnam veterans ‘day' or ‘week,' luncheons, banquets, and memorial services.”
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The VVLP had enormous reach. The historian Patrick Hagopian has documented the VVLP's role in vetting Hollywood feature-film scripts to determine which ones deserved the Pentagon's financial and logistical support. For example, the first of the Rambo films,
First Blood
, was turned down because it portrayed the central character as a “psycho.”
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The VVLP office at 25 Broadway opened in 1982 in space donated by the brokerage firm Drexel Burnham Lambert. The objective was to help veterans relate their military skills to the job market. The VVLP eschewed any interest in issues such as Agent Orange or “whether the Vietnam War was won or lost, and by whom.” Indeed, it asserted it only cared about “harnessing the unused or underused energies of a remarkable pool of men and women who still have a lot to contribute to their country.” The VVLP was convinced that these individuals would do whatever it took to get themselves out of the welfare system and into meaningful careers. Its central argument was that “we haven't mothballed our experience … It is still working for America.”
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Ed German was one of the first volunteers for the New York VVLP He remembers:

Gene Gitelson contacted me and told me about what he was proposing to do, and once we got started with it, the whole effort to put together an organization of Vietnam veterans seemed to help to validate our experience, which was never validated before, you know … Everything was just negative. A lot of it came from the media and the movies. A lot of movies came out, not Vietnam movies, but just general regular movies that somewhere in the script would be a sniper or somebody and then he would be identified in the film as a Vietnam veteran and that all Vietnam veterans were crazy. The whole thing about losers was because a lot of veterans came home and dropped out of society and were on drugs and stuff like that. We weren't seen as heroes when we came home. There was nobody there to welcome us, we had no parades, and there were no organizations that were helping us do anything. Nobody. There was a fear in the general public if you mentioned Vietnam. A lot of people shunned it and didn't want you to be involved with what they were doing because they felt like you weren't stable. The Vietnam vets were portrayed as being people who had been through something so horrific and crazy that it was going to affect them and that the war itself wasn't successful.

The whole thing about VVLP was vets helping vets. One of the strategies of the program was to identify successful Vietnam veterans. Veterans who had come back and had some success in their careers and businesses. Veterans who might be able to, in some way, offer a hand to help those veterans who had not been so successful. Identifying those successful veterans also helped to validate our experience because there was a general notion that Vietnam veterans were losers.

Corporate assistance was critical to the effort. Manufacturers Hanover provided money to create a database of prospective employers and job candidates.
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The VVLP asked other major corporations for help, too. A solicitation letter to IBM echoed the national leadership's goal of restoring the image of the Vietnam veteran. It asserted a connection between employment, a veteran's identity, and the idea that Vietnam veterans could see themselves differently. “For too long,” the letter said, “veterans have been seen as victims and unfortunately have accepted that role to some extent. We do not believe this is so. We believe that veterans are resources that are sorely needed in this community and the only way we can make that happen is for veterans to take that responsibility on themselves with our guidance.” The organization claimed that “those who did well after they returned from the service were, until recently, reluctant to step forward and use their experience and door-opening ability to help their fellow veterans.” The VVLP therefore was an opportunity for well-placed veterans to acknowledge their veteran status and help others, who got a “second and perhaps last opportunity to reenter the mainstream.”
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