Vietnam veterans find a new role

Steve Johnson Reporter • E-mail

For Tim Beebe, the hard reality of what it meant to be a Vietnam veteran came a few months after he returned to the United States, when his riot control unit was sent to face off with protesters at the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. “It became abundantly clear to me that there was something wrong with the fabric here,” Beebe remembers.

For Bob Peragallo, it came at the very moment he stepped off the plane in Los Angeles, when an anti-war protester spit in his face. “It just blew my mind,” said Peragallo, now an ordained minister in British Columbia. “We'd heard there was a lot of unrest but it was just a mess."

For Jim Garrett, returning home to South Carolina in 1969 after a year in Vietnam with the 3d Marine Division, it wasn’t the reaction that set his head spinning, but the lack of any reaction. “Nobody mentioned that I’d been gone anywhere,” he remembers. “There was an expectation I would pick up with my life where I left off and just get on with it.”

"I stayed angry all the time because people here were just walking around doing day-to-day things when my friends, my fellow Marines in Vietnam were getting killed," said Garrett. "Nobody here had any involvement in the war."

Little appreciation for service
What stung most for many veterans, was the almost complete lack of recognition of their service.

"We were all a bunch of losers," said Peragallo, who went to Vietnam with the 3d Marines in 1965. "It was a little humiliating."

E. Kenneth Hoffman Street child, Saigon, 1970

“When I came back from Vietnam, one of the quickest ways to stop a conversation was to say you were a Vietnam vet — no one knew what to say,” said Garrett, now a senior Veteran’s Administration official in New England.

He remembers a large family Sunday dinner in South Carolina: “We were sitting around in a room watching TV when a jet flew over making a loud noise, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor looking up at everybody."

His relatives helped him to his feet, Garrett said, “But then everybody acted as though it didn’t happen. People were afraid to ask questions.”

Blaming the troops
As more and more Americans turned against the war, they also turned against the men and women who were serving there, blaming them for the failure to defeat the Viet Cong, tainting them all for the well-publicized actions of a few. “The veterans of the Vietnam War became a scapegoat for all of the political shenanigans that went on,” Peragallo said.

And the news media piled on. “There are always incidents that happen in wars, atrocities, that were often not reported, but that now were captured on TV,” said Garrett. “The American people had never seen American soldiers doing that.”

The United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1973; two years later, 30 years ago this weekend, the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces. The United States tried to forget everything it had ever known about Vietnam, including its veterans. Even some traditional veterans groups turned their backs on Vietnam vets.

“There was this stigma because the Vietnam War was the only war the U.S. has ever lost,” Beebe said. “But we would argue it was the only war where our soldiers never lost a single battle. But some veterans associations didn’t welcome Vietnam vets.”

From those depths, the road back has been a slow one, but it was the Vietnam vets themselves who found the way. They started by learning to talk about the unspeakable. It wasn't easy.

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