Dropping The Bomb on Vietnam Myths

By: Monica Tomutsa/News Editor

Posted: 10/26/05

Last week, co-author of Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation was Robbed of its Heroes and its History B.G. Burkett, shed light on wide-spread and completely false misconceptions surrounding the Vietnam War. While trying to raise funds for a Texas Vietnam memorial, he realized that the media's influence and false coverage had altered the memory of Vietnam for the worse.

Correlating Burkett's lecture and the Vietnam War with something the UD core esteems, Thomas G. West, politics professor, drew upon Plato's image of the cave in his introduction.

"We here at UD read Plato's Republic and are shown Plato's cave, but what does that mean in the real world? Plato's cave suggests that the human condition is that we are all living underground chained in, with our eyes riveted on the wall in front of us where we see nothing but shadows made by people hiding behind us. We think the shadows are reality," he said.

West explained how Plato's Cave is still pertinent today. "If that image is true, it means that we as Americans and UD students for the most part believe a lot of nonsense; we believe things that are just not true. Another thing that we learn from the philosophers is just how hard it is to get out of the cave. We talk about the cave, but most people who talk about it are still in the cave. They say, 'well I've done the UD core curriculum-I'm out of the cave, I'm wise, I'm a philosopher' but when you ask them about current events you get the standard opinions," he explained.

Burkett graduated from Vanderbilt University before he toured Vietnam with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade from 1968-69. When he returned, he moved to Dallas where he has been a stockbroker for the last 35 years. He was also an adjunct professor at UD for three semesters.

Burkett grew up in a military neighborhood and his father was a World War II airforce colonel.

"Going in the military was not something my father necessarily encouraged or discouraged; it was just an accepted thing that when I got out of college I was going to go in the military. I had other siblings and paying for a bunch of kids to go to college was expensive," he said.

During his senior year at Vanderbilt, Burkett went down to the Little Rock airforce base and enlisted to go in two weeks after graduation.

"The fact that there was a war going on didn't really enter into the question one way or the other, and actually for most of us who served in Vietnam. Call it the stupidity of youth, but there was a little bit of excitement that we weren't just going to practice the game for three years we were actually going to get in the game.

"While stationed at Fort Hood, I got to participate in the Chicago riots with Martin Luther King Jr., and within the week of returning from those riots I volunteered for Vietnam," he said.

After serving in the military from 1966-1969, Burkett went to graduate school in Tennessee and then moved to Dallas. In the mid-1980's, a friend of Burkett's from Vanderbilt told him about an organization that was trying to build a Vietnam memorial in Texas, but was having trouble raising funds. He asked if Burkett would be interested in going to a meeting with this group and he agreed.

"Texas alone lost 3,427 men in Vietnam. There virtually wasn't a community in the state that wasn't touched by the losses at Vietnam. We realized this organization didn't know what they were doing and were already in debt $100,000," Burkett said. "Being in the financial world, I knew how to approach the foundations and corporations. So we found another partner and my friend, Paul Russell, and I jumped into it. I became a co-chairman and he became the president."

The three divided up the labor. Burkett was in charge of fundraising, Russell handled all construction and city-permits, and the other co-chair, because of his connections, became the rainman.

Burkett said the universal response from foundations and corporations when he solicited donations, was "Why would we give any money to those bums-meaning Vietnam veterans?"

"Well, I didn't serve with any bums. The guys I served with were the cream of the crop, and a lot of them came from Ivy League schools. I realized very quickly I didn't have a fundraising problem, I had a public-relations problem," he said.

Burkett decided to find the root of the problem, and called the Department of Labor to find employment statistics for Vietnam Veterans.

"Four months later the study came out. The unemployment rate in the economy at the time among all males was 6%," he said. "But among the men who went to Vietnam it was 3.9%--the lowest unemployment rate of any major group in America.

Burkett looked into the apparently high suicide rate among Vietnam veterans and found it was not even remotely true.

"Vietnam veterans have one of the lowest suicide rates in America. The two years after the war there was a slightly elevated rate that was only modestly higher then our peers who never went into the military. It fell off dramatically after that," he said.

Widespread Vietnam Veteran homelessness is another myth.

"Back, around the late 70's Teddy Kennedy had a $10 million government grant to have a building in Boston for all the homeless Vietnam veterans. Several of guys gave testimonies about how they ended up on the street after Vietnam, but I got the military records of those individuals and virtually none of them were Vietnam veterans," he said.

Burkett said other investigations have shown that very few "homeless veterans" were in the military.

Another myth he dispelled was the incarceration rate of Vietnam veterans. The prisons are not full of criminal veterans, Burkett said.

"I went to the bureau of prisons and got the statistics, the demographics. At the time there were 1 million men in prison. 55% of those in prison are black, only 10.5% Vietnam Veterans are black. 80% of the incarcerated do not have a high school degree. As I mentioned 90% of Vietnam Veterans do have a high school degree. You can't get in the military with a felony conviction and 80% of the incarcerated have a felony conviction as a youth offender. About 75% came from broken homes, but about 80% of Vietnam Veterans came from a 2-parent home," he said.

Another falsity surrounding the war is the exceptionally young age of enlistees and draftees.

"I often ask reporters, 'How many 18 years old draftees do you think died in Vietnam?' Most of the time they answer between 10,000 and 24,000. The answer was 101," he said.
Only seven black 18-year-old draftees died in Vietnam.

Burkett explained that the draft starts with men in their mid-20s and works down.

"The average age of Vietnam Veterans was 23 at the mid-point of their time in Vietnam," he said. "Of the 18 and 19 year olds that died in Vietnam, 97% of them were volunteers."

Burkett said drug rates were also low among Vietnam veterans, partly due to surprise inspections.

"You could buy marijuana very easily; they literally sold it in bags on the street. But when you're living in a bay with 40 guys and you may be going into combat, I can guarantee if you're doing drugs-marijuana or otherwise-the 39 other guys are going to report it because they're not going into combat with some pot-head," he said.

Drug rates increased at the end of the war, due to the bitterness and boredom among the troops waiting to come home, Burkett said.

"By that time, over 90% of anyone who had served in Vietnam had already come and gone, so the high drug rate occurred among just that 10%. And the vast majority, whatever they were taking, they quit taking the day they came home," he said.

Burkett said race was another politically incorrect myth he tackled. At the time of the Vietnam War, 13.5% of the draft pool was black yet only 12.5% among this group were drafted.

Because of less access to medical care and lower educational rates, blacks failed the physical and aptitude exams at a higher rate than whites.

"Nobody's ever telling the real story of the black man in Vietnam. They are always focusing on "The black man; the victim". They weren't victims; they were patriotic Americans. 75 percent of the blacks that served in Vietnam were volunteers-exactly the same rate as whites. Twenty won the Medal of Honor, 100 won the Distinguished Service Cross and dozens upon dozens won the airforce cross and the Navy Cross.

"Nobody knows that about 300 went on to become admirals or generals in the armed services of America," he said.

Burkett also refuted the idea that it was only the poor or middle class who served and died in Vietnam.

Contrary to an explosive story that said rich kids stayed home, Burkett said high per-capita income communities like Beverly Hills, and Grosse Pointe, Mich. actually had significantly higher casualty rates than the norm.

Burkett countered the argument that there was widespread desertion and chaos amongst the ranks by comparing Vietnam with WW2. He also said personal problems-like a dying father or unfaithful girlfriend-were the prevalent cause.

"There were 250 desertions in Vietnam over a 12-year period and only 24 of those gave the war as an excuse for desertion. WW2, in Europe alone, there were 20,000," he said.

Similarly, Burkett refutes the popular media claim that Vietnam was the war of atrocities.

"I didn't hear of one single atrocity from my unit in the six years I was there. Over the 12 years of war there were about 223 individuals tried for capital crime. There's not a police chief in the world who wouldn't take that as a crime rate in his city of 3.3 million," he said. "You have some guys come into the military who are bad guys. Going into the military doesn't cure or refine your soul. You also have good guys who will do bad things in the worst of circumstances. But we were lectured constantly in Vietnam about the fact that we were guests there."

An important consideration when getting the historical facts straight, Burkett stressed.

Vietnam had never been a country, and the problem was not a civil war. Ho Chi Mihn had 20,000 to 30,000 guerrillas in the south, which he refused to remove. South Vietnam or the Republic of Vietnam was a member of the Southeast Asia treaty organization; we had a treaty obligation to defend them," he said.

Contrary to popular opinion, the South Vietnamese did not stand neutrally beside the foreign troops. They fought alongside their allies and suffered many casualties, equivalent to loosing about 6 million American troops.

Burkett said that despite repeated arguments with donors about the politically incorrect myths, they were still able to raise enough money. The memorial was dedicated by Pres. George Bush, Sr. on Nov. 11 (Veterans Day), 1989 in Dallas Fair Park.

"It's the only Vietnam memorial in the country that's been dedicated by a US president. When the National Memorial was dedicated, Pres. Ronald Reagon was in office and he was conveniently busy. So was the Chief of Staff at the military, the Secretary of Defense, and the Vice president. The highest-ranking government official at that dedication was an undersecretary of the VA, who happened to have been a navy pilot, and a POW in Vietnam," he said.

Burkett said Vietnam veterans have been Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners, but their Vietnam service is rarely mentioned. Most American's image of Vietnam is based on movies like Born on the Fourth of July and Apocalypse Now, an image "that is completely bogus-it doesn't exist; it's not reality."