Veterans/victims

...The VA is the medical provider of "last resort" for 70 per cent of the veterans it treats...

...Finally, there seems to be an assumption throughout Wounded Men, Broken Promises that private medical care is ipso facto superior to that which can be delivered by a publicly supported system...

...Klein assigns three principal reasons for the VA's precipitous decline: budgetary restraints and a shift away from health care delivery as a priority...

...Baker is closer to the target when he observes that "Vietnam took the measure of the man and of the culture which put him there...

...policy toward El Salvador...

...While many themes—especially the disillusionment with American values and the brutality inherent in technological warfare—are repeated, each story stands by itself...

...Wounded Men, Broken Promises provides a real service by shining a light on this empire, although one wishes that Klein's book were less chatty and more substantial, particularly in terms of institutional analysis and explication...

...Some of the accounts in both books are harrowing...

...Not since The Naked and the Dead has the face of war been conveyed with such candor...

...Indeed, it would require a reversal of the course on which the Reagan Administration has embarked...

...Baker tells us that the accounts we read in Nam are "war stories...

...Klein makes extensive use of patient interviews to develop his thesis that the quality of VA medical care has steadily An Educational Exhibit About The EFFECTS AND DANGERS OF NUCLEAR WAR National Sponsors United Nations Association of the U.S.A...

...While the VA boasts that an unprecedented number of Vietnam veterans returned to school, actually an unusually low rate completed their studies...

...Yet each shares a common quality: a fixation with self rather than Ronald Reagan's "noble cause...

...Klein doesn't tell us much about how or why...

...People's history is not necessarily the sum of its parts: Reflection, insight, objectivity, and other tools needed for good history are required if the true lessons of Vietnam are to be appreciated...

...This may be true, but Klein fails to make the case...

...So it is with the Vietnam war and its veterans...

...In some cases, the reader may have to pry between the lines, but in others the voices are quite clear...

...His deft editing carries the reader along from the days before induction through the hell of Vietnam and back to the streets of postwar America...

...A WIDELY ACCLAIMED 16-PANEL EXHIBIT WITH A POWERFUL MESSAGE available in two FORMS: 16 posters 38"x25" ready for mounting - $30 postage prepaid 16-PAGE BOOKLET 7V'xll" - $22 PER 100, POSTAGE PREPAip California buyers add S% or 6,5% sales tax Make checks payable to NORTHERN CALIFORNIA DIVISION—UNA-USA Mail checks or inquiries to: John B, Massen, Director Northern California Division--UNA-USA 152 St...

...Klein relates this, in part, to the VA's inability to provide readjustment therapy for thesemen...

...and the willingness of the traditional veteran Organizations like the Legion or VFW to compromise on health care issues in exchange for concessions on pension and disability compensation...

...Despite the VA's vast size (220,000 employes, 300-odd hospitals and clinics), the average citizen knows less about it than about Federal agencies one-tenth its size...

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...Santoli, who holds that it was not the North Vietnamese army that beat us but "our own politicians," subscribes to the greatest myth of all: American battlefield supremacy in Vietnam...

...It is a natural transition from books about the Vietnam war to one which confronts the treatment which awaits its veterans/victims...

...The personnel and equipment which were providing better care have gone somewhere...

...Tod Ensign and Michael Uhl (Tod Ensign and Michael Uhl are coauthors of "GI Guinea Pigs," published by Playboy Press in 1980...

...Klein uncovers some important facts: Item...

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...But he too fails to tell us exactly what we can hope to learn from these veterans' experiences...

...In one ghastly account, a "newbie" is initiated into his Marine squad by being forced to tear apart enemy bodies in order to steel him for the brutality which awaits him...

...Neither Baker nor Santoli tells us much about why it is important to preserve these accounts of Vietnam...

...Until 1979 the VA refused to recognize that Vietnam veterans might need psychological services different from those offered veterans from other wars...

...Only after a detailed analysis of the interstitial relationship between the VA system and all other components of the booming "health industry" can one really begin to understand the problems...

...He hopes that the revelations in Everything We Had will allow the country to move on without forgetting...

...Some of the voices are new, or at least little heard from in the past, particularly women veterans, whose reports add a dimension...

...The danger is that the vacuum will be filled by the same corporate and governmental forces which designed the policies which led to our involvement in the first place...

...Moving on" in a way that is responsible to the veterans and their history will require more than passive forgetfulness...

...Klein has a tendency to belabor some of his points, and the book could be better organized...

...His description of both the Environmental Protection Agency's action against the domestic use of 2,4,5-T and of the complicated litigation which has been filed against the Agent Orange manufacturers is also flawed in several respects...

...Though the ceasefire occurred in 1973 after a decade of unpopular war, the power of the experience remains white-hot in the daily lives of those who fought there...

...His chapter on Agent Orange suffers from careless research...

...Francis Blvd., Daly City, CA 94015 Phone: 415 - 991-2080 declined over the past decade...

...Klein believes that this vulnerability allows the VA to avoid accountability for a standard of care which is often grossly inferior...

...True, but these tales of wartime gore and horror read like short stories, with all the texture of life, because the events took place and they are narrated without embellishment...

...A star burns out deep in space, yet for eons we on earth continue to see its light...

...American Friends Service Committee - Peace Education Division Center for Defense Information Institute for World Order Physicians for Social Responsibility Union of Concerned Scientists United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A...

...Two oral histories, Nam by Mark Baker, and Everything We Had, edited by Al Santoli, consist almost entirely of first-person accounts by men and women veterans of the Vietnam experience, but Baker's book provides a much more comprehensive sense of what Vietnam was like for the average soldier...

...The now familiar stories of body-counting and mutilation are no longer attached to the political anger of antiwar veterans who were trying to end the insanity into which they were forced to descend...

...At least—and this is a good deal indeed—the perspectives found in the two oral histories are eclectic...

...The myriad contradictions of American life are reflected there...

...We suspect that the underlying causes are much more complicated and intractable...

...The war's catastrophic effect on both the nation and its, veterans can be measured in economic decline and renewed militarism on one hand and the personal tragedies engendered by the post-Vietnam syndrome and Agent Orange on the other...

...We are shown, over and over, the isolation of the GI, caught between the hammer of the "inscrutable" collectivized enemy and the anvil of the impersonal military machine...

...over-reliance upon medical school interns and foreign-trained doctors...

...He believes that the VA's demise can be explained in terms of personal weakness or a failure of lee iership...

...In attempting an expose of the Veterans Administration, Robert Klein plows unfurrowed ground...

...the reader is taken to the abyss and forced to peer over into something horrible indeed...

...He wants the stories in Nam to help us learn something about ourselves...

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...Some of the abuse and humiliation of ailing vets by VA personnel almost defies belief...

...While giving us some of the material on which judgments about the war can be made, there is a danger in just letting the veterans "speak for themselves" without offering an interpretation of their experiences...

...Surely this is naive...

...He erroneously reports that the herbicide will "knock down" a 150-foot tree in two days...

...Whatever Nam and Everything We Had lack in analysis, they make up for in part with sheer moxie and emotional honesty...

...Otherwise, when its effects go unacknowledged, it continues to be fought in other forms, as exemplified by U.S...

...The VA lacks a chief of physical therapy or rehabilitation medicine, even though it is the nation's largest provider of rehab care...