HONORABLE SOLDIERS

...An infantry officer awarded the Bronze Star in Vietnam in 1968, Bur-kett didn't come home from the war with a chip on his shoulder...

...It is not my desire to refight the Vietnam War," Burkett wisely states in the book's prologue...

...And then there's the magnificent Scott Barnes, Arizona dress shop owner and self-described Vietnam covert-action warrior, surfacing in 1992 to train-wreck the presidential campaign of wacky military buff H. Ross Perot— who abruptly quit the race when Barnes persuaded him that secret agents working for the opposition were planning to tap his phones and insult his daughter...

...There's Brian Den-nehy, the tough-guy movie character actor who regularly claimed to be a wounded veteran (but never went to Vietnam, claim the authors...

...Burkett began paying attention to the news media's routine attitude toward Vietnam veterans—noticing, for example, how reporters invariably gravitate to the scruffy, self-proclaimed combat vets in boonie hats and camouflage fatigues, many of them sporting oddly mismatched Special Forces regalia, who always seem to show up front-and-center at public events to spout "gruesome and horrifying descriptions of their experiences on the Vietnam battlefields" and myriad covert missions...

...There's Larry Hogue, the wild-eyed lunatic gullibly portrayed on 60 Minutes as an out-of-control Vietnam veteran menacing an entire Manhattan neighborhood...

...One place they should start is with Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History, the new book by B. G. Bur-kett and Glenna Whitley...

...Barnes, Burkett declares, never served in Vietnam...

...Military records, say Bur-kett and Whitley, show that Yandle, far from being a much-decorated hero, was a clerk who never saw combat...

...they would want our respect...

...As CNN and Time showed, the stories keep on coming...

...Burkett puts it better at the moment he first gazes at the 58,209 names on the memorial's wall and thinks, "These men wouldn't want our pity...

...Even the Dallas chapters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, dominated by World War II vets, conveyed contempt...

...and second, that Vietnam veterans constitute a uniquely dysfunctional demographic subgroup plagued with suicide, drunkenness, drug addiction, mental illness, unemployment, crime, and homelessness (the consequences of which afflict society at large...

...They then move on to their main campaign, which is to expose the role of reporters, film-makers, and academics in the three-decade-long perpetuation of these pernicious myths— myths laced with ideological scorn, the authors argue, deriving from antiwar activists exploiting their growing cultural influence after the war...

...Though the book is long (seven-hundred pages, including indices and notes), its mission is clear and focused...

...In the public perception, Vietnam veterans are "losers, bums, drug addicts, drunks, derelicts—societal offal who had come back from the war plagued by nightmares and flashbacks that left them with the potential to go berserk at any moment...

...Over the years he spent tracking down records, Burkett became something of a legend at the National Archives and at military records facilities, which he bombarded with endless requests under the Freedom of Information Act...

...In response to the first myth, Stolen Valor shows that more than two-thirds of the 2.7 million men who went to Vietnam were volunteers, as were about 75 percent of those who died, the average age of whom was nearly twenty-three...

...Hard-nosed, provocative, and courageous, Stolen Valor masterfully and on occasion gleefully debunks some of the popular canards and much of the anecdotal record about Vietnam veterans...

...Capitol on July 24 and murdering two policemen, was described by his family as believing he was an Army general pursued by Navy commandos determined to prevent his spilling unspecified secrets...

...So too, in virtually every movie made about Vietnam, Hollywood has dramatized the crippled Vietnam vet still harboring hideous secrets— unfolding tales of My Lai-style massacres by the score, phantom POWs left behind to die in captivity, deranged commandos dealing drugs on behalf of the CIA and assassinating any brave Rambo who tried to stop them...

...He also developed a network of acquaintances, including some conscientious print reporters, who kept him apprised of questionable Vietnam claims...

...Panhandlers and POW-MIA hustlers work the hushed crowds like vendors at a ball park, while mental-health counselors guide groups of post-traumatic stress victims on emotional field trips...

...If true, the report would have exposed a nearly thirty-year Pentagon conspiracy to cover up the use of nerve gas on innocent villagers and our own soldiers...

...What's wrong with the picture, Burkett decided, is that these ragtag Hectors with their "wildly improbable tales" and anguished cries of woe simply do not resemble "me or anybody I knew who had served in Vietnam—even those who had been horribly wounded or captured and tortured by the enemy...

...That they had not been there turned out to be the answer more often than even Burkett believed at the start of what would become a ten-year odyssey to accumulate thousands of military records...

...The only tinny note in Stolen Valor comes when the authors say that America should issue an "apology" for the myths it has accepted about those who went to Vietnam...

...Prominent among these reporters was Glenna Whitley of D Magazine, a Dallas monthly, who encountered the indefatigable Burkett in 1990 when she was writing about the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder among middle-aged Vietnam veterans and decided that much of what she was hearing sounded false...

...Along with the usual suspects in the media, the "enablers" of this distortion included veterans' agencies and medical and social workers, Burkett decided...

...The cause of Yandle, who claimed that the horrors and atrocities of Vietnam service had made him into a heroin addict subject to violent flashbacks, was championed by the Vietnam Veterans of America, which generated a massive letter-writing campaign and persuaded both 60 Minutes and the Boston Globe to take part in a campaign to secure his release from prison...

...Shooting down flimsy statistics and junk social science is easy, and Burkett and Whitley dispense with that quickly in Stolen Valor...

...Now that Vietnam vets are well into middle age, the myth has even spawned progeny, from the birth defects said to plague the children of veterans to second-generation would-be Rambos like Russell Weston Jr...

...Some of Stolen Valor's stories of media suckering, at both the local level and the highest penthouses of journalism, are priceless...

...An entire generation of veterans had been tainted with the labels of victim, loser and moral degenerate...

...HONORABLE SOLDIERS Debunking the Myth of the Vietnam Vet By Joe Sharkey The last American forces left southeast Asia twenty-five years ago, but we are still being startled by "revelations" about the Vietnam War, most recently the CNN-Time magazine joint report that American troops attacked a Laotian village with illegal nerve gas during a covert operation to kill American A Vietnam veteran, Joe Sharkey is a widely published journalist and author...

...Burkett, who knew some of the men whose names are engraved on the black granite, feels oddly alienated during his visit to the monument—and he finally realizes why when he notices that the area around it has become a flea market where scruffy men in combat fatigues peddle memorabilia and perpetuate the false Vietnam myths...

...When Burkett decided to write a book to set the record straight, he turned to Whitley for help...

...At big defense-contract companies which had profited handsomely from Vietnam, he heard repeated expressions of disdain for Vietnam veterans...

...the forty-one-year-old who, after storming the U.S...

...And in response to the second myth, Stolen Valor shows that addiction, unemployment, and homeless-ness among Vietnam veterans is lower than the national average for comparable age-groups...

...Like most who went to Vietnam (excluding, of course, the thousands who did not come home), he assimilated and got on with his life...

...A quarter-century after the choppers hoisted the last Americans off the rooftops of Saigon, journalists are still fumbling with their notebooks, trying to grasp what happened...

...Burkett and Whitley self-published Stolen Valor after mainstream publishers told them that Vietnam books in general don't sell, especially ones that fail to genuflect to the orthodoxy...

...The often-repeated assertion that more Vietnam veterans died afterward by their own hands than were killed in combat simply isn't true...

...When Burkett optimistically set out to call on prominent business people in conservative Dallas, he was flabbergasted at the reactions he encountered...

...Back in 1986, when he began to notice how effectively the professional Vietnam vets were spinning the news media, Burkett decided that reporters were not demanding an answer to a simple question: "Were these men really there...

...Finally, Burkett says, "The truth slapped me in the face...

...His most recent book, Lady Gold, a novel co-authored with Angela Amato, appeared in August...

...In 1995, after 60 Minutes had run its third piece in support of Yan-dle, Massachusetts governor William Weld commuted the sentence of the Vietnam hero who had flipped out because of post-traumatic stress...

...Suicide rates for Vietnam veterans are no different from those for corresponding non-veterans...

...Though the CNNTime blockbuster was quickly debunked as bits of old junk clumsily assembled by an overreaching reporter's ambition, the widespread credence the report initially received was a sharp reminder that we still haven't come to terms with Vietnam...

...Easing comfortably into middle-age, prospering as a Dallas stockbroker, Burkett was asked to serve as a co-chairman of the Texas Vietnam Memorial, which had been delayed for years because of tepid support from business and civic groups...

...All in all, Stolen Valor uncovers the records of more than 1,700 men who have publicly (and sometimes to great celebrity) made false or grossly distorted claims about service in Vietnam...

...Furthermore, the average Vietnam soldier was far better educated than his counterpart in World War II...

...Burkett finally concluded that "a massive distortion of history" was being perpetuated on the subject of Vietnam...

...That remains to be seen...

...There's Shelby Stanton, the best-selling author, who has appeared on his book jackets in Special Forces outfits and claims two tours in Vietnam as a commando (never happened, the authors say...

...Sometimes they had never even been in the military...

...A fluid writer, she managed the difficult task of helping Burkett organize his voluminous research into a coherent, rational argument...

...For decades, local papers and national news services alike have bestowed credibility on these impostors...

...Not until 1986 did Burkett begin to appreciate the power of the poisoned mythology...

...Another therapeutic gold mine was discovered in complaints about physical and emotional problems (including violent flashbacks) caused by long-ago exposure to Agent Orange, a defoliant used in Vietnam...

...The book ends with Burkett's iconoclastic assessment of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., which he refers to as "America's Wailing Wall...

...defectors in 1970...

...For me, a reporter who is also a Vietnam veteran, Stolen Valor goes on the shelf somewhere near Neil Shee-han's A Bright Shining Lie, David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, and a few other books whose lasting value is that they make more comprehensible some of the epic complexities of Vietnam, which was the central cultural event of my generation...

...America accepted this pervasive stereotype, and it was constantly reinforced...

...Welladjusted Vietnam veterans were the exception, he heard again and again...

...Finally, there's Joe Yandle, convicted of murdering a liquor store clerk in 1972...

...That conventional wisdom, firmly entrenched now after years of reinforcement, essentially consists of two myths: First, that poorly educated draftees, a disproportionate number of them black and Hispanic teenagers, did most of the fighting and dying...

...Others had actually been in Vietnam—but as cooks, truck mechanics, or clerks, nowhere in the vicinity of the events in which they claimed to have participated...

...Rather, the authors aim to demolish much of the conventional wisdom about who actually went to Vietnam...

...Stolen Valor is not an attempt to argue the rightness of what most people now think the benighted idea of sending American troops to support the South Vietnamese...

...Anxious to keep the customer pipelines filled as World War II vets die out, clinicians recruited Vietnam veterans into well-funded, long-term treatment programs for "post-traumatic stress disorder," a relatively modern psychiatric diagnosis that has been lavished on Vietnam veterans...