Restoring Faith and Confidence

Got a large dose of déjà vu while watching breathless reporters trying to forge a link between the two military veterans involved in recent atrocities. They were both soldiers, right? Both veterans of combat deployments in our Middle East forever wars? So somehow, the active-duty green beret who killed himself and blew up a Tesla truck in Las Vegas must have been in cahoots with a discharged and recently radicalized Muslim vet who plowed his vehicle into a celebratory crowd in New Orleans.

That kind of faulty reasoning is red meat for conspiracy theorists but it ignores reality. Chances of one soldier meeting and conspiring with another to commit mayhem in a million-man US Army spread across hundreds of bases and stations are miniscule. Especially when they soldiered in different fields, one Special Forces and the other admin support jobs. Nonsense from the outset, but that wasn’t what tripped my memory triggers.

What got me was the resurgence of the pissed off, potentially violent veteran trope that was the subject of so many movies in the years following the end of the war in Vietnam. Like thousands of other survivors who saw combat in the decade our country spent in an ultimately fruitless endeavor in Southeast Asia circa 1965-1975, I was tarred with a broad brush. While I was proud of my service and fraternally linked with other Vietnam Veterans, lots of folks at the time were leery about me and harbored a suspicion that I might someday flip out and start gunning down people who were vocal about their opposition to my war. There’s some drama for you. There’s some tension and grist for the Hollywood movie mill.

For almost as long as my war lasted, American audiences were treated to films like Taxi Driver, Deer Hunter, and First Blood. In many ways, films like this and others featuring angry and violent veterans drove me to try and correct such impressions in my own movie and TV career. It was a tough task, and I often felt like Sergeant Sisyphus pushing a big boulder uphill against people who had little clue about the unjust damage they were doing to an entire generation of military veterans. Not to mention besmirching the legacy of 58,000 killed in action in Vietnam combat.

As is often the case in such matters of American popular concern, the pendulum eventually began to swing in the opposite direction. After the atrocities of 9/11 there was nationwide knee-jerk support for the men and women sent to fight jihadists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and other sinkholes throughout the Middle East. That lasted for quite some time until it became undeniably clear that no one in authority had any concept of what victory might look like. It seemed as if we just kept pumping people over to shoot or get shot at without measurable progress. Knock out one bunch of violent radicals and another bunch stepped up with AKs or IEDs ready to go. In short order, Hollywood started to pump out films featuring a second generation of ticking timebomb veterans, pissed off, on a razor-thin edge of violent reaction to…well, to anything that added to or reflected their frustration.

And that’s where we sit right now. But with a new administration in office, maybe it’s time to ponder the issue a little deeper than movie plots. Do we have a new generation of military veterans angry over what seems to be meaningless military service in combat against a virulent, relentless enemy? Yes, indeed, and recent events in New Orleans and Las Vegas demonstrate that.

It’s neither widespread as yet nor is it always violently expressed, but men and women in uniform, faced with what seems like endless and mostly fruitless deployments, are often dazed and confused. Can’t say I blame them for that. Motivation in military service, beyond all the superficial perks and veterans benefits dangled by recruiters or career counselors, is most often a matter of belief. It requires confidence that what an individual is doing in unform matters to the nation and to fellow citizens. Lose that at any level in the military and you’re in dicey territory where frustrations can manifest in ugly ways.

This loss of faith and a (false) sense of meaningless military service is being talked about by veterans in our neighborhoods and even in the national political arena at relatively high levels. We hear from our new Vice President, a Marine veteran of overseas service, who writes in his best-selling autobiography Hillbilly Elegy that he went to Iraq highly motivated and returned angry and disillusioned. That kind of thinking is worrisome to me nearly as much as our woefully underfunded and unprepared military. We can—despite lengthy delays and exorbitant costs required—rebuild our military to face and fend off enemies in China, North Korea, Africa, and the Middle East, but restoring faith and confidence in the value of military service might be a more difficult ask. I don’t have all the answers but from the perspective of a formerly disillusioned combat veteran, I can tell you that it will take more from each of us than a superficial “thank you for your service.”

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