The Forgotten Warriors

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sort of legislation can only make a dent in the Viet Nam vet's profound sense of exclusion, his bruised conviction that America —a nation that cherishes almost an ideology of its own fairness—has done him deeply wrong. The vet's first port of call, the Veterans Administration, seems to him abundant evidence that the nation he risked his skin for cares very little in return. The VA is, they say, a $23 billion-a-year bureaucracy devoted mainly to older vets (the World War II generation), a social service agency dispensing health care not to the wounded-in-battle but the merely aged. Officials of the VA answer that many of these critics are unaware of benefits for which they are eligible.

The women who served in Viet Nam make a case against the VA as well. Their chief organizer in Washington is Lynda Van Devanter, 34, a nurse lieutenant who labored in an evacuation hospital in Pleiku in 1969-70. "Women veterans are the last minority," she says.

The symbolic—and emotional—change in attitude toward the Viet Nam veterans began last January. The extravagant, even slightly hysterical, welcome home that America proffered the hostages from the embassy in Tehran filled many vets with a sense of maddening unfairness. Business at the 91 veterans' counseling centers dramatically increased immediately after Americans festooned the nation from coast to coast with yellow ribbons. The 52 hostages, after 444 days of captivity, got lifetime passes to baseball games; thousands of Viet Nam vets, who spent years in a form of internal exile, had been rewarded with either contempt or oblivion.

One Viet Nam veteran in New York City spends all his days on his back porch, throwing lighted matches into a pail. Another has not been out of his house in ten years: a literal hostage to the war that goes banging on in his own mind. Robert Moore, 32, spent eight years hiding at home, before he joined a VA-supported outreach center in Queens. There, he and two other veterans work as a team to locate similar cases of radical withdrawal —men hunkered down in their little psychic tunnels, like Viet Cong staying safe from all that American rolling thunder.

Wives, mothers and brothers call every day to help vets who will not leave their rooms. After a vet in Rochester killed his mother and went berserk in a bank, the counseling center heard from hundreds of mothers who feared that the ex-teenager upstairs was a human bomb, waiting to explode and take his little corner of America with him.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (DSM-III), an official publication of the American Psychiatric Association, is the definitive word on psychological disturbances. Viet Nam veterans (along with rape victims, among others) achieved some psychiatric status when DSM-III in 1980 officially defined their suffering as "posttraumatic stress disorder." In such distress, a person develops vivid symptoms after a psychologically traumatic event that is outside the range of usual human experience: he or she grows numb toward the external world, or else hyperalert, jumpy, insomniac; in nightmares the event that brought on the trauma is obsessively replayed.

Mitchell Samples came out of Strange Creek, W. Va. The son of a coal miner, he is not the sort of man to question an order to report to his draft board: "The