{"id":155425,"date":"2025-03-25T09:08:26","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T09:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/american-history\/vietnam-veterans-in-american-historical-memory\/"},"modified":"2025-03-25T09:08:26","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T09:08:26","slug":"vietnam-veterans-in-american-historical-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=155425","title":{"rendered":"Vietnam Veterans in American Historical Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Early in his first term, President Donald Trump signed the Vietnam War Veterans Recognition Act of 2017<\/a>, establishing March 29 as National Vietnam War Veterans Day. The law honored the women and men who served in the military during the Vietnam War, and, as Trump put it, \u201cwere spit on and treated like dirt for serving.\u201d It was clear that Trump envisioned himself that day righting an age-old wrong. After decades of neglect and disdain, Vietnam Veterans Day would offer these Americans the heroes\u2019 welcome home they never received.<\/p>\n

That is one way of telling this story. But it unfortunately obscures a great deal more than it reveals.<\/p>\n

U.S. involvement in Vietnam officially began on November 1, 1955, with the establishment of the American Military Assistance Advisory Group for South Vietnam, and ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon and the departure of the last remaining American personnel. Between these mileposts, 8.75 million American men and women served in uniform around the world, 40 percent of them stationed in Vietnam and adjacent Southeast Asian countries. More than 58,000 of those would die in the war.<\/p>\n

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President Lyndon Johnson visits with U.S. troops in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The so-called \u201cpolice action\u201d in Vietnam evolved over time to become the most challenging war in American history. Although World War II resulted in nearly seven times as many American deaths, Vietnam has come to occupy a place of unique anguish in the national psyche. Its vague and conflicting goals, its protracted nature, its ballooning unpopularity at home, and its eventual end in ignominious defeat conspired to make honoring, celebrating, and remembering service in the war difficult and messy.<\/p>\n

Efforts at honoring Vietnam veterans cannot be understood apart from the experiences and memory of their parents\u2019 (\u201cGreatest\u201d) generation who served in World War 2. The war their father\u2019s fought was clear in its aims, short in its duration, virtuous in its achievements, and victorious in every sense. Surviving veterans returned home, en masse, to the open arms of a jubilant and grateful nation. American military service in all future wars would be compared to these images and experiences. Anything short of ticker-tape parades would raise questions of honor and gratitude.<\/p>\n

This helps us understand how the image of the scorned Vietnam veteran became a mainstay of American oral tradition in the years following the war\u2019s end. This image portrayed him returning home from Southeast Asia not to adoring crowds or fanfare but to derision, anger, and contempt. The notion gained traction through various anecdotal accounts in circulation and was all but \u201cconfirmed\u201d thanks to widely read memoirs like Ron Kovic\u2019s Born on the Fourth of July<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(1976) and Robert Mason\u2019s Chickenhawk<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(1983), along with comparable depictions in film including William Devane\u2019s in Rolling Thunder<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(1977) and Jon Voight\u2019s in Coming Home<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(1978).<\/p>\n

The reality on the ground was more complicated. A Harris Poll<\/a> commissioned by the Veterans Administration in 1971 found that only 1% of returning veterans described their reception upon their arrival home as \u201cunfriendly.\u201d The best scholarship on the home front amid the Vietnam War has challenged popular depictions of the derided returning veteran. Historians like Jerry Lembcke and Eric T. Dean could find no evidence of spitting on veterans, and very few incidents of ridicule or hostility. They conclude that the trope of the reviled Vietnam veteran is a historically dubious, yet politically useful myth.<\/p>\n

By contrast, examples abound of communities throughout the war welcoming veterans home with euphoric celebrations\u2014even parades! Despite the war\u2019s strange complications\u2014and a vocal anti-war movement\u2014Americans, by and large, remained patriotic backers of American military operations in Vietnam, showing particular support for military personnel risking their lives. Richard Nixon understood this dimension of the American public when he appealed aptly to the \u201cgreat silent majority\u201d in a November 1969 televised speech<\/a>.<\/p>\n

None of these observations are meant to imply that returning veterans didn\u2019t experience challenging, even painful homecomings seasoned with feelings of alienation, loneliness, dissonance, or post-traumatic stress. Many obviously did. \u00a0But so too did veterans of previous wars\u2014even the \u201cgood\u201d ones. Even so, the feeling that Americans lacked gratitude for Vietnam veterans lingered and became its own cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre.<\/p>\n

Because Vietnam veterans never received massive or triumphant homecomings like those fondly remembered from 1945, groups began lobbying public officials to give this younger generation the honor they deserved. No one wrote more letters, lobbied more members of Congress, or traveled more miles on behalf of this cause than Alfonso Sellet, a building superintendent from tiny Pine Bush, New York. Sellet deserves title as the true father of Vietnam Veterans Day.<\/p>\n

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April 17 was proclaimed Vietnam Veterans Day in NY State under the signature of Gov. Rockefeller. Al Sellet (2nd from right)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Born in 1920, Sellet immigrated to the United States from Italy as a small child with his parents just before the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924<\/a> went into effect. He spent his formative years in Brooklyn. While living an otherwise ordinary American life, Sellet had the rare distinction of serving and seeing action in World War II (earning a Bronze Star), Korea, and Vietnam. He thus experienced personally both the exhilaration of a celebrative welcome home in 1945, and the humiliation of arriving returning (injured) from Vietnam in 1966 to a quiet, abandoned Air Force base. No one there to greet or thank him or his fellow returnees. Something had to be done.<\/p>\n

In 1968, he founded the Committee to Honor Vietnam Veterans, and began lobbying state and federal officials to, among other things, observe a special \u201cHonor the Vietnam Veteran Day.\u201d He quickly won over his congressman, Hamilton Fish (R-NY) who would sponsor a bill in 1971 to this end. Despite receiving what Fish reported as \u201cletters and newspaper articles by the hundreds acknowledging the need for recognition of these brave men\u2014AND NOT ONE DISSENT,\u201d it would take until 1973 for the bill to be considered, passed, and signed. Just before Christmas, President Nixon signed a resolution declaring March 29, 1974, \u201cVietnam Veterans Day,\u201d marking the one-year anniversary of the last American serviceman to withdraw from South Vietnam.<\/p>\n

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Statue of the Three Servicemen, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC. Photographed by Bernt Rostad, Nay 10, 2009.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the meantime, cities and states issued dozens of their own \u201cofficial\u201d Vietnam Veterans Day, held often on March 29 and sometimes, confusedly, on March 30. While the March 29 was not (and still isn\u2019t) recognized as a federal holiday, various congresses and presidents through the years have episodically recognized the day with their own proclamations of gratitude and honor of the millions who served in uniform during the Vietnam era. In some cases, such as the congressional resolution passed in 2009 and the bill signed by President Trump in 2017, these proclamations were set forth as though the day was being recognized for the very first time.<\/p>\n

It is good that Americans honor our military personnel who have served our nation in seasons of both peace and war. And it is especially important that we recognize the sacrifice of those who risked and gave their lives amid a conflict that was complicated and unpopular. But the story of Vietnam Veterans Day is a telling reminder that American memory\u2014especially when it comes to military service\u2014is always tinged with politics. It is also short and prone to amnesia.<\/p>\n

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Jay D. Green is Professor of History at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where he has been on the faculty since 1998.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n