The Wounds of War-And Racism

Groundbreaking study now examining Vietnam's effect on Asian American troops

By Janet Dang

At 19, Lance Luke volunteered for the very duty so many Americans his age were seeking to avoid-fighting in the Vietnam War.

When he enlisted for a three-year stint with the U.S. Army, Luke saw it as the first step in a military career serving the country he loved. But what he endured on the field, largely from fellow U.S. troops, shattered his ideals and haunts him even now.

Luke, who is of Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese descent, was the only Asian American in his military unit. To many other soldiers, he looked like the enemy-and they treated him that way. Luke remembers one night, more than a quarter-century ago, when he was awakened by the sharp coldness of a blade at his throat-a knife wielded by a white soldier.

"He just started laughing," remembers Luke, now 49. He also remembers the soldier's words: "You look just like one of them ... you just might die."

"It was continual harassment, anything from 'dinks,' 'slant eyes,' 'rice bowl,' to threats of being shot in the back," recalls the veteran matter of factly. "It was like fighting two wars."

Luke's recollections aren't unusual memories among the 35,000 Asian Americans who fought for America in the Vietnam War. For a tiny minority among the 8.7 million Americans who served there, their loyalty was called into question or they were mistaken for North Vietnamese. After the war ended, they returned to a country largely uninterested in hearing about Vietnam veterans' problems in general, let alone those created by such racial dilemmas.

It comes as no surprise that Luke still can't comprehend what exactly happened to him; that some 30 years later, he still suffers nightmares, flashbacks and depression that clinicians attribute to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Recognition of PTSD as a bona-fide psychiatric disorder came shortly after the Vietnam War, which claimed almost 60,000 U.S. lives, ended. Another decade passed before researchers began to look into how racism exacerbated the disorder among Asian American veterans. But now, for the first time, a study funded by the department of Veterans Affairs-the Asian American Vietnam Veteran Race-Related Study-is under way to chart race-related experiences that Asian American Vietnam veterans, both combat and civilian workers, experienced during the war, and to determine what effects such racism had on PTSD and other stress-related psychological disorders. Researchers hope the findings help the military learn how to prevent such wounds from within in future wars.

"A lot of them say this should have been done 30 years ago," says Lily Adams, head researcher of the Northern California region and a counselor at San Francisco's Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She herself is a Vietnam vet.

"If they had known 30 years ago, they may have created an opportunity in which they could have resolved some problems," Adams says of military veterans. "They didn't realize it was a problem."

The Vietnam War was the first in which Asian Americans fought as part of the mainstream military against an Asian country, a fact whose ramifications have been largely ignored. According to principal investigator Chalsa Loo, a clinical psychologist for the National Center for PTSD at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Hawaii, the study is the first to systematically examine the effect of racism on Vietnam veterans.

"We selected Vietnam vets because they were more likely to be mistaken for the enemy based on their race," Loo explains. " It was a confusing war, and it was more conflicting."

While Asian Americans who saw combat in Korea or in World War II were often segregated into special units, like the all-Japanese American 442nd Army infantry division, those who fought in Vietnam were part of ordinary military units, often the only Asian American in a unit. And as the troops descended into guerrilla warfare, soldiers perceived as resembling the Viet Cong risked harassment, imprisonment, beatings or death.

"It's traumatic to be mistaken for the enemy," Adams says. "People would think they're the North Vietnamese, and they were called derogatory names ... some were beat up in the showers. It's humiliating and embarrassing."

The first phase of the study, which includes interviews with 150 Asian American veterans from Hawaii, began nearly three years ago in Hawaii and has just been completed.

Researchers are hoping to conduct another 150 interviews of Asian American veterans, mainly from California, and to complete the study by next September.

"We need for people to understand what this is about, for health-care providers and people who lived with them to understand this phenomena," Loo says.

Veterans participating in the study-both those who have and haven't sought treatment-are asked to fill out questionnaires about their military history and to participate in an interview. Adams says participants have come from all branches of the armed forces. Some had never talked about the issue before. "It's very traumatic," Adams says. "Some of these stories are pretty horrendous."

She observed that many veterans suffering from postwar stress had "a problem with seeking help. They're embarrassed. They think its crazy." Many have kept quiet for years, hoping that their silence might quiet the torment in their minds, Adam says.

Some, like Rod Santos, did manage to suppress the memories temporarily.

Santos says he didn't think about his 1969 service much before participating in the study, but that his memories flooded back once given a chance-the slanted eyes on the dummies used in bayonet training, the Vietnamese civilians who came up to him, saying "you same same Vietnamese."

After the interview for the study, he says, "they asked if I was feeling all right; of course I was all right." But it took him days to get over the memories. "That's what bothered me, I was able to recount in details what happened 30 years ago-detailed, to the point that I can tell you what the weather was like, the smell of the jungle, and the napalm and the clicking, buzzing sounds of the helicopter blade."

Such memories can't be ignored forever, Adams says. "Anybody who has been through a trauma is going to get post-traumatic stress. You're hearing yourself crying for help, you're having bad dreams, and you just accept that its a normal thing. People need to learn what PTSD is and through counseling that you minimize these symptoms. But people don't know that."

As she talked with Asian American veterans in the 1980s, Adams soon discerned an unsettling pattern-all referred to racism as part of their trauma. And although it's too early for researchers to conclude that racial experiences add to the trauma of war combat, they are hoping that the study helps the military better tailor its approach to minority veterans.

"The VA was not alert to looking at race and cultural issues in terms of what a veteran has experienced, and we're hoping the VA become more aware of this impact of readjustment [for the veteran]," Loo says.

Though this study focuses on Asian Americans rather than Latinos and African Americans, it carries implications for those groups, Adams points out.

"If you were black and in the South during the civil-rights movements, there is no doubt you'd have race-related trauma during that time. But that's not been vindicated ... this study will open that up. Racism in general, that whole field, is opening up."

Growing up in San Francisco, Luke says he was very aware of racism, but he expected more from the military.

"I thought I signed on to a more professional military than what I was led to believe. Everybody in the military was supposed to think in one color, and that's green. Nobody was black, white; everybody was a soldier doing their job and then come back home," he says.

But that ideal failed to live up to the realities of the trenches. Luke remembers how the soldier who held a knife to his throat later put a rifle to his neck-and he remembers saying nothing about either incident. He didn't want to be a whiner, and he didn't think it would do any good. "We had lieutenants and captains turning a deaf ear; they knew what was going on, but they weren't going to stop it."

The isolation, Luke says, left him as "the lone ranger. I felt like the enemy."

David Oshiro, 49, understands the feeling well: Having served in the Army special forces in 1970 and 1971, he remembers how sergeants in basic training dehumanized the enemy by calling all North Vietnamese "gooks" and "dinks"-slurs that necessarily dehumanized the Asian Americans in the ranks.

Then there was the reaction he got from the Vietnamese. One day while he was driving through the muddy city of Da Nang in central Vietnam, a bicyclist hit his truck and fell. Soon, Oshiro was surrounded by a crowd of angry Vietnamese civilians and soldiers crying out anti-U.S. slurs. The crowd of Vietnamese pointed rifles at him, and he could remember hearing them scream, "You same same me, you shoot, you shoot."

Oshiro, who was just as American as the next soldier, found it frustratingly absurd to be accused of betraying his race. "I put my butt on the line for these people," he says, his fear and rage at the time still apparent.

Even 30 years later, he is still trying to understand the chaos and the conflict. "Both sides are working against you. I thought I was prepared for it, but I was left really appalled and disgusted."

Oshiro didn't acknowledge his anger until many years after the war. "For a long time, I was in complete denial. I thought it was only me, but later, no, no, this is something that goes on. It made me a little more comfortable in that I wasn't weird or anything."

Santos, now 50, remembers, trying to see himself as just one of the guys. "I saw myself as being an American, I had no awareness of being Asian American" at that time, he says.

But the slurs and the Asian-faced dummies used in bayonet training bothered him deep down. Though he "laughed along with everyone else and kept up with the training ... somewhere deep in the subconscious it bothered me, and I still remember it 30 years later."

A Filipino American, Santos recalls being approached by Vietnamese who said he was the same as they. Now, he acknowledges that he knows what they meant.

"From the very first day I stepped foot in Vietnam, there were many Vietnamese who would come up to me and say, 'you same same Vietnamese.' For a little while I would deny it. I would pull out my wallet and pull out my American military ID. I'm sure they all knew I was an American by my uniform, height, manner and body language-no doubt I was an American G.I.

"It was later that I've come to realize that they were just making me aware that I definitely was 'same same, Vietnamese'; I am an Asian, just like they are," Santos recounts.

"It's bad enough for a individual to be in a conflict and in war, but to have to fight or kill or maim an individual that looks like you and shares the same culture-I don't think it'll take a genius to figure out the emotional and psychological damage it does to the individual."

Santos hopes his participation will lead to better military strategies for dealing with such issues. "I'm optimistic that the result will lead into other studies, that our government will evoke some changes on how we send soldiers and sailors and Marines around the world with all of this conflict."

For Luke, the study offered a revelation, a vindication of his feelings, some of which had been supressed for decades.

"These are things that these guys are left hanging with ... that happened to a lot of guys in the Asian communities," Luke said. "It's acknowledging the problem too little too late, but it's acknowledging the problem."

Still, though, Luke acknowledges that for him, some hurt will always remain.

"I've come to the understanding that it will not go away," Luke said of his memories. "It's just something that I have to live with, try to understand ... you try not to let it sink into the real you. You try the best way you can to not let it change your way of thinking."

Asian American Vietnam War veterans interested in participation can contact Lily Lee Adams at 415-221-4810, Ext. 4589.

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