The social construction of Vietnam veteran identity

One of the unintended consequences of the American political-military adventure in Vietnam was the generation and widespread public and scientific acceptance of a stereotyped and stigmatizing image of the Vietnam veteran as victim and executioner. Veterans who believed in themselves and their service in Vietnam felt not only unrewarded for their service by their countrymen but that America held them accountable for a lost War and a lost sense of American purpose and might.;This dissertation examines the social construction of Vietnam veteran identity and the post-War adjustment problems of veterans, including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, not as a manifestation of individual psychic distress, (what the distinguished sociologist C. Wright Mills called "private troubles of milieu,") but as a reflection of the interactive effect of these perceived "troubles" with "public issues of social structure." Specifically, the dissertation suggests the reported anomic and alienated attitudes and behavior of Vietnam veterans can be located in the de-legitimation of the personal biographies and life experiences of youthful American warriors in the post- Vietnam War era.;In turn, the dissertation focuses on the varieties of motivation and social rewards which encourage young men to engage in the deathly enterprise of war, historical and pragmatic conceptions of morality in guerrilla warfare and the appropriateness to the battlefield experience of veterans of construing veteran post-War distress as "moral guilt and anguish," the biases of the individual and institutional actors, including anti-War activist psychiatrists and psychologists, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, combat psychiatry, social scientific researchers, the mental health community and the funding agencies that produced our current understanding of the impact of the Vietnam War on its combatants.;Finally, the dissertation focuses on, and suggests the significance of, the lack of national consensus on mission, costs and rewards for the construction of "spoiled identity," collective dissonance and social reconciliation following unpopular wars.