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Ghost Patrol
The curious mythology of the Vietnam war.
by Andrew Nagorski
11/7/2009 12:04:00 AM, Volume 015, Issue 09
War Stories
False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers--What Really Happened in Vietnam
by Gary Kulik
Potomac, 304 pp., $29.95
One of the oft-repeated stories among soldiers in Vietnam concerned a purported island in the Pacific where the U.S. Army would dispatch those men who had contracted incurable forms of venereal disease. To spare their families embarrassment, so the stories went, the military would inform them that their loved ones had gone missing in action--and the afflicted soldiers would never return. To this day, some Vietnam veterans remain firmly convinced that this really happened.
"It is of course a false and absurd story," writes Gary Kulik, who served as a medic in Vietnam. "In my experience some young soldiers thought that their repeated cases of gonorrhea were marks of virility, rather than symptoms of long-term unpleasantness. I can easily imagine medics, who were usually older and better educated, using such a fantasy for its invigilating effects."
Kulik's wry comment about this fantasy island constitutes a rare lighter moment in an otherwise deadly serious, emotionally charged book. Anyone who grew up in the 1960s--whether he served in Vietnam, took to the streets in protest, did both, or neither--is likely to hesitate before picking up a book with the subtitle: "False atrocity tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers--What Really Happened in Vietnam." The instinctive reaction is to ask what ideological line Kulik is peddling--and why should I, as a reader, dredge up all the political, personal, cultural, and psychological battles of that era? What ...
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