Military, War, and Society in Modern American History: Dear John by Carruthers Susan L

Author:Carruthers, Susan L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Emotional Injury: Causes and Consequences

“If an army could be conscripted of no one but jilted men, there wouldn’t be a force on earth that could beat them, because they would be the meanest sonsofbitches in the world.” So proposed Winston Groom in Better Times Than These, a novel in which soldiers serving in Vietnam are betrayed by girlfriends who’ve simultaneously turned against the war and against the men fighting it. As orchestrator of his characters’ actions, Groom could ensure this utterance rang true in the universe of his fiction. Unencumbered by attachments to the worthless women who sent them Dear Johns, his soldiers gain ruthless determination from the experience of romantic rejection, their aggression honed on a whetstone of righteous ire. Although Groom traded on his first-hand authority as an infantryman who’d served in Vietnam, which reviewers of Better Times approvingly noted, few military psychiatrists would have concurred with his proposition about the martial prowess of jilted men.1 Nor would some other combat veterans.

Consider this episode recounted by Dennis Nicks, who served as an army captain in Vietnam in 1969:

Not too long after we arrived, one of our soldiers got a Dear John letter and he really took it to heart … It really bothered him. I think he got drunk. And since he was a door gunner, he had access to guns … so he went down and got his machine gun and this is in the evening, and he‘s by the flight line and he’s carrying his machine gun with the belt of ammunition. Starts shooting it over the barracks … No one was hurt, but I believe there were some holes in some of the barracks walls. That got everybody’s attention. Everybody’s hitting the floor, trying to figure out what’s going on – whether we’re being attacked.

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