Media and the angry vet myth
Our buddy, Alex Horton, wrote in Defense One “When Will the Media Stop Fueling the Angry Vet Narrative?” a favorite subject of ours. Horton tries to separate Nidal Hasan and Aaron Alexis from their veteran labels, but that will probably never happen. Remember James Wenneker von Brunn? He was the 88-year-old who shot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in June 2009 with the intention of killing a lot more people, but he was stopped by those security guards. The first thing out of the media’s collective mouth was that he was a veteran. von Brunn had been a veteran of freakin’ World War II and hadn’t served since, but it was easier for the media to understand that he did it because he was a veteran.
Then the was Wade Michael Page who shot up a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. He was a veteran – he was a Hawk Missile repairman from 1992 to 1998 and was booted with a general discharge for being drunk on duty and AWOL. But, see, he’d wore a uniform, so he was a veteran and that made it all understandable to the press.
There was Benjamin Colton Barnes who shot two Park Rangers in Washington State last year was a pogue and never heard a shot fired in anger during his service, which ended ignobly, too, but CNN and others loved to show the picture of him with scary black guns and tats. They even warned the public that he was highly trained in survival skills – but he was found dead of hypothermia face down in a stream. Hypothermia is covered on Day One of any survival training. I’m sure that sticking your face in water is pretty near the beginning of the class, too.
If you watch this video released by the FBI of Aaron Alexis on the prowl in the Navy Yard, veterans can tell the clown had no training in closing with and destroying people;
He looks like Rosie O’Donnell sneaking up on a cupcake. He chose a shotgun because it takes virtually no training to shoot and hit what you’re shooting at. It’s Joe Bite Me’s weapon of choice, so you know that.
None of these incidents have anything to do with these people being veterans and it has everything to do with them being off their rockers. But the media is happy to just cram us into the nutty vet cubby hole because it makes it all easy to understand. And they don’t know any veterans personally, so they have no frame of reference outside of Hollywood. But the truth is that everyday millions of successful veterans go to work and do their jobs without intentionally scaring anyone.
Category: Veterans Issues
Well said, Jonn.
B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley documented how the media had created multiple derogatory myths about Vietnam Veterans 15 years ago in the book Stolen Valor. They also documented how Vietnam Veterans, as a group, are more successful and have less problems than their demographic peers. Burkett and Whitley also documented how the myth of the “screwed up Vietnam vet” was created virtually out of whole cloth by the media – either knowingly, or via the media being negligent in checking people’s claims of their wartime service. (Sound familiar?)
The media has been anti-military since LBJ’s bald-faced lies about Vietnam and how he used those lies to get the US into that conflict came to light. (Sadly, some in the DoD and in uniform aided and abetted LBJ in telling and selling those lies.) They’ve never given people in uniform a fair shake since.
Much of the media is still anti-military today; many of those who aren’t have “drunk the kool-aid” regarding the “messed up vet” myth. And all too many are simply lazy, incompetent, or clueless when it comes to fact-checking the stuff they write for publication. They need to be taken to task every time they push the “screwed up vet” line of bullsh!t – because it’s virtually always either bullsh!t or irrelevant to the story they’ve written.
Klebold (Columbine), Harris (Columbine), Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), and Lanza (Sandy Hook). They killed more than 70 innocent people and wounded, non-fatally, I don’t know how many. Not a Veteran among them. And don’t even mention Terrorist Bastard Hasan. He wasn’t a Veteran and not crazy at all. He was a terrorist, a Muslim enabled by political correctness, who did what terrorists do: murder innocent people for their cause.
Hondo has it right. Like the Crazed Nam Vet the Media will never stop on the general theme, ever.
The answer is never. Hondo has it right. There are actually two myths rooted in Nam. The drugged crazed borderline psychopath and anti military anti hero super soldier “Rambo”. Everything after those two are variations on a theme.
Sooooo. . . The “Main Stream Media” wants to label and pigeonhole all vets as angry, crazy, and drugged out. Make the term “veteran” a pejorative.
Two can play that game. Lets us vets make the term MSM (or LSDM) journalist a pejorative (spit-tooy!).
I remembered as a kid in the early-mid 1970’s watching crime/cop shows at night, and whether it was “SWAT”, “The Rookies”, “Police Story”, “Hawaii Five-O”, “Kojak”, or what have you, almost every other episode featured a messed-up/deranged/drugged-out/felonious Vietnam Vet as the villain. Little wonder the public perception of the Vietnam Vet (and even Vets in general) remains abysmal even today…
I’m only pissed at the media, they are responsible for most of my moral outrage
There is this idiot, scared silly and ignorant meme, created by the media about the military in general, that all vets are somehow nuts.
Then there is the other meme, that of the returning soldier/whatever being a hero/heroine and the ‘feel good’ stuff like videos of surprise homecomings for the kids / girlfried / boyfriend / spouse, that is such a contrast to the first ‘meme’.
Those two are in wild contrast to each other and both of them are fostered by the adrenaline junkies who work in the news media (MSM). Whatever gets the story on the front page and gets a byline for the person who reported it is what counts. Where I live, there are fewer ‘bad vet’ stories reported in the newspaper and a large number of ‘good vet’ stories instead. It might be because Great Lakes is probably a major employer in this area, and because the Service Schools and RTC generate business when the training sessions are completed.
I think it’s up to all vets to do whatever it takes to change the general mindset of the media. One day, they might just need us.
Most vets I know aren’t angry, they’re tired.
How about the other myths? People only join the military because they have no where else to go. Mostly the poor join the military. The uneducated join the military…etc…
I feel another verse of Tommy Atkins coming on….
Just yesterday while getting my monthly hair cut, the lady cutting my hair mentioned that her son thinks all Vietnam Vets are crazed animals waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting. Usually this stuff just rolls off like water on a ducks back, but this time for some reason it stung. Demonization by a sizeable portion of the left leaning people in this country is starting to bother me, I’m either a bible thumping, gun toting, inbred hillbilly of low intelligence and now a crazed Vietnam Vet……..oh yeah I left out racist. I’m tired of this shit its getting really old!
Trust me, as a former recruiter, I pretty much heard every stereotype in the book at least twice.
+1 Internetz to the person who shares with us one I have yet to hear.
OT hit the nail on the head. I’m sick of the whole only joining the Military because we were too stupid to go to college (Thanks John Kerry). They don’t realize that you have to have an education to go anywhere in the Military. The days of conscripting illiterate farmers are over.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/kerrysign.asp#photo
The link is for a funny picture I’m sure you all remember.
Looky here: no crazed vet association for this shooter.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/26/20702066-very-dangerous-individual-hunted-after-deadly-office-shooting?lite
Just someone who was pissed off over a ‘bad business deal’. And subsequently, the police went around scaring the bejesus out of everyone they ran into.
Right, agreed about the media.
Special thanks of course go to Ollie Stone, Mike Cimino, and Franny Ford Coppola….I know it’s just art, but in this society of celebrity obsessed 4sshole art doesn’t imitate life it creates its own distorted reality for mass consumption by the uneducated buffoons who populate this country in ever larger numbers….
The media was pleased when they thought that Jarod Loughner was a veteran (he’d talked to a recruiter once), but no one mentioned that it was a veteran who tackled him. Or a veteran who operated on and saved Gabby Giffords. Our former friends at Little Green Footballs were clapping wildly when a phony veteran murdered a man and his daughter.
The media believes anyone in the military is a gun nut. Has to be, right? The military is all about guns, right? So when a vet goes sideways, it’s the 1+1=2 math for them: Veteran + gun = violence. Nothing more fits in a 30 second clip, so that’s where they land.
Oh, hey, we have a NEW angle on all of this, in the current release of a new book by John Corsi, ‘Who Really Killed Kennedy’, in which he insists taht the CIA was behind it all because THEY wanted to create an uptick in Vietnam and Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam. He also says the Warren Commission lied about all of it.
There was some stuff about a Corsican and the mob when Corsi was talking about it on the news this morning. If I can get it for free, I might read it.
What? Someone has to perpetuate the mythos.
and no matter what generation the ‘crazed vet’ is from, background music always breaks into “Run Through the Jungle”
Almost 25 years ago I read a book by (I think) James Dunnigan and he talked about a phenomenon he called “the Great Divorce.” That is, during the WWII and post-WWII period, military service was so common as to be nearly universal, a cultural touchstone that almost anybody could identify with. Witness, for example, Elvis being inducted into the Army (GI Blues anyone?) or old episodes of the Dick Van Dyke show where they had “flashback” sequences that referenced Van Dyke’s characters military service. See also the likes of “Sergeant Bilko” and even (yes, I know, I’m rolling my eyes too) “Gomer Pyle.” What these televions shows (and others) depicted was military service as a normal and conventional part of American life. In that day and age, the notion of military people being disturbed lunatics would have no traction because too many people knew military folks (or served themselves) and would know it to be a lie. But then in 1973 the draft ended and military service became something that was confined to an ever-shrinking percentage of the population as a whole. In that environment, the only exposure people have to the military is the likes of action movies that – for obvious reasons – play up the drama and the “other-ness” of the military. Another factor is the residual guilt of those who dodged or who didn’t serve. In order to justify their shirking of military service, it became convenient to characterize those who did serve not as heroes, but as victims, victims of a cruel and vicious organization that turned a momma’s boy into a cold blooded killbot. And the final factor in the mix was a few veterans themselves, who got into trouble after their service (because, being human, a certain percentage are bound to do so) and then being quick to blame their (largely embellished and often outright fictional) military service as the ’cause’ of their anti-social behavior. And the result was the “perfect storm” that has resulted in the cliche of the crazed veteran, an innocent (if willfully naive) young man who was turned into… Read more »
And yet it was and is the dastardly military that gives a host of young people a work ethic and a sense of responsiblity.
I guess that doesn’t fit the meme either, does it?
In this day and age, a for-real combat veteran wouldn’t even kill in the manner of these people. These ‘angry vets’ were committing suicide-by-cop. Otherwise they would have figured out a way to live and continue the fight. For-real combat veterans appear to trend heavily towards surviving that which should kill them.
#20: the VFW magazine had an interesting 2 or 3 part series on Hollywood and veterans. The vet-as-addict appeared as early as the first talkies after WWI. But these were more sympathetic portrayals. The only difference between then and now is that most of Hollywood (and by extension most of the entertainment industry), for all it’s silicone-breast thumping talk of courage, is populated by cowards who can not bear the thought of enduring what must be endured, or dying in combat.
Put a man or woman who has served in combat behind the camera as director and producer and we would see vastly different films instead of the childrens’ pablum of witchcraft and revenant romance like Harry Potter and Twilight.
DavidO: a director who’s “been there” doesn’t necessarily mean the message will be neutral. Oliver Stone served in Vietnam and came home with a BSM w/V Device and 2 Purple Hearts.
Yeah, his movies aren’t pablum or romance. But they’re not exactly evenhanded much of the time, either.
“Oliver Stone…not exactly evenhanded”
That is a classic understatement if ever there were one…along with Michael Moore, Mr. Stone seems to be the sort of fellow who will never accept a lex parsimoniae solution to anything involving the government. Those two will believe the singularly most convoluted solution if it incriminates the rich, the government, or the military.
Perhaps not quite Veterans Today level conspiracy buffs, but close enough to make you wonder if they’ve collaborated with Duff at some point in their past.
#23 Hondo: where did I say a combat-veteran-director’s work would be evenhanded? Where?
Some of us would go so far as to say that the dirty, stinking hippies created not only the myth but the entire problem. I hold them responsible for most of the “issues” that the typical Viet Nam vet had/has. Certainly, I will allow that some small percentage of combat vets would have problems simply because some folks will have problems no matter where they are or what they experience.
Those of us old enough to remember the stories or remember the actual events of returning WWII and Korean War vets know that many were not exactly welcomed home. Most were expected to more or less pick up their lives where they had left off prior to leaving for war. Not necessarily the best thing for every returning vet, but being asked to simply forget the war experience is far easier to tolerate than being shamed for having answered the call or the draft to serve in Viet Nam.
Thanks to not just being greeted with indifference when our Viet Nam vets returned home but facing serious disdain, they had to deal with all sorts of outrageous situations (many of which it seems that we will never outgrow) for which no one had been trained. Gee, thanks, all you lefties for once again creating a problem where one did not exist and then offering idiotic “solutions” which only made the problems you created worse, as you denied all responsibility and blamed everything on others.