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HOME TO WAR: A History of the Vietnam
 Veterans Movement, by Gerald Nicosia.
  N.Y. : Crown Publishers, 2001, 690 pages, Illustrated,
$35 hardcover (book also in paperback).

Gerald Nicosia, 53, deserves to be well known by all Beat/Post Beat readers and writers—for the book here under review and also far his work of the past three decades. I’ll give some details.

Firstly, he’s a somewhat unusual Post Beat Independent poet and writer. I mean, whereas other P.-B. I’s follow the Beats in being personal and writing about themselves and the immediate lives they are living, Gerry, for whatever reason or reasons, writes mainly about others. We all know his stellar MEMORY BABE, the critical biography of Jack Kerouac. Some of us also know his one or two page poem portraits of fellow poets Harold Norse, Jack Micheline, Charles Bukowski, Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, &c. (he does this kind of poem better than anyone). And his next book may be about the Black activist Mumia Abu Jamal, currently on Death Row in a California prison, He also long and fervently championed Jan Kerouac in her battle with the Lowell Sampases  thru the courts for control of her father Jack’s literary estate. Ever serving friends, he has even organized recent death time tributes to Corso and Ken Kesey in San Francisco (he lives in the Bay Area). Last year he also published a long critical study of me in a New York literary magazine, The Dirty Goat. And he is presently writing a novel (he already has one in the drawer) about his immigrant parents.

So now we have HOME TO WAR, his latest work about others. It’s a massive 690 page explanation, defense of and tribute to the Vietnam veterans who initially and for years lost much more than a war in Southeast Asia on their return home to America. The long Vietnam war stretched from the USA “military advisors” days in the late Fifties early-Sixties to the marines’ landing in Da Nang in 1965 to the inconclusive peace treaty of 1973 to the actual end of the war with the fall of South Vietnam’s American supported Saigon to the North Vietnamese in 1975. Many tens of thousands of American men and boys were killed or terribly wounded (mentally and emotionally as well as physically) in what was actually a civil war they should never have been part of. Even more Vietnamese dead and wounded, lots of innocent civilians included, napalm, bomb, hand grenade, rifle, gun,  bayonet  victims, swelled  the horrendous “body count.” And many of the American soldiers who were lucky — or, often enough, unlucky — to come back to homeland America alive instead of in body bags became peace and rights activists. In yet another selfless defense of the underdog, Gerry  Nicosia — ever righteously and rightly incensed over the injustices of this war and this world and a formidable ally for anyone to have — most ably relates their story. Tho not a vet himself, in this book he mounts a vivid crusade for the G.I’s, especially those in the Vietnam Veterans Movement who came “home to war.”

The war the vets came home to was multifold. Firstly, the United States Government and Establishment, from its various culpable, uncomprehending and unwilling to face facts Presidents (Nixon and the others before Clinton) down the line were not keen to support or even acknowledge the “grunts” or Army foot soldiers. Presidents, generals, the Congress, the Pentagon, the CIA, the Courts with their handpicked judges, the popular press, the police, even the Veterans Administration (VA), Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) and Veterans Health Administration (VHA), all inadequately funded by the government, chose to blame the soldiers, not themselves or the System, for losing the war, the first ever lost by the proud and mighty USofA. Officialdom couldn’t bear to acknowledge losers. And, next, taking their cue from the top, neither could the “Silent Majority” citizenry of America. Therefore, just about everyone chose to ignore, oppose, reject or “block out” the vets and deny them the legitimate claims of their representatives, especially the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the American Veterans Movement (AVM) and the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA), for recognition of the officially ignored realities of the war and the vicious carnage and slaughtering in one way or another of everyone directly involved. To the forefront were the needs (psychological, medical and compensational) of those who returned with injuries, illnesses and disabilities resulting from not only wounds, paralysis and amputations but from things like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Agent Orange (with thousands of deformed and disabled dioxin afflicted vets’ children one horrific result) and the slow developing Hepatitis C, all real and deadly despite the cowardly and insensitive denials of officialdom, including the Veterans Administration.

The VA hospitals filled with the mentally, emotionally and physically  wounded, often kids in or just barely out of their teens, were just a disgrace — places it was generally easier to crack up or die in than be healed in. These kids, often also now drug addicts due to their sufferings, confusions,  anxieties and disappointments, were themselves victims of a war of genocide perpetrated by them against the Vietnamese people (the infamous My Lai was a not uncommon occurrence). The often terrified, frustrated and angry young American troops were driven to commit atrocities by the very nature of a guerrilla war they knew or suspected was a lie from beginning to end and one they could not win but would probably needlessly die in. These VA hospitals, supposedly there to serve and heal the vets, were grossly inadequate, both the physical plants and the staff, a true sham, scandal, horror and disgrace.

Slowly, very slowly over the long years, the VVAW and other vets’ organizations (including, late on, the Military Families Support Network or MFSN) cut thru the propaganda and lies of the Establishment driven media and educated and enlightened the American people. Nicosia meticulously details and documents this process and while mightily for and with the Veterans Movement, he does not shrink from reporting the harsh divisions, in fighting and ego conflicts among the leaders of the VVAW, &c. — inevitable in such taut organizations where distinctions like “heroes” and “villains” got blurred in the common cause.

Readers of this book will meet both “heroes” and “villains” and unforgettable “characters” like wheelchair bound vet Ron Kovic, author of BORN ON THE FOURTH  OF JULY, over a critical time span of forty years (1960’s to early 2000’s) of American history. So many people are dealt with as individuals that readers will be drawn right in with them, sharing their lives, their marches, their rap sessions, their variable other activities, &c. And there is no doubt that these readers will be deeply moved (probably to tears like me, often needing to stop to wipe my eyes and my glasses). They will not only meet the brave, seriously disturbed and maimed vets but the noble civilians who joined them and championed them against all the odds. To put it another way, in this book you get Nicosia, who is a compelling writer, reaching both the minds and the hearts of his readers with concise no bullshit angry but controlled prose. “In American politics, manipulation carries the day over brains almost every time,” he writes (and hey, did I just hear someone mumble “George W. 2002” in recognition of this latest President with a misguided oil more than terrorism-based war to get out of his and  the USA’ s system, this time the target little Iraq, O!) Gerry’s prose offerings also include the famous black-point of view refusal of the draft statement by Muhammad Ali: Ain’t no Viet Cong ever called me ‘nigger’.”

Well, I’ve given this review the time and space it deserves, no less! For HOME TO WAR is about the most  damning indictment of  the Vietnam war and all  waryou are ever likely to read or imagine! Nicosia, in conclusion, makes the point that Establishment people and agencies, political, &c., are not generally evil per se. They start out intending to serve others but inevitably end up simply serving and perpetuating themselves. Therefore they always have to be opposed for, indeed, they always end up doing evil. Hip “counter culture” readers know that too well, tho not in the detail this writer gives in his original and definitive book. He is well supported by the many, many rare and moving photos backing up his words. Yes, and I’d personally say that the war for right, reason, justice and inevitably peace on Earth must continue until power, money, greed and overall ignore ance are replaced as the criteria for political, military, industrial, &c., leadership and modus operandi by no less than universal Consciousness, the one constant and only non divisive element underlying all the myriad wisdom systems of Man.

I bow to Gerald Nicosia, historian, and highly recommend his book to everyone.

 
     Gerald Nicosia

   Kaviraj George Dowden