Fighting the Internal and External War

The story of Vietnam Veteran, William Ehrhardt, shows a uniquely vulnerable and raw account of what the average United States soldier was faced with upon arrival in Vietnam. Ehrhardt details his confusion upon arrival, for he believed the corporate narrative America was projecting onto our country at this time of war: America was saving and helping the poor and helpless Vietnamese people from their own destruction. Hopeful and liberation-motivated soldiers, like Ehrhardt, were tragically mistaken when the truth of the Vietnam War was revealed only through their first-hand experience. 

“I saw four armed enemy soldiers the first eight months I was in Vietnam, and yet our battalion, during that same period of time, sustained 75 mining and sniping incidents per month. Over half resulting in casualties.”

-William Ehrhardt

Through accounts of once naive soldiers like Ehrhardt, it is clear how the American government took advantage of a drafted slew of young men that did not know why they were being commanded to do unthinkable actions. The United States government had the upper hand, however, for if the young soldiers didn’t capitalize on their commands, they were going to be killed by “villainous” Viet Cong. 

“The notion I had in high school was that the Viet Cong terrorized the Vietnamese population, forced them to fight the Americans on the pain of death. What I began to understand in Vietnam was that they didn’t need to do things like that. All they had to do was let a marine patrol go through a village, and whatever was left at that village, they had all the recruits they needed.”

-William Ehrhardt

Ehrhardt was not the only soldier to realize how harrowing this cycle in Vietnam was, for the boys at war were all yearning for a ticket home on the “freedom bird,” the only way out alive. Once soldiers were granted a one way ticket home, they expected to have escaped the combat. Little did they know the terrors they physically escaped were traveling back to the states with them. 

The United States government drafted naive young men to fight an unjust war, only to leave them stranded with the scarring memories of the acts of terror they were forced to commit. When the war ended in 1975, and the last troops were brought home, the acknowledgement of PTSD was scarce. The mere notion of being affected by what happened overseas was a topic that was commonly swept under the rug. Yet the men who made it home from Vietnam were affected like no other veterans before due to a variety of reasons, including a majority of solitary tours, a lack of decompression time, and the fact that the US Department of Veteran Affairs did not recognize PTSD as a disorder (Linscott). 

In order to battle with their internal war, veterans only had the option to help themselves because no one else knew how. In the 1970s admitting to being affected by the war was shown as a sign of weakness, for soldiers were simply expected to move on from their time deployed. Such unrealistic expectations from such a gruesome war left many suffering alone, but some were able to find creative outlets to ease the pain. William Ehrhardt, interviewed above, was a poet before the war, yet after the war he used his creative skills to work out his issues of PTSD from the Vietnam War. A leader for other veterans, Ehrhardt started a new path to recovery for struggling war veterans.