Vietnam’s deep scars
The Vietnam War – one of the 20th century’s longest military conflicts – began, according to most historians, with active US military involvement in the region in 1954, although its underlying origins stretch back to the 1800s. Fundamentally, the war pitted communist North Vietnam and its allies against South Vietnam and its main ally, the United States. But it also involved several other countries.
Australia’s involvement began in 1962 when it agreed, as a US ally, to send ‘military advisers’ to Vietnam. Then, in 1965, in a move intended to further strengthen relations with the US and help prevent the “spread of communism in Southeast Asia”, Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced Australia would send a battalion of combat troops to South Vietnam.
By the time the war was over in 1975 the casualty figures were huge. The dead included an estimated 2 million North and South Vietnamese civilians; more than 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and their guerilla allies, known as the Viet Cong, who were based mostly in the dense jungles of South Vietnam; up to 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers; and more than 58,000 members of the US armed forces. Of the 60,000 Australians who served in the conflict, 523 were killed and more than 3000 physically injured. New Zealand also committed some 3000 troops, 37 of whom were killed and 187 wounded.
For Australia, there has also been an immense ongoing impact on the servicemen who returned from the bitter conflict – as well as their families. It’s been documented, for example, that up to a third of Australian Vietnam veterans suffered from ongoing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition defined by the American Psychiatric Association as “a psychiatric disorder that may occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event, series of events or set of circumstances” which they “may experience…as emotionally or physically harmful or life-threatening and may affect mental, physical, social, and/or spiritual wellbeing”.
In 1999, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released a report confirming, after much anecdotal evidence, that the suicide rate in the children of Vietnam veterans was “three times that of the general community”. According to the Institute, “an estimated 230 children of Vietnam veterans suicided between the end of the Vietnam conflict and 1997, with 80% of these being male”.
It’s tragic evidence of the ongoing intergenerational trauma of war, indicating that PTSD certainly reached well beyond the men who fought in the Vietnam conflict.
