Judith Coburn

When a rainbow of KPFA staff and supporters protested the moves, as well as Berry’s racial rationale, months of chaos ensued. Berry and Executive Director Lynn Chadwick fired the station manager, censored its public affairs programmers to keep them from talking about the controversy, had a broadcaster arrested — while he was on the air — for defying the ban, shut down the station and locked KPFA staffers out, had peaceful demonstrators arrested, and paid anti-union lawyers, armed security guards and a tony public relations firm over a half-million dollars to prevail.

Here in the home of the free speech movement, Berry’s moves outraged even people who don’t listen to the station. The result is that in the last two months, she has been socked with complaints before her own Civil Rights Commission, accused of unfair labor practices before the National Labor Relations Board and investigated by a committee of the California Legislature; she has been attacked by a wide political spectrum of local Berkeley politicians, including the police chief, and sued by listeners and staffers challenging her actions in the KPFA struggle.

What’s striking is the fact that the Civil Rights Commission she chairs has also been mired in controversy and management woes in the last decade — but few liberals have bothered to raise their voices about her management practices there. A reluctance to criticize Berry is understandable, because she is revered by civil rights activists.

They cite her heroic fight to defend the Civil Rights Commission against conservatives appointed by President Reagan (and against Reagan himself, who tried to fire her), who were trying to abolish both affirmative action and the commission itself. She took part in the infamous celebrity arrests at the South African Embassy in 1983 along with Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., and others.

She was gutsy in opposing Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March, calling the Nation of Islam leader guilty of “the most despicable, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes imaginable.” About the only time she’s ducked a controversial national issue was when she kept silent on President Clinton’s welfare reform, which many civil rights activists abhor.

Berry’s struggle from a childhood of desperate poverty to a life of accomplishment as an activist, scholar and high government official is a noble one. Besides chairing the boards of the Civil Rights Commission and Pacifica, she has served as an assistant secretary of education and holds an endowed chair in American social thought at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of seven books, most focusing on civil rights, feminism and the law.

But Berry’s achievements have come at a cost. Off the record, people who know her well describe her as a vitriolic brawler who doesn’t know when to stop fighting, and who turns on anyone who disagrees with her — even African-Americans with civil rights records equal to or more impressive than her own. More than one African-American politician and journalist have suffered a tongue lashing from Berry and been called an “Uncle Tom” just because they didn’t share her agenda.

Pat Scott, the former Pacifica manager who herself drew furious complaints about her attempts to “professionalize” the grass-rootsy stations, rues the day she recommended Berry for the top Pacifica job. The civil rights leader’s tenure “could be the end not only of KPFA but of the whole Pacifica network,” says Scott, who is also African-American.

But Berry’s use of the race card to silence her critics is especially unfortunate, because the management chaos she has presided over at Pacifica is paralleled by disarray at the Civil Rights Commission she heads.

A 1997 report by the General Accounting Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, found the Civil Rights Commission to be “an agency in disarray, with limited awareness how its resources are used … the Commission could not provide key cost information for individual aspects of its operations … significant agency records documenting Commission decision-making were reported lost, misplaced or nonexistent …”

The GAO report questioned why only 10 percent of the CRC’s money went to the anti-discrimination investigations and reports that are the agency’s mission. It found that CRC reports took so long to complete that in many cases they were outdated and irrelevant by the time they were issued. Hearings on the apocryphal Los Angeles uprising in 1992 weren’t held until 1993 and a report, revamped as a blast at the L.A. police, wasn’t even issued until May, 1999.

The GAO also reported that the commission filed few of the reports to Congress and other departments of the government that they were required to by law. At a July, 1997 hearing on the report, GAO investigators told congressmen that many of their questions about the commission couldn’t be answered because commission staff withheld information even after several requests from the GAO. (Berry also refused to open Pacifica’s books or to testify during a recent California lawmakers’ probe of Pacifica until she was threatened with a subpoena).

When criticized, Berry stonewalled. She began her testimony on the GAO report by saying, “I will not respond to some of the comments that were made by the [congressional] members [of the subcommittee] since my years of working in Washington tells me that way lies peril and I will not take the time to do it.” Berry then blamed the former CRC chairman and current staffers for the disarray the GAO found even though she has been in charge for six years.

She blamed cutbacks in the CRC budget, which was slashed 50 percent in 1986 and has inched up only slightly under Clinton. She blamed the White House for not appointing a staff director who should have been in charge of day-to-day operations. But Berry then admitted that when a staff director was hired she offered the woman a two-day-a-week, $30,000-a-year job teaching one of Berry’s courses in Philadelphia. This arrangement was roundly condemned as a conflict of interest by conservatives on the subcommittee.

Berry’s allies on the badly divided subcommittee leapt to her defense, playing the race card as Berry herself often does. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., dismissed the entire GAO report on the grounds that it had been requested by Republican opponents of affirmative action. The hearing was nothing but an “unrelenting and mean-spirited attempt to dismantle civil rights protections,” Waters fumed.

While there is no doubt that the conservatives in Congress are determined to dismantle affirmative action and abolish the Civil Rights Commission, Berry was finally forced to admit that day that bad management hardly helped her cause. Luckily for Berry, her Congressional opponents seemed to have dropped the ball after the 1997 hearing.

Rep. Asa Hutchinson, R-Ark., said this week he was unaware of whether there had been any reforms at the commission in response to the GAO critique. Berry refused to return Salon News calls. The CRC press office faxed back a letter from its staff director, Ruby Moy, to the GAO saying that an administrative handbook had been rewritten and a new management information system was in place. But the letter did not mention any of the larger, more serious issues of delayed reports and lax investigations.

Committee congressmen were unaware of Berry’s Pacifica job and the conflict of interest it poses. Hutchinson told Salon News he didn’t know about Berry’s job at Pacifica or the legal turmoil there, “but that questions might be asked at our next oversight hearings.”

Concerns about Berry’s management and personal style have a long history. But few of her critics will talk on the record, which has made documenting her troubles difficult. Enough of them were willing to speak off the record to the Washington Monthly magazine that in 1987 it nominated her for a “Powers That Shouldn’t Be” piece, naming public officials who shouldn’t be nominated by the next Democratic president.

The magazine reported that when Berry was assistant secretary of education under President Carter, officials there cut her out of policy decisions because “she’d shatter consensus and jeopardize initiatives … she distrusted people [so] as to not be trustworthy herself …”

“Oh, I remember Mary,” a former Carter aide told Salon News. “She was a real loose cannon. We spent a lot of time smoothing over things after she’d opened her big mouth.”

Berry’s divisive management style is well-documented in the Pacifica debacle. She played the race card early and often, insisting the changes she proposed were necessary to diversify KPFA’s staff and listener base. But she refused to meet with people of color from the station’s staff and leadership, who mostly opposed her high-handed attempts at reform.

“KPFA has been doing everything it could for years and was on the right track,” says Pat Scott, who was once called “the black manager of a white station.” Concludes Scott: “This whole issue is crazy.”

Maybe the most bizarre episode yet is Berry’s appearance at Pacifica station WBAI in New York in late August, where she dropped by unannounced and asked to meet with staff. She lectured the staffers about “diversity,” apparently not noticing that most people in the room were black, Latino or Asian.

“We were amazed how little she knows about radio or what programming we do,” reported Mimi Rosenberg, a labor reporter and local advisory board member at WBAI, who ended up in the unannounced meeting with Berry because she happened to be dropping off a tape at the station when the chairwoman swept through.

Berry then flabbergasted her listeners by suggesting the network sell WBAI and/or KPFA and buy a string of small, black radio stations in the South. “A kind of black NPR,” one staffer described it. “Laudable, but to cannibalize Pacifica with its own 50-year history and listeners? She should go out and build that network on her own and see how hard it is!”

But Berry has always seemed determined to use Pacifica for her own ends. Her detractors point to a statement she made when she took over as chair, in which she said nothing about her vision for the future of the progressive network. Instead, she vowed not to let anything that happens at KPFA destroy her reputation.

And Berry has used her federal connections to further her Pacifica agenda. She used contacts at the Justice Department to get a department official to call Berkeley Police Chief D.E. Butler and ask why KPFA supporters who were peacefully demonstrating outside the station hadn’t been arrested. The Berkeley cops got tough for a day, arresting scores, until outraged citizens and the City Council reversed the get-tough policy.

“Many labor disputes have taken place in Berkeley over 25 years,” Butler wrote in a letter to the East Bay Express. “But the Pacifica Foundation’s decision to turn a labor dispute into a mass arrest situation was a first.” Chadwick then demanded the City of Berkeley pay for the security Pacifica had hired because the police had failed to protect the station. The City Council fired back a bill for $200,000 to Pacifica for police overtime at the round-the-clock demos.

To be sure, wrangles between central Pacifica management and local stations predate Berry. It was Pat Scott, KPFA station manager and later Pacifica Foundation executive, who began an all-out push for “professionalization” of the stations. Scott and her allies believed the amateurish, circa-1960s, anything-goes style of KPFA, WBAI in New York and KPFK in Los Angeles couldn’t wash in the increasingly conservative ’80s.

She and the board took control of finances away from the stations, which she says had either been unable to keep books or, in the case of the Washington station, wasted money on fancy offices for the station manager. Scott inserted the board into programming — traditionally left to the stations — when she fired black nationalists at KPPK in Los Angeles for anti-Semitic remarks on the air, and got rid of longtime programmers at KPFA whose shows she deemed outmoded.

Such changes, condemned by critics as “mainstreaming,” were opposed furiously by many staffers and members of the local advisory boards. The Pacifica executive committee began to view the local advisory boards, the traditional backbone of Pacifica’s listener-supported, “free speech” culture, as the enemy. In 1995, the executive board issued what became known as its infamous “My Way or the Highway” memo urging local board members who disagreed with the vast changes at the stations to resign if they didn’t agree. The board also closed all finance committee meetings and ruled board minutes “confidential,” again over furious objections of listeners, most staffers and local advisory board members.

Not surprisingly, the network’s attempts to go mainstream have met with approval, not suspicion, from federal regulators, and the choice of a board chair who is herself a high federal official has only won the network friends. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for instance, which funds Pacifica, has been happy to see it lose some of its radical tinge, since the agency had been savaged by right-wing senators in the early ’90s for funding “a communist network,” as Sen. Jesse Helms called Pacifica.

When some local opponents of the network’s centralization moves filed a formal complaint with the CPB, on the grounds that CPB rules dictate that all public stations keep open books and hold open meetings, the investigation went nowhere. Two investigators lost their jobs over the controversy and when a watered-down but critical report was finally released, it was dismissed by the CPB president, Robert Coonrod, who actually praised Pacifica in the meeting in which the report was presented.

Top CPB officials were also only too willing to help Pacifica in its battle to bring the stations, listeners and their local advisory boards to heel. Before Scott left Pacifica, she discovered an obscure CPB rule that prohibits local advisory board members from serving on the governing board of a public station. It had never been enforced. Scott reported to the CPB that the Pacifica stations were violating the rule.

At first top CBP officials seemed unconcerned, calling it “a technicality” in conversations with one Pacifica board member and several local advisory board members. Documents show, though, that in the weeks before the critical Pacifica board vote over cutting ties with the local boards, Lynn Chadwick was in close contact with Coonrod.

Suddenly, on the eve of the vote, Coonrod sent a letter to Pacifica threatening a cutoff of CPB money if the ties weren’t cut. The board went along with Berry and Chadwick, a decision that is being challenged in California court by a group of local advisory members and listeners from the five stations.

Chadwick, in a recent interview, said, “The CPB tries to give as much autonomy as possible to the stations it funds … the board’s decision was the least disruptive alternative … only a vocal few oppose it.”

The Federal Communications Commission, too, has given Pacifica free rein. When the network shut down KPFA during July, and installed an ISDN line to its transmitter so it could pipe programming from its Houston station — outside its FCC-approved signal area — Pacifica did it before it had even asked the FCC for a waiver. Ten days later, Pacifica got permission. “We don’t intervene in labor-management disputes,” is how FCC spokesman David Fiske characterized the lockout.

Even when Berry caved in to the protests at KPFA and announced she was reopening the station at the end of July, she turned what could have been an opportunity for peacemaking into an ultimatum. If staffers didn’t return the next day at 9 a.m., they’d lose their jobs, even though no job protections or an end to the “gag” on discussing the controversy on the air were guaranteed.

Employees were also threatened with “corrective action” by the board if they didn’t, within six months to a year, increase the number of listeners, the diversity of the audience and its “loyalty.” Berry’s ultimatum required that a commercial ratings service would be used to measure the station’s performance, another gut punch at KPFA’s grass-roots, listener-supported tradition.

Back on the air, the station had lost its general manager, program director, business manager, music director, a second host for the morning show and its manager for the apprenticeship program — which trained young people of color — because of the turmoil and financial uncertainty. Interim general manager Jim Bennett says he’s only been able to replace some of them with temporary hires. “Talented people are reluctant to apply because of how unstable it is in KPFA and Pacifica land,” he says. It is still unclear whether the more than $500,000 Pacifica spent on the lockout will come out of KPFA’s budget.

“She’s setting us up for failure,” says award-winning broadcaster and KPFA talk-show host Larry Bensky. “Berry doesn’t want to improve KPFA. She wants revenge.”

KPFA begins a critical fund-raising marathon Tuesday, and listeners are filling the airwaves with tortured laments that the money they send to KPFA will go to the now-despised central network, Pacifica. The Pacifica board, fraught with resignations by two members and whistle-blowing by another, has postponed its October meeting by a month, leaving the stations operating without budgets for the first time in their 50-year history. Listeners have formed an organization to push for Berry’s resignation and scores of back-channel pleas have been made, so far to no avail.

Mary Berry’s term as chairman of the Pacifica board runs out in nine months. Many hope she will simply step down then and disappear. But that doesn’t sound like Dr. Mary Frances Berry. She told WBAI staffers at her drive-by visit last month, “If you want me to stay I will go. But the minute you ask me to go I am here forever!”

His eloquent commitment to his fellow Marines is the highest value in military life. But the Bush administration, which sent Blake Miller, his fellow Marines and 1.3 million other Americans (so far) to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, apparently does not share this commitment.

Much has been written about how President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld waged war on the cheap, sending too few ill-equipped young soldiers — 30 percent of them ill-trained Reservists and National Guardsmen — into battle. But little has been reported about how shockingly on the cheap the homecomings of these soldiers have proved to be. The Bush administration awarded Miller a medal, but it has fought for three long years to deny soldiers like him the care they need. While Miller and his men were being thrown into the fire in Fallujah, the White House was proposing to cut the combat pay of soldiers like them. (Only an outburst of outrage across the political spectrum caused the administration to back off from that suggestion.)

The Department of Veterans Affairs, now run by a former Republican National Committeeman, has been subjected to the same radical hatcheting that the White House has tried to wield against the rest of America’s safety net. Cutbacks, cooking the books, privatization schemes, even a proposal to close down the V.A.’s operations have all been in evidence. The administration’s inside-the-beltway supporters, such as the Heritage Foundation and famed antitax radical Grover Norquist, like to equate veterans care with welfare. Traditionally, however, most Americans have held that the V.A.’s medical care and disability compensation were earned by those who served their country.

Unfortunately, in our draft-free country, the fight to protect the V.A. and to fully fund it has gone on largely out of public sight. Other than the Washington Post and the Associated Press, relatively few journalistic organizations have bothered to regularly cover the department. The fight over it that White House hatchetmen, V.A. political appointees and their allies in Congress have had with congressional critics (Democratic and Republican) along with veterans organizations has been monitored closely only by veterans’ Web sites like Larry Scott’s VA Watchdog.org, Veteransforcommonsense.org and Military.com.

While national deficits soar, thanks in part to skyrocketing war costs, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are flooding into the increasingly underfunded V.A. system. As of April 28, the Pentagon says that 2,401 Americans have died and 17,762 have been wounded in combat in Iraq (and 281 more have died in Afghanistan). But these casualty figures seem to be significant undercounts. After all, 144,424 American veterans have sought treatment from the V.A. system since returning from those wars, not including soldiers actually hospitalized in military facilities.

These figures were wrested only recently from the V.A. after years of fruitless demands from Democrats on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee. The 144,424 figure includes not only many of the 17,762 reported wounded in combat by the Pentagon — if that figure is, in fact, accurate — but those wounded psychologically, those injured in accidents and those whose ailments were caused or exacerbated by service in the war. (Think of war, in this sense, as an extreme sport in its toll on the body.) Of course, neither Pentagon nor V.A. figures for the wounded include estimates of soldiers or veterans who don’t show up at a Department of Defense or V.A. facility. Among these casualties are post-combat-tour suicides (who obviously can’t show up) and the victims of diseases like leishmaniasis, caused by the ubiquitous sand flies in Iraq, who often suffer on their own.

Nonetheless, the V.A. has admitted — and it has been confirmed by an Army study — that a staggering 35 percent of veterans who served in Iraq have already sought treatment in the V.A. system for emotional problems from the war. Add this to the older veterans, especially from the Vietnam era, pouring into the system as their war wounds, both physical and emotional, deepen with age or as, on retirement, they find they can no longer afford private health insurance and realize that V.A. healthcare is — or at least was — more generous than Medicare.

Just as the Pentagon failed, after its March 2003 invasion of Iraq, to plan for keeping the peace, guarding against looting, fighting a resilient insurgency or handling a civil war, so has the Department of Veterans Affairs failed to plan for caring for casualties of the war. The V.A. admitted recently that 33,858 more vets showed up for treatment in just the first quarter of fiscal year 2006 than were expected for the entire year. Do the math yourself. Multiply times 4, assuming that the war goes on injuring Americans at current levels, and you get a possible underestimate of about 135,000 casualties for the year.

Even more distressing, the San Diego Union-Tribune recently reported that mentally ill soldiers are being sent back to war armed only with antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. The Union-Tribune quotes Sydney Hickey of the National Military Family Association as saying that “more than 200,000 prescriptions for the most common antidepressants were written in the last 14 months for service members and their families.” According to the Union, an Army study also found that 17 percent of combat-seasoned infantrymen suffer from major depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder after a single tour in Iraq. California Sen. Barbara Boxer has called for an investigation.

Are such chronic underestimates merely the result of incompetence? Not according to the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm. In a series of reports on the V.A. over the past three years, the GAO found that the department’s top officials submitted budget requests based on cost limits demanded by the White House, not on realistic expectations of how many veterans would actually need medical care or disability support.

In repeated testimony before Congress, top V.A. political appointees have opposed demands by veterans groups like the American Legion and the Disabled Veterans of America to increase significantly funds for medical care and disability payments for the new patients now flooding the system. Top V.A. officials assured Congress that more money wasn’t needed because the agency had stepped up “management efficiencies.” But the GAO found that from 2003 to 2006, there were no obvious management efficiencies whatsoever to offset the increased treatment costs from the Iraq war, nor did the V.A. even have a methodology for reporting on such alleged efficiencies.

While the GAO’s findings, when describing the V.A.’s budget manipulations, were couched in such relatively polite bureaucratic euphemisms as “misleading,” “lacked a methodology” and “does not have a reliable basis,” the conclusions nonetheless were striking. “The GAO report confirms what everyone has known all along,” American Legion national commander Thomas L. Bock commented. “The VA’s health-care budget has been built on false claims of ‘efficiency’ savings, false actuarial assumptions and an inability to collect third-party reimbursements — money owed them. This budget model has turned our veterans into beggars, forced to beg for the medical care they earned and, by law, deserve. These deceptions are especially unconscionable when American men and women are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Some veterans are calling it fraud. Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee calls it “Enron-styled accounting.”

The economic realities of the wars the Bush administration has taken us into are, in truth, budget busting. A recent study by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard management expert Linda Biones — which actually factored the costs of “coming home” into war expenditures — sets the total cost of the Iraq war at between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, including $122 billion in disability payments and $92 billion in healthcare for veterans.

Pentagon healthcare costs for soldiers still in the military have doubled in the past five years and are projected to total $64 billion, or 12 percent of the official Pentagon budget, by 2015, according to William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. Soaring American medical costs are only partly to blame. Advances in combat medical care have also meant that far more wounded soldiers are being kept alive than in earlier wars, many of them with serious brain injuries and/or multiple amputations. Taking care of these tragically maimed soldiers for life will be extraordinarily costly, in both medical care and their 100 percent disability payments. (The V.A. rates disability on a scale of 0 to 100 percent, which then determines the size of the monthly disability payment due a veteran.)

Even before recent veterans began flooding the system, the V.A. was already underfunded and being criticized for poor services. Then, three years ago, Rep. Evans and Rep. Chris H. Smith, R-N.J., chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, raised the alarm that the V.A., already short of funds, would face a catastrophe as the troops began returning from Iraq.

Smith was rewarded for his efforts to sound the alarm by being removed not just from his chairmanship, but from the committee altogether, by the House Republican leadership. Similarly, in November 2004, V.A. head Anthony Principi was forced out by the White House because of his opposition to the V.A. being shortchanged in the budget the White House demanded — so lobbyists for veterans believe. But Principi seems not to have suffered from his V.A. experience. The Los Angeles Times reported recently that a medical services company Principi headed, and returned to after running the V.A., earned over a billion dollars in fees, much of it from contracts approved while Principi was V.A. chief.

The V.A. admits its disability system was overburdened even before the administration invaded Iraq; and, by 2004, it had a backlog of 300,000 disability claims. Now, the V.A. reports that the backlog has reached 540,122. By April 2006, 25 percent of rating claims took six months to process — no small thing for a veteran wounded badly enough to be unable to work. An appeal of a rejected claim frequently takes years to settle. One hundred twenty-three thousand disability claims have been filed already by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, in its budget requests, the administration has constantly resisted congressional demands to increase the number of V.A. staffers processing such claims.

Congress has fought the White House over its low V.A. budgets for several years. In the fiscal year 2006 budget, all Congress could finally grant the V.A. was $990 million above the agency’s already meager request — an increase of just 3.6 percent over the previous year despite the rise in casualties to be treated. In fact, top V.A. officials now admit it would take a 14 percent increase in the present budget simply to keep up with the inflation in medical costs.

Rep. Evans estimates that there has been a $4 billion shortfall in V.A. funding in the years 2003-’06. In 2005, the White House admitted that, for medical services alone, the V.A. was short $1 billion for the year — and would be short an additional estimated $2.6 billion in 2006.

What may ultimately swamp the V.A.’s ability to cope is the emotional toll of combat — unless it jettisons thousands of returning soldiers. Nearly one in three veterans has been hospitalized at the V.A., or visited a V.A. outpatient clinic, because of an initial diagnosis of a mental health disorder, according to the V.A. Its numbers are consistent with a recent Army study on soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such a rate might add up over time (depending on how long these wars last) to almost half a million veterans in need of treatment — or more. A 2004 study of several Army and Marine units returning from Iraq and Afghanistan that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine found only 23-40 percent of those with PTSD had sought treatment. And post-traumatic stress is called “post” for a reason — its most serious symptoms usually emerge long after the trauma is over.

Listen to the V.A.’s own national advisory board on PTSD in a report released in February 2006:

“[The] VA cannot meet the ongoing needs of veterans of past deployments while also reaching out to new combat veterans of [Iraq and Afghanistan] and their families within current resources and current models of treatment.”

The V.A. is now paying out $4.3 billion a year for PTSD disability to 215,871 veterans. The report also found that a returning war veteran suffering from emotional illness has to wait an average of 60 days before he or she can even be evaluated for diagnosis, let alone treated. Forty-two percent of V.A. primary care clinics had no mental health staff members and 53 percent of those that did had only one. Eighty-two percent of new patients needed to be in the most intensive PTSD treatment programs, the V.A. report found, but 40 percent of those programs were already so full that they could take only a few more patients; 20 percent said they were too full to take any at all.

“VA’s data show a 30 percent increase in the number of [Iraq and Afghan war] veterans who have an initial diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder from the end of FY 2005,” says Rep. Michael Michaud, D-Maine. “I applaud the courage of these veterans who have sought help, but the administration refuses to acknowledge fully the demand and need for mental health services.”

Further down the line: How many Iraqi veterans will eventually join the ranks of the 400,000 homeless vets on the streets of American cities? (Right now the V.A. takes care of only 100,000 such vets, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.)

This dire situation has only encouraged the budget cutters and anti-government radicals like Norquist, who once joked that he hoped to shrink the government enough so that he could drown it in a bathtub. With PTSD rates soaring among vets, the hatchets have been out not just when it comes to treating them, but even when it comes to the diagnosis of PTSD itself. In 2005, the V.A., under White House pressure, announced that it was reopening 72,000 long-approved PTSD disability claims for review, many of them for Vietnam veterans. Right-wing columnists quickly swung into action with Op-Ed pieces insisting that many PTSD claims were fraudulent. The V.A. backed off — but only after a New Mexico newspaper reported that a troubled Vietnam veteran with a 100 percent PTSD disability killed himself upon fearing that the V.A. might review his case and a firestorm of criticism from Congress and veterans organizations followed.

Other White House ideas for cutting back the V.A., including making vets pay insurance premiums and higher co-pays and doubling vets’ costs for prescription drugs, have also been beaten back by Congress. One V.A. response to its huge backlog of claims has been to limit enrollment for its services. In January 2003, the White House ordered the V.A. to create a new, temporary cost-cutting category of “affluent” vets who would not be eligible to use the V.A.’s services. But the new category seems headed for permanency. And it sets the cutoff level for eligibility for V.A. care so low — around $30,000 for a so-called affluent family of four — that many vets who have been cut off can’t possibly afford health insurance and medical care on the private market.

In World War II, 12 million Americans fought on behalf of a nation of 130 million. Twenty-five percent of American men served in that war. They came back heroes to a country more than willing to give them the latest medical care, compensate them for their wounds, send them to college and help them buy homes.

Fifty years later in Iraq — an unpopular war — only 1.3 million are fighting for a nation of 300 million. “Never have so few sacrificed so much for so many,” one Desert Storm veteran said recently. Iraq may be the wrong cause for sacrifice. But Vietnam veterans taught us that once war starts we must be willing to take care of everyone who gets hurt in it.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

Loyd says soldiering is in his blood. The military men he’s descended from fought in the Boer War and in World War II, and he was a soldier himself with the British in Northern Ireland (where he apparently didn’t witness a single shot fired in anger). He tells us he “wanted to know what it was like to shoot people. I felt it was the key to understanding so much more.” But as a journalist/photographer (he’s never clear about what, if anything, he’s doing work-wise), when he gets his chance to actually kill a Serb, he doesn’t. And elsewhere he forgets to take photos altogether, making him an all-around fuck-up as a “shooter.”

Since he’s not interested in “the story,” you won’t learn much here about these wars that you haven’t already read in the newspapers. Perhaps because he’s not tied to the daily story the other journalists and photographers are covering, though, he does make use of the time he spends cruising around on the fringes of the fighting, discovering how tribal the Bosnian war is and how provisional the ethnic loyalties and the alliances between Muslims, Croats and Serbs are.

But he isn’t much of a storyteller. There are a few revealing anecdotes: How an American peacekeeper was so spooked by a Bosnian killing field war-crimes investigators were exploring that he wouldn’t patrol it at night. How some Swedish peacekeepers backed off from the courageous move to free a score of Muslim prisoners from their Croatian captors after a visiting BBC team decided the scene was too dangerous to film. But nothing here compares to the stories Tobias Wolff tells in his Vietnam memoir, “In Pharaoh’s Army,” which distill the whole war into a few pages.

Loyd’s strongest writing is in his descriptions of carnage — of the sound and smell of shellfire; of the sexual release of blasting away with an automatic machine gun; of the stroke victim’s daughter who is raped while her father lies paralyzed and unable to help; of the Croats who wire up Muslim POWs with claymore mines and make them walk back to their own lines, forcing their buddies to shoot them to save everyone else. This is pure war reporting, free from the usual journalistic constraints that often give a false significance to suffering. And Loyd waxes eloquent on the backblast of his war time, a heroin addiction that begins before his arrival and becomes the only way he can survive his breaks from the fighting.

Smack and war go together like a horse and carriage. That nihilistic cocktail can seem truer than the hysterical humanism of TV war reporting. But druggy ruminations are notoriously shallow, and an “existence is meaninglessness” POV makes for dreary reading. The hype machine has compared “My War Gone By” to Michael Herr’s masterpiece, “Dispatches,” but Loyd’s book is devoid of Herr’s vivid prose, his wacko humor and his wild, deep love for the American grunts he hung with in Vietnam. There are no people we come to know and understand in Loyd’s book except for a Sarajevo family he looks up when he arrives in the war zone, and he really doesn’t even bring them to life. Although he does once brave enemy lines to save some wounded children (and even saves a cow), he’s ultimately just a tourist.

For Loyd, war turns out, like smack, to lose its transcendent power after a while and decline into an addiction. As for his hope that war would be “the key to understanding so much more,” maybe before he set off he should have listened to Frank Zappa’s warning: “Understanding is the booby prize of life.”

To give Lind his due (which he rarely gives anybody else), his new book, “Vietnam: The Necessary War,” takes off from a breathtakingly plausible assertion: “The United States fought the war in Vietnam because of geopolitics and forfeited the war because of domestic politics.” Hard as it is to find any statement about Vietnam that reflects enough agreement between the still-warring hawks and doves to be accepted as a fact, this might be one.

Lind points to the current consensus on the war — that it was a mistake to intervene in Vietnam at all, but that once the United States did, we should have used unlimited force to quickly win — and finds it misguided. Vietnam, he argues, was no aberration (as many Americans would still like to believe) but one of a series of limited wars, like those in Korea and the Balkans, that we have fought to protect our interests.

But Lind quickly falls into the good guys/bad guys reductionism that polemicists find so bracing. The United States had to fight in Vietnam, he argues, because we were facing a communist bloc that sought to crush us and rule the world; the South Vietnamese were our proxies and the North Vietnamese were the puppets of the communist bloc. It’s that pesky domino theory again, this time dressed up in a new metaphor, “bandwagoning.” Lind sees international power politics as a matter of lesser powers jumping on the “bandwagon” piloted by whichever superpower seems to be dominant at any given time; thus, if the United States hadn’t intervened in South Vietnam, everyone would have jumped on the communist “bandwagon.” (This unfortunate metaphor conjures up a kind of Metternichian musical comedy set to tunes from “The Music Man.” Dominoes is better: You can imagine a tense game, staged ` la “The Seventh Seal,” with Stalin playing Lind for world domination.)

What if the United States hadn’t intervened in Vietnam? What if the course of world politics wasn’t entirely attributable to Cold War machinations? What if the global anti-colonial struggles of the period — which Lind never mentions — or the economic and social upheavals in various countries also came into play? Why is what happened in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos so different? What about the internecine struggles between the two most powerful members of the communist bloc, Russia and China? What about Afghanistan, where the Russians failed to take over? None of these complicated scenarios fit into Lind’s Cold War cartoon of the world.

Lind gleefully (and justly) skewers the American anti-war movement for its romantic fantasies about Uncle Ho and the National Liberation Front. But he never mentions how wrong conservatives were about our South Vietnamese allies, how unwinnable the war was or how extensive the civilian casualties of American bombing were. (And he trots out an old anti-Semitic prejudice about the left when he declares that “apart from Jews, few American students in the sixties were radical.”)

But it’s when he tries to analyze Indochinese politics that his sheer blazing ignorance comes out in full force. To pigeonhole the Vietnamese, southern or northern, communist or anti-communist, as simple pawns smacks of the kind of dismissive racism that did so much to help the United States lose the war. Independence from colonial control was the passion that drove the Vietnamese, whether they were anti-communists, pro-communists or part of the historically significant third force that fought both American and communist domination –which Lind doesn’t even mention.

Lind’s ideological prejudices are so distorting that he fires off some real whoppers. For years it was rumored that 50,000 Vietnam veterans had committed suicide after the war; Lind gives the number as 500,000. (Several years ago I did my own investigation and found out there was no proof for any number.) Gareth Porter, the scholar who argued that U.S. bombing was responsible for Khmer Rouge atrocities, was in fact the only researcher who held this view; he wasn’t, as Lind implies, at all representative of anti-war thinkers. More refugees were not created in communist Vietnam after the war, as Lind claims, than at any previous time; during the war, American bombing and the fighting on both sides created more than a million refugees. All communist regimes are not, as Lind believes, alike; it’s absurd to equate the countless victims of Khmer Rouge genocide and of Maoism and Stalinism with the far fewer victims of Vietnamese land reform.

But then Lind gets his information on Vietnamese (and Russian) politics almost solely from defectors, who, with their special hatred and the angry sense of betrayal they carry into exile, are notoriously unstable and unreliable sources. Doan Van Thoi, a darling of the far right and Lind’s main source, drew some headlines in the late ’70s by convincing Joan Baez that the Vietnamese communists had slaughtered millions of victims after they took over in 1975. No Western journalist who stayed on after the takeover, nor any reputable historian since, has found evidence of such a bloodbath. And the newly opened Soviet archives, which Lind depends on heavily, are a dubious source of information about Russian intentions and actions: Like FBI files and the Pentagon Papers, they’re rife with raw misinformation and wishful thinking.

But the most bizarre of Lind’s ideas is his concept of “losing well.” He argues that by withdrawing from Vietnam in 1969, President Nixon could have sustained Americans’ support for the Cold War — but Lind never explains why withdrawing five years earlier wouldn’t have caused everyone to jump off the American “bandwagon.” In a breathtakingly cynical analysis of casualties and the “worth” of the United States’ intervention in Vietnam, he writes, “A war to defend a great power’s military credibility might be compared to an art auction, which is, among other things, a competition among the rich for prestige.” In his view, the fact that you stop bidding (or fighting) at a certain level doesn’t mean that the painting (or the war) wasn’t worth investing in initially — just that you’ve reached your budget’s limit. Needless to say, there isn’t a hint of the cost in human lives in Lind’s flashy cost-benefit computations.

Now that it’s possible to travel and pursue research in Vietnam and Russia (if not yet in China), it may finally be possible for a historian with a keen, compassionate intelligence to write a solid history of the war, taking into consideration who did what, when and why. “Vietnam, the Necessary War” isn’t even a shadow of that book.

“The Coral Reef” reads more like James Ellroy or Georges Bataille than like Hemingway or Michael Herr. Vu centers in not on the nobility, redemption or “meaning” of suffering but its degradation — something that has been largely taboo in the humanistic tradition of war writing. The story’s form mimics the emptiness of this suffering: A sketchy journal that makes no attempt to seem like a complete or even a contemporary record, it just stops when the boat rights itself on a high tide and moves off, as if the 12 days of horror and futility had never happened.

The rest of the collection is just as hermetic and tortured. A blinded burn victim who rapes his sister (replicating her earlier rape by pirates who preyed on boat people) says, “It’s only when we’re in pain that we take time to think.” An S&M triangle mimics the sadistic partner’s obsessive, bloody accounts of Vietnamese history. A man force-feeds his woman live fish. An unfaithful wife laps up her lover’s vomit like an animal. It’s as if history’s brutality is literally written on their bodies

But if Vu’s vision in these stories is narrow, the title story explodes it. Part allegory, part hallucination, part pornographic fantasy, “The Dragon Hunt” lurches in and out of control: hilarious exaggerations, over-the-top descriptions of ejaculations (“the sperm still wiggling on her face”), nipples as metaphors over and over, false moments galore but also lardings of gorgeous writing — as when a sip of anisette, “like a green snake, runs down his throat, slips under his Adam’s apple and wriggles before disappearing into his gut … I feel an anise flower unfurl and bloom in the soles of my feet.”

According to Vietnamese legend, the country was conceived by a dragon (a Sino-Vietnamese symbol of vitality) and a fairy. In “The Dragon Hunt,” Vietnamese veterans who fought on opposing sides unleash an arsenal from their Mercedes 500 SEL at a troop of baby dragons and then debauch on the dragon meat. Phoenix hearts are consumed with gallons of anisette. Blood gushes and skulls crack on every page. The narrator’s voice spins in and out of hallucinations, which seem as real as what may or may not actually be happening. And throughout, the storyteller is stalked by brutal metaphors of the sea and its crossings, “the odd thrill of chasing death … float[ing] back staggering across the ocean.” The coral reef has spawned writing, if not meaning.