Vets angered by comments

Veterans object to comparisons made by a CSULB professor

At least 30 veterans, all employed by Cal State Long Beach, rallied together in protest of a recent article that linked Vietnam veterans with drinking problems and improper medical attention.

The article, published April 26 in the Daily Forty-Niner, highlighted the research by Chicano/Latino studies Professor Jose Lopez on street gangs and the problems that perpetuate their violence.

Lopez has been teaching at CSULB since September of 1970, and has been studying gang members for the last 10 years. Lopez said he did not mean to offend anyone.

"My intention was not to insult or offend," Lopez said. "I did not feel I offended anybody, but if I did, I feel badly about that because that's not the kind of person I am."

Lopez likened the quality of street gangs to that of a war zone and inferred that Vietnam veterans, like gang members, are suffering post-traumatic stress which eventually causes people to "explode."

"With Vietnam vets," the article quoted Lopez as saying, "from the literature that I've read, (they are) going to be having a lot of major problems, because it's been 25 years since the war's been over, we know these guys who came back have been drinking all this time, taking care of their own problems by suppressing it through alcohol."

Raymond Renaud, an equipment maintenance assistant at CSULB, said he was deeply offended by the article and is requesting that Lopez publicly apologize for generalizing that all Vietnam veterans are alcoholics with health problems.

"I took great offense at being compared to the low-life gangbang members of our society," said Renaud during an interview Wednesday at which eight other veterans attended. "This imagery is false. He generalized all Vietnam veterans and went way out of whack with this one."

Renaud wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Forty-Niner and circulated a petition for signatures from veterans who were offended by the article. So far, he has obtained 31 signatures, Renaud said.

Lopez said the statements in the article were taken out of context.

"What I said was that most statistics we're shown say we're going to see a lot of (Vietnam veterans) freak out because they have not received proper medical attention," Lopez said. "All of sudden, now they're 50 and they've been drinking all this time and they are not going to be able to sustain that anymore. You're going to see a lot of explosive personalities."

Lopez said he was not referring to all Vietnam veterans in his statement, but rather to the number of people referred to in various research data.

"It's hard not to use the Vietnam experience because if anything came out of the war, it is the fact that we now recognize that their situation created a lot of stress-related problems," Lopez said. "But I guess I could have been more sensitive in that statement."

The article follows the 20th anniversary last month of the fall of Saigon in 1975, marking the end of the Vietnam war.

Yet many veterans on campus have said they are still fighting a discrimination war of their own that has gone on for years.

"People were totally against us when we were over there and they don't accept us now when they find out we served in Vietnam," said Larry Lee, an equipment technician and 18-year employee at CSULB.

Walter Moore, head of the Communicative Disorders Department under the College of Health and Human Services, said that comparing Vietnam veterans with gang members perpetuates the negativity surrounding them.

"You've got to realize that there's a difference between lifestyles," said Moore, who signed the petition. "For gang members, it's a chosen lifestyle. For Vietnam veterans, it was an imposed lifestyle. There's a whole different mental setting here."