Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls Revisited: The Research, the Findings, and Some Observations of Recent Native Veteran Readjustment

in early 1981 my longtime friend Harold “Hodge” Barse, a Sioux/ Wichita/Kiowa who was at the time a readjustment counselor with the Oklahoma City Veterans Administration Outreach program, called to ask me if I knew of any studies of Native American Vietnam veterans. I had to say that I did not know of any. With that telephone call we began an unfunded inquiry into the lives of American Indian Vietnam veterans. It was, in keeping with the foundations of American Indian studies, an activist, academic approach to what we perceived was a largely overlooked and misunderstood group of Indian people who not only deserved recognition for their military service but also merited attention to their specific needs in dealing with their return from a war zone. Both Hodge and I were veterans— he of the army, I of the Marine Corps— and very much aware of the various problems of our veterans and the social, political, and economic conditions they faced upon their homecoming. In particular, Hodge wanted to collect information on our veterans so that he, in turn, could make a case to the Readjustment Counseling Service of the then Veterans Administration to identify and deal with the specific needs of Native American veterans.