Since the last announced end of the Vietnam war (there have been three so far) some "people of conscience" have enjoyed enormous popularity. The decade following the second announced end of the war was especially kind to them. During that stretch of time, between 1973 and 1983, they passed into the popular culture as the only true American heroes of the war.

You couldn’t watch a quality prime time television series or movie or anything else worth watching without seeing them as the good guys whenever a war and peace issue arose. More than that, they were always the good guys in hit series where no Vietnam war and peace issues were involved but war and peace mentalities in general were. Larry Gelbart’s "M*A*S*H," with Alan Alda was one example. Norman Lear’s, "All In The Family" was another. Then there was "Hill Street Blues," "WKRP In Cincinnati," and "Barney Miller."

The standing representatives for the other side were dingleberries like Major Frank Burns of "M*A*S*H," Archie Bunker of "All In The Family," the S.W.A.T. team leader in "Hill Street Blues," whatever his name was, "WKRP’s" unlikely Army Airborne alumnus, Les Nessmen, and Wojo, the lovable but not so bright Polish-American ex-marine on "Barney Miller." One word describes all of these men. The word is, stereotype.

Take Wojo, for example. Wojo had strong feelings about a lot of things. But you had only to know that he was doing the talking to tune out any serious consideration of what he said. When he talked about flag and country you had to laugh at his simplistic notions of patriotism. You pitied him too, because you knew that he couldn’t do any better. You could see that he was a victim, not only of his inferior intellect but his untrustworthy government.

Wojo was a Vietnam vet.

You will note that it was ok for one of us to be "on the wrong side of the issue" if he was a Wojo, a good hearted dimwit who believed everything the government told him. You will also note that Wojo just happened to be a member of an ethnic group which, according to the popular stereotype, is supposed to be a few quarts low on smarts.

Can you imagine a black Wojo on prime time American television in the `70s and `80s? I can’t. Black people had too much experience with the "ignorant darkie" image to be passive about it. We knew first hand how that unchallenged image influenced behavior, how whites who didn’t question it treated blacks and blacks who didn’t question it treated each other. We knew how easy it was to become what we were reputed to be or to turn violently against our own who seemed to.

If you want to divide any group against itself, you can’t go too far wrong if you begin by giving it some emotionally charged stereotypes. You’ll need plenty of negative role models and, for contrast, you’ll need some positive ones too. But you have to make certain that the images you want people to think with are positive and negative, from your point of view. If you are in a position powerful enough to project both images to a significant number of people, it is an actuarial certainty that you will get what you want.

Vietnam vets are about as divided a group as you are likely to find. I don’t think that the good vet/bad vet, smart vet/dumb vet images of us in the media are incidental to that condition. Parallels to black stereotypes on television and in the movies, which once served to keep non-stereotypical African-Americans out of sight and out of mind, are too close to ignore. By the same token, I cannot put aside the literal connection between racial stereotypes and the frequent portrayal of the Vietnam War as something of a race war, an imperialistic white man’s war of genocide against yellow peasants.

That’s where the "oreo" comes in. The white man in the black man’s body. The "white man’s nigger." The enemy. Like all stereotypes, the oreo has some basis in fact. But the name is more often applied to people who bear only a superficial resemblance to the stereotypical character. Defenseless victims of all vicious attacks on out-groups, are made victims by that same broad stroke application of identifying them as though they were enemy soldiers on a field of battle. The stereotype, based on whatever grain of truth people can identify with in a visceral way, is the uniform the predator imposes on his prey.

That’s the rub.

An obvious fact is the most potent ingredient in an outrageous lie. Black people who speak standard, white, middle class, midwestern English, are often accused of being oreos by people who don’t know them, which leaves them vulnerable to vicious attacks. The same thing happens with distressing regularity to blacks who still express the belief that no fundamental human difference exists between any member of the human race. To some blacks it will certainly sound like the self-hate rhetoric of an oreo. The powers that be in some circles, will not tolerate it.

The 1973-1983 powers that were in the media, tolerated little freedom of expression from Vietnam vets of any color who didn’t see the war the way they did. You could say that color had something to do with it. But it had more to do with the color of feathers and flags than it did with skin. It had more to do with the pure white feathers of a dove and the dirty bloodstained feathers of a hawk.

If you fought under the colors of the United States with no clear idea of what the killing and dying was about, you were either a victim or a war criminal. If you wanted to say as much in public, you had the freedom to do it. If you fought under the same colors for freedom, with a clear, informed sense of what that meant for Indochina and the Indochinese, you didn’t exist.

I don’t expect you to imagine what it’s like to be made invisible by an impenetrable wall of stereotypes after surviving an experience that should have killed you. For now, I will just say that it is something I take personally because it has affected me personally for many years. I am in the distinct minority, as most stereotyping victims are, but it is not a minority of one as you might be led to believe by what you don’t see or hear of us in the media.

Stereotyping can be hazardous to the mental health and general well-being of a lot of innocent individuals. A good look at black people who think of themselves as niggers will tell you all you need to know about that. The insidious thing about the practice, apart from how naturally it comes to us, is that the victims get blamed for their oppression and on the face of things it seems reasonable. The presumption of guilt is thus on the accused and the accused have little or no standing in the court of public opinion to argue their case, because they are never seen for who they truly are.

I am not about to argue that stereotyping is always a bad idea or an unfair way of dealing with people. I would suggest, however, that it’s like striking a match, and that people in certain positions should be damn careful about when, why and how they do it.

If stereotyping is not always a bad way of judging people, it is always an inaccurate way. We can say quite accurately, for instance: golfers play golf and cat lovers love cats. Looking at ten people in each category who really stand out for the one thing that unites them in that category, we can find other things that they have in common. Let us say that the golfers are generally friendlier, though not as attractive as the cat lovers. If we hold our groups to be representative samples of all golfers and all cat lovers, we will have arrived at the comparative judgment that golfers are nice but ugly and cat lovers are nice looking but not very nice. Besides taking too small a sample, we have not allowed for the possibility that golfers could love cats and cat lovers could play golf. We have created two stereotypes.

You will note that certain expectations go with each "representative sample," and all members of the group are held to those expectations until they can prove that the rule does not apply to them. We might grant that he or she is the exception to the rule but we probably won’t be inclined to change the rule. Moreover, if we were pressed for time or otherwise indisposed to give due consideration to their individuality, we would not grant them the opportunity to show us anything.

As I said before, there is a place for stereotyping. That place is the battlefield. Here, the fact that stereotyping the members of a group will limit their freedom of action is tacitly understood to be a prerequisite to survival. It means that you are mentally prepared to "do unto them before they can do unto you." You call them, "the enemy," and you act against all of them as though they were evil incarnate. You don’t want to give anyone that you are in kill or be killed competition with, a single psychological advantage, which is ultimately more than half of any battle. The extent to which you think of the enemy as anything better than a killer determined to kill you is the extent to which you are willing to die. It is also the extent to which you are willing to let your friends die with you—or instead of you. As far as the enemy is concerned, you’re all the same.

In combat it does not matter one whit that someone you call the enemy would be your closest friend if you got to know each other as people. It matters only that he is trying to do bad things to your body that you would rather he didn’t. It matters not that a man you call "friend," is a sadistic animal, an all around scumbag or even a Republican. What counts is his ability to recognize and neutralize the enemy.

From your point of view as a field soldier, the good guys are always the ones who are shooting at the people who are trying to kill you. It’s as basic as that. But on the higher level of psychological combat, the enemy will try to get to you on a person-to-person basis—one human being to another. They will call themselves your true friends the way Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally did during WWII and prevail upon you to condemn your leaders’ unjust and immoral war. Few of you will listen to them because you know they are lying, even when they tell the truth, because you know they are not telling the whole truth. And because you know who they are.

You have a strong psychological defense against any conceivable method they might have of winning your trust and persuading you that you should not be fighting them. You have not, in your mind at least, given them the freedom to express themselves as individuals. Your are, therefore, not impressed by the fact that they speak your language and play your music, that they are charming and entertaining and that they seem to have your best interest at heart. You know whose interests really come first. You know they are the enemy and that’s all you need to know.

But what happens to that psychological edge when you fail to identify them as the enemy? What happens when somebody who already has your trust assumes the role of an Axis Sally or a Tokyo Rose and calls for peace the way they did on the enemy’s terms? I don’t think it’s reaching too far to say that she will have some effect, that her efforts will, at the least, be divisive for a long time to come. Is she the patriot she claims to be or the traitor she appears to be? Was she a true peace advocate or a hypocrite? Should she be held to account for what she did or should her critics be dismissed for living in the past.

That last item, by the way, represents a stereotype that I know well and by which I am known by many influential people who have never laid eyes on me. What really makes me want to choke somebody, is the freedom, some people have had to create that image, and my total inability to fight back.

I have to go along with Voltaire, or whoever it was who said, "Your freedom to swing your arm ends where my nose begins." When you use a negative stereotype to determine how a person you don’t know will be treated, you are setting your arm into motion on a collision course with somebody’s nose. The damage you do depends, of course, on the power you have to inflict it. As an ordinary citizen, you don’t have much. As an armed combatant in a war zone, you have a little. But as a popular "personality" in an influential medium like radio or television or the movies, you have the power of a god. You can even cause some undesirables to vanish.

Few mortals ever reached that level of influence. Few can. It takes a visible cause, a great performer, a receptive audience and a few magic words.