In June 1988, CBS aired a documentary titled “The Wall Within.” It was about our Vietnam veterans, but it was not designed to honor them. It reported that about a third of them, perhaps a million men, had been so traumatized by their Vietnam experience that they were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD for short. The documentary gave the impression that they had become brutes, baby-killers, drug addicts and psychotics.

Dan Rather was the narrator for the program. He told a reporter that CBS News was airing this because it wanted to save the documentary as a television form. He said this was “a tattered banner we have been trying to keep flying.” But what they aired made a lot of viewers want to rip that tattered banner into shreds. When we told people what Dan Rather had done to smear the image of the Vietnam veterans, he got so many calls from irate Americans that for two days he had all his calls answered by a recording of the Star Spangled Banner.

The documentary showed a half-dozen men who claimed to be Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD. We say, “claimed,” because CBS News had made no effort to corroborate these stories about their experiences in Vietnam that they said caused their problem. The Veterans Administration said it had not been asked to provide any records of these men to CBS, and there was no evidence that anything they said had been confirmed by their service records.

What they said was incredible on its face. A man identified only as “Steve” claimed he had enlisted in the Navy at age 16 and had become a Navy Seal. He claimed to have been a highly trained assassin who operated behind enemy lines for almost two years. But he said he was only 19 when he returned home and went into hiding in the wilds of Washington State. His trauma, he claimed, was caused by his having helped wipe out entire Vietnamese villages, bringing him to the point where he just couldn’t do it any longer. He said he nearly murdered his own mother, mistaking her for a Vietcong. He also said he had punished himself by getting into 23 car accidents.

This story struck us as being highly dubious at the time, and Navy officials pointed out that it would have been impossible for him to join the Navy, much less the Seals, at age 16. They said his description of his activities in Vietnam was absurd. CBS wouldn’t provide any details that would enable us to look up Steve’s service record and check out his story.

But B.G. “Jug” Burkett of Dallas, Texas was determined to find out who Steve was and what he actually did in Vietnam. Burkett is a Vietnam vet who gets very angry about phonies that give the real veterans a bad name, and he had made exposing them his avocation. They May issue of Reader’s Digest has an article about him by Malcolm McConnell titled “The True Face of the Vietnam Vet.” This article tells how Burkett ferreted out Steve’s identity and checked out his Vietnam records. His name turned out to be Steven Ernest Southards. He was never a Navy Seal or a trained assassin. He was a fireman’s apprentice in rear-area bases in Vietnam. He was transferred to the Philippines, where he repeatedly went AWOL and spent time in the brig.

Another star of Rather’s documentary was a fellow names Terry Bradley, a frequently hospitalized psychotic. Bradley told Rather that his life had been ruined by “the awful stuff inside.” Urged to describe it, he said, “Let’s say could you go up to 50 people in an hour … and go out and get a knife and skin ‘em? Get babies’ arms, eyeballs and guts and hold their heart in your hand and throw them in piles? Could you do this for one hour of your life, just stack up every way a body could be mangled, up into a body, an arm, a tit, and eyeball … and stuff like this and then pile them up?” He claimed to have done this for a year.

Burkett found that Terry Bradley was an Army artilleryman who in three and a half years of service spent 300 days either AWOL or in confinement. He served one year in Vietnam, stationed near Saigon. Burkett said there was no record of large numbers of civilians being killed near his unit.

Burkett discovered that two other stars of the program had not been exposed to the heavy combat they claimed. They had served as security guards. Another claimed to have suffered PTSD because he had seen a friend die on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam, but the accident actually occurred during training off California.

Despite this proof that “The Wall Within” was a fraud, CBS says it stands by its story and continues to sell it to schools as part of its video history of the Vietnam War. If you want to tell Dan Rather how you feel about this, his number is 212-975-6677.

Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@AIM.org.