Remembering Canada Vets of Viet War

Tonight, at the Hollywood Bowl, the Doobie Brothers reunite to play a benefit and make another remembrance for Vietnam veterans. It will be an admirable yet familiar flicker of a sad war. Nothing unique.

Except for some special guests: a dozen Canadian veterans of the Vietnam War.

They will be there representing an overlooked, almost banished army of 30,000 Canadians, men who came south in the Vietnam decade to wear American uniforms and crawl the tunnels of Cu Chi and hunker at Khe Sanh and fall on Hamburger Hill.

Our war did not discriminate. Sixty-six Canadians died in Vietnam and their names are not separate from American names on that black granite wall in Washington. There are no preferential mentions during American POW-MIA ceremonies for the several Canadians still missing in action.

Hundreds of soldiers from Toronto and Vancouver and Winnipeg won Silver Stars and Purple Hearts and wheelchairs. Like Americans, they are fighting delayed stress, alcoholism, job discrimination and losing their lives to Agent Orange cancers and suicide.

Unlike American GIs, they are doing it for nothing.

For Canadians who returned to Canada receive no Veterans Administration benefits. No payments for prostheses. No psychiatric treatment. No free medication. No flag nor reimbursements for caskets or burial plots.

They are being crunched by the classic of all Catch-22s.

Section 624C, Title 38 of the U.S. Code bars payment of veterans benefits to non-U.S. citizens living outside the United States. That’s it.

The Canadian government attends to former servicemen through its Department of Veterans Affairs--but not if that service and service-connected problem was with a foreign army. That’s that.

And in Canada, acknowledged a Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman in Ottawa, there is only skimpy knowledge of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and certainly no facilities for its Vietnam sufferers.

Those are the laws. These are our thanks.

“Yet this isn’t a group of rednecked guys who said: ‘Let’s go to war,’ ” explains Sarina Rotstein Cheikes of Hollywood. She is a Canadian-born movie producer and one among a nub who recently began attacking the problem on both sides of the border. “These men went to Vietnam because they believed very strongly in the Camelot era, that we are one as North America . . . and because if there was a domino theory and the United States fell, then Canada would fall.

“All these Canadians want, all they are asking for is to be treated the same as any Vietnam veteran in the U.S. But right now, in terms of public awareness, understanding and treatment of his problems, the Canadian Vietnam veteran is where the American Vietnam veteran was 15 years ago.

“That’s why U.S. veterans’ organizations are taking them under their wing, saying: ‘We understand . . . what can we do to help?”’

To date, the help hasn’t extended much beyond light but obligatory overtures to politicians and readings for the Congressional Record.

But a contingent of Canadians did stir some Washington publicity with a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. There is tonight’s concert. In October, Cheikes’ one-hour documentary should be ready for network television and has been titled: “The Lost Brigade.”

Recently, a national coalition of Vietnam veterans’ organizations in the United States accepted the Canadian Vietnam Veterans Coalition as a member. It will support and dog the passage of a Senate bill seeking repeal of Section 624C, Title 38.

Within that lobbying will be reminders of the obligations of brotherhood, of easy, friendly borders, of Canadians who have fought for the United States since the Spanish-American War.

Of two nations under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The Doobie Brothers, the Hollywood Bowl, tonight at 7. Ticket details from Vietnam Veterans Aid Foundation: (213) 338-0377.