Starsky's Military Background

Tropes and genres
Related tropes/genres	Served in Combat
See also	Hutch's Mustache, The Hutchinson Finger, The Torino, Post-Sweet Revenge
Related articles on Fanlore.

In Starsky & Hutch canon, David Starsky briefly mentions in the episode "The Plague, part I" that he was "in the army." He is also portrayed using hand grenades and rifles in a familiar way.

This, coupled with the freshness of the memory of the Vietnam War in fans' minds during the fandom's formative years, led many fans to envision a significant backstory for Starsky, one that had him serving in active combat in Vietnam. Most stories in which this background plays a significant role show Starsky's experiences as traumatic and emotionally devastating, or contributing substantially to the shaping of his personality.

No other explicit suggestion of past military experience is made in the show, making this a rather famous example of a Fanon taking on a life of its own to the point where it is almost universally accepted as fact. The question of whether Starsky really was in Vietnam was the subject of a 2004 SHarecon panel.

One Fan's Commentary

From a review of Bomb Scare:

In S&H fandom, there's a piece of fanon that is basically universally accepted, which is that Starsky was in combat in the Vietnam War. The only canon basis for this is a throwaway scene in "The Plague, Part I" where Starsky grumbles "Wait, wait, wait.... I thought I got done with this in the army" while on a tense stakeout waiting for some Big Shit to go down. Nothing else.

Granted, it's not a big leap of logic to assume that, when a police officer in his early 30s, in the USA, in 1977, who has been a police officer for about a decade, is talking about how he was in a situation like this in the army, he means Vietnam. But everyone takes this Vietnam War fanon as a given, treats it as canon, and devote whole fics to Vietnam-War-related PTSD/nightmares/guilt/angst/rape/old war buddies/old war enemies/gay sex in foxholes/Even More PTSD/yadayadayada. It's pretty odd just how widely accepted it is, given how tiny the canon reference is, even though it's in-character IMO, and I have zero problems with it. I kind of love it, actually...

There’s an obvious reason for why it took off as a story topic – it’s Grade A Prime angst and h/c and bonding fodder. However, it’s so accepted that it's not just a story trope -- it's also used as a random, throwaway reference in fics that have absolutely nothing to do with Vietnam or with the characters’ backstories. It just gets tossed in as if it was a canon fact.

However this is where it gets weird: a quick google reveals that “The Plague, part I” aired in November 1977 -- and if this zine really was published in 1977 like it says, there's just no way the author saw that episode before writing this fic. Like I said, I wasn't alive back then so if anyone knows anything and can correct me, please do, but I can't figure it any other way. Even if the zine was published in December, I don't see how the fic could possibly have been conceived of, written, sent in, reproduced, compiled, and published that fast.

So unless I'm missing something here, the Vietnam backstory here has nothing to do with the canon reference in “The Plague” at all. It might be just this author going "hey, how about some awesome dramatic Vietnam War backstory fic! The timeline fits!" and everyone copied her. Perhaps it's just an example of reverse-Jossing, where Jan Lindner's headcanon just happened to be validated by the show after she wrote this fic and it morphed into fanon over time. Maybe the universality of this fanon is more because Vietnam was such a big part of the recent past in 1977; and because of how it fits Starsky’s personality – it may not be explicitly canon backstory, but you could argue it ought to be canon backstory, because it makes for a good explanation of why he is the way he is – his tough and accepting personality, his soldier-like loyalty, the surprising level of authority and intimidation he can project whenever he wants to in contrast to his equally strong natural cheerfulness and childlike streak....

Also, in this particular fic, Hutch was in Vietnam too, and actually met Starsky there. Hutch being in Vietnam occurs in a couple other really old fics I've read, but never, as far as I know, in more recent fics (by "more recent" I mean "anything since the late 1980s as far as I can tell"... c'mon give me a break, this IS a really old show, you know.) In almost all prequel fics, Hutch was in college (perhaps chanting "Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" at student protests, if you want some added narrative flair) while Starsky was getting his ass napalmed off on the other side of the planet. So my theory is that somewhere along the lines, the fanon morphed and writers must have started connecting their Vietnam fic to that canon reference, which included only Starsky.

[on contemporary influences on fanfic] Starsky & Hutch is a really intensely post-Vietnam show, culturally/socially/politically speaking. It's even moreso a post-Watergate show – it's possibly THE most intensely post-Watergate show I've ever seen in my life – but it's also distinctly post-Vietnam.

How it Plays Out in Fanfiction

• Fics in which specific experiences during his war that influenced his character as we see it in the show, which may appear even in stories that otherwise do not focus on Starsky's military background.
  • Suzan Lovett's "The Thousandth Man" illustrates this practice in a passage where Starsky recalls an incident where he was forced to kill a young Vietnamese girl laden with explosives:

His immediate reaction had been blind, impotent rage. He would have gladly burned the world to get to the monsters who had turned a small child into a self-destructing weapon, and him into an executioner. He had stayed drunk for a week and had awakened in a stockade, covered with scrapes and bruises from whatever free-for-alls he had managed to throw himself into. The rage had been gone, in its place a deep hurt for the innocents, the pawns, the helpless, the misguided. Maybe his choice for the direction of the rest of his life had been made then - the protector of the innocents to atone for one terrible choice that had been forced on him.

• Fics depicting and exploring the emotional repercussions of his experiences, including nightmares, guilt, and PTSD (which was just starting to be acknowledged as a psychological condition in the '70s), such as Terri Beckett's "Killing Ground"
• Original Characters who were Starsky's old army buddies appearing as supporting characters or villains in fanfics.
• The war is often used by slash writers to allow Starsky to have previous homosexual experiences in a context that wouldn't be OOC for him, as he is portrayed as hesitant and conflicted about homosexuality in the episode "Death in a Different Place." An early and influential example is the 1982 story "The Cost of Love" by Alexis Rogers.
• Some fics portray him being in the army or another branch of the military that WASN'T Vietnam (examples)
• Some very early works, such as nearly all of Teri White's stories, and Jan Lindner's "Bomb Scare" (perhaps the very first story showing Starsky in Vietnam ever written), had Hutch in Vietnam too, but this became pretty much nonexistent later as the immediate memory of Vietnam faded from the minds of fans, especially second-generation ones, along with the perception that it was common for police officers in the 1970s to be Vietnam veterans. Fanfic sometimes suggests that Hutch received a deferment due to his canonical college attendance.

Examples

• A list of fics that substantially involve the military or the Vietnam War at Tagging Bay City.
• The Cost of Love by Alexis Rogers
• Graven Images by Jane Aumerle
• Resonance by SunnyD
• Killing Ground by Terri Beckett
• Bomb Scare by Jan Lindner
• (needs more examples)