Backspaces converted to ^? -- want to get rid of ^? -_-...

[youshi10 at u.washington.edu]

        Ok, this happens regularly on my FreeBSD box at home when I'm not su'ed in as root using vim, or the SuSe box at work when I VNC into it (using vim once again), and I'm frankly quite tired of lame control characters screwing up my day. Is there any way to fix this behavior so pressing backspace erases a character, not prints out a ^? character?

Thanks,
-Garrett