My grandfather didn’t want either of his sons to go to vietnam simply because he had seen war and didn’t want them to face it. One ended up doing his service in the national guard and the other got a scholarship to UofM. He wasn’t anti war or liberal in any sense of the word, he simply felt that he had paid enough and didn’t want to risk his sons. If they had wanted to go he would have backed them.
Granddad was such a gentle and kind man, its hard to imagine him in the middle of a brutal war.
I remember on the show last night there was a man who was talking about hitting a German in the head and slitting his throat while he was separated from his unit and afraid(the same guy that captured 18 people with a mine detector mentioned before). It seemed to bother him terribly, even to this day. I guess when people are in a war zone, a certain level of survival instincts take over, and when you come back home, it's difficult to cope with when you think about what you had to do to stay alive.