Actually they did estimates, remember PTSD has been acknowledged under various names for a long time. But even low ball estimates for Viet Nam vets (from the 70s) are 15% compared to the 9% estimates for previous wars. It’s a simple fact, veterans who fought in unpopular war without the full backing of the government and people come back a bit more messed up than those who had support. Which makes perfectly good sense, being in the foxhole knowing your country is behind you has got to be a vastly different experience than being in the foxhole knowing your country doesn’t give a $%^&.
Problem is you’re seeing insults where they don’t exist. DH and AN do NOT insult you and other VN vets, they simply don’t. It’s not in the content, it’s not in discussions the makers of the films have had about the movies. There are movies that do, but not those. It’s simply not there.
I am sure that PTSD is pretty much a constant in any war, among men who were in direct combat. Combat is fear, more sustained fear than human beings are geared to withstand and anyone who has gone through that has a good chance of permanent damage. I think that figures that show us as having a greater incidence of PTSD compared to veterans of Iwo Jima or Normandy or the Chosin Reservoir are incorrect.
Combat, real combat not just being in a place where might possibly get hurt - it’s day to day murder and there aren’t any soft ways to describe it. We had some people who learned fast and well and they were the ones who were most effective. We had others - most, really - who did what they were supposed to and carried their part of the load but never developed the talent for it. And then we had some luckless souls who weren’t going to make it, no matter what you did for them.
The fact that our people back home didn’t support us did hurt, no question. I don’t think it materially affected my own recovery mentally or physically (I was shot. Where I was, almost everyone was wounded at least once). All it did was make me closer to my fellow veterans and less likely to associate with everyone else.
Our war was different than any of the movies supposedly made about us. As I said before, the Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now and Platoon and MASH and Rambo were cruel cartoons. How should we have felt?
The closest they got was Hamburger Hill and Forrest Gump - but I cringed while Lt Dan kept yelling on patrol. Seriously, who the heck would make any noise at all on patrol? At least there seemed to be an honest attempt to make it seem authentic.
I am proud of us and our war. I’m just sick of the cartoon-like images that are all we have.