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.
MASH was about the Korean War. Unless you mean metaphorically.
I think they’re accurate. Not that WWII guys came out unscathed, but they had support during and after. Sure maybe vets of some of the big nasty battles wound up in the same mental boat, but that’s another one of the difference, Viet Nam was always nasty, always at that extra level that does the extra damage.
The lack of support has to have effected you. It’s of course impossible to know for sure, but the coming home process alone has to have broken some Viet Nam vets. No heroes, no eagerness for support. As a society we treated Viet Nam vets like ex-felons, didn’t want to give them jobs, didn’t want to have them in the neighborhood, preferred if they just kept quiet. That’s not good for you.
Rambo I can see. That was retarded. Platoon was based on Stone’s experience actually there, and again was really focused on a command structure that dumped unprepared people into a war they didn’t want to win. MASH was similar, it wasn’t against the soldiers, one of the big motifs in MASH (movie here, TV show was vastly different) is that when it came time to do their jobs they were all consummate professionals, it’s the rest of the time they were driven mad.
I think it’s easy to filter a movie through expectations. Certainly there are plenty of times Viet vets were portrayed very poorly in cinema and TV and one can easily write it all off as the same. But it really isn’t, some of those movies when they show bad behavior from the soldiers aren’t talking about the soldiers, they’re talking about what would drive somebody to that. And with these things hitting close to home you just might not be able to see through that. I can’t see any movie with computer whizbang people randomly slapping their keyboard to hack into systems without wanting to puke. I’ve got a friend that’s a forensic scientist and just cannot stand any of the modern age of cop shows. Anything that comes close to where we live tends to hit us wrong because we just can’t see it the way it’s intended, we see what they did wrong, we one whacky character as an insult to our group. It doesn’t mean it’s actually supposed to be that way, it just means we’re too close and have lost the forest through the leaves.