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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.

I think that any estimates of measure for what we have called PTSD for the WW II combat veterans would be flawed, simply because there was no real interest after WW II in identifying those who were seriously affected. Everyone was just expected to get on with life, keep their memories to themselves, grow old and then die. I have had the privilege of knowing a number of veterans of Guadalcanal and Iwo and Normandy and both of my Uncles were combat fighter pilots. They had their own set of the “flinchies” and they were all reluctant to talk about anything for a while. Once I became a veteran too, my Uncles and my friends finally opened up to me about their experiences and I could see that there was a lot of similarity it how things affected them as well.

You are correct that they at least had the impression that they were supported by the American public and that probably helped them psychologically. They also had a distaste for the rear area commandos, War Critical Workers and the 4Fs that stayed home and had a great old time while they risked their lives and saw things that no young person should ever see. In a generation that was conditioned by their culture to suck it up and keep quiet, it would be very difficult to identify and assist those who experienced more than they could handle. The approach taken was and sometimes still is, to take to the bottle and self-anesthetize.

Your description of how we were treated when we got back is accurate and it was damaging. There were no places for us to resolve our problems except with each other. Our campuses were overflowing with know-it-alls and pro-enemy disrupters, our news agencies competed with each other to present the most negative interpretations, and our government acted as though they had no role at all in defending us or helping us recover. We had to deal with things that no other veterans ever had to deal with. I was refused service in a restaurant because I was in uniform – even though I was with my parents and had crutches and a steel full-length leg brace on. I had a woman – a very beautiful woman – spit in my face in front of all my employees at J.C. Penneys when she heard that I had served in Vietnam. I had my fellow workers at Lockheed Aircraft drop sheet metal behind me on the concrete floor to see me flinch and yelled “hit the deck” to roaring laughter. A friend of mine once said that “we knew that our country didn’t love us anymore”.

The movies were just one aspect to add to the mess. They developed the stereotype of the costumed Vietnam veteran loser who either was gibbering coward or a war criminal or a super-lethal nutcase that could go off at any moment. The caricatures have stayed with us, thanks to movies like those we have mentioned and many more. The war as we experienced it was much more conventional than Hollywood wanted everyone to believe. We went out, we searched for the enemy and when we found them, fixed them, pounded them with supporting arms, then annihilated them. We had three enemies; the local VC, the Main Force VC (“Hard core”) and the North Vietnamese Army (“Hard hats’). Each had their own set of capabilities and we had to deal with the differences. You’ll never know from the movies that the enemy had artillery and in some cases, tanks but they did.

The real story has never been told and we have never been depicted as we really were. It’s a shame.