There are "back-office duties" and back-office duties. In Vietnam, clerks, nurses, medics, etc., were in the camps in-country. They may not have gone out on patrols in the jungle, but they were subjected to the same shelling and rocket attacks as everyone else in the camp.
Does that disqualify them as "combat vets"?
I was thinking of a guy whom the media characterized as a ‘ticking time bomb’, who had actually spent his time in Iraq as a bureaucrat in a secure base. Sure, the base could have been attacked, but it was pretty secure overall.