The Christmas 1976 episode should always have a disclaimer attached to it, because during that episode (a draft dodger friend of Mike’s has dinner at the Bunkers with a friend of Archie’s who lost a son in Vietnam) Mike lectures to Archie: “When the hell are you going to admit that the war was wrong?”. This was when many millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians were dying or forced into labour/reeducation camps by the Communist regimes there that were in turned emboldened by the departure of U.S. forces.
His mother took him and his infant sister and “walked for a long time and over a mountain” to visit him just once.