[Dusty Road]

Most of the Vietnam Vets you run across today are fake, there’s less than 600,000 thousand of us left. The last units started rolling out in 73. I turn 71 in November and I left Vietnam in 71 and was discharged in 72, I was 19 years old when I enlisted. To be a Vietnam Vet we’re looking at a bare minimum age of 70. Most of those claiming Vietnam Vet status served during the period which ended in 1975. While they are Vietnam era Vet’s they never served in Vietnam. I’m not going to take anything away from them, they served and they could just as easialy been sent as the rest of us did. Luckily they wasn’t. But when they claim Vietnam service I get a little irritated. I had one the other day claiming he served in Vietnam when he didn’t even enlist until 1973. Yes he served during Vietnam but he never served in Vietnam.

[Laslo Fripp]

Don’t hold me to the exact numbers, but this story is reflective of what you say.

According to the Department of Defense, there were 9,000,000 Vietnam era veterans. By the time the 1990 Census was released, that number had swelled to 11,000,000!

[Chainmail]

I'll improve on your stats just a little: of the men who served in Vietnam as volunteers or draftees, roughly 80-90% served in Combat Support or Combat Service Support capacities (Combat Support - artillery, armor, air support, etc. Combat Service Support - logistics, maintenance, motor transport, airfield support, etc.) Because the war was 10,000 miles away from home, we had a much higher requirement for support troops to keep things running for the combat forces - the 10-20% carrying rifles and machine guns. The running joke was "this is the first time in history that the dragon is 10% teeth and 90% tail".

the men in the infantry had very high casualty rates and my analysis is that the average time for an infantryman to be wounded or killed was about one and half months. In our case in the Marines, it meant that everyone in the rifle companies were wounded at least once in their tours (you could not throw an M26 frag grenade in open ground far enough to avoid being hit by your own frags, for instance)

That means that far fewer of our surviving Vietnam Vets were actually in direct combat - and we are dying off faster because of the residuals of wounds, the diseases we caught out in the fields and the poisons the Air Force so thoughtfully sprayed uphill of us while we filled our canteens downstream (I have had aggressive prostate cancer and so has every single surviving member of my rifle company).

One of our responders commented that the Vietnam Veterans he knew were uniformly cranky - I'm sure that he's messed up but given the incredible heat, humidity, rate of diseases, rate of death and injuries that we had (plus a very close to 100% "Dear John" Rate), and the rousing treasonous reception we got when we got back - maybe a little crankiness is in order?

[stylin19a]

can you point me to that data? supposedly 2.7 million served in-country during the war.

https://www.uswings.com/about-us-wings/vietnam-war-facts/

how much of this is true, I don’t know.