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"These guys are fighting over there, and there are all these arguments. Somebody should tell these guys, 'Hey, you're fighting for us, and we appreciate it,' " Shipley said. "It's not their fault that we get in the predicaments that governments put us into."
It is a lesson some of the veterans know well. Self is a former Navy corpsman who served with the 3rd Marine Division in Da Nang in 1965 and 1966.
"I went through the same thing in Vietnam," Self, 74, said. "There wasn't anyone to see me when I got home, so we're here to make sure that doesn't happen again."
Many veterans of Vietnam, returning to a deeply divided United States, were greeted with scorn, even spitting or hostile epithets, when they arrived home in uniform. As yet, the nation's ambivalence about the Iraq war has not extended to the men and women fighting it. Self, Shipley and the other veterans want to make sure it stays that way.