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”Well that is nice, but what kind of real work experience do you have?”

...is no different from...

" Tell me more about your education, training, experience, qualifications, etc."

You are playing sematics. Forty years later, I doubt if
the exact phraseology has survived.

I wasn't trying to play semantics or use any ploys. I was just calling it the way I saw it, and apparently the vet who was subjected to this question saw it the same way I did. I'm not trying to get on your case or anything. Maybe, a question like that wouldn't bother you, and that's fine. I just think it could've been worded a lot better than it was.

The subject of Vietnam Vets being mistreated (or even appearing to be mistreated) is a touchy one for me, because of my dad.

I remember when I was little, asking him things like if he'd ever been spit on, did any of his friends die over there, did anything bad happen to him, did he ever have to kill anyone, etc. He always evaded the issues, pretended like everything had been OK, told me about all the wild and crazy things he and his friends did over there, making it sound more like he'd spent a year at Summer Camp rather than in a war zone.

I didn't find out until much later, when I was an adult, how truly bad it had been for him. I learned the truth, when the traveling Vietnam Memorial Wall came to town. My dad broke down, though he tried to hide it, and I saw the names of some of his wild and crazy "Summer Camp" friends on that Wall. Some of those names he expected to find there; others came as a complete shock to him, and that's what caused him to lose some of his composure.

When I was a kid, my dad wanted me to keep my innocence and feel secure, so he protected me from the cold, hard truth and pretended all was well with him. Now, as an adult, I feel equally protective of him and (as an extension of him) all other Vietnam Vets, too. That's why I can get so irate on threads like these. It could've been worse, though. This could've been a Jane Fonda thread. ;-)