It's on tonight, PBS.

Question. Why so many Vietnam vets on drugs, and homeless compared to any other war? Why so many with PTSD compared to other wars? Were WWII vets facing the same issues? Iraq? Korea?  Did America hate Vietnam and it's vets because of the peace movement? Those shows that deal with the shitty treatment of those guys are hard to watch. Why the poor treatment still to this day?

So, you are gullible enough to believe that the guy on the street corner is actually a vet?

The actual answer is, there was a draft. Drunks and druggies ended up in uniform for a short period of time.

Most of them are lying to get some money out of you.

A green camo jacket does not mean vet to me, no matter what his cardboard sign says. This docu tonight looks interesting. Interesting answer. Before my time.

I want rock solid proof that every homeless person claiming to be a vet really is a vet.

This is as much of an issue as those vets who actually do end up on the streets.

There was a story done on some guy out of WA that claimed all sorts of serious issues from serving in Vietnam, killing babies, raping women, etc.  

AFTER the story aired the journalist decided to see what he could find on the guy in DoD records.  The guy was a Vietnam Vet . . . served as a cook.  Lots of opportunities to rape women as a cook, I am certain.  Maybe the Army altered his records

If you know what to look for, you can find indications that there were substantial numbers of vets from both world wars who came home with a lot of problems too.  I think that a lot of them just burned out without much notice by society, especially the ww1 guys that came back to deal with a depression.

We also have to think about how many men we put through Vietnam.  While the size of our military may not have compared to the number of men we had fighting ww2 at any one time, the war itself went on for ten years and like the French "moria" system in ww1, we spread the fun around to a lot more guys with shorter deployments.

Heck, I think a lot of that also had to do with the way our guys left Vietnam.  Most left it about how they found it, an undecided warzone.  The pullout followed by the fall of SVN denied our guys the opportunity to see a job finished properly.  We left too many loose ends.

Grossman the Author of On Combat and On Killing central theory is that the number one human phobia is close in mortal combat. Normal human beings don't like taking another human life and will do a lot ot avoid it. They also don't like the idea that they may have to take a life. Many wars previous to Vietnam soldiers were hailed as heros and marched in parades when they returned home. This helped them deal with the mental pain of being a soldier because they felt what they did in combat was just and right. Vietnam was not very popular nor considered just by many. When the vets returned home they were not treated well and probably felt like they fought for nothing.



Grossman also added that Vietnam was the first war where in the same day soldiers could be in a war zone and then be on a plane and home. This didn't allow for decompression. Soldiers coming back from WWII and WWI spend weeks on boats before they came home.

One of my dads friends told me the story of whe he got home from Vietnam. He says he can vividly remember a little kid spitting in his face.

I feel for those guys. They did their duty and got shit on by America.

The homeless vet population is pretty much the same as the population in general I would imagine.  Trust me, there's a lot of screwed up vets that aren't on the street corner.  Of course the majority came home and had very normal lives.

When we came back to the world we were cautioned against wearing our uniform during personal travel.  News reporters would do interviews and after editing the results were anything but what was said.