VIETNAM VETS’ ACHIEVEMENTS MIRROR ‘GREATEST GENERATION’
By the time this reviewer returned home from a tour in Vietnam as an artillery battery commander circa 1970, the stereotypical image of Vietnam veterans was well-established in the consciousness of the general public. We were all assumed to be incurably and permanently traumatized by the war: drug-addled, unemployable, homeless misfits; or soulless, psychopathic killers deserving of fear. The typical villain-of-choice in Hollywood films and TV “cop shows” of that era was a “deranged Vietnam vet” driven by combat experiences to commit homicidal mayhem. Years of daily bombardments by “all the bad news that’s fit to print” media coverage of the war convinced the public that those who fought in Vietnam were poor, ignorant dupes who should be either pitied or feared—no “in-between.” In They Were Soldiers, co-author Marvin J. Wolf explains this egregiously mistaken perception:
If Vietnam a lost cause and ‘a bad’ and‘unnecessary war,’ that was hardly the fault ofthose who left homes andto fight for objectives that a lawfully electedgovernment chose to pursue. Nevertheless,the false and misleading generalization persiststhat Vietnam veterans are a legion ofbroken soldiers, sailors, and marines, a lostgeneration, warped and wounded by wartimeexperiences and rejected by the greatersociety.
