actually my fathers personal experiences in Vietnam tend to agree with the history as presented by the media and he's a 25 year Veteren with the Silver Star. And having sat through his 10,000 slide show from all the pictures he took in country it got pretty bad. But like everything in military life, it didnt happen all the time. See thats the thing people dont get about the military. Theres a lot of downtime, even when your in the Front. So dad has pictures of stuff that happened in Saigon, that ... well he never showed his mother thats for sure. Now 90% of it was just drinking, but as Morale fell in the last few years of the war things went down the toilet. The Draft was the biggest problem, but also the fact that the war just dragged on and on. 10 years, its a long time, and it wasnt a popular war. Draftees had less of a reason to get behind Vietnam than say Korea or World War II. Since they didnt understand the fight, or why they were there, in fact since they resented being there they got involved in some horrible stuff. The big issue was morale.
To say that the stuff never happened is kind of looking at the later war through blinders. The Army has tons of released documents about the drug trade, and drug problem and crime that exploded after about 1971 in vietnam. Especially the Heroin problem. In fact, its one of the main reasons why the army has lobbied against the draft since the Vietnam war inspite of low recruiting numbers.
Its not at all an isolated occurance either. Alcohol was a huge problem in World War II even on the front line, and the most common offense prosecuted for the duration was in fact drunkeness.
Now that isnt meant to impune the proffesionalism of our military, which beats every standard the world has when it comes to soldiery.
The army, heck the whole military has learned a lot of lessons from vietnam, and soldiers are not only educated about drugs, (and tested for them which is a huge deterrant with a zero tolerance policy) but better trained with a better esprit de corps than the draftees of the end of the Vietnam war ever were.
as an anecdote, my dad and a bunch of other pilots were in some Mamasan bar at 3 am when the company XO came in; they had been drinking since about 4 pm and were all really drunk. The XO walks up to the table and says...
"ok, how many beers did you have" to each man.
He gets the numbers from about half the guys (the rest cant remember or are too drunk to string a sentace together) and then says "Ok, well If you remembered how many beers you had your sober enough to fly, you got a mission at 0600, now get back to base for your briefing."
Not only was going to the Bar off limits anyway and drinking prohibited in the field, but it was doubly taboo for pilots at the time. Course no one ever got UMJ, or administative punishment for it either.