Another thing that people tend to forget about war is that everyone has a different experience.
My father was a platoon leader with the 101st in 1967 and 1968. He also won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart. His personal experience disagrees diametrically with the popular history. I'm not saying either your dad or mine was right or wrong in how they remember what went on. Everyone's experience was different.
My beef is that the common perception both percieved and proffered is almost totally one-sided. The mainstream press, who hated the war and the men who fought it for political reasons, almost exclusivel spent their time trading stories with one another in the Saigon bars and writing it home as truth. I've told the Walter Cronkite anecdote on the forum before, if your interested I'll repeat it.
Now, admittedly, your dad's experience as a pilot was totally different from my father's as a line infantryman. While pilots were in no way REMFs they spent their down time where all the REMFs hung out. Not so the grunts.
Nor am I saying that there weren't drugs in VietNam. It just pisses me off that, according to the mainstream press, and hollywood, and academia, being a VietNam vet is synonymous with being a drug addict. Our literature, even the SF that obviously draws heavily on the VietNam experience, always portrays the soldier in VietNam as either a struggling drug addict who hates America and deeply resents being called upon to help with the common defense or someone who is even more noble because he is the rare exception to the rule. It's a wildly skewed perspective and people are still buying it hook line and sinker.
My father volunteered for VietNam and to this day it just kills him that the people he fought and bled for were abandoned by our government because the partisan press was making it harder for them to get re-elected. He understood the war and got behind it. He's not a draftee, I understand the difference. Now ask yourself why the draftees in WWII, who were away from home for far more time than your average VietNam soldier, had such a different attitude.
I submit that many of the vets who had good experiences, like my father, learned not to talk about it because they got sick of being booed down and vilified by the liberals who disagreed with them and the war enough to do things like spray ovencleaner in the faces of returning wounded veterans.
I apologize Jeff. I've reread my posts and they sound like I'm trying to bait you. That's unintentional. Like I said, I just have a huge chip on my shoulder about VietNam and the perception thereof. If the Pro-America propoganda that the press indulged in during WWI and WWII was one end of the spectrum, the anti-soldier/anti-america orgy the press perpetrated during VietNam was at the other. The truth lies in the middle. Maybe someday it will get aired out.
