re: #223 NJDhockeyfan

I met a Vietnam vet at a Sbarros in the mall once. I asked him why the WWII vets came back as heroes and generally led a normal life afterward but alot of the Vietnam vets came back with mental problems.
He explained it like this. When the soldiers came back from fighting during WWII they spent time together on a ship talking about what they just went through. It gave them time to reflect what happened with others who had experienced the same thing and helped them deal with it. During the Vietnam war he said they would be fighting in the jungle then suddenly flown home on a plane and to the states the next day. They had no fellow soldiers to talk with on the way back. He believed coming back on ships for weeks helped the WWII soldiers where the flights back from Vietnam hurt those guys.

The other thing to remember though is that a lot of WWII vets did come back with mental health issues. It just wasn’t socially acceptable back then for most anyone to talk about such things. So they kept things bottled up inside for decades. It could also be that it wasn’t on the forefront as much because of the prevalence of the modern media during the Vietnam era.