Word: vets
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...Airborne, he would disappear into the jungle to search out enemy positions and kill Viet Cong stragglers. Joyce and Don were married. Then Don began an agony of delayed stress: sudden flashbacks, explosions of anger, a restlessness that propelled him from job to job. Joyce heard about the Atlanta vet center on a TV commercial. The couple went to a rap session there...
...They get flashbacks, nightmares, depression, startle reactions, and that wild red haze of rage in the brain when self-control goes and adrenaline shakes the whole frame, and some terrific violence struggles to cut loose. That is Viet Nam combat doing its wild repertory in the theater of a vet's nerves...
...later, he was found dead with a jug of whisky and an empty pill bottle beside him. A former artillery sergeant, Steve Androff, 33, went on last week with a fast he began on May 27 in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. It is a vet's version of the I.R.A. protest, designed to coerce some attention to victims of Agent Orange. Over the July Fourth weekend some vets planned a demonstration on the site in Washington where a Viet Nam memorial will be built ? a dark, somberly graceful V of granite bearing the names...
Indeed, the new attention to the problems of the Viet Nam vet really does amount to something deeper than fad. The dimensions of the change are practical, symbolic and, in the widest sense, spiritual. Congress recently has been showing itself remarkably responsive to the veteran's needs, even in these days of Reagan's almost-everything-must-go budget cuts. Congressmen are sensitive to public sentiments. Besides, there are 31 Viet Nam-era vets sitting in Congress now. The Administration's plans to cut $131 million out of veterans' counseling, employment and education programs detonated real indignation among Congressmen...
...sort of legislation can only make a dent in the Viet Nam vet's profound sense of exclusion, his bruised conviction that America ?a nation that cherishes almost an ideology of its own fairness?has done him deeply wrong. The vet's first port of call, the Veterans Administration, seems to him abundant evidence that the nation he risked his skin for cares very little in return. The VA is, they say, a $23 billion-a-year bureaucracy devoted mainly to older vets (the World War II generation), a social service agency dispensing health care not to the wounded...