Word: viets
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...symbolic?and emotional?change in attitude toward the Viet Nam veterans began last January. The extravagant, even slightly hysterical, welcome home that America proffered the hostages from the embassy in Tehran filled many vets with a sense of maddening unfairness. Business at the 91 veterans' counseling centers dramatically increased immediately after Americans festooned the nation from coast to coast with yellow ribbons. The 52 hostages, after 444 days of captivity, got lifetime passes to baseball games; thousands of Viet Nam vets, who spent years in a form of internal exile, had been rewarded with either contempt or oblivion...
...Viet Nam veteran in New York City spends all his days on his back porch, throwing lighted matches into a pail. Another has not been out of his house in ten years: a literal hostage to the war that goes banging on in his own mind. Robert Moore, 32, spent eight years hiding at home, before he joined a VA-supported outreach center in Queens. There, he and two other veterans work as a team to locate similar cases of radical withdrawal ?men hunkered down in their little psychic tunnels, like Viet Cong staying safe from all that American...
...Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (DSM-III), an official publication of the American Psychiatric Association, is the definitive word on psychological disturbances. Viet Nam veterans (along with rape victims, among others) achieved some psychiatric status when DSM-III in 1980 officially defined their suffering as "posttraumatic stress disorder." In such distress, a person develops vivid symptoms after a psychologically traumatic event that is outside the range of usual human experience: he or she grows numb toward the external world, or else hyperalert, jumpy, insomniac; in nightmares the event that brought on the trauma is obsessively replayed...
...area I was from, I guess you would call real patriotic." Samples first saw action in June 1968 at Chu Lai. When he started firing at Viet Cong in a paddyfield, he told himself with a certain wonder, "This is fun." That day he won a Bronze Star for taking out a V.C. position at great personal risk. But there followed a different kind of killing. Samples came upon a Viet Cong gunner who was wounded, lying on his back, begging for help. "We radioed the company and said, 'What do you want us to do with...
...Viet Nam was different from other wars; that difference defines the distinctive isolation and grievance of many Viet Nam veterans. Douglas MacArthur warned against an Asian land war; he was right. There were no front lines. Reality tended to melt into layers of unknowability. The same person could be a friend and an enemy?the smiling laundress in the morning carried a V.C. satchel charge at night. The enemy might even be a child with a basket. The ambiguity made Americans twitch. "My Lai?" says Larry Mitchell. "There were lots of My Lais...