In wars past, when Johnny came marching home, he could expect cheers and bands. He could also look forward to a gratitude that helped him come to terms with the horrors he had endured and gave him a feeling that his sacrifices meant something. For the Viet Nam veteran, coming home was far less glorious. "You know about the class of '46, the guys who came back after World War II, greeted with parades and jobs," says Alan Fitzgerald, 30, a drafted infantryman who fought near the Cambodian border in 1970. "When I came back and landed at San Francisco airport with 200 others, we were spit on and kicked at."
The U.S. sent 2,796,000 soldiers to Viet Nam, of whom 303,000 were wounded and 57,147 killed. For those who returned, the physical and emotional toll was drastically increased by the unpopularity of the war and America's unresolved guilt about its role. "Get that in Viet Nam?" a fellow student asked Veteran Frederick Downs as he walked across a college campus with a hook where his left hand should have been. When Downs nodded, the student snarled: "Serves you right." Says Michael Murray of Lewisboro, N.Y.: "They were down on us when they should have been down on the people who sent us there."
What makes re-entry all the more difficult is that the Viet veteran has been stereotyped as angry, alienated, semiliterate and drug-prone. Some veterans feel that their experience in Viet Nam makes prospective employers wary. Says Bruns Grayson, who went on to Harvard and Oxford after five years in Viet Nam: "What I find offensive is the feeling that all Viet Nam vets are latent psychos or, like Jon Voight in Coming Home, sensitive and guilt-ridden. These are comic-book caricatures." Charles Figley, a Purdue University psychologist who wrote a study of his fellow Viet Nam veterans, agrees: "All the myths about the guy being a walking time bomb are just total and utter fantasy. Most have readjusted remarkably well, considering the circumstances."
Indeed, the statistics indicate that Viet Nam-era vets are not doing so badly. Their median income is higher than that of nonveterans in the same age group. At least 65% have used the G.I. Bill to further their education; only 51% made use of it after World War II. The unemployment rate for veterans 25 to 29, however, is 7.7%, vs. a 5.5% overall average for that age group.
In many ways, the statistics are misleading. Says California's Democratic Senator Alan Cranston: "The gross indicators show they're doing well, but when you look closer at the educationally disadvantaged, the young, minorities and the disabled, you see some serious problems." These problems are masked because the figures lump together all 8.8 million veterans of the Viet Nam era, and fewer than one-third of them actually went to Viet Nam. Those who did tended to be the blacks, the poor and the less educated. One million of them have not been able to find jobs that keep them fully employed. Of the Viet Nam-era veterans who joined the armed forces without completing high school, half have not chosen to continue their education.