Heartbreak in HiDef

[mickeym]

I'm watching the 'Vietnam in HD' special on History Channel, and it's breaking my heart right now. They've got two guys who served over there talking about when they came home, and people's reactions/responses to them. The one guy was saying how he came home in his uniform, with his medals on his chest, and he was proud of himself, full of patriotism... and people were staring at him, whispering, moving away from him. He was in a bus terminal (or airport), and the seats were full... except for the one to his left and the one to his right, and how people would rather stand or sit on the floor than sit beside him. The other guy was telling how protesters surrounded the car he was getting into, banging their signs on the hood and roof, and hitting the windows, shouting and calling him names.

40 years later, and these guys still get choked up trying to talk about it.

Matthew and I talked about some of this last night. He didn't know that our soldiers returning from Vietnam were...attacked, yelled at, called names, spit on, had garbage thrown at them. He was pretty shocked.

Comments

[mickeym.livejournal.com]

Hey, no worries about changing subjects :)

I think it was probably 3-4 years before we got everything straightened out with them. :/ Unfortunately the VA is super slow, and now they're likely to be even slower, from the flood of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

I'm not 100% -- and I left a message for my mom to call me back, so I can double-check with her -- but if you're not working with a service officer, they can probably help you out a lot.

I'm going to take this to PM now, because I have some questions for you that you probably don't want to answer in public post :)