ABSTRACT
One grunt observed, “Most of the veterans returned home reasonably whole, as whole as returning veterans from earlier wars. The majority were not dopers, did not beat their wives or children, did not commit suicide, did not haunt the unemployment offices, and did not boozily sink into despair and futility.”Author Tim O’Brien worried in the early 1980s that “we’ve all adjusted. The whole country. And I fear that we are back where we started. I wish we were more troubled.” Yet, he noted that “some prisons are still populated with black vets; the VA hospitals still do their bureaucratic thing too often and fail to help. Some vets, more than a decade later, have not yet recovered, and some never will. . . . The vets had to build their own monument.”1
