ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a sense of the war years and a description of the key experiences through which soldiers interpret the legacy of Vietnam. Only a small group of Vietnam veterans had a positive first impression of Vietnam. Vietnam veteran's basic attitude was that they had come to Vietnam to fight a war and that was what they were going to do. The chapter focuses on three behavioral aspects of the war: combat; witnessing of and participation in abusive violence; and the issue of killing Vietnamese. It describes these experiences below, the need to specify the nature of war stress in Vietnam becomes clear. The chapter explores the association between emotional responses to death and dying and the combat experience. A good deal of literature on the war emphasizes that draftees entered the military under duress and therefore were likely to respond quite differently from men who voluntarily enlisted.
