Nearly a million individuals serving in the United States Armed Forces engaged in combat or were exposed to life-threatening situations in Vietnam during the years between 1964 and 1973.[i]  According to a four-year study conducted by the Research Triangle Institute for the Veterans’ Administration, an estimated 480,000 of those suffer from a phenomenon known as post-traumatic stress disorder. Formerly accorded less clinical terms like “shell shock” and “battle fatigue,” PTSD is hardly peculiar to the Vietnam War, but the circumstances of those who lived through combat in that particular cataclysm are unique in American history.

During World War II, even though the pre-induction psychiatric rejection rate was nearly four times higher than that of World War I, psychiatric casualties were three hundred percent higher.[ii] At one point in the early 1940s, more men were being discharged for “war neurosis” than were being drafted.[iii] Twenty-three percent of the men who suffered from battlefield psychological breakdowns never returned to combat. Owing to immediate on-site treatment provided during the Korean War, psychiatric evacuations dropped to six percent of total casualties. But in Vietnam, psychological breakdowns were at an all-time low—twelve per one thousand.[iv] 

Several factors contributed to this apparent improvement. The DEROS [Date of Expected Return from Over Seas] system was employed for the first time in Vietnam. A soldier’s tour of duty lasted twelve months—thirteen if he was a Marine. They served their time, tried to stay in one piece, and rotated back to the States. In the meantime, the “Fertile Triangle” along the borders of Laos, Burma and Cambodia supplied some of the finest substances in the world for numbing trauma. Soldiers caught “self-medicating” or manifesting other character disorders, by any superior who gave a damn, were given administrative discharges. And thus the whole question of psychological trauma was neatly—and deceptively—avoided. As a consequence of DEROS, drugs, and discharges, the “official” neuropsychiatric casualty rate in Vietnam was significantly lower than in either Korea or World War II.[v] It looked like the Pentagon finally had a handle on the embarrassing problem of battle fatigue.

Quite apart from the debilitating effects of drug and alcohol addiction, DEROS, like every apparent solution, created a new generation of problems. After the first few years of the war, soldiers who had trained together were rarely sent to Vietnam as a whole unit.  Consequently, esprit de corps was almost nonexistent. A regular soldier would arrive in isolation as an FNG, ignorant of combat’s horrifying reality. Considered a liability by the hardened short timer—who knew the best way to stay alive was to stay aloof—the new guy learned quickly to trust no one but himself, and f--k the rest. His private war began the day he set foot in country, and ended the moment he was airlifted out.    

Before his tour was up, a grunt was introduced to the grisly nuances of guerrilla warfare, where booby traps and incessant sniper fire accounted for an astonishing number of casualties, where the VC [Viet Cong] and NVA regulars were rarely even seen, where the enemy included women and children, where the average age of his fellow combatants was under twenty, and where the ideological justification for the war he was fighting was slippery, if not impossible to grasp. A soldier’s only consolation was the knowledge that if he survived his solitary year in hell, he’d eventually return with honor to his homeland. 

Or so he thought.