FROM GLORY TO GRIEF: THE LOST DREAMS OF VIETNAM VETERANS

For all the talk of American might, for all the boasting of generals and politicians, the Vietnam War turned out to be a lost cause. It dragged on for over eleven years, a long stretch of sweat, blood, and chaos. Over fifty-eight thousand American boys under the age of twenty-three died, and another hundred fifty thousand came home broken, wounded in body and spirit.

On the battlefields, we dreamed of home. Every day, we kept a piece of that dream, like a map to remember. We conjured up the streets we left behind, the things we’d never said, and the lives we’d lost to the battlefields. But the dream was a lie. The government turned its back on us, and the people we fought for, the ones we thought would understand, hated us for having fought at all.

Another thought did not exist. The war overshadowed everything; to think of anything else was to play the fool. It would dull you, make you soft. But deep down, somewhere buried a fire burned for something better — for something more. But the longer we stayed in that miserable place, the harder it became to remember what that was, what it felt like to hope.

When we finally returned, we did not know how hard it would become to transition into the lives we once knew. It was all the same but different. We were not the same, confused, hollowed out. The…