Missed Connections & Unexpeced Deaths

I have two bachelor's degrees. The first is irrelevant to this story. The second I earned in the field of psychology after I returned from my Peace Corps stint in Africa in the early 90's. Upon earning my psychology degree, I worked at the local VAMC for 2 years as a Neuropsychology .Research Assistant and Technologist. While there I interviewed, counseled and tested inpatients as well as outpatients.
Although everyday presented a new set of challenges, as time went on, patterns began to emerge in the various populations. The WWII veterans were usually given the battery of tests aimed toward measuring dementia. They were the ones we most often assessed for whether or not they should still have a valid driver's license, live on their own or go into assisted living or be admitted to the medical center itself. For some reason, we didn't see enough Koren War vets to make a sweeping generalization about that population. Maybe that has something to do with the relatively small numbers of troops involved in that relatively short war (as contrasted to the Persian Gulf/War in Iraq and Afghanistan, that seems to have been going on close to half my lifetime). But just as much, if not more so, I think that something needs to be said about the general acceptance of the war and processing afterward due to the long running series M*A*S*H*. Not only were these men depicted as heroes who protected & defended the South Korea from the North Koreans, but they were, for the most part, funny and likable characters who the returned vets could tune in to watch at their leisure, while processing and integrating their own experience in their own living rooms, complete with a laugh track. This pop cultural phenomenon had the added benefit of educating the public about this time period in the lives of the vets, albeit limited to a half-hour sitcom.
The Vietnam vets were a whole different story. For them, the opposite happened, as far as being re-integrated into the population. A heavily protested war at the time, they returned to a hostile environment taunted by chants of 'baby killer' and having things hurled at them in the streets of a nation at war not just overseas, but within its own borders as the civil rights movement was in full swing, as was the woman's rights movement. The late 60's and early 70's were a time of great strides for people of color and women in America. To one who was born in, but was too young to remember this era, this seems almost like America's period of adolescence. The raw emotion that hormones usher in, the struggle to find one's identity and the confusion and frustration of coming of age without having all the rights of an adult. Many of the soldiers that entered the Vietnam war were adolescents themselves. The average enlisted 'man' in the Vietnam war faced less scrutiny, as far as age verification goes, than your average college, or even high school, student at your average bar on a Saturday night. Blacks enlisted and were drafted at an alarmingly disproportionate number. The 'baby killers' returning from Vietnam were not that far removed from their own childhoods when they entered this conflict. Not only that, but this was the nation's psychedelic era. Before the war on drugs, this was a time when drug experimentation was a common pastime for both those protesting the war and those fighting the war. Many of those protesting the war, safely evolved out of this phase, for the most part their drugs were milder and done in more of a social context. For the war ravaged youths returning to a hostile environment, this transition was not so easy. They went in as mere children, mostly boys, and came out hooked on LSD and other narcotics. They were taking drugs to cope with having to kill men women and children in order to follow orders. The perfect storm combination of youth, drug addiction, and returning from a war to a hostile reception instead of a hero's welcome, resulted in the most damaged population to date of returning war veterans.
Following their return, the terms 'shell shock' and 'talking therapy' became popular terminologies for what is now known as 'PTSD' and group therapy. Although I was unaware of the fact at the time, I had a lot more in common with them than I knew. At the time that I was testing them, entering data. helping research, compile stats, and edit and ready papers for publication in magazines in the field of neuropsychology, I was 2 years returned from the Peace Corps. I was a volunteer in a country that is military dictatorship that saw its share of coups, strikes against the government, and tear gas. One of its past leaders went so far as to declare this country an empire and himself its emperor. In addition to the instability in government, this country also is a land locked nation with only two legal natural resources...ebony and malachite. The school system is set up according to France's system know as pedigogie. Directors and teachers are paid by the nation's government.