In a split-second scene in the 1969 Robert Altman movie M*A*S*H, we get to see into the mind of an American Army doctor as he learns that his orders have come through and he will be going home from the war in Korea. The Army doc visualizes stepping off an airplane in his hometown and spotting his wife and young children on the tarmac. He grins, tosses his hat in the air, and rushes to greet them. As he is engulfed in hugs and kisses, a marching band plays a patriotic tune.

That idealized homecoming vision couldn’t be further from the decided non-welcome the nation’s 2.8 million Vietnam War veterans received when we came home from America’s most controversial overseas war. Even today, 50 years after the war ended, the shameful way we were treated still stings for many of us.

Unthinking doves greeted us with contempt for participating in the war. War hawks, primarily those in our parents’ not-so-great Greatest Generation, castigated us for not winning, as if we were responsible for the catastrophic strategic errors made by our military and government leaders. The entire nation, it seemed, figuratively turned its back on us, treating us as social pariahs. We came to call it blaming the warrior for the war.

Adding to the misery was how three powerful institutions designed to support veterans—what some Vietnam War veterans began referring to sarcastically as the Iron Triangle—treated us. That would be the old-line ultraconservative veterans services organizations (VSOs), primarily the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion; Congress’s two Veterans Affairs’ Committees; and the Department of Veterans Affairs, then called the Veterans Administration.

Dominated by the World War II generation, the VFW and the American Legion demonized returning veterans from Vietnam as whining losers. The congressional committees all but ignored us after we came home, most egregiously doing nothing about the woefully underfunded and outdated GI Bill.

For its part, the VA refused to provide treatment for post-traumatic stress and stonewalled any suggestions that a range of Vietnam War veterans’ health issues were related to exposure to the toxic defoliant Agent Orange. Not to mention subjecting hospitalized veterans, many of them amputees, to abysmal treatment in many VA medical centers. How abysmal? Check out Ron Kovic’s primal scream of a memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, for details.

Then there was the way Hollywood created and perpetuated the image of American Vietnam War veterans in far too many movies and TV cop shows as deranged, violence-prone misfits tarred by their horrific wartime experiences. That egregious stereotyping continued for decades and ended only when Vietnam War veterans began speaking out with the message that constantly portraying returning veterans as walking time bombs perpetrated a myth and demeaned the vast majority of veterans, who came home, adjusted to life, and got on with their lives.

The Movement

Ironically, the widespread deplorable treatment of the men and women who came home from that misbegotten conflict led to one of the few positive legacies of the American war in Vietnam: The Vietnam veterans’ movement. It began in earnest in the mid-1970s, the beginning of the end of “The Sixties” and the progressive civil rights, women’s rights, Native American rights, environmental, and anti-war movements spawned by the robust activism of that era.

That’s when disaffected Vietnam veterans—on their own and banding together in small but vocal groups—began trying to counter the litany of ills they faced after coming home.

One group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, were active in protests against the war they had fought but felt they could no longer justify. Some of those veterans, along with other Vietnam War veteran activists, quickly realized that because of the Iron Triangle’s intransigence, they would have to lead the fight for government programs and other types of recognition of their service to their country. And that’s what they did for the next two decades, with the support of a few Vietnam War veteran allies in Congress, primarily Senators John Kerry, Bob Kerrey, and Chuck Hagel and Representatives David Bonior, Lane Evans, and Tom Daschle.

It took time, but beginning in the late 1970s, throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, the movement had a string of successes, including lobbying Congress to create the Vet Center program, a series of nationwide storefront psychological counseling centers outside the VA hospitals, staffed by Vietnam War veteran mental health professionals. In 1979, the year the first Vet Centers opened, tens of thousands of Vietnam War veterans and their families sought and received counseling. What’s more, the program is alive and well today, continuing to counsel Vietnam War veterans, as well as those who have served in the subsequent wars in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan.

In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association—after lobbying efforts led by Vietnam War veteran psychologist and family therapist Charles Figley and others—added post-traumatic stress disorder to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, marking a huge step in promoting understanding and treatment of PTSD.

In 1978, with the VFW and the American Legion all but closing their doors to Vietnam War veterans and doing nothing to advocate for their issues, a handful of progressive veteran activists, many of them members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, started what would become Vietnam Veterans of America.

Led by Robert O. “Bobby” Muller, a Marine lieutenant who was paralyzed from the waist down after being shot in the spine in South Vietnam, the organization became the first and only congressionally chartered VSO (Veterans Service Organization) that devoted its efforts to working exclusively for Vietnam War veterans and their families. Its founding principle speaks volumes: “Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.”

Vietnam Veterans of America, which still is active today, has focused on treatment and compensation for illnesses caused by exposure to Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides; recognition and treatment of PTSD, which has disproportionately affected Vietnam War veterans and their families; combating homelessness among Vietnam War veterans; women veterans’ issues; and accounting for Americans missing in action in the war.

As part of its long-standing mission to work for the fullest possible accounting of American Vietnam War MIAs, Vietnan Veterans of America in 1989 set up its Veterans Initiative program, a pioneering humanitarian, veteran-to-veteran effort. The program—which is still in existence today—sends delegations of American veterans to Vietnam to help resolve the fate of some 300,000 Vietnamese troops who remained missing in action following the end of what that nation calls the American War.

Working with its counterpart, the Veterans Association of Vietnam, the program has sent provided materials to help the Vietnamese account for their missing. That includes wartime letters, documents, photos, and eyewitness accounts solicited from American veterans. That information has led to the discovery of hundreds of the remains of missing Vietnamese service members and their repatriation to their families. The Vietnamese veterans, in turn, have provided information that has helped locate and repatriate the remains of dozens of formerly missing American troops.

In the years since its founding, the American and Vietnamese governments joined with the American Veterans Initiative teams and their Vietnamese veteran counterparts in a cooperative effort to locate and excavate suspected aircraft crash sites and burial areas. The two former enemies, that is, are working together on a humanitarian mission that honors those who perished in the war and affords their families a measure of closure.

Journalist and historian Marc Leepson is the author of 11 books, most recently The Unlikely War Hero, a slice-of-life biography of the youngest and lowest-ranking American POW held in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. He is the arts editor, senior writer, and columnist for The VVA Veteran, the magazine published by Vietnam Veterans of America. He was drafted into the Army and served a 1967–68 tour of duty in the Vietnam War with the 527th Personnel Service Company in Qui Nhon.