Since the book very carefully confines itself to public incidents involving just returned veterans within a few minutes of getting off the airplanes that brought them home, MMario's examples (which I am inclined provisionally to accept) arent' strictly counterexamples to Lembke's thesis.

The Vietnam veterans I have known seemed mostly well-adjusted and easy-going. The only explicit complaint I ever heard relating to someone's tour of duty was a gripe about the M-16's tendency to jam. Nevertheless my guess is that there is some truth to the image of the let-down vet. Was every returning GI made to feel welcome at the local American Legion post or other Veterans' clubs ? Was every GI who subsequently went to college made to feel welcome by the students and faculty at the college of his choice ? But the people who did the letting-down weren't necessarily those who had opposed the war. War supporters, sore at the GI's for "losing" might just as easily have been deliberately or thoughtlessly unkind. (Query: did some veterans of Korea feel as though they were not welcomed home as warmly as their older brothers had been from WWII ? If so, was it partly because the home-front was sore at them because they didn't achieve a clear-cut victory ?)

T.