If you have ever had cancer, you have likely suffered from the same sort of alienation and disconnect from friends and family as Vietnam Vets experienced. For those who experience such painful life altering events, there is always an adjustment period, when they learn to accept no one, except those who have also been through the same experience, will ever be able to understand their experience.

People with cancer often describe how, once they have "come out" about having cancer, they are treated like lepers. People the cancer patient once considered reliable family, friends, and colleagues, often disappear and are mysteriously no longer available when needed. The cancer patient, or the divorced person, or parent of a murdered child, or person with a SO murdered, or survivors of concentration camps, of being bombed and living in a war zone--any number of people who have gone through such traumatic, life changing events, knows when they are being ostracized because of it, and can easily identify it when it is happening to them.

That said, for survival sake, most people who have survived such experiences also learn they must move on, and do just that. If they don't, they become lifelong sufferers of acute and chronic diseases, and mental health disorders.

The problem I have with this whole VV thing here in Mudcat is this. It has been just over 27 years since the last guys came home from Vietnam. I know PTSD, and health problems associated with their service (like Agent Orange exposure) has lasting effects. But so do many other life altering experiences such as those I describe above. Vietnam Vets don't own the market for suffering, or for being shunned.

My position is, after 27 years, anyone getting as vociferous as those here claiming military service in Vietnam, getting all up in people's faces with these "we were spat upon" sort of claims, is merely using the Vietnam Vet as victim ploy for manipulative power mongering and point scoring in arguments in internet discussin forums.

If I seem unsympathetic to the Vietnam Vet as victims here in Mudcat, it is because I am unsympathetic to people using their service in this way online. There is no shortage of VV wannabees in the web world, and I take all Mudcat claims of military service in Vietnam with huge grains of salt, just as I would in any online discussion forum where the diatribes got busy dissing each other.