Approximately 3.14 million American men and 7,200 American women served in the Vietnam War. It is important to distinguish between popular myths about Vietnam veterans and their actual experiences, both short-term and long-term, after leaving Southeast Asia.

Many veterans described feelings of relief upon leaving Vietnam, mixed with a sense of dissociation from American society when they returned. By the late 1960s, a youth counterculture had transformed American society; some of the young people coming home from Vietnam could not relate to their civilian peers, although others embraced aspects of the counterculture, including its fashions, music, and drugs. Most veterans returned home singly or in small groups; they were not welcomed with parades, but neither, contrary to popular assumptions, were the majority of World War II and Korean War veterans. For wounded and disabled veterans, the homecoming was even more difficult. Veterans' hospitals did not always provide adequate...