The spirit of my father (two tours in South Vietnam, 1968 and 1972) has sarettah's back on this one.
I remember when my dad got back the first time. He was walking across the living room and his arm spontaneously split open and began to bleed. I made those gurgle noises with "uh...DAD!" attached to the end. He looked down and shrugged. "Jungle rot," he said. My little 14 year old mouth made an "O" and stayed that way for a while.
Periodically, he woke up screaming...for the rest of his life.
He told me about the horrific shit they had that they dropped on the forest to strip every living thing. Most of you know it as "Agent Orange." He got a very close up view of that stuff. He died of cancer of the just about everything.
My dad was lucky. To the small town in Connecticut we lived in, he was considered a hero. My mother got him drunk and made him talk about it the first night he was home. (She threw up three times that night, she told me. She *never* told me a word of what they talked about.)
He had a "hippie" (no telling what constituted a "hippie" in my father's mind, though.
) who wanted to paint flowers on his personal carrier, or "half track," to those that know. My dad said fine, as long as he cut a stencil and put a phrase on my father's half track. My dad said "and before you say a word...that's my daughter." So, I had my very own half track named after me. Actually, I had two. The first one went over a land mine. When my dad told me about that, I asked with wide eyes "gosh, I hope nobody got hurt." Good ol' dad managed to convince me that nobody got so much as a scratch. (I was older before I realized how fucking unlikely *that* was.)
I wasn't there, sarettah, but the old WWII phrase resonates. "They also serve who merely sit and wait," or something like that.