In the over half-century since 1968 when the anti-Vietnam War spirit began to surge in America, a pattern of blaming and shunning its veterans became commonplace. Simultaneously, a mental health literature accrued that principally defined the mounting prevalence of Vietnam veteran maladjustment using a new but ultimately imprecise diagnostic construct, posttraumatic stress disorder. Together they created a mental health legacy regarding the war's effect on the deployed troops, i.e. that a refractory, one-size-fits-all, combat trauma-based biopsychosocial malady had afflicted the majority of troops while they were serving in Vietnam – what I refer to as the Vietnam combat PTSD myth. Recently published scholarship from the Vietnam War – which in particular shows that over 8 years of the ground war there was an exceptionally low incidence for combat stress reaction and negligible numbers of cases unresponsive to treatment – explodes this legacy through challenging its component sub-myths: That (1) in general most veteran PTSD cases represent intractable combat stress reactions; (2) That veteran PTSD is simply the military analog of civilian PTSD; (3) That Vietnam veterans suffered an unprecedented prevalence of PTSD, and it was primarily caused by their combat ordeal; and (4) That Vietnam veteran PTSD arose while in Vietnam. The resultant enlightenment permits a more sophisticated approach to understanding and treating psychiatric disability among combat theater veterans, including PTSD. It allows a fuller appreciation of the individual "meaning" of their ordeal, taking into account not only the unbearable rigors, dangers, losses, and horrors that may have resulted from combat participation, but also the psychologically deleterious effects of deployment stress and especially, repatriation stress, as they psychodynamically interact with predisposing risk factors.
Norman M. Camp (Mon,) studied this question.