Folder 63 John F. Kerry

After war experiences of veterans? Pp. 16, 17

People did not listen to veterans of the war. The press itself had difficulty in perceiving of a group of Viet Nam veterans being opposed to the war, and we had been trying through more legitimate non-threatening means to get them to say, "God, they're a group of veterans who are opposed to this war. We suddenly realized we have to do something else to make America understand how the soldiers of the war feel about it, and also some of the things they were engaged in over there.

SR 2525 pp.3-5
After war experiences of veterans…

One of the reasons I think that veterans of Viet Nam are still dealing with the war in many different ways is that we went and came back totally different from the soldiers of any other war. We didn't go over with the units the way the did. We didn't live with a group and come back with a group and we didn't have time to work things out on a troop ship for three weeks, playing poker, losing our wages, crying in each other's arms, doing all the things that those soldiers did, and we didn't have three weeks in Paris or six months or whatever it was. We didn't come back tot the docks that were lined with people who validated the experience in all the ways that they were validated then……you land back in the United States of America and nobody cares. Getting into San Francisco that first night and nobody could have cared less where I had been. Absolutely unbelievable…