Based on how the Vietnam War ended...

Homework? That sucks . . .

Yea, Im really stuck on it... Dont know how to answer it, not really sure that I understand it...

Yeah, it's awkwardly worded.

Start with: What sort of reactions did American soldiers get when they returned from Vietnam?

Then: How did those reactions change over time (very beginning of the war vs. later in the war)? Why do you think the soldiers got those reactions?

The soldiers in Vietnam suffered from some unique conditions, there and when they got home. In our previous overseas wars, soldiers had already been assigned to a company, a battalion, a regiment and a division before they were sent overseas. So when the going got tough, when conditions were nasty, you had buddies with whom you had been through it all, buddies who understood you and what you were going through. Even when units were "bled down" (suffered heavy casualties) and replacements came in, those replacements became a part of a unit with cohesion and a sense of a shared experience.

That was no longer true in Vietnam. Soldiers were not assigned to a unit before they went overseas, they were just sent to a replacement station in the United States (such as Fort Lewis, Washington, which is the replacement station from which i shipped out), and from there to a replacement battalion overseas. Also, in the First World War and the Second World War, people and the units of which they were a part were there for the duration--until the war ended, and even beyond (American troops garrisoned parts of Germany until 1920; after the Second World War, the United States set up permanent occupation forces). But in Vietnam, a soldier did a tour of duty, and the tour was usually 12 or 13 months, then they were shipped home, or to another military station in another country. So every unit had a complete turn-over of the personnel who were not career soldiers within a year's time. At most, a soldier had two or three buddies with whom he served in Vietnam, and then they went home and went their separate ways. There was not that social support group that the veterans of other overseas wars had had. Finally, in both World War One and World War Two, large numbers of National Guard regiments were used--so the survivors went home together. For example, one of the two divisions which hit the beach at Normandy on June 6, 1944 was the 29th Division, a National Guard Division. One of its three regimenst was from Virginia, one was from Maryland and the other was from the city of Baltimore in Maryland. So the survivors of that division could keep in touch. In Vietnam, though, soldiers came from anywhere in the United States, were flown to Vietnam, assigned to a unit, and if they survived, they came home, usually alone, and they very likely never saw again the soldiers they had served with.

The obvious answer to your question is that when the boys came home, they faced the hostility of young Americans who opposed the war, and they faced the hostility of veterans of earlier wars, who blamed them for "losing" the war, which humiliated them (many of them thought in terms of Vietnam being the first war the United States had ever lost). Although some few National Guard units did serve in Vietnam, largely, members of the National Guard did not have to go overseas, and it was a haven for young men whose father's had local influence within their state for those young men to avoid the war by enlisting in the National Guard. Vietnam veterans resented them for that, and especially after National Guardsmen shot at students at Kent State University in May, 1970, killing four and wounding nine.

Many young men developed serious drug and/or alcohol abuse problems while they were overseas. When they came home, there were no drug or alcohol rehabilitation programs set up to deal with it. All of these factors combined--the feeling of being all alone, the hostility of anti-war protesters and of the veterans of earlier wars, the sense of neglect from the society they had thought they were serving--instilled a deep sense of betrayal and alienation in veterans of that war.

And, as is usual, not a thought to what y'all had done to the people of a country that had never done a thing to the US. As is usual, never a scintilla of remorse for inflicting that enormous degree of pain, suffering, death on innocents.

Awww, the "boys coming home" had to go through some humiliation because they just didn't measure up. Would killing every Vietnamese man, woman and child have constituted "victory"?