My most lasting memory of the Vietnam War is the divisiveness it created in the small American town where I grew up. The nation was divided at every level. Even junior and senior high school kids could be grouped into hawks and doves, more or less along existing fault lines separating hoods and hippies. And the arguments went in circles, something like this:
"The war is wrong, we have no right to bomb Vietnam." "What are ya, some kinda communist?" "No, I just don't agree with the war." "Yeah, you and all the other hippies. Spitting on our boys when they come back from Vietnam."
The image of veterans being mistreated lasted long after the war ended. Unseemly but easily imagined, the spat-upon vet was an icon that summed up an unpopular war.