Americans’ attitudes toward veterans of the Vietnam War have been characterized by tension between a sense of virtue and a sense of shame. Photograph by Samuel Corum / Andalou Agency / Getty

From time to time during the American war in Iraq which began in 2003, aging Vietnam veterans wearing baseball caps and khaki jackets emblazoned with pins, patches, and the names of their units gathered at the small commercial airport in Bangor, Maine. A few older vets of more noble wars were sometimes among them, frail men from the Second World War and Korea, as they assembled in the passenger lounge to greet returning troops when their planes touched down for refuelling. Bangor would be the arrivals’ first contact with American soil since they left for the zone of combat.

At the gate, the Vietnam vets usually formed two lines—as an avenue of welcome, of course, not a gauntlet. They were giving something that many of them felt they had not received decades earlier. Eventually, the strapping young men and women, looking vibrant in fatigues of desert colors, filed in, with heads high and backs straight, as the rows of bent and paunchy veterans applauded, shook hands, and patted backs. The lounge quieted down as other passengers realized what was going on and joined in a wave of appreciation. “Thank you for your service,” they said.

I saw this many times, while dropping off and picking up relatives in Bangor, and the faces of the returning warriors always seemed too flat, too expressionless for the occasion. You might have expected some observable relief, at least, and grins as well. Perhaps flying home made the transition from seeing and doing the unthinkable too short compared with the journey back by ship from the Second World War and Korea, with too “little decompression time,” as the historian James E. Wright, who is finishing a book about those who served in Vietnam during the late nineteen-sixties, puts it.

“There were no waiting crowds or bands at the airport for the Vietnam guys,” Wright told me recently. “Most of them had been warned to expect a hostile reception.” The animosity was probably less widespread than had been predicted, or than is now remembered, but “there was no ‘Welcome home,’ ” he said, “and in some cases there were protests and even outright hostility. So the veterans hurried home, often changing out of their uniform at the airport.”

Some needed to melt into invisibility, hide whatever trauma they carried, and bury their experiences in silence. Others, however, proudly joined veterans’ groups, spoke and wrote of the war, and took sides in support or opposition—most notably the young naval officer John Kerry.

Through the years, our varied ways of thinking about the Americans who fought that war, which ended ignominiously forty years ago this week, have been characterized by tension between a sense of virtue and a sense of shame. Americans cannot agree amongst themselves on what happened there, on what might have happened had we done one thing or another differently, or on what would have happened if justice and morality had prevailed.

Even those of us who feel shame disagree over which aspects to regret. Is it that we entered the war in the first place, against a legitimate anti-colonialist struggle? That we bombed and defoliated ruthlessly? That, in the name of democracy, we sacrificed our troops on behalf of corrupt, undemocratic South Vietnamese governments? That Americans killed innocents, sometimes up close? Or, on the other hand, that our military strategies were actually too restrained and ill-conceived? That we had no staying power? That the anti-war movement gained too much sway over public opinion? That our policymakers, in cutting vital military aid, betrayed and abandoned South Vietnam?

Many fictions have been woven into the shame, and much selective history. But one truth towers above them all. When a war goes well, it looks like a good idea, and it garners support. When it goes badly, Americans sour on the enterprise. Military officials understood this well enough to lie routinely about the progress in Vietnam, until the fabric of falsehoods was shredded by undeniable facts on the ground. In some conservative quarters, the press is still blamed today for reporting those facts.

The phases of ambition and disillusionment about the war were mirrored in Americans’ views of their soldiers. Wright, who for his book interviewed about a hundred and twenty-five veterans, identifies four periods. First came the heroic time, when the ground troops the United States first sent in 1965 were seen as “saving the Vietnamese.” Then the appraisal shifted, as the fighting dragged on inconclusively and drafted teen-agers were propelled into villages and rural areas where they had trouble differentiating between Vietcong guerrillas and civilians who were just trying to survive. “Within a couple of years,” Wright said, “people felt sorry for the kids who were forced to fight in a war we shouldn’t be involved with.”

In the third period, news of crimes of warfare tainted the American military. Random killing was permitted in areas designated as “free-fire zones,” where any unidentified person could be considered an enemy combatant. Some American soldiers were complicit in torture. In 1969, Seymour Hersh broke the story of the massacre in the village of My Lai the year before, when a U.S. Army company that had lost a fifth of its men was sent in search of Vietcong and, finding none, rounded up hundreds of old men, women, and children, herded many of them into a ditch, and slaughtered them. Learning of the event led many people to believe, Wright said, that “rather than victims of a cruel war, they were perpetrators of a cruel war.”

Since the nineteen-eighties, we have seen something of a rehabilitation of Vietnam vets, led first by President Ronald Reagan and bolstered by the sombre wall of names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Unlike triumphalist monuments to war, that engraved and polished stone allows room for every emotion. It does not dictate what to feel as your hand reaches out to touch a name. Patriotic yearning, grief, pride, and a sense of sin coexist there, as they do in the country at large. It is an odd mixture, yet the veterans who stand before that wall can find dignity in sorrow.

Lost wars are never celebrated, but passing time dulls the edge of humiliation and, therefore, the grievances. As the ranks of those who were adult enough to remember the misdeeds in Vietnam grow smaller, today’s teachers, editors, writers, and filmmakers rely increasingly on others’ memories, competing histories, and wishful thinking. Some gauzy recollections benefit the veterans’ sense of honor but miss the sordid elements of the war. An example is Rory Kennedy’s recent documentary “Last Days in Vietnam,” which seeks and finds moral courage among Americans who, as North Vietnamese troops advanced southward, defied the United States Ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, by secretly organizing evacuations of South Vietnamese who would be at risk. It’s a powerful film, but its brief historical setup, which blames only North Vietnam for violating the 1973 Paris Peace Accords’ ceasefire when all sides did so, protects American viewers from recognizing their country’s guilt.

We are in a mood to hail the military. The fervent accolades that have greeted the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have changed the atmosphere for all veterans, including those who served in Vietnam. Even old leaders of the anti-war movement now express regard for Vietnam vets. In a recent letter complaining about the biased history the Pentagon was planning to offer as an educational resource during this week’s anniversary, they wrote, “We support the announced purpose of honoring our veterans for their idealism, valor, and sacrifices, assuming that the full diversity of veterans’ views is included. As you know, anti-war sentiment was widely prevalent among our armed forces both during and after service, and was certainly a factor in bringing the war to a close.” By searching for virtue among its veterans, America finds some relief from its shame.