"It was a different time," Booth remembers. "The culture was entirely different. There was a lot of hippyness. If you were serving in the armed forces you were part of the problem. I never had any trouble personally. No one spit at me. But nobody offered to buy me a beer in the airport either. Nobody cared. And that war wasn't any less popular than this one."

The difference is, in this one no one's taking it out on the troops.

"I think what's happening now is completely appropriate," says the Vietnam vet who was awarded a medal, a Navy Unit citation, for the good work he did in the Gulf of Tonkin. "If you talk to any Vietnam veterans, I'll bet they'll tell you the same thing. They don't begrudge the attention the troops are getting today. But you look at the firetrucks, the parades, the sirens, and compare that to what we came home to, and you can't help thinking, 'What's wrong with this picture?'"

---

Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.