[The Ledger] The generation that fought World War II has largely disappeared. The remaining Korean War veterans are glimpsing the twilight.The country’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who came of age in the 1960s during Vietnam are mostly in their 70s and 80s. Not surprisingly, they constitute the largest group of surviving veterans, in numbers approaching six million.
For these veterans, especially those who experienced combat in Vietnam, the memories can be exceptionally vivid.
Most veterans of that era never went to Vietnam, and of those who did, the vast majority were not assigned combat roles. But for those so deployed, they experienced a largely directionless war that killed in excess of 58,000 of their countrymen and an estimated million or more Vietnamese.