oe Zinck grew up on a Dorchester street corner, graduated from English High in Boston, and went to war in Vietnam in 1968 the way a lot of guys did: without much forethought, without making a big deal of it.
''It was what you did,'' says Zinck, who lived through the epic 77-day North Vietnamese siege of Khe Sanh. ''It was what our fathers did before us.''
The fact that Zinck brought back memories of foxholes full of mangled people did not stop him from marrying his sweetheart, getting a college degree, or becoming lieutenant detective of police in his old neighborhood. He is completing work on a master's degree in criminal justice at Curry College.
But Zinck, like most Vietnam vets, had to endure a period when fellow Americans viewed him as something he was not.
''The movies made us out to be crazy, drug-crazed people without feelings about other people, without emotions,'' Zinck said recently while having coffee with the friends who work with him to maintain Dorchester's Vietnam memorial. The image ''just wasn't true. The vast majority came back and just got on with life.''
Actually, they did better than that.
To be sure, some Vietnam veterans still are emotionally troubled. Some are homeless. But as a group, they are far from the unemployables of Sylvester Stallone movies, with heads wrapped in bandanas and minds messed up with post-combat trauma. Vietnam vets are leaders today in many areas of society - bank executives and senators, car salesmen and social workers, university administrators and small businessmen.
But for years, ''when you picked up the paper, you didn't see the CEO of the bank, the head of the Court Street shelter, the guys selling cars,'' Zinck said. ''The media wanted a story, and there wasn't a story in writing about our lives. You'd see the guy in the cemetery shooting at the Quincy police, the guy walking down Neponset Avenue with a bandana on his head and a bayonet in his boot.''
The images of confused, bitter men capable of vengeance and cruelty were compounded by intense public opposition to the mission they were sent to perform, and by a government that did not care for them once their tours of duty were up. The result was a lasting impression that Vietnam vets did not fare well after the shooting stopped.
Unquestionably, soldiers who returned from Vietnam faced challenges and prejudices that did not confront their predecessors. It was difficult for some to fit back into society. They were much younger, on average - 19, compared with 26 in World War II - and were using immensely more powerful weapons. They got little help coping, during and after service, mentally or physically. And they paid a price.
Studies in the 1970s showed that the suicide rate for Vietnam vets was more than 20 percent higher than that of nonveterans of the same age, according to Bobby Mueller, founder of Vietnam Veterans of America. Other studies showed the vets were at a disadvantage in education compared with their peers who got draft deferments and were more susceptible to certain diseases.
''A lot of guys came back from World War I, World War II, and Korea and never recovered, and drank or smoked themselves into the grave,'' says US Senator John Kerry, who was a patrol boat commander in Vietnam and later a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. ''The reason the Vietnam veterans' suicide rate is higher ought to be clear to everyone. They didn't go as a team, they didn't return as a team, and they weren't rewarded when they came back.... You had to sublimate the whole experience.''
About a third of homeless people in Boston today are veterans, and over 60 percent of them - 1,940 in this year's count - are Vietnam-era vets, according to Tom Materazzo, longtime commissioner of veterans' services in the city. But he estimates that more than 85 percent of the 3 million Vietnam veterans were reabsorbed into mainstream America without incident.
Today, Marsh Carter is a poster boy for those who want it understood that Vietnam veterans have as proud a record of post-service accomplishment as those who fought in earlier wars. A West Point graduate, son and grandson of generals, he is chairman and chief executive officer of State Street Corp., one of the nation's oldest financial houses.
He recalls with some rancor how, when he left the service as a Marine major in 1965, he encountered the stereotype of the Vietnam vet.
''I wrote to 75 or 80 companies'' seeking a job ''and only three even gave me interviews,'' Carter said. ''I had a wife and two kids. I was a heavy-combat veteran, with 13 or 14 years in the military, and people made me feel like that time was worthless.''
In addition to proven ability to lead people under the most stressful conditions, for which he won the Navy Cross and a Purple Heart, Carter had two master's degrees - one in operations research and systems analysis and one in foreign policy. But when he came home, companies told him he did not seem to have many skills.
''One guy said to me, `The general view is that you did a lot of things over there that are going to give you trouble,''' Carter said. ''He told me they didn't want to take the chance.''
Carter still avoids doing business with some of the companies that snubbed him back then, but like many of his comrades he is at peace with the Vietnamese and is going back. During this month's observances of the 25th anniversary of the end of the war, he will be one of a delegation of American business leaders visiting the country to consult with officials there on how to energize the Vietnamese economy.
They will be building on the work of other veterans, people like Tom Vallely, who grew up in privileged circumstances in Newton, and came home with a Silver Star on his chest and a craving for politics - antiwar and otherwise - in his blood.
''When I went to Vietnam the first time, I came home happily,'' Vallely said. ''The second time I went to Vietnam [in 1985], I didn't come home.... I became a Vietnam specialist,'' working on educational and economic exchanges growing out of the normalization efforts launched by senators Kerry and John McCain.
Since 1985, Vallely has worked on Vietnam issues through Harvard University's Institute for International Development. Among other things, he has helped 300 Vietnamese obtain higher education in the United States and 700 obtain economics training in their own country.
As complex as the legacy of Vietnam is for all veterans, it is more so for black veterans.
In the early years of the war, blacks fought and died in disproportionate numbers. By the conflict's end, this imbalance largely disappeared, though the heavy toll on poor and working-class people did not. Black veterans generally recall their war years as a time of high racial tension, while most whites say they were unaware of any racial strains.
Ed DeBity, associate executive director of the Veterans Benefits Clearinghouse Inc., in Roxbury, participated in antiwar demonstrations at Syracuse University, joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and was photographed picketing draft boards. When his draft notice arrived, he initially did not report. But the army came after him. Faced with a choice of five years in jail and a $10,000 fine or two years in the Army, he went to war.
''In those years, if a black man went to jail in America he was never going to be acceptable when he came out, so I kind of sold out my lofty [antiwar] ideals,'' DeBity said, in an interview in an old building on Warren Street where he and Ralph Cooper, also a Vietnam veteran, run the clearinghouse.
When he came back to the United States, ''in 24 hours, I got a haircut, a steak dinner, a clean uniform, and my back pay, and was told to be off this base by midnight,'' he said. He slept that night in the Seattle-Tacoma airport. Looking at the veterans around him, Cooper realized he had reached a kind of equality, because the military and Veterans Administration ''didn't pay any better attention to the white guys.''
Black veterans came home to communities in flames.
''The return was more traumatic than Vietnam,'' said Ernie Washington, a Roxbury native who served in Carter's Marine unit. Washington arrived at Logan International Airport on April 4, 1968 - the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. ''The cabs wouldn't take me to Roxbury. The community was ablaze, plagued with drugs, in a shambles.''
The loss of a generation of black men hurt the communities from which they came, said Washington, who attended college nights and eventually prospered running a security company and parking lot business. ''So many men killed, so many out of whack.... We miss those black males. The loss of those guys is still hurting us. Older men who could have calmed some of the storm.''
Vietnam was a particularly transforming experience for Charles Desmond, an aimless, mediocre student from a troubled family in Malden who won a Silver Star and a Bronze Star for heroism.
''I definitely see my life in three phases - before I went to Vietnam, in country, and post-Vietnam,'' said Desmond.
On a battlefield overrun with enemy soldiers, ''I promised God if I get out of here alive I will do something constructive with my life,'' Desmond said.
Returning highly motivated, he graduated from Northeastern University with high honors, and made a career of helping young people ''a lot like me - poor, from broken homes, without many people trying to help them.''
He became vice chancellor of UMass-Boston, founder of the Urban Scholars Program, and chairman of the William Joyner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences.
The paths taken by Desmond and Vallely were not uncommon for men returning from Vietnam, said Cooper.
''The healing thing for many of us was helping others,'' he said. ''By helping others, you wound up helping yourself.''
Charles A. Radin is a member of the Globe Staff.
