Author Description

When Bill Ward returned from Vietnam, things had changed. Not just in the small, farming community where he had grown up, but in the entire country as well. The country had mourned the deaths of Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy and had just received the news of the shootings at Kent State. There was a great ambivalence about our presence in Vietnam. Even in our country's heartland, people were beginning to question why we were there at all. Our veterans, who had answered their nation's call, were now returning to a country that greeted them with indifference, and sometimes worse. For the first time in American history our veterans were returning to a "nation of silence".