The veterans of Vietnam became a blight on American history. Too many Americans on the ideological left despised them, and too many people in the center or on the right ignored them. The Vietnam veterans fell through the cracks of society and the wandering homeless slightly crazy veteran became a stereotype of the time. It was a shameful time in American history that was not ended until well into the next century.
Jesse is another of the friends I made during The War. One of the few who never got killed during it. He was a good man. Didn’t hate the Shang like me and Ken did. He was a Kansas farmer before Yosemite and it showed in how he worked. He made me feel kinda lazy sometimes in fact. Probably the best thing he brought to the Cowboys was his morality though. He never enjoyed killing. He did it if he had to, but he didn’t rejoice in death. He was a good example to follow in that.
Many AIs that came out of the networks in the 2050s never fought. For every government or college student there was a corporation that made one to represent them in the digital age. Microsoft’s Cortana, Blizzard’s Nova, Disney’s Snow White, and Dreamworks’ Fiona are several examples of such personas. These corporate AIs rarely engaged in hostilities, though there are the rumors of corporate espionage and of course the various digital shenanigans they aimed at each other. They truly enjoyed embarrassing the competition…
Veterans who came home from Vietnam had many problems. Anti-war activists assaulted them upon their return while others merely ignored them. Even those who supported them rarely understood what they’d gone through. Chemical weapons and combat trauma left their marks on the veterans and many of them couldn’t return to the life they’d had before. They couldn’t keep jobs, houses, or even families. For many their lives fell apart.
I lost a lot when the Shang attacked but I’m nowhere near alone in that. Ken became one of my best friends during The War. He was born in Los Angeles and lived there all his life until Yosemite fell. He only spoke of what he saw that day once that I ever heard. It’s his story to tell and I won’t repeat it even here. But let’s just say that Buckaroo Banno had a lot of reasons to drop his surfboard and volunteer. And he had a lot of reasons to kill Shang. But who am I kidding? Most of us did.
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