The Vietnam War’s got silver hair now, a mortgage, and is much closer to Social Security than college.

Hard to believe it’s been fifty or so years since the height of American involvement in that conflict, but there it is. Math don’t lie.

I think Confucius said that?

Anyhow, Vietnam. The debate surrounding the war tore apart our country in ways unseen since the Civil War a century before, and unseen since. “Vietnam was a terribly important thing for this country,” the great writer Robert Stone said in an interview before his death. “It’s like a wound covered with scar tissue or like a foreign body, a piece of shrapnel that the organism has built up a protective wall around, but it is embedded in our history; it is embedded in our definition of who we are. We will never get it out of there.”

So much of the modern military and veterans culture was shaped and influenced by what happened in Vietnam and its aftermath. There’s no more draft, for one. Then there’s the entire repatriation process — in Vietnam, soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen came home one at a time after their 365 days, piecemeal. No one’s written about the strangeness of this journey better than Tim O’Brien, who described in his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone changing out of his fatigues and into civilian clothes in the bathroom of an airplane.

When my unit in the 25th Infantry Division came home from Iraq in 2009, we marched into an auditorium together, to the applause of our families and friends. The anthem from Rocky was playing through speakers. It was weird and surreal and all sorts of other things, but it definitely wasn’t lonely. We weren’t processing the homecoming by ourselves. We had community.

So much of what my generation of veterans takes for granted — the parades, the Thank Yous for Your Service, the separating of the soldier from the politics of war, etc. — is because of what happened the generation before.

American society as a whole recalibrated, true enough. But I’d like to present the case that it recalibrated only because of the leadership and commitment of the Vietnam veterans who said to themselves, to each other, to anyone who would listen, “Never again.”

So much of what my generation of veterans takes for granted — the parades, the Thank Yous, the separating of the soldier from the politics of war — is because of what happened the generation before.

The Vietnam vets are the ones who paved the way forward, something that couldn’t have been easy or even natural, given their own homecoming experience. While incidents of being spit on at airports and the like are overblown (some would even go so far as to call it all a myth), the spirit behind those stories was as true as day. (Check out Karl Marlantes’ nonfiction What It Is Like to Go to War if you remain skeptical.) And those cold receptions weren’t only being offered by socialist hippies and jackass anarchists — older veterans groups, like the VFW and the American Legion, wanted nothing to do with Vietnam vets for much of the sixties and seventies.

The reasons why vary, from post to post, and from teller to teller. Partisan politics played a role, certainly. Basic generational disconnects. Some of the older vets resented the young guns and cited Congress never officially declaring war as reason enough for keeping them out of their clubs. (Related: Congress still hasn’t declared a war on a fixed target since World War II. So we’d all be locked out!) And then, of course, the ultimate middle finger to their younger brethren who’d served the same country they had, worn the same uniforms in the field, saluted the same flag, and eaten the same shitty food while getting shot at by strangers far from home: “You didn’t WIN your war, like we did.”

Hate to say it, but let’s call a dick for what it is. And some of those guys in the Greatest Generation could really be dicks.

In a way, the World War II vets were treating the Vietnam guys the same way the World War I cohort had treated them some thirty years before: “What, you assholes weren’t gassed in trenches? That’s not a REAL war!” The Spanish-American vets probably did the same to the returning doughboys in 1918, and on and on and on, all the way back to the American Revolution generation busting out their deployment cred on the 1812 crew. Somehow, some way, the Vietnam veterans, as individuals and in concert as groups, decided to break that trend. What courage. What resolve. What foresight.

Much of the credit belongs with the leaders of the various Vietnam organizations, like Bobby Muller, Stuart Feldman, Ron Kovic, John Rowan, among many, many others, as well as prominent politicians like John McCain and John Kerry. But much of the credit also belongs with the everyday Vietnam vets, ones not necessarily involved with or connected to the national groups and movements, who’ve spent the last decades making their own way through America. They’ve been the ones who’ve established this positive precedent on the ground.

Last month I gave a reading in Kansas City, and went out after with some folks for dinner and drinks. One of the gentlemen who joined us was a quiet, solidly built man who, after some coaxing, revealed he’d served in Vietnam. He’d arrived just before the Tet Offensive.

“Many others did more than me,” he said in a low voice tinted with a thoughtful sadness, which is exactly what someone who’s done more than their share always says.

I wanted to say so much, but all I could muster in the moment was to thank him for helping pave the way for us Iraq and Afghanistan vets. It wasn’t enough, of course, but I hope it was something. They understood what awaited us well before we had any idea.

Thank you, Vietnam vets. You’ve done more for the next generation and for our nation as a whole than you’ll ever get credit for. And the fact that you all could give a damn about that credit makes it all the more extraordinary.

IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES: LARRY BURROWS; CHIP SOMODEVILLA